Great Courses - My First Year

As I mentioned in my "Year of..." post, 2009 was the year I discovered Great Courses. I've mentioned most of them over the course of the year, but not all of them. Because they have been remarkably good, and because I bought the first of them a year ago this week, today I'm going to catalog the Great Courses I have heard in this first year, with a comment or two on each of them.

One thing I will point out -- I wrote above that I'm going to catalog the courses I heard, not saw. The Teaching Company makes some courses available in both audio and video formats, but some are only in video formats. Since I only listen to the courses in my car -- I cannot watch DVDs while driving -- those video-only courses are not for me. This is mildly disappointing because all of the math courses and many of the science courses are only available on DVD [Makes perfect sense. Math is a highly visual subject to teach. So are most sciences.] However, it will definitely help to herd me towards some music courses, which really intrigue me.

So, without further ado, the Great Courses so far. The "Course" is a link to course information at The Teaching Company site. The "Steve's Notes" often contain links to my review/remarks from previous blog entries.

Course: Classical Mythology
Instructor: Elizabeth Vandiver - Whitman College; Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin
Steve's Notes: I actually wrote an entire blog entry on this one. I officially wish I had taken this course in college. Then again, I almost feel as if I have, now.

Course: Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It
Instructor: Steven L. Goldman - Lehigh University; Ph.D., Boston University
Steve's Notes: I only really talked about this one in my blog that covered the first five Great Courses I heard. I still owe myself a longer entry on this one. One absolute about science is this: What science shows to be true one day becomes something that it shows is not true when more science has been done. Yet, this does not excuse throwing out science. The new truths always provide answers for what the old truths did, plus more. And yet we always struggle with what is "real."

Course: Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2nd Edition
Instructor: Richard Wolfson - Middlebury College;Ph.D., Dartmouth College
Steve's Notes: Covered in the First Five, and then again in the entry where I admit that I like gravity, even if it doesn't exist, and again once I was done with the course. This still might be the most important of the courses to me, because it helped my mind become comfortable with relativity. It's also the course I'm most likely to listen to again, so I can help it sink in.

Course: Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life
Instructor: J. Rufus Fears - University of Oklahoma; Ph.D., Harvard University
Steve's Notes: Again, First Five. But also in my entry on Universal Values, which was probably the biggest message I got from the course. And then again I wrote about how many of the classic books were "fantasy." Yet now I am listening to another course about "fantastic" literature, so I will have to re-examine. Learning always induces re-examination. I love that.

Course: Consciousness and Its Implications
Instructor: Daniel N. Robinson - Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University; Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown University; Ph.D., City University of New York
Steve's Notes: I actually reviewed this course. Good, but took too long to get going. Probably my least favorite. Which is a tough pick, but does show that the only pure history course I took (The Great Debate) must have been pretty good.

Course: Science and Religion
Instructor: Lawrence M. Principe - Johns Hopkins University; Ph.D., Organic Chemistry, Indiana University at Bloomington; Ph.D., History of Science, Johns Hopkins University
Steve's Notes: One of my First Five. Also talked about in my short essay on "devolved." I am amazed that we have such a misconception about the conflict between science and religion, when giants in both fields from centuries past already knew that such a fight did not, and need not, exist.

Course: The Old Testament
Instructor: Amy-Jill Levine - Vanderbilt University; Ph.D., Duke University
Steve's Notes: This one only received a short mention in the blog. But for anyone who is at all interested in the scholarly history of some of the most influential words ever put to paper, this is for you. Never dry. Opens eyes. Puts things in context, and gives cultural comparisons that shed light and offer new meaning.

Course: The New Testament
Instructor: Bart D. Ehrman - The - The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.Div., Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary
Steve's Notes: I haven't blogged about this yet, so here are a couple of points of interest: 1) Paul almost certainly never had a written "Gospel" from which to work. Think about that! Research indicates that the four canonical gospels were not written until after Paul was dead. 2) Each of the four gospels has a specific literary theme. I must study them each again with this in mind. It helps explain some of the discrepancies which has disturbed my Western mind which typically reads them as historical documents.

Course: The Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitution
Instructor: Thomas L. Pangle - The University of Texas at Austin; Ph.D., University of Chicago
Steve's Notes: Mentioned in my First Five post, and then again in my Blogs in History post. One interesting (and yet somewhat sad) part of what I learned in this course: Those people in the modern U.S. who want to go back to what the Founders really meant are at a big disadvantage. Two, really. First, there is no clear agreement on what the Founders wanted, since they disagreed amongst themselves so much. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the U.S. has never, ever functioned exactly as the Founders set out in the Constitution anyway. So there is no way to "go back to the beginning" because the government was never like they proposed, even in the beginning.

Course: Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works
Instructor: Eric S. Rabkin - University of Michigan; Ph.D., University of Iowa
Steve's Notes: This is my current course, so I am not ready to review it. I have already learned that, in the technical jargon, "fantasy" is defined in a way that doesn't quite fit what I would normally classify as fantasy. But I am eating this course up. The Brothers Grimm, Poe, Lewis Carroll! I've also been introduced to E.T.A. Hoffmann, so I need to find some of his works [and I must add polymath to my vocabulary, since apparently Hoffmann and Carroll {Dodgson} were both polymaths.] Then a full half of the course will be on Science Fiction!

That's nine course completed, and a tenth started, in a year. Just think how much more I could have heard if my commute lasted longer than 11 minutes! Oh, it's becoming a little harder to find courses I immediately recognize as "must have" but there are plenty left. I look forward to my second year of Great Courses.