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Is a good society built mostly on good laws, or on good habits learned at home? Chinese thinkers argued about that more than two thousand years ago, and the argument still sound…
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In 1757 a Paris crowd watched a man torn apart for attacking the king. Today most punishment happens out of sight, behind prison walls, yet the old question remains: what gives …
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Why do millions of strangers obey words written by people they will never meet? This course starts with that puzzle and the old quarrel it sparked between natural lawyers, who t…
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Two centuries ago, by historians' rough estimates, most people alive were desperately poor. Today a much smaller share are, yet hundreds of millions still live on a few dollars …
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In 1983 the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet reported that a slow buildup of brain activity begins a fraction of a second before people feel they have decided to move. Headlines ha…
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Women in New Zealand voted in a national election in 1893. Women in Switzerland waited until 1971. Between and beyond those dates runs a long argument about what equality betwee…
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What do you do when the old answers about the meaning of life stop working? Between the 1840s and the 1950s a loose band of writers, from a Danish author who attacked his own na…
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Why does a quarrel over a parking space so often turn into a fight about respect? This course starts from the idea that conflict is normal and that what matters is how people ha…
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Why should anyone obey a law simply because a government made it? That question has produced some odd companions in political thought: a Russian prince who watched animals coope…
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In 1812 the British Parliament made breaking a textile machine a crime punishable by death. The workers it targeted were not against machines as such; they were angry about who …
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An introduction to Stoicism, the ancient philosophy of character and resilience and its origins in Athens with Zeno and the Painted Porch, the dichotomy of control, virtue as th…
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Why statistics matter and how they mislead, describing data with averages and spread, percentages, rates and risks, how samples and surveys work, why correlation is not causatio…
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What religion is and why it is hard to define, the classic arguments for God's existence, the main arguments against it or for doubt, the relation of faith and reason, whether m…
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What organizing is (and how it differs from mobilizing and advocacy), its traditions from labor unions to Saul Alinsky, Ella Baker and the civil rights movement, one-on-one rela…
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What nations, states and nationalism are, the scholarly debate over whether nations are ancient or modern, the history of the nation-state from Westphalia to decolonization, the…
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An introduction to environmental ethics, the branch of philosophy that asks what we owe to the natural world. This course covers the basic questions of moral status and value, t…
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What a cognitive bias is and why the mind relies on shortcuts, fast and slow thinking, confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, the surprising fallibility of memory and percep…
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An introduction to talking and disagreeing well in public life. Eight levels cover why civil discourse matters for self-government (and the critique that civility norms can sile…
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A factual introduction to genocide and other mass atrocities. Eight levels cover where the word genocide came from and what the law means by it, the conditions and processes tha…
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What epistemology asks, the main theories of truth (correspondence, coherence, pragmatist and deflationary), knowledge as justified true belief and the Gettier problem, theories…
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What nonviolence is (and is not), its roots in religious and philosophical traditions, Gandhi and satyagraha, King and the US civil rights movement, Gene Sharp's theory of power…
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Why media literacy matters for self-government, how news is made, bias and framing, the history and techniques of propaganda, misinformation and manipulated media, algorithms an…
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What liberalism is and how it grew out of the wars of religion, the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, John Stuart Mill on liberty and free speech, constitutionalism …
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What a right is, the long road from natural law and Magna Carta to the revolutionary declarations and abolition, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the treaties, courts …
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