Courses Autumn Term 2024
Monday 30th September to Thursday 5th December
2024-25 Courses will be taking place online and we have grouped them per term. Please contact the tutor for further details as to how exactly their courses will operate. Registration fees will standardly be £135 unless otherwise stated (some shorter courses will be offered at lower fees). Tutors also have the discretion to offer a concessionary reduction of £20. In other respects, the details given at enrolment apply.
MON 1-3pm: 10 weeks starting 30th September:
Problems in Philosophy
Jane O’Grady
Would it ever be possible for a machine to think? Is ‘free speech’ a retrograde notion? Does morality amount to what different cultures, or cultural groups, believe to be good and bad? How far is ‘identity politics’ helpful, and to whom? Would you want to live in a virtual reality world in which you could have total power over what happens to you? This course will consist of debating these and other philosophical questions and thought experiments. Students will decide each week what topic to discuss, and will be sent relevant material in advance.
MON 7-9pm: 8 weeks starting 7th October:
Phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
Keith Barrett
At the beginning of the 20th century, Edmund Husserl proposed a completely new way of doing philosophy with his method of phenomenology. We will closely examine Husserl’s phenomenology and study the criticisms brought against it by later thinkers such as Jacques Derrida. We will also trace in detail the modification of Husserl’s phenomenology carried out by his greatest pupil, Martin Heidegger, in the latter’s masterpiece ‘Being and Time’. Heidegger pioneered ‘existential phenomenology’, and we will study Heidegger’s phenomenological description of human existence. Finally, we will examine the phenomenological philosophies developed by Jean-Paul Sartre, and by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, noting their respective critiques of Husserl and Heidegger.
TUE 11am-1pm: 10 weeks starting 1st October:
Philosophies of Reading and Writing 1
Anja Steinbauer
TUE 1.30pm-3pm: 10 weeks starting 1st October:
Political and Social Philosophy Reading Group
Anja Steinbauer
TUE 3pm-5pm: 10 weeks starting 1st October:
Philosophical Writings about Women
Anja Steinbauer
TUE 7-9pm: 10 weeks starting 1st October:
History of Western Philosophy part 1
Full outline here
History of Western Philosophy course outline and reading Part 1 2024a.
Jane O’Grady
‘What’s it all about then, guv?’ a taxi driver asked Bertrand Russell. This course gives a chronological survey of some the great Western philosophers who have formulated, and tried to solve, enduring puzzles – what reality is, who we are, how we should live. It traces the ongoing argument, and invites your contributions to it. Part 1 (this term) runs from the ancient Greeks to John Locke; Part 2 runs from Spinoza to Schopenhauer; Part 3 runs from Nietzsche to now. You can join any or all of these courses.
THUR 1.30-3pm: 10 weeks starting 3rd October:
Kant Reading Group
Anja Steinbauer