You can watch what appears to be all the lectures of a Yale introduction to political philosophy course from Steven B. Smith. The first is lecture is here but at this point, I want to call attention to his lectures on Locke, the first of the three being the following:
I’ve not listened past the first few minutes here, so if you sit through it, please post some comments re. what you got out of it. It sounds like this course would do well to tie together several of our episodes for those interested, including our upcoming one (episode 40) on Plato’s Republic and some Aristotle, whose politics we will likely not get around to for a while still. You also get, on this clip, some more detail on the First Treatise than we gave in the episode.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Steven Smith is an excellent lecturer. I watched all of this lecture series some months ago. For a first-year university course it is well delivered. It is fun to see what he does when a student ‘accidentally’ forgets to turn her/his cell phone off. There’s also Shelly Kagan’s fantastic Death course (also Yale) http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/ which, is awesome.
I’ve now been listening to Smith (via iTunes U) on Plato’s Republic, of which he’s a tremendous advocate. He gets at some literary aspects (e.g. what each of Socrates’s interlocutors represents) that I wouldn’t pick up on, and is otherwise enjoyable, but slow. I listen to these on double speed on my iPhone, and in this case, when played at double speed he sounds exactly like a normal person talking in a very unrushed manner at regular speed. Also, he moves very very slowly through the material covered, dwelling at great length on the part before the argument really even starts, so all this may try your patience, but I’m digging it.