Fifty lessons from Thales to the present day — each one a location in your memory palace, each idea a vivid image you will never forget
♦ ♦ ♦Choose your own fifty places. Each number links to its lesson.
Each lesson follows a seven-part structure: Review (what you remember from earlier lessons) → The Story (the philosopher's life and world, told as narrative) → The Ideas (the philosophy itself, with original texts) → Key Dates (encode with the PAO system) → Memory Palace (place five vivid images at your chosen location) → Your Turn (reflect and discuss) → Final Review (lock it in).
Content returns at +3, +7, and +14 lesson intervals through spaced repetition in the Review tabs. By the end, you will have 250 palace images and 150 encoded dates — and the whole sweep of Western thought living in your memory.
This course does not prescribe a single building or route. You choose fifty locations from your own life — rooms in your home, stops on a familiar walk, places you know by heart. Each lesson gives you five vivid, bizarre, sensory-rich images to place at your chosen location. The stranger the image, the stronger the memory. By the end, your personal palace holds 2,600 years of philosophy.
Every philosopher in this course is trying to answer one or both of two questions: What is the world made of? and How should we live? Watch how each thinker wrestles with these questions — and notice what each one leaves unresolved. The answers build on one another, and the story has a shape that only becomes clear at the end.
Wonder is the beginning of wisdom. — Socrates