1. Agreement to these terms
These Terms and Conditions (the “Terms”) form a binding agreement between you (“you,” “your,” or the “User”) and Christian McTighe, an individual trading as CWM Digital Technologies as a sole proprietorship (Einzelunternehmen) registered under the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, with its place of business at Christel-Küpper-Platz 17, 81379 München, Germany (“we,” “us,” “our,” or the “Business”), governing your access to and use of The Great Conversation — the online course, materials, and related services (collectively, the “Service”). The online course itself, with its lessons and downloadable materials, is referred to as the “Course.” For our full legal-identity details, see our Imprint.
By creating an account, completing a purchase, or otherwise using the Service, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. You represent that you are at least 18 years old (or the age of legal majority in your jurisdiction) and capable of entering into a binding contract.
2. Nature of the Course and no guarantee of results
The Course provides general educational content on the history of Western philosophy, including its medieval Islamic and Jewish strands. It presents that history as a continuous account, in roughly chronological order from antiquity to the present day, through lessons grouped into modules, with reference appendices and optional self-check questions. It is written for general readers and assumes no prior knowledge of philosophy. Content may be updated, added to, or reorganized over time, as described in Section 7.
The Course is a self-study course with written content, downloadable materials, and any pre-recorded content we offer. It does not include individual instruction, answering questions about the course content, assessment of your work, or monitoring of your learning progress. Our support covers technical and account-related questions only.
No credential or academic credit. The Course is an independent, self-paced educational offering provided by the Business. It is not part of, and is not affiliated with, any certificate, diploma, degree, or other accredited or state-recognized program of study, and it is not offered, sponsored, or accredited by any university, college, school, or academic or professional body. Completing the Course, or any part of it, does not result in a certificate, diploma, degree, license, qualification, or professional designation, and the Business does not issue any. No academic credit, continuing-education credit, or other credit of any kind is awarded, and the Business makes no representation that the Course, or your progress in it, will be recognized or accepted for credit, admission, advancement, or any other purpose by any educational institution, employer, professional body, or other third party. The self-check questions and progress indicators within the Course are provided for your own convenience only; they are not examinations or assessments and do not constitute a record of academic achievement.
The content is provided for general informational and educational purposes only. It presents the arguments of historical thinkers together with commentary and interpretation; neither quoting a position nor expounding it is an endorsement of it. It is not professional, legal, financial, or other specialized advice, and it is not tailored to your specific circumstances. You should consult a qualified professional for advice specific to your situation.
Quotations from primary sources appear for the purposes of criticism, comment, and teaching. They are kept short, attributed, and credited to their translators; rights in the quoted material remain with their respective holders.
Your results depend on your own circumstances and actions. We do not guarantee any particular result, and you remain responsible for your own decisions and outcomes. This section does not affect our obligation to provide the Course as described.
3. Access to the Course
The Course is sold as a one-time purchase. There is no subscription and no recurring payment.
After your payment is completed, you get personal access to the Course through your user account. Access continues for as long as we offer the Course, subject to Section 8 (Discontinuation of the Course) and Section 11 (Suspension and termination for breach).
We aim to keep the Course available at all times. Short interruptions, for example for maintenance, security updates, or technical faults beyond our control, may occur.
4. Your account
You sign in with a one-time email link. You are responsible for keeping access to your email and account secure and for all activity under your account. Provide accurate information and let us know about any unauthorized use.
Your access is personal and may be used by one person only. You may not share your login details, allow others to use your account, or transfer, sell, or assign your account or access to any other person. Keep your login details confidential and inform us without undue delay if you suspect misuse.
Discount codes are intended for the recipient only. They may not be published, shared, or resold unless we have expressly allowed this.
We may take reasonable technical measures to prevent account sharing, such as limiting simultaneous sessions.
5. Fees and payment
Access to the Course requires a single one-time payment in the amount stated at checkout. There is no subscription. Prices are listed in U.S. dollars (USD) and are shown before tax. Any applicable value-added tax (VAT), sales tax, or GST is calculated based on your location and added at checkout. The total amount you pay, including any tax, is shown before you confirm your purchase.
Your purchase is made through Stripe Managed Payments. Stripe acts as our payment processor and, through its Link service, as the merchant of record for your purchase: your order appears as “sold through Link,” your receipt and any refund notice come from Link, and the charge may appear on your card or bank statement as “LINK.COM*” followed by a short descriptor. Stripe also handles payment support and payment disputes for your purchase.
If you buy from a country where Stripe handles indirect tax for Managed Payments — including every member state of the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada — Stripe also calculates, collects, and remits the applicable tax and sends your invoice. If Stripe does not handle the tax for your country, Link still sends your receipt, but your invoice is issued in our name, and we are responsible for any tax due on the purchase.
At checkout, Stripe may offer to show the price in your local currency. If you pay in your local currency, Stripe converts the price at its exchange rate and includes a currency-conversion fee in the local amount; the exact amount is shown before you confirm. You can avoid that fee by paying in U.S. dollars, although your bank or card issuer may then apply its own exchange rate and fees.
For questions about a charge, receipt, invoice, or tax, you can contact Link support or us. By purchasing, you also agree to Stripe’s applicable terms for the payment. We provide the Course and remain responsible for its content, your access to it, and its support, as described in these Terms. We do not store full payment-card details on our own systems.
Stripe Managed Payments is not available in every country or territory. Where it does not support your location, you may not be able to buy the Course.
6. Refunds, withdrawal, and cancellation
Because the Course is a one-time purchase rather than a recurring subscription, there is nothing to cancel. Your right to withdraw from the contract, which you can exercise online through our Withdraw from contract function, and any right to a refund are set out in our Refund and Cancellation Policy, which forms part of these Terms.
7. Changes to the Course content
We may update, correct, reorganize, replace, or remove individual parts of the Course (for example, lessons, examples, or materials), in particular to keep the content current, to reflect changes in law or practice, to improve teaching quality, or for technical or legal reasons.
Such changes will not result in any additional cost to you. The overall scope and quality of the Course will remain essentially the same.
If a change more than insignificantly affects your access to or use of the Course, we will inform you in advance by email in a clear and comprehensible way. In that case, you have the statutory rights under Section 327r of the German Civil Code (BGB), including the right to terminate the contract free of charge.
8. Discontinuation of the Course
We may discontinue the Course as a whole. We will inform you by email at least 30 days before access ends.
If access ends within 12 months after your purchase, we will refund a pro-rata share of the amount you paid, including any tax:
refund = amount paid × (12 − full months elapsed since purchase) ÷ 12
The refund is paid automatically to your original payment method; you do not need to request it. If access ends later than 12 months after your purchase, there is no refund. This section does not apply if your access ends under Section 11 (Suspension and termination for breach).
9. Intellectual property and license to use
All content within the Service — including lessons, text, graphics, templates, downloads, and other downloadable materials, and the selection, arrangement, and structure of the Course — is owned by the Business or its licensors and is protected by copyright and other intellectual-property laws.
Subject to these Terms and your payment, we grant you a simple (non-exclusive), non-transferable, non-sublicensable right to access and use the content for your own learning and personal, non-commercial use, for the duration of your access, and to download the specific materials for which a download function is provided, for your own personal reference. You may not, in particular:
- copy, download, record, screen-capture, or otherwise reproduce the content in bulk (for example, whole lessons or the Course as a whole), or publicly display or perform it, unless a feature of the platform (such as a download function) expressly allows it;
- share, publish, sell, resell, sublicense, rent out, or otherwise make the content available to any third party, including by sharing your account credentials;
- edit the content or use it to create a competing course or product;
- use the content to train, fine-tune, or feed artificial-intelligence or machine-learning systems, or process it systematically with automated tools (scraping); or
- remove or alter any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices, or circumvent any access control or usage-tracking feature.
Personal notes. You may take screenshots of, or copy, individual passages, quotations, and tables from the Course into your own private notes, for your own reference. You may not share those notes or excerpts with anyone else or make them public in any form, whether free of charge or for payment.
Downloaded materials. The PDFs and other materials you download from the Course are licensed to you, the person who purchased the Course, for your own personal use only. You may not make them public — for example, by posting or uploading them to a website, social media, a forum, or a publicly accessible file-sharing or cloud-storage link — and you may not share them with anyone else, in any form and whether free of charge or for payment.
These restrictions apply to the course materials themselves, not to the general knowledge, skills, or good-practice habits you gain — you are free to apply what you learn in your own life and work. Statutory permissions under copyright law (for example, quotations under Section 51 of the German Copyright Act, UrhG) remain unaffected.
10. Acceptable use
You agree not to use the Service to violate any law, infringe any third party’s rights, attempt to gain unauthorized access to our systems, interfere with the Service’s operation, or facilitate any unlawful or harmful activity. We may suspend or terminate access for violations, as described in Section 11.
11. Suspension and termination for breach
If you breach Section 4 (Your account), Section 9 (Intellectual property and license to use), or Section 10 (Acceptable use), we will first ask you to stop the breach and may temporarily suspend your access until the breach is resolved.
In case of a serious breach, we may terminate the contract for good cause without prior warning (Section 314 of the German Civil Code, BGB). Examples: publishing or reselling Course content, systematically sharing your account, or fraud in connection with your purchase.
If the contract is terminated for a reason you are responsible for, you are not entitled to a refund of the amount paid. Our further statutory claims, and your statutory rights, remain unaffected. Upon termination, your license to access the content ends. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — including intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law — will survive.
12. Disclaimers
Currency and accuracy of content. The content reflects our understanding of general good practices as of the date it was prepared and may become outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate. We update the Course as described in Section 7, but you should independently verify current guidance before relying on it.
Third-party products and services. The Service may reference categories of third-party products as illustrative examples only, and not as an endorsement, guarantee, or recommendation. We are not responsible for third-party products, and your use of them is governed by their own terms.
This section does not limit your statutory rights, for example for defective digital content (Sections 327 et seq. of the German Civil Code, BGB).
13. Limitation of liability
We are liable without limitation for damage caused intentionally or through gross negligence, for injury to life, body, or health, under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), and to the extent we have given a guarantee.
In cases of slight negligence, we are liable only for breaches of an essential contractual obligation (an obligation whose fulfillment is essential for the proper performance of the contract and on whose fulfillment you may regularly rely; “Kardinalpflicht”). In that case, our liability is limited to the typical damage that was foreseeable when the contract was concluded.
Apart from this, our liability for slight negligence is excluded. These limitations also apply to the personal liability of our representatives and agents.
14. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify the Business against claims, losses, liabilities, and reasonable legal costs, to the extent they result from your intentional or negligent breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or third-party right.
15. Privacy and international users
Your use of the Service is also governed by our Privacy Policy, which explains how we collect and process personal data. The Service is operated from Germany. If you access it from outside Germany, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with local laws.
16. Changes to these terms
We may revise these Terms from time to time. When we make material changes, we will update the “Last updated” date and, where appropriate, provide notice. Changes to the Course itself are governed by Sections 7 and 8. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.
17. Governing law and place of jurisdiction
These Terms and all contracts concluded under them are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). If you are a consumer, this choice of law applies only to the extent that it does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the country where you have your habitual residence.
If you are a merchant (Kaufmann), a legal entity under public law, or a special fund under public law, the exclusive place of jurisdiction for all disputes arising from or relating to these Terms or the Service is Munich, Germany. If you are a consumer, you may bring proceedings in the courts of your own country of residence, and mandatory consumer venue rules that protect you are not affected by this clause.
18. General provisions
These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any policies referenced at checkout, are the entire agreement between you and the Business regarding the Service. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full effect. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign or transfer them in connection with a sale or transfer of the Business.
19. Contact us
Questions about these Terms may be sent to info@cwm-digitaltech.com. Our full contact details are in our Imprint.