Starting January 1 (2015) I will be teaching an online course on Critical Thinking in the 21st Century: Essential Skills Everyone Should Master. Click that to register.

The required course text (which students should purchase as soon as possible) is Ken Manktelow, Thinking and Reasoning: An Introduction to the Psychology of Reason, Judgment and Decision Making (available in paperback … or on kindle for either purchase or rent: make sure you select the desired option before purchase). All other course materials (articles and video lectures) will be provided for free.

Official Course Description:

Richard Carrier (Ph.D., Columbia University) will provide instruction and advice on the new skills now needed to become a good critical thinker in the 21st century in his new course “Critical Thinking in the 21st Century: Essential Skills Everyone Should Master.” Based on Dr. Carrier’s acclaimed presentation for the Secular Student Alliance, this course will: teach students standard skills in traditional logic and fallacies; cover cognitive biases and how to detect and avoid them, including motivated reasoning and the problems associated with a political brain; tutor in Bayes’ Theorem, and Bayesian problem solving, for the non-mathematician, and other skills in reasoning about probability; learning how to see things from someone else’s perspective; and useful skills of self-examination, self-critique, and personal improvement in thinking and reasoning, for personal belief development and the acquisition of wisdom. Each student will be left with a complete toolbox of ideas and information to work with, which will make them sharper thinkers in every domain.

As usual, these courses are one month long, and you learn at your own pace and on your own time, and participate as much or as little as you want (many just lurk and read the assigned readings and resulting discussion threads).