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
What is literature? What is a text? What is interpretation? What happens when we read? This course is about philosophical aspects of engagement with texts. Making use of resources from a spectrum of philosophical disciplines, including epistemology, aesthetics and hermeneutics, we will examine our relationship to the written word. We will draw on thinkers from Plato to Derrida, John Locke to Susan Sonntag. This course extends over two terms but either of the terms can also be taken individually.
TUE 1.30pm-3pm: 10 weeks starting 1st October:
Political and Social Philosophy Reading Group
Anja Steinbauer
Formerly the “Frankfurt School Reading Group”, we choose texts from 20th C social and political thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas and Edward Said. Joining the group is free of charge but you are asked to read and think along.
TUE 3pm-5pm: 10 weeks starting 1st October:
Philosophical Writings about Women
Anja Steinbauer
This course offers a chronological overview of the ways in which women have been characterised in the philosophical canon, from debates in antiquity and the Enlightenment to our present day. We will look at feminist thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir, at those sympathetic to women such as Marcellus Rufus and John Stuart Mill, as well as those ambiguous about or outright hostile to women, such as Aristotle and Arthur Schopenhauer.
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
With the beginning of this term we will embark on another long term project: the plan is to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Are you up for the challenge? The meetings are free of charge, and you are most welcome to join, but some background in philosophy is required.