105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More

You may remem­ber that we fea­tured Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy, an open access phi­los­o­phy project cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got start­ed. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keep­ing in with its mis­sion of pro­duc­ing free, infor­ma­tive and enter­tain­ing ani­mat­ed videos meant to intro­duce a host of philo­soph­i­cal issues. Our own Josh Jones called it “a nec­es­sary ser­vice to those just begin­ning to wade out into the sea of The Big Ques­tions” in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Ques­tion coast­line than ever before. There are cur­rent­ly 105 Wiphi videos in total.

At the top of the post, you can watch a whole playlist of Wi-Phi’s videos on cog­ni­tive bias­es, which add up to a sur­pris­ing­ly thor­ough half-hour primer on the forces that knock our think­ing askew, from the “alief” (an auto­mat­ic or habit­u­al men­tal atti­tude, as opposed to a delib­er­ate belief) to ref­er­ence depen­dence and loss aver­sion to what we might per­haps describe as a meta-bias amus­ing­ly called the GI Joe fal­la­cy (the ten­den­cy for our bias­es to stick around even when we should know bet­ter). Just above, we have Wi-Phi’s three-part guide to the good life, as exam­ined by Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Kant.

Both of those playlists do come with a cer­tain prac­ti­cal­i­ty, at least by philo­soph­i­cal stan­dards: who, after all does­n’t want to think more cor­rect­ly (or at least less incor­rect­ly), and who does­n’t want to live the good life (or at least a bet­ter life than they live now)? But the hard­er core of casu­al phi­los­o­phy enthu­si­asts — always a demand­ing group — should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or his­tor­i­cal philo­soph­i­cal top­ics, such as the sev­en-part playlist on clas­si­cal the­ism above. Dig deep­er into their Youtube chan­nel and you’ll find more sim­ple but not sim­plis­tic lessons on the phi­los­o­phy of math­e­mat­ics, lan­guage, ancient Chi­na, and much more.

The list of uni­ver­si­ty stake­hold­ers in Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy nowa­days includes, we should note, Duke, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts at Amherst, and U. Toron­to, in addi­tion to Yale and MIT. Plus, you’ll find that profs from oth­er uni­ver­si­ties have con­tributed to the video col­lec­tion. For exam­ple, Chris Sur­prenant (Uni­ver­si­ty of New Orleans) cre­at­ed the videos on Pla­to, Aris­to­tle, and Kant. Also find com­plete cours­es taught by Sur­prenant on our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: An Open Access Phi­los­o­phy Project Cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT

The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life: A Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast

Phi­los­o­phy Bites: Pod­cast­ing Ideas From Pla­to to Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Since 2007

Phi­los­o­phize This!: The Pop­u­lar, Enter­tain­ing Phi­los­o­phy Pod­cast from an Uncon­ven­tion­al Teacher

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.