Tom Dunton
Publisher
The Teaching Company
Pub. Date
[2004]
Language
English
Description
You live with it 24 hours a day, but how well do you really know it? This course is an owner's manual to a remarkably complex, resilient, and fascinating structure: the human body. Using detailed color illustrations, life-sized models, and, even a video shot during surgery, this course examines the major systems of the body, explaining exactly how things work and why they sometimes don't. Each lecture concentrates on a particular organ or organ system,...
Author
Series
Publisher
Teaching Co
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
Examines the fundamental question of our times: why was the 20th century so violent? It looks at the ideologies that promised utopias and total solutions to social problems and relates the terrible human toll of attempts to realize these ideas.
Series
Publisher
The Teaching Company
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
Surveys the history, traditions, and practice of Judaism from biblical times to today, with explanations of the major aspects of Jewish culture. Focuses on Judaism from within and how it is understood by its adherents, past and present. Covers topics such as the sacred books of Judaism, modes of worship, the calendar and holidays, and rites of passage such as bar and bat mitzva and marriage. Illustrates how Judaism reinvented itself by embracing the...
Publisher
Teaching Company
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
The world of mathematics contains some of the greatest ideas of humankind--ideas comparable to the works of Shakespeare, Plato, and Michelangelo. These mathematical ideas can add texture, beauty, and wonder to your life, without being a mathematician! This course explores the fourth dimension, coincidences, fractals, aesthetics, the allure of number, geometry, and how great mathematical ideas arise, along with learning to think abstractly, to grasp...
Series
Publisher
Teaching Co
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
In the period 1700-1900, kings and empires rose and fell, but science conquered all, taking the world by storm. Yet, as the 1700s began, the mysteries of the universe were pondered by "natural philosophers" whose explanations couldn't help but be influenced by religious thought, and political and social contexts shaping their world. The ideas of the Enlightenment were especially important and influential, and the work of these natural philosophers...
Series
Publisher
The Teaching Company
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
Provides an overview of Christianity, the world's largest religion, and discusses why, in addition to being vast and popular, it is also extremely complex and often highly contradictory. Explains why the central figures, elements, and creeds of Christianity are hard to fathom yet give Christianity its distinctive character. Covers topics such as Christianity's birth and expansion across the Mediterranean world, the development of its doctrine, its...
Series
Publisher
The Teaching Company
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
Buddhism challenges some of the most important Western ideas about God, human life, and the self. In Buddhism, there is no single almighty God who created the world. Instead, Buddhism teaches that all of life is suffering, and there is no permanent self. Moreover, it teaches that in accepting that all life is suffering, bliss can be achieved in this life. Buddhism's core philosophy that nothing is permanent--all is change--has made it an astonishingly...
Series
Publisher
The Teaching Company
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
Hinduism is the world's oldest living religious tradition, with roots deep in the ancient cultures of the Indus Valley civilization and the Aryan society from Central Asia, which combined to create a highly diverse family of religions and philosophies. Topics explored in detail include the sacred scripture the Veda, transmigration of the soul, reincarnation, and karma. Hinduism can be both monotheistic and polytheistic, and systems of social stratification...
Series
Publisher
The Teaching Company
Pub. Date
[2003]
Language
English
Description
Islam has more than 1.2 billion adherents worldwide. Today, it is imperative that the West understand Islam's role as both a religion and a way of life, what Muslims believe, their practices and history. This set of twelve thirty-minute lectures present an exploration of Islamic law, mysticism, civilization, and Muslim life and society through the ages. Examines the "struggle for the soul of Islam" occurring today between conservatives and reformers,...