Scholars Online Philosophy Courses

Available Courses

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The Three Faces of Philosophy

Philosophy can be considered in three aspects: historical, topical, and methodological.

In its historical aspect, philosophy studies individual philosophers, talks about their intellectual background, strives for a full picture of their ideas, and asks whether those ideas have continuing validity today.

In its topical aspect, philosophy studies “great questions” about truth, beauty, and moral obligations. This study typically surveys views of multiple philosophers.

In its methodological aspect, philosophy asks questions about the methods used in other fields of study. The course in reasoning is of this type. It looks at reasoning in different fields (logic, practical reasoning, science, law, ethics, theology) and asks how those instances of reasoning are similar and how they are different.

Some early Christian thinkers felt that Christian truth was so important and so final that philosophy should be forgotten. But philosophy has survived and many of its significant figures were Christian or heavily influenced by Christianity. Our philosophy courses are inspired by the view that Christianity is true and that philosophical study (historical, topical, and methodological) can illuminate Christian truth. Philosophical study can also provide intellectual tools to help our students evaluate and respond to opponents of Christianity, whose views they will inevitably encounter.

Class Examples

In order to prevent disruption of the teacher's curriculum and to secure the student learning environment, Scholars Online does not allow non-members to visit live class sesssions. We have, however, included a log from an actual chat session, changing only student names to protect their privacy. The content and flow of the course discussion has been preserved, so that you can get a sense of how the chat environment works. Note that while this is a non-audio class, students and teachers may enter HTML tags and unicode characters (unlike simple IRC sessions), and the log is preserved for student review.

Introduction to Reasoning example chat session

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