Philosophy

Study in the first two years

Coursework and Assessment at Levels 1 and 2. In all courses at levels 1 and 2, you attend lectures three or four days per week and attend a tutorial with an assigned tutor. Coursework includes an essay and a final examination, worth 40% and 60%, respectively, of the final mark for the module.

Philosophy 1K: Knowledge and the World

This course offers an introduction to philosophical theories of the mind its relation to reality, along with a section on reasoning itself. It begins with a study of the Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes, which in many ways set the agenda for philosophy since it was published in 1641. This lively book introduces students to dominant themes of modern philosophical thinking. Descartes raises fundamental questions concerning the foundations of knowledge, and, famously, argues that the mind and the body are quite distinct entities or substances. He challenges directly the belief that it is perceptual experience which grounds our knowledge of reality. He holds that, so far as the content of our experience goes, it might be just as it is and yet there be nothing in reality corresponding to that content. Knowledge of reality requires something other than what we experience.

In the second part of the course, Simon Blackburn's Think introduces students to more recent perspectives on many of the issues raised by Descartes, along with some other issues such as the implications of modern science for our understanding of the mind and self.

The course will be examining arguments for and against various conclusions, and it will be important to have a conception of how to assess the force of those arguments. Thus a third component of the course aims to provide students with skills in critical thinking or informal logic. Such skills are essential not just in philosophy, but for assessing arguments in politics, advertising, other academic disciplines, and elsewhere.

Philosophy 1M: Right and Wrong

This course introduces students to some of the basic problems that arise in trying to understand that specific kind of thinking that is moral thinking. Everyone - well, nearly everyone - goes in for moral thinking: they say (for instance) that racism or terrorism or homosexuality is wrong, that compassion makes you a good person, that people have a right to education or shelter. But what does it mean to say that something is wrong or good or that people have a right to it? How, if at all, can we find out whether something is wrong or good or that people have a right to it? Are right and wrong 'all subjective', 'just a matter of feeling', so that child abuse is wrong only in so far as you, or some folk, happen to feel disgusted by it? Are people capable of acting morally or, deep down, is everyone selfish?

Emphasis in the course will be on understanding these issues rather than acquiring any particular response to them. Part of the course will focus on a classsic text; other parts will concentrate on more general questions about moral and political philosophy, and about some contemporary moral issues. No particular moral standpoint is required in students taking the course, nor are students expected to come out of the course with any particular moral standpoint. The aim is to learn think critically and reflectively about the issues.

Philosophy 2M: Morality, Politics and Religion

Morality, Politics and Religion is mainly focused on issues in moral and political philosophy. It has four components. The first part introduces students to the study of meta-ethics. In this, theories such as moral relativism and moral scepticism are evaluated. In the second, you study some central issues in the philosophy of religion: What reasons can be given for believing that God exists? What is religion? Is the existence of a benevolent god consistent with the existence of evil? In the third, we examine what is perhaps the most influential of all philosophical theories of morality, Mill's Utilitarianism. According to it, the moral goodness of an action is to be explained in terms of its effects on human happiness. Can such a theory account for concepts of justice and right? The final sectionis a critical examination of John Locke’s classic theory of how a government gets the right to rule people and when people are entitled to take up arms against their governments.

Philosophy 2K: Knowledge, Meaning and Inference

What is it to know something? Are there limits to knowledge, due to the limits of our own physical or psychological make-up? Can we know things they are in themselves, or are we limited to knowing how things appear to us? Does all knowledge depend on the senses, or can some things be known a priori, that is, by pure thought? This course centres around a close study of one the definitive books on these subjects of the past 100 years, Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. As well as providing an incisive and famously readable account of these issues, it introduces the student to ways of conceptualising the issues characteristic of philosophy in the Anglo-American world since it was written. It provides an excellent background to the more contemporary works studied at Honours. In addition, the course provides an introduction to Logic, which is essential to a systematic understanding of the structure of knowledge, and of the way in which questions of language and meaning enter into philosophy. In the third component of the course, concepts and methods from both the Theory of Knowledge and from Logic are used in examining a cultural phenomenon with an unparalleled influence on modern life – science. What is the methodology of scientific inference? Can science give us knowledge of things that are beyond our powers of observation? Does science deserve its reputation of being fully objective and rational?