My Collection

Before I look at my current project. I would just like to mention my collection.  I guess its all the Internets fault, but the web is such a treasure trove of information.  I could not resist the temptation of downloading, purchasing, reading and storing books and data.

My main source of entertainment when it comes to philosophy is listening to lectures.  I do have books, but most times I just like to sit back, close my eyes and listen to lectures.  There are several of audio lectures on the web and my favourite one related to my interests is The Teaching Company.  The company has a vast field of lectures covering many fields on philosophy, history, politics and so on.  Feel free to check out The Teaching Company.

There are more audio lecture sites, in fact many of them.  My next favourite site is The Modern Scholar.  The lectures are in depth, but the range is not so vast. Sometimes I find the lecturer talking too fast, but some lectures provide some tests at the end.

Next on the list is a very old site and the audio lectures are very hard to come by, but do not be fooled. The narrators here will keep you interested in the content of the course.  This site is called Knowledge products. I listened to my first lecture here on existentialism and have never looked back.  I am now hooked!!

I have collected the rest of my lectures from several sites and a good one worth mentioning is Learn Out Aloud.  Most of the audio books/lectures are free and worth downloading to listen to.  Another way to get at lectures is via itunes.  This is because many universities place free lectures and books on their sites and Itunes can get access to them in one stroke.  Make sure to download Itunes and look for your favourite subject be it postmodernism to pragmatism.  Here is a list I am using, which I use as a reference if I find a topic too hard. Visit wikipedia often as a reference, even if sources do not seem reliable, it is a good start to break down harder topics.

Moving away for audio books, lets look at video.  Please be aware that downloading video can eat up your drive, so its worth investing in a external hard drive.  I have four external drives ranging from 500 GB to 1 TB of info mainly on books and courses. 

Your best access to documentaries and videos on intellectual topics would be Youtube, but there are others floating around.  I recently discovered Annenberg Learner and most of their content is free, although some will only allow viewing from the states.

Lets move to PDF books.  My collection on PDF ranges on the following topics that I am interested in being "History of Philosophy, ethics, philosophy of the mind, Epistemology, sociology and so on".  The size of the book collection is vast in GBs. Reading from the computer screen is not usually recommend, so printing out the book is a good option, still you can get away from this by using Text to speech software, this is so your eyes do not take the strain.  Neospeech is by far one of the best text to speech voice, which is in the generation of SAPI 5, problem is Neospeech can be expensive, but if you look into Ivona Text to speech then they are almost just as good and much cheaper.  Use Balabolka to read the PDF text which is free to save eye strain.

My last collection is actually not on the computer or Hard drives, but on the shelf and yes, you ve guessed it.  I have books in plain old hard or paper back lying around.  Perhaps the best way to read, there is only one problem.  Books take up space and when you consider that a HD can hold thousands of books compared to what my room can hold.  There is only one winner and I am thinking about looking for PDF versions of my hardbacks.

I have only mentioned a very small part of educational material you can find on the web.  There are much more and if you come across some, feel free to share the links with others.