The Great Courses
  • 1800 461 951
  • Help & Customer Service
  • About Us
  • Shopping Cart
  • Recently Viewed
  • My Account
  • Home
  • Courses
  • Professors
  • Recommendations

New & Featured

  • Best Selling Professors
  • Professors With New Releases

Professors by Topic

  • Science & Mathematics
  • History
  • Fine Arts & Music
  • Religion & Theology
  • Philosophy & Intellectual History
  • Literature & English Language
  • Business & Economics
  • Better Living
  • Professional
  • High School
  • View All Professors

Find a Course

Learn More About The Great Courses

  • What Are The Great Courses?
  • About Our Sales
  • Lifetime Guarantee
  • Recommendations

Designed to meet the powerful demand for lifelong learning, The Great Courses is an intellectual engaging series of video and audio courses led by the world's best professors and experts in diverse fields such as philosophy, history, literature, science, and the arts. The Great Courses currently maintains a catalog of more than 350 courses delivered by great teachers from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and more.

We work closely with our customers and professors to create every single Great Course. Here's how we do it:

  • Customers Choose the Professor:We begin with the most engaging professors—the top 1% as determined by The Great Courses and its customers. In the end, only 1 in 5,000 professors meets the standards set by our customers, who vote on all professors we retain.
  • Customers Choose the Course: We interview thousands of customers to find out what courses they want and how they want them made.
  • Professors Carefully Craft the Course: Months of preparation ensure that a course will satisfy our customers. Long before a word is spoken on stage, our professor outlines and prepares each lecture and writes the extensive Course Guidebook.
  • We Record the Course: Working in our in-house recording studios, we record the video of each lecture on high-definition-quality equipment and media, or record the audio of each lecture on the latest CD-quality equipment and media. We then devote weeks to include dynamic visual elements into the video lectures and to professionally master the sound for the audio lectures.

Our Sales

There's always a sale at The Great Courses. We call it The Great Deal, and here's how it works:

  • Every single one of our more than 300 courses goes on sale at least once a year!
  • You enjoy savings as high as 70% off the full list price!

Why do we do this?

The answer is simple. By producing large quantities of only the sale courses, we keep our costs down and pass the savings on to you. This approach also enables us to fill your order immediately—99% of all orders ship within 24 hours.

When on sale, our typical course on CD is $54.95 for 12 CDs, or 12 hours of content. That's only $4.58 per CD. Compare $4.58 to what you pay elsewhere for a CD—$20? More? In any format, our courses costs much less than most audiobooks, DVDs, or CDs.

Our Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee

Every single Great Course you order comes with a Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee.

If a course is ever less than completely satisfying, you may exchange it for another or we will refund your money promptly. If a disc ever breaks, warps, or gets damaged, we'll replace it as long as the course is in print. Absolutely free.

Most publishers don't guarantee your satisfaction with their books or recordings, but we do. Why? Because we want you to be our customer for a lifetime of learning.

This guarantee, which we've honored every day since we were established in 1990, not only protects your investment in learning, it also compels us to produce only great courses—and nothing less.

Here's what one of our customers has to say about our Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee:

"To understand how powerful [The Great Course's Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee] is, keep in mind what this company sells. These aren't little audio tapes with 30 minutes of fluff, they're HUGE, in-depth, taped lectures from some of the best minds in the country.

"When I saw the guarantee, I was sold. Where's my credit card?

"But there's another reason for the guarantee—ethics. Thomas Rollins, [founder] of [The Great Courses], said his company values clients so much, he simply doesn't want them to have any product they don't absolutely love. In our lively phone conversation, he said, 'We call our lectures The Great Courses and if we don't deliver great courses, we don't deserve the money.'

"Wow! Most people think of customer loyalty as customers being loyal to a business. But how about a business being loyal to customers?"

—Dean Rieck, Direct Marketing magazine

"A dream come true for the lifelong learner. ... The Great Courses series features a semester's or more worth of lectures in hundreds of disciplines by some of the country's leading scholars."

—Video Librarian


More Testimonials

Newsletter Sign-Up

Be notified of special promotions and new releases (privacy policy)

What Do You Do With My E-mail Address and Personal Information?


Here's what we do with your e-mail address:


  • Send you order confirmations.
  • Send you course starter materials.
  • Send you free articles.
  • Collect your feedback on courses and professors.
  • Notify you of special sale offers.

Here's what we do with your name and mailing address:


  • Send you our monthly Great Courses catalog.
  • Send you The Great Courses Magazine, newsletters, and other special sale catalogs

For more information, please visit our full Privacy Policy.

Daniel N. Robinson
"Aristotle has the desire to know as a universal human characteristic. Teaching attends to that desire and, when done well, even satisfies it."

Daniel N. Robinson

Ph.D., City University of New York
Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University; Distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus, Georgetown

Dr. Daniel N. Robinson is a member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University, where he has lectured annually since 1991. He is also Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at Georgetown University, on whose faculty he served for 30 years. He was formerly Adjunct Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, and he also held positions at Amherst College and at Princeton University.

Professor Robinson earned his Ph.D. in Neuropsychology from City University of New York.

He is past president of two divisions of the American Psychological Association: the Division of History of Psychology, from which he received the Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Division of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, from which he received the Distinguished Contribution Award.

Professor Robinson is author or editor of more than 40 books, including Wild Beasts & Idle Humours: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present, An Intellectual History of Psychology, The Mind: An Oxford Reader, and Aristotle’s Psychology. He is former editor of the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Dr. Robinson has also published widely on the constitutional history of the U.S. and its philosophical foundations, with original research appearing in the International Journal of Constitutional Law and The American Journal of Jurisprudence. He is coeditor of The American Founding: Its Intellectual and Moral Framework (London: Continuum, 2012).


  • Thumbnails
  • Descriptions
  • Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition
    Quick Look
    Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition Daniel N. Robinson
  • Consciousness and Its Implications
    Quick Look
    Consciousness and Its Implications Daniel N. Robinson
  • American Ideals:  Founding a "Republic of Virtue"
    Quick Look
    American Ideals: Founding a "Republic of Virtue" Daniel N. Robinson
  • Great Ideas of Psychology
    Quick Look
    Great Ideas of Psychology Daniel N. Robinson
  • Greek Legacy: Classical Origins of the Modern World
    Quick Look
    Greek Legacy: Classical Origins of the Modern World Daniel N. Robinson
  • Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition & Great Ideas of Psychology (Set)
    Quick Look
    Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition & Great Ideas of Psychology (Set) Daniel N. Robinson Save Up To $715
  • Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition
Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition
Daniel N. Robinson

These lectures offer a coherent and beautifully articulated introduction to the great philosophic conversation of the ages. They cover an enormous range of seminal thinkers and perspectives, but always from the vantage point of the enduring questions: What can we know? How ought we to act? How should we order our life together? Dr. Robinson's lectures make the ideas of philosophy thrilling, passionate, human, and divine. Customers agree: "Professor Robinson explains multiple disciplines like no one since Aristotle. His scope is awesome. A professor's professor."
  • Consciousness and Its Implications
Consciousness and Its Implications
Daniel N. Robinson

Join distinguished philosopher, psychologist, and award-winning Professor Daniel N. Robinson and explore fascinating questions about human consciousness in Consciousness and Its Implications. You'll probe the depths of this mysterious subject from the perspective of the philosopher, the psychologist, the scientist, and the doctor. A master storyteller, Professor Robinson brings this riveting topic to life with real-world examples and striking anecdotes about smart computers, sleepwalkers, comatose patients, zombies, and more. An in-depth guide to a subject we're learning more about every day, this course will change how you think about your own mind.
  • American Ideals:  Founding a "Republic of Virtue"
American Ideals: Founding a "Republic of Virtue"
Daniel N. Robinson

Just which "ideals" were affirmed by the Founders? What lessons of history were closely studied by them? American Ideals: Founding a "Republic of Virtue" is an invitation to enter this part of the American debate regarding human nature and the conditions right for its flourishing. In these carefully crafted lectures, Professor Daniel N. Robinson traces the dominant features of the early American ethos that culminated in declared independence and a constitutional form of government unheralded in political history. This is a fascinating opportunity to trace the manner in which the founding documents of the United States evolved.
  • Great Ideas of Psychology
Great Ideas of Psychology
Daniel N. Robinson

This introduction to psychology stands out because it brilliantly analyzes the larger intellectual context in which the discipline has grown up. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Jung, you follow the fascinating debates that occur and recur as one school of thought after another seeks answers to the continuing mysteries of the mind.
  • Greek Legacy: Classical Origins of the Modern World
Greek Legacy: Classical Origins of the Modern World
Daniel N. Robinson

In the 12 lectures of Greek Legacy: Classical Origins of the Modern World, explore the continuing influence of the classical Greek achievement on contemporary life. Your guide to the rise, fall, and return of Greek influence on Western culture is acclaimed Professor Daniel N. Robinson. He explores this rich legacy in specific aspects of our 21st-century lives, including: literature, art and architecture, learning, science and medicine, and government. By the final lecture, you'll have gained a fresh perspective on the remarkable continuity and preservation of the Greek ethos over thousands of years.
  • Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition & Great Ideas of Psychology (Set) Save Up To $715
Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition & Great Ideas of Psychology (Set)
Daniel N. Robinson

In Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2nd Edition, survey the long chain of philosophical debate that began in ancient history and continues through our contemporary world. Then, take a similar approach to the field of psychology in Great Ideas of Psychology. Both courses will help you better understand these two piercing areas of human endeavor.
  • Contact Us|
  • Terms & Conditions|
  • Privacy Policy|
  • Site Map

© This site and content copyright 2013. The Teaching Company, LLC. Site contents are also protected by
other copyrights and trademarks. All rights reserved.

SSL