Critical Thinker Academy: Learn to Think Like a Philosopher

https://www.udemy.com/critical-thinker-academy/

This course is created by Kevin deLaplante, an independent educator from Ottawa, Canada. Before becoming independent he served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University from 2009 to 2013, though he wrote on his personal site¹ that it was from 2008 to 2012.

The course is a big one, it has about 14 hours of video lectures and PDF supplemental text of 600 pages total. Considering these text more complicated than average and estimating that it takes about five minutes for a page, a student needs about 50 hours to read all of them. You probably need some more time to make exercises and to think about new topics, let’s say it can take about 20 hours. So the course in total can take about 84 hours.

The author covers a number of topics, beginning with an introduction to critical thinking and importance of the topic. The he follows with cognitive biases, logic and fallacies, reasoning with probabilities, and even more fallacies. He also covers applying critical thinking to conspiracy theories and writing argumentative essays.

According to the author you don’t need to have any background knowledge, but I can add that you probably need to have at least a high school education to better understand some topics.

Some of videos was created from a podcast with added presentation slides, though I don’t know, were slides in the podcast in the first place or have the author added them later. Still, this approach looks pretty solid and you can use this course to start your education in the area of critical thinking.

I agree with the author that the course is aimed for a broad audience. So you may want to just learn critical thinking, or you may want to learn how to write argumentatively. You may also want to learn about psychology of belief and judgment, or learn more about philosophical ideas and methods.

1. ^ : https://kevindelaplante.com/about/