The Best Philosophy Lectures on YouTube

A living resource for your self-education.

Latest Update: 17 January 2026

If you want to fight back against slop, you should refuse to produce it and refuse to consume it.

Platforms like YouTube are the home of most slop, but they are also home to some fantastic educational content. I’ve compiled a list of philosophy lectures which you can enjoy, free of charge, to further your philosophical education.

I’m glad that these videos exist. I wish that more philosophers would make them. There has been a push in professional philosophy circles to do ‘public philosophy’ some time, and I admit I find it all a bit frustrating — they focus on trade books and op-eds, which are fine enough, but I think the single best thing a professional philosopher can do to spread philosophy to the public is to make YouTube videos. You could potentially reach millions of people on a platform where the audience does, on occasion, actively seek out high-quality content.

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This is a living resource: I’ll update it when I find more. You can also make suggestions down below.

I won’t paywall this article, as I’m merely sharing resources which are already free. You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber.

Anderson on Political Theory

Ellie Anderson

is a professor at Pomona College and one of the cohosts of Overthink, a philosophy podcast. She also worked with Crash Course – a series started by John and Hank Green, I believe – to produce a lecture series on political theory.

I admit I don’t like the Crash Course format: the videos are short, and I prefer longer lectures. But that’s part of the appeal of Crash Course: they are quick, digestible videos that can help you learn something. So, I’m very glad that somebody is making these.

Anderson’s Collected Lectures

Elizabeth Anderson – no relation to Ellie Anderson, I believe – is one of the most prominent feminist political philosophers working today, at least in the analytic question. She doesn’t have much of an online presence, but her lectures are often recorded and posted on various channels. One noble soul has collected these lectures into a single playlist:

Brandom on Frege

Robert Brandom is, to my mind, one of the most interesting philosophers alive today. He uploads his lectures on YouTube, including his seminar ‘Frege in Context.’ Unfortunately, he doesn’t make playlists, so you’ll have to navigate on his page yourself.

You’ll also find lectures on Hegel, Sellars, logic, reasons, and more.

You can also find a lecture on Hegel’s Phenomenology on Yale’s YouTube channel.

Bonevac on Philosophy

Daniel Bonevac is a professor of philosophy at University of Texas, Austin. On his YouTube channel, he’s uploaded 476 videos, mostly lecture content. Some of them are quite niche – like a 19-minute video on the ethical theory of Johann Gottfried von Herder – but some are of much wider general interest.

In this video, he introduces students to philosophy in general in a single lecture.

Drefyus on Being & Time

Hubert Dreyfus used to give a lecture course on Heidegger’s Being & Time at University of California, Berkeley. From what I can gather, it was a legendary course — in one of the recordings, I believe Dreyfus was complaining that university never provided enough seats for interested students.

For a years, these were available on iTunes U, which served as a platform for free educational content. That’s where I found the Dreyfus lectures; I listened to all of them between my first and second year of graduate school, the summer I decided to read Being & Time on my own. I wouldn’t have made much progress without Dreyfus.

But iTunes U was deprecated. I thought that the lectures were lost, too, but someone has uploaded them to YouTube.

Frick’s Ethics Lectures

Johann Frick is a professor at UC Berkeley, and he’s published in some of the top ethics journals in the world. Tragically, his YouTube channel has gotten very little attention. This is a real shame, because Frick is essentially giving away his Berkeley undergraduate-level ethics course.

He didn’t make them into a playlist, so you’ll navigate on his page. You’ll find lectures on the non-identity problem, moral luck, theories of well-being, and much more.

Houlgate on Hegel’s Science of Logic

Stephen Houlgate is a professor of philosophy at Warwick University. His research largely focuses on Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. He’s written several books on Hegel, including a reader’s guide to the Phenomenology of Spirit. But I’ve linked to his lectures on another of Hegel’s work, The Science of Logic. This is close to 20 hours of lecture content guiding you through this famous work.

Kagan on Death

I think a number of us get into philosophy because we found ourselves thinking about death all the time. It was certainly one of my philosophical preoccupations as a teenager. ‘How strange it is to be anything at all,’ the song goes — what’s even weirder is imagining not being.

Shelley Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and he’s posted his entire course on the philosophy of death on YouTube. According to his website, his work on death has been particularly popular in China and South Korea.

You can skip most of the first video in this series, as he’s going over course requirements. But there is a section where he explains why common views about death are wrong, which you might want to listen to before proceeding.

Kaplan on Russell’s Paradox

Jeffrey Kaplan doesn’t post very often anymore, but when he does you know you’re in for a treat. Kaplan has a gift for explaining – really explaining – famous paradoxes. I’ve also made a video about the Liar Paradox, and my video is awful by comparison. To get a taste for what he’s like, you can watch his video on Russell’s Paradox.

If you like that, you can also check out his work on ethics and philosophy of language, all on the linked YouTube channel.

Magee’s The Great Philosophers

In 1987, the BBC aired The Great Philosophers. Each episode is an interview with Bryan Magee and a philosopher, and the subject of conversation is some other philosophical topic. There were 15 episodes, and they’ve all been compiled into a single video here:

Rawls on Modern Political Philosophy

John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice is a one of the most important works of twentieth century political philosophy. His most important concept may be the Veil of Ignorance: a thought experiment in which we imagine we are designing a society without knowing what role we will occupy in that society. Rawls’ believed that we would converge on an arrangement that, while not strictly egalitarian, would ensure that the least well-off would maximally benefit.

A brief description of this thought experiment is found in a helpful article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The parties are not however completely ignorant of facts. They know all kinds of general facts about persons and societies, including knowledge of relatively uncontroversial scientific laws and generalizations accepted within the natural and social sciences – economics, psychology, political science, biology, and other natural sciences (including applications of Darwinian evolutionary theory that are generally accepted by scientists, however controversial they may be among religious fundamentalists). They know then about the general tendencies of human behavior and psychological development, about neuropsychology and biological evolution, and about how economic markets work, including neo-classical price theory of supply and demand. As discussed below, they also know about the circumstances of justice—moderate scarcity and limited altruism—as well as the desirability of the “primary social goods” that are needed by anyone in modern society to live a good life and to develop their “moral powers” and other capacities. What the parties lack however is knowledge of any particular facts about their own and other persons’ lives, as well as knowledge of any historical facts about their society and its population, its level of wealth and resources, religious institutions, etc..

Rawls was at Harvard at the same time as Robert Nozick, perhaps the best defender of libertarianism in academic philosophy. I’ve always found that interesting: two philosophers, with offices in the same hall, thinking about the same subjects came to such radically different conclusions on what an ideal society would look like.

Rawls’ lectures on modern political philosophy are available (in audio-only) here. I didn’t know about these until very recently, when Daniel Muñoz shared them in a note.

Robinson on Kant

Daniel Robinson earned his PhD in neuroscience at the CUNY Graduate Center, and for many years he was a professor of psychology at Georgetown. He was then a fellow in philosophy at Oxford. He’s written on Aristotle’s psychology, but late in his career he turned his attention to Kant. That’s the subject of this lecture series.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures

The Royal Institute of Philosophy has a YouTube channel full of high-quality lectures. Unlike most of the channels or playlists featured here, these are not by one philosopher. Instead, these are lectures from many different philosophers in a wide variety of subfields. I’ll share a few of my favorites, but you’ll want to explore this channel for yourself.

Sadler on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Over the course of a decade, Gregory Sadler produced the ‘Half-Hour Hegel Series,’ This is 379 videos going paragraph-by-paragraph through Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Sadler is one of the original philosophy YouTubers. He’s made close to 4,000 videos at this point. (For contrast, I’ve made about 100.)

Sandel on Justice

Michael Sandel may be the most famous political philosophers alive, in large part due this wildly popular lecture series on Justice. It’s easily the most popular thing on the list. The first video in the series has amassed 40 million views. (For comparison, my biggest viral hit has about 3.2 million views, and I certainly didn’t get those views by discussing philosophy for 50 minutes.)

Sugrue on Marcus Aurelius

Michael Sugrue became famous through YouTube. His introductory lectures to the great philosophers have been viewed millions of times. When he died in January of 2024, he was mourned across the internet, a testament to the number of people whose lives he touched. I’ve linked his most popular video on the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.

Sugrue’s channel is full of content like this. It was his life’s work, and he’s an inspiration to me and many others.

Wolff on Marx

Robert Paul Wolff was professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He specialized in political theory, with an emphasis on anarchism. This is a 7-part lecture series on Karl Marx, whom Wolff calls ‘the greatest social scientist who ever lived.’

My Own Series

Very slowly, I’m developing a series on my channel where I provide in-depth explanations of various philosophers, schools of thought, and great books.

I’ve made three so far: ‘Stoicism: An In-Depth Explanation,’ ‘Aristotle’s Guide to the Good Life,’ and ‘Plato’s Republic: An In-Depth Guide.’ I’ve placed them all in a single playlist:

My goal in 2026 is to produce 6 more of these. The first one in 2026 is going to be a guided tour of the history of Western philosophy, but then I’ll return to individual books and thinkers.

And yes, it may be a bit gauche to include myself, but I think these videos are the best things I’ve ever produced, and I think that when I look back at my time on YouTube, I’ll be most proud of this series.

I have 30 videos in the series planned, meaning I could theoretically finish it in 5 years.