This May, in preparation for my June course on the Historicity of Jesus, let’s get acquainted with all the critical thinking skills we should employ in examining all historical claims! Skeptics will benefit greatly from learning these practical insider skills. And you’ll get to ask all the questions you’d ever have of a bona fide expert, a published historian, with a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University and several peer reviewed articles and monographs in the subject of history. Want to know how historians vet claims, and how we tell the difference between true and false, probable and improbable? Have some challenges in this regard to pose to me? This is the course for you!
Join my affordable online course for the month of May on how to think like a historian and test, challenge, or validate their claims. Or share this with anyone you know who might be keen to. Or both!
General Description: Learn how to question and investigate claims about history. Learn not only the logic of historical reasoning and argument, but also a lot of the practical tips and tricks real historians employ to test and check claims. And hone your skills of skeptical and critical thinking about history.
Primary topics: Best practices among historians; historical methods as modes of reasoning (both criteria-based and Bayesian); examples of flawed reasoning and bad arguments in peer reviewed history journals and monographs (and how to spot them as a layperson); and what to do to critically examine a claim using both immediate criteria and procedures for more labor-intensive inquiry.
What it’s like: The course is one month online. You study and participate at your own pace, as much or as little as you like, and you get to ask me any questions you want about the course topics all month long, as well as read and participate in online discussions with me and other students. I will direct and comment on readings throughout each week and offer weekly course assignments, for those who want to tackle them, which consist of doing a simple online investigation, or answering questions about what you’ve learned and what you think about it.
Required Course Text: The only course text you have to buy is Proving History (available in print and electronic editions). All other readings and media will be provided to students free of charge (all you have to provide is your access to the internet).
Note: This course is useful by itself, but also a good preparatory course for my class on the historicity of Jesus, which I will actually be teaching in June. It’s also a good companion course to my class on New Testament Studies for Everyone, which I will also offer again later this year.
Tuition: $79. But you can also get a discount on that by entering the coupon code 2277437 at registration.
Join us this May! Register here.
Hi Richard, Bart Ehrman is doing a podcast with Sam Harris? You need to do one.
Because that’s how that happens. We just “decide” to be on someone else’s show. You are sending this message to the wrong person. You are supposed to ask Harris to invite me onto his show, not ask me to invite myself onto his show. And this applies to all other interviewers and shows whatever: you need to send these requests to them. Not to the interviewee. Please.
Sorry! I got too snarky there. Apologies.
Hi, Dr. Carrier, will you be offering your “How to think like a historian” course again? I would like to join if possible. Thanks, Ryan
Yes!
I repeat each course every six-to-nine months. I am wrapping up the historian course now. But it will be offered again in six-to-nine months. To get notice, you can follow my feeds (blog, twitter, facebook) or subscribe to the Secular Academy email list to get notified of every course that comes available.