“All human beings by nature desire to know”
-Aristotle, Metaphysics
Master the basics of Western philosophy in 8-weeks with a group of mature and thoughtful participants and an Ivy-League instructor.
By completing this course, you can expect to become more comfortable talking about complex philosophical ideas with others, and better at being able to think more deeply on your own. You will also be exposed to philosophical questions and problems that most people go their entire lives without ever being aware of. If there is one philosophy seminar to take, it would be Introduction To Philosophy above all others.
The pedagogical backing of this course is that philosophy should be studied and taught in a way that transforms one’s soul, activating it’s highest intellectual potential, and making an impact on lived experience. This is not knowledge or knowledge’s sake, or pure theory.
This is philosophy that can be immediately integrated with your life.
Every semester, I teach Introduction To Philosophy to a room of 75 undergraduates who pay $9,000+ per course. This seminar is the exact same content they will be learning, but for 1% of the cost. Read that again.
This course is ideal for wisdom lovers seeking a rigorous introduction to philosophy, but without needing to lock themselves in to months of meetings and hundreds of hours of reading. The goal here is high-impact with optional depth. If you want to go deep, there will be plenty of opportunities to do that as well. Also, you can cancel anytime if its not for you. Nothing is required and everything will be recorded.
You can fill out the interest form for free by following this link. This will help me make sure that the live sessions fit your schedule.
You can also access the course syllabus here.
I will post video lectures and weekly guides to cover the basics, and then we will go deep in our weekly calls.
We start with Parmenides, who stunned the ancient world by arguing that change itself is an illusion and that reality is far stranger than it appears. Next is Plato, who asked whether the world you see is real or merely a shadow of something deeper. Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, brought philosophy back down to earth to ask what it actually means to live well and flourish.
From there we cross into modernity with Descartes, who tore everything down to a single unshakable certainty—I think, therefore I am—and rebuilt knowledge from the ground up. Kant revealed that the mind isn’t a passive mirror of the world but actively shapes everything we experience. Nietzsche took a hammer to our most cherished beliefs and famously declared that God is dead and challenged posterity to create their own values in a universe that hands us none. Finally, Heidegger confronts what he takes to be the most fundamental question of all — what does it mean to be?
Course Details
When: 8 Weeks (July 25- September 12)
Where: Online
(Session 1) Saturday mornings 12pm (EST/EDT); (Session 2) Wednesday mornings 7AM (EST/EDT)
How To Join: When you upgrade to a paid subscription you receive complete access to The Micro-University which includes this course + all previous courses, a private community chat, and additional learning resources.
8 Week Syllabus
In this course, you will read: Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and De Beauvoir.
Eight monumental thinkers in the Western tradition.
Here is the complete schedule:
Week 1 — Parmenides: Is Change an Illusion? Reading: The fragments of On Nature (the surviving lines of the poem, especially “The Way of Truth”).
Focus: Being vs. becoming, the claim that “what is” cannot change, and the birth of metaphysics as rigorous argument.
Week 2 — Plato: The World Behind the World Reading: Republic, Book VII (the Allegory of the Cave); selections from Book VI (the Divided Line).
Focus: Appearance vs. reality, the Forms, and what it means to be “freed” into knowledge.
Week 3 — Aristotle: How to Live Well Reading: Nicomachean Ethics, Books I and II.
Focus: Eudaimonia (flourishing), virtue as a mean, and habit as the path to character.
Week 4 — Descartes: Tearing It All Down Reading: Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations I and II.
Focus: Radical doubt, the cogito (”I think, therefore I am”), and rebuilding knowledge from certainty.
Week 5 — Kant: The Mind That Shapes the World Reading: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (selections); Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Section I.
Focus: How the mind structures experience, and the categorical imperative as the foundation of morality.
Week 6— Nietzsche: Creating Your Own Values Reading: The Gay Science §§108–125 (including “The Madman”); Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue.
Focus: The death of God, nihilism, and the task of creating meaning for yourself.
Week 7 — Heidegger: What Does It Mean to Be? Reading: Being and Time, Introduction (§§1–8) and the sections on Being-toward-death (§§46–53).
Focus: The question of Being, authenticity, and how mortality gives life its weight.
Week 8 — Simone De Beauvoir: How To Live Authentically Reading: The Ethics of Ambiguity
Focus: Authentic vs. inauthentic responses to the problem of free choice
Private Community
When you enroll in The Micro-University, you will be pleased to know that you are entering an already thriving community of serious intellectuals who are willing to not just show up every week, but to have actually read the material.
For the past several months, we have been working through some of the most challenging texts in the history of philosophy — Heidegger’s Being and Time and Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil.
All of that work has built a real intellectual community that is here to stay.
We would love for you to be a part of it.
Hi Paul, tried to fill out your interest form and it said it was closed for responses.
Are you still open for people to add interest in joining the course?
Hi Paul. I upgraded to a paid membership yesterday but got a mail from you today reminding me about the course. Should I do anything else to enroll and get access to the course?