“All human beings by nature desire to know”
-Aristotle, Metaphysics
This 8-Week introduction to philosophy is the exact same content that I will be teaching to my Ivy-League students over the summer, but offered to you for a 1% of the cost.
This course is ideal for students seeking a rigorous introduction to philosophy in a short period of time without needing to commitment thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours to understanding these great ideas.
For 8 weeks, we will dive deep into the greatest philosophical minds of the Western tradition and work through their texts together.
If you want to join the course waitlist for free, you can sign-up with this link.
You can also access the course syllabus here.
I will post video lectures 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. Marcus Aurelius turns philosophy inward, showing how a Roman emperor used Stoic discipline to stay grounded amid power, grief, and the certainty of death.
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 your own values in a universe that hands you 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), Saturday mornings 12pm (EDT/EST)
Where: Online
How To Join: You can join by upgrading to a paid subscription to this Substack. Access is for paid subscribers only.
8 Week Syllabus
In this course, you will read: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
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 — Marcus Aurelius: Philosophy as Practice Reading: Meditations, Books II, IV, and V (selections).
Focus: Stoic discipline, control vs. acceptance, mortality, and living according to nature.
Week 5 — 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 6 — 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 7 — 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 8 — 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.
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.
When it says join the course wait list for free, is this simply joining a waitlist to potentially gain access to the course. I assume a paid subscription to the micro philosopher is still required?
Hi Paul, may I ask how long each Saturday meeting lasts?