BBC Uses Animation To Teach Philosophy

The BBC has done a series of a short animated films to illustrate the History of Ideas, a courageous and bold way of trying to make philosophy accessible to a broad audience. The idea is to use cartoons to make relatively complex ideas easier to understand.  Here at Bucks we applaud this innovative use of animation to bring tricky ideas to a wider audience. Animation used to be a tiny cottage industry, but now it's everywhere, a universal medium growing in popularity and used in many different media.

Philosophy made easy. With animation

Want to know about the balance between liberty and security? If you've never read Thomas Hobbes, or even if you've read it and forgotten most of it (like me), these short videos are a clever and very successful way to bring ideas to life.

They are really animated comics, moving illustrations. But they are brilliantly done, and a superb way to communicate complexity in a way that is easier to understand.

To see the films, follow this link to the official Radio 4 site.

For more on the experience of studying at Bucks New University, come and visit us at one of our Open Days,  take a virtual tour of one of our animation studios, check out what our students think of our course, and see why we're ranked in the top 12 creative universities in the UK. Find out why we're giving free laptops to all our students, and why we give all our students free access to videos at Lynda.com. Also, see what financial assistance might be available to you. Learn which is better for animation, a PC or a Mac? Get hold of a copy of a map so you can find your way around campus, and learn about motion capture at Bucks.