Please use this thread to let us know if you have adopted one of the books (or parts of one or more books) for a course! We’d also love to hear if you have adapted any of the chapters or books for your courses.
For adoptions, please include: which book you adopted, your course and institution, and an approximate number of students in your course. For adaptations, if you’re willing to share please also let us know in what way(s) you’ve adapted the book(s) (and be sure to attribute correctly, as explained in the licensing and remixing sections of our books).
Also, please fill out our adoption form, which asks for a bit more information and collects it nicely in one place.
The Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics text is just what we have been looking for. At the University of Notre Dame, Fremantle (Australia) we teach ethics as a Core Curriculum requirement for all undergraduate degrees. This course is approximately 400 students per semester, per year. The Ethics text book is written exactly for this type of reader. It provides a general introduction to the three main theories of ethics with a couple of metaethical chapters as well. Excellent work on this and I look forward to seeing the development of other Open Textbooks. Professor Philip Matthews
Thank you so much, @philip.matthews! We have also talked a bit over email, but I wanted to say thank you here too for letting us know that the book is being adopted at the University of Notre Dame Freemantle and that you think it will serve the students there well. We love hearing about adoptions of the books in this series!
Dear Rebus Community, I am working on developing OER for PHI220 Ethics ( Southside Virginia Community College) and I plan to use several chapters from Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics to create OER to meet the course goals and objectives of this course. I will be certain to include the proper attribution, and I have already completed the adoptions form. Thank you for the hard work you put into developing this text.
Hi Debbie–Thank you so much for contacting us, and I’m sorry for my very delayed reply. It’s wonderful that you are going to use some of the chapters in our book in your own OER! Thank you for letting us know, and I hope the creation of your own resource goes well. If you have any comments on the chapters or book we’ve created, please let us know on the feedback form!
I’m adopting the Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics text for my Ethics course at DBU. I’m going to pair it with primary text readings from Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Aquinas. I teach this every year with 20-30 students.
Thank you so much for letting us know, @brandt.jared! I’m not sure what DBU stands for, though. Is it Dallas Baptist University? That’s what I found on a web search! Glad to hear you’ll be using one of our texts.
Hello Miss Christina. I am Rev. Serge Maniba from the Philippines. I am a newly installed rector of our college seminary in the Province of Antique, Philippines. I was browsing through google to find resources on how to teach Philosophy of Religion and was lucky to find your site. We plan to use the resources you provide. We have studied theology but often not prepared to head a philosophy program. We have enrolled to the University of De la Salle, Manila, Philippines this coming October for their ladderized program designed for seminary formators/professors. Thank you for these resources as they are truly helpful for us in the far flung places with not much access to big libraries.
This is the 2nd semester that I am using the Ethics book. It covers the theory as the textbook for my Introduction to Ethics class . I’m paring it with a variety of content: primary source readings (e.g. Mill/Kant), fiction (e.g. Ursula K. LeGuin), secondary source essays (e.g. Mappes “A Liberal view of Sexuality”), interviews/biopics (e.g. on Martha Nussbaum), podcast clips (e.g. Clay Jenkinson’s “Decent is Essential”), and youtube videos (e.g. a Corvino lecture). So what I like about using this shorter book is that the theory section is not followed by 500 pages of primary and secondary text that I get locked into because “I made them buy the big, heavy book.” With a bit of work on my end, I can design a class with a variety of sources and styles.
While I still keep it rigorous with reading, writing, and argument analysis, I admit that this class is not “training for future philosophy majors” who need to go through all the texts. Most of my students go on to the University of Arkansas, or Arkansas St., etc., for a 4-year degree. But 95% of my students are not going on to major or minor in philosophy. Therefore, this book covering the ethical theories briefly, yet well, is exactly what I need here at Northwest Arkansas Community College.
Dear Serge,
Thank you so much for letting us know about your use of the resources! I’m very sorry for my extremely delayed reply. The notification of your message must have gotten lost in my email inbox somewhere. I truly appreciate you letting us know that the Philosophy of Religion book has been useful to you!
Hello, and thank you so much for letting us know about how you’re using the Ethics book, and that you’re finding the structure of it useful! The way you’re pairing the book with other sources makes a lot of sense, and I’m glad that it’s offering valuable flexibility in providing some introductory material that you can pair with primary and other secondary sources as you find most helpful for the students in your courses. Thank you again for letting us know, and I apologize for my late reply (it’s been a rough last couple of years and I’ve found myself behind on too many things, including replying here!).
I am the Director of Antinomi Institute for Science, Philosophy and Religion, an Indonesia-based non-profit organisation promoting the democratisation of knowledge. One of our programmes is translating English literature on philosophy into the Indonesian language and making it available online free of charge. This year we plan to translate into Indonesian all the books from the Introduction to Philosophy series by Rebus Community. The first one we will execute is “Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology”. It would be finished in the next three months, Thank you for your work. I have always been looking forward to the next books in the Introduction to Philosophy series.
Just echoing Apurva here–thank you so much for letting us know that the books are being translated into Indonesian! That’s wonderful! I’m so glad the books are finding a large audience and are able to reach people who speak other languages. Please do let us know when the translations are done!
