Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Online teaching materials from George McDonald Ross

George McDonald Ross has some very nice, but sadly incomplete electronic philosophy teaching materials online. The highlight are interactive reading tools for difficult philosophical texts. This is a sample of an interactive Kant reading. The reader is given a passage from Kant and then asked to select the best interpretation of it. Better yet, after that, she has to select the best reason to think that this is the best interpretation. After selecting both an interpretation and a reason, she gets a response. My only complaint is that the responses are too vague. Almost all of them boil down to "Yes, that is a reason."

George also has a very elaborate page for a Kant course which I have only poked around in a little. The nice thing about it is that you can get, in side-by-side frames, George's translation of the first critique and his commentary on it.

Also cool: lots of free online translations of historical texts in philosophy. He's got some Boethius in there, but not the Consolation. If there was a free student-friendly translations of the Consolation out there, I would be able to get through three-quarters of my intro class using free texts. (Right now I am using a nice translation of Plato for students by Cathal Woods and Ryan Pack made available under the creative commons license. I also use this nice free version of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. which has been annotated for students by Jonathan Bennett.

No comments: