Courses Spring Term 2025
Monday January 20th to Thursday 27th March
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 20th January:
Philosophy through Literature
Jane O’Grady
What is it to be human? What is the point of living? What are we to make of our tantalising experiences of transcendence? Anglo-American analytic philosophy increasingly neglects, and indeed scorns, such questions. They are, though, the very stuff of literature, which also makes concrete and visceral some of the more standard philosophical issues.
The fraught gap between wanting to do something and summoning up the will to do it; how far our feelings are necessarily play-acted and how they can be sustained over time; sincerity and its limitations; how far truth-telling is valuable or destructive; the terrifying unplumbed inner depths of the mind; the struggle for identity and freedom – these issues are graphically expressed and enacted in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, the novels and short stories of George Eliot, James Baldwin, Henry James, André Gide, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, the poems of Baudelaire, Browning, Christina Rossetti, T S Eliot and Edward Thomas. We’ll look at philosophical insights conveyed in these great works of literature, or in excerpts from them.
MON 7-9pm: 8 weeks starting 27th January:
The Philosophy of Wittgenstein
Keith Barrett
Coming from the Analytical tradition, Ludwig Wittgenstein revolutionised our understanding of language in the 20th century. In his early work, the ‘Tractatus’, published in 1922, he sought objective structures within language that would anchor words to their referents in the world. But in his later work he rejected this conception, and produced an entirely new way of thinking about language based on paying close attention to the ways in which everyday communication actually works. His later view of language crystallised in the ‘Philosophical investigations’ published posthumously in 1953. We will study both these works and trace the development of Wittgenstein’s central ideas – examining in detail his new terminology of ‘language games’, ‘family resemblance’, ‘forms of life’, and ‘the private language argument’. Finally, we will celebrate Wittgenstein as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and explore the way in which his later work bridges the divide between the Analytical and the Continental traditions.
TUE 11am-1pm: 10 weeks starting 21st January:
Philosophies of Reading and Writing 2
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 continues some of the themes of term 1, but can be enjoyed independently, so join us if you’re interested even if you haven’t attended last term’s classes.
TUE 1.30pm-3pm: 10 weeks starting 21st January:
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 21st January:
Philosophy of Violence
Anja Steinbauer
“The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.” – Hannah Arendt’s analysis of violence is as compelling as it is controversial. We will read her alongside philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Frantz Fanon, and ask what exactly “violence” is, if and how it can be avoided and if it is ever justified.
TUE 7-9pm: 10 weeks starting 21st January:
History of Western Philosophy part 2
Full outline here history of western philosophy course outline and booklist Part 2 2025a
Jane O’Grady
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 (last term) ran from the ancient Greeks to John Locke; Part 2 (this term) is on the Enlightenment — from Spinoza to Kant; Part 3 (the summer term) runs from Schopenhauer to Sartre. You can join any or all of these courses.
THUR 1:30 – 3pm: 10 weeks starting 23rd January
Kant Reading Group
Anja Steinbauer
With the beginning of this term we will continue 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 at any point, but some background in philosophy is required.