Philosophy MA Modules

Philosophy MA Modules 2024/25

AUTUMN SEMESTER

PHIL41240 John Henry Newman – Philosophical Perspectives (Dr Angelo Bottone)

This course will provide an overview of the relationship between John Henry Newman and philosophy.
After having considered the two main philosophical sources of his formation, namely Aristotle and Cicero, his contribution to the 19th century intellectual debates will be examined.

Themes to be covered include the understanding of the historical development of ideas, the relation between education and morality, the justification of religious beliefs, the personal conquest of the truth, the tension between conscience and civic duties.

Newman's ideas will be compared with those philosophers whom he overtly confronted and criticised: John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

Finally, the course will focus on his legacy and influence on later philosophers, particularly Ludwig Wittgenstein.

PHIL41280 Feminist & Gender Theory (Professor Katherine O’Donnell)

This seminar will introduce students to key contemporary feminist philosophers and debates between feminist philosophers with a view to understanding how their work draws from and challenges dominant philosophical traditions in the creation of new philosophical understandings of knowledge, ethics, self and politics.

We begin with an exploration of what is feminist philosophy? Feminism has a much more recent history than Philosophy. Feminism can be characterised as a popular (or unpopular) social movement that seeks to change the status quo to enable equal participation by girls and women in the public to that of boys and men, and to create a cultural parity of esteem for both masculinity and femininity. Besides this egalitarian project feminism has another impulse which is to seek to deconstruct the meaning of what it is to be male or female and to inscribe new signification for these terms and for the relationship between them. The ambivalence of these goals might be seen to excite many of the debates among feminists. The initial seminar will seek to collectively arrive at definitions for what Philosophy is and does which will begin a discussion that will continue for the remaining weeks: how might we define feminist philosophy?

Feminist philosophy is vibrant with debate and revision and the topics that will be addressed in our reading and discussion will offer a variety of contestations among feminists. These topics will include:
(i) What is Gender and its significance?
(ii) Feminist epistemology and feminist philosophies of ignorance;
(iii) Feminist conceptions of what is a Self?;
(iv) Feminist Ethics;
(v) Feminist Political Philosophy;

We will meet face-to-face in our seminars . The lectures (powerpoint) and required reading will be available in advance on-line on the Brightspace learning platform. It is expected that students will engage with this material before our lecture time slot. When we meet for our seminars we will be able to have a lot of interactive discussion on the required reading. The lecturer will merely re-cap the key points of the lectures uploaded on Brightspace and answer points that students find confusing, interesting, exciting, debatable or even objectionable in the readings and lectures.

PHIL41510 Ethics in Public Life (Associate Professor Danielle Petherbridge)

Face to Face and Online Evening Module for Prof Certificate in Ethics

Should we be permitted to say whatever we want, whenever we want on social media? Or should our freedom of expression be restricted? Are interferences with other people’s decisions regarding their well-being or careers ever justified? Which responsibilities do scientific experts have towards society?

This module will introduce students to contemporary ethical challenges concerning freedom of speech, freedom of action, and ethics of expertise. In the first part of the module, we will analyse challenges concerning freedom of speech and freedom of action. Topics covered will include the moral dimension of trust, the role of respect and toleration in public debates, and the tension between freedom of action and paternalism. We will discuss these topics through specific case studies, such as mandatory vaccinations and sex work. In the second part of the module, we will focus on the ethics of expertise. We will explore what it means to be an expert in the current society, and we will discuss a range of issues, such as the social responsibility of scientists, ethical decision-making in the face of uncertainty, and the ethics of technology.

PHIL41810 Critique, Destruction & Deconstruction (Associate Professor Joesph Cohen)

Our Module will address the inception and the development, the confrontations as well as the similitudes, both the historical sources and the philosophical orientations, between three fundamental "gestures" in contemporary European philosophy: "critical theory" in Adorno and Horkheimer, the "kritische Abbau" or "destructio" of onto-theology or metaphysics in Heidegger and the "deconstruction" of the metaphysics of presence in Derrida. Our first task will therefore involve a genealogical contextualisation of these three "gestures" in order to analyse and interpret why, how, and in which manner - that is, according to which disposition and in view of which heading - each of these, in retrieving our philosophical tradition, engage in opening novel spaces and directions for what Hegel termed "the need for philosophy".

Consequently, we will engage in showing how each of these philosophical "gestures" propose new reformulations of the traditional philosophical questions of meaning and signification, telos and arché, judgment and testimony, truth and justice in history.
From the study of these three "gestures", our Module will also endeavour in presenting the premises towards a renewed approach to historical events, past and future, in our lived-present.

The aim of this MA module is to explain why Descartes is considered the "father of modern philosophy". However, numerous scholars insisted in the past decades on the medieval heritage of Descartes and on his training in the Jesuit schools. Building upon this scholarship, the purpose of the module is to examine the conceptual difference of Descartes's philosophy with respect to the medieval understanding of one of the major topics in Western Philosophy: the mind/body problem. We will study how Descartes is forced to sharpen and clarify his own views on the topic and insist on the concept of "unity" (of mind and body) in contrast to previous philosophers who discussed the "union" (between mind and body) and "conjunction" (of one intellect to each individual body), in order to define the thinking subject, the famous "ego cogito". The explanation of the "union" was clarified by Thomas Aquinas, and endorsed by most theologians and philosophers, whereas more radical authors developed the concept of "conjunction" following Averroes.

We will begin by studying an interesting episode of Descartes' self-proclaimed "disciple" Regius. Misunderstanding Descartes' views, Regius endorsed a problematic view that was attributed to Descartes by the theologians from the University of Utrecht who accused him of being an atheist and endorsing the positions of Averroes and Latin Averroists. The important quarrel that followed ended with the condemnation of Descartes's teaching. But this debate allowed Descartes to explain further his thoughts and revise some of the themes presented in the Meditations. In order to understand the accusation and Descartes' replies, we will study the most relevant doctrines on the soul that were known to and accepted or rejected before the Utrech dispute.

PHIL41890 Authenticity & Attitudes (Assistant Professor Elmar Unnsteinsson)

What does it mean to be authentic? Are some desires more authentically ours than others? What is the difference between faking or lying and being sincere or true to oneself? In this module, students are introduced to new developments in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with the goal of answering these questions. To this end, we will explore the nature of propositional attitudes (especially desires), sincere or authentic expression, and many ways in which our own inner life might be opaque to us. Thus we will also cover self-deception, implicit attitudes, and inner speech. Students will have the freedom to pursue their own projects and interests within this fairly large range of topics and questions.

SPRING SEMESTER

PHIL40010/40970 Consciousness, Agency & the Self (Assistant Professor Keith Wilson)

This course covers some central topics in the philosophy of mind, beginning with classic discussions of consciousness and the mind–body problem, and more recent debates about the ‘extended mind’. In the second part of this course, we will consider issues concerning the relation between perception, action and attention: Is the brain a Bayesian prediction machine? What is the role of the physical body in shaping and influencing our experience of the world? And what implications does this have for the possibility of artificial minds and agents?

PHIL40250 Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Associate Professor Tim Mooney)

This module comprises a close reading of Phenomenology of Perception, one of the most significant treatments of philosophy of perception in the European tradition. Merleau-Ponty offers a sustained critique of the portrait view of perception and argues that the embodied perceiver must actively appropriate and organise the perceptible environment as a condition of having a world. We begin with his initial adaptation of phenomenology, and proceed to outline his arguments against objectivism as found in the empiricist and intellectualist approaches to perception. Merleau-Ponty's proposed alternative founded on phenomenological description will then be explicated in detail. Topics to be covered include perceptual synthesis, the body as objectified, as lived and as anonymous, the role of kinaesthetic awareness, proprioceptive awareness and the body-schema, the motor-intentional projection of action and the perceptual field.

PHIL40410 Philosophy & Literature (Assistant Professor Lisa Foran)

In this course we will approach the relationship between philosophy and literature through a phenomenological framework by asking: 'what is the experience of reading philosophy and what is the experience of reading literature?' The aim is to discover the manner in which each genre of text reveals something of the human experience but to precisely question the extent to which that revelation actually impacts upon the reader's experience of being human. Philosophical texts will be drawn from the continental tradition broadly construed to include phenomenology, critical phenomenology, feminism, post/decolonial studies and critical theory. A range of literary texts--novels, short stories, poems, and plays-- will be read in conjunction with these philosophical texts. Students will be encouraged to engage with these texts through the prism of their own research interests.

PHIL40420 The Good Society (Professor Maeve Cooke)

Our specific topic is "Human Agency in the Anthropocene".
Ecological catastrophe has happened and continues apace. Many disastrous processes are irreversible, much has been irretrievably lost. ‘The Anthropocene’ has gained currency as a way of describing this unprecedented moment in the history of our species: Human activity, amplified by the rapid development of capitalist industrialization and the unchecked pursuit of affluence, has unleashed uncontrollable natural forces that leave modern humans as vulnerable to the devastating power of nature as their earliest ancestors.

In this module we will consider the implications of The Anthropocene for individual and collective agency. Within democracies in the Global North, the Enlightenment promise of freedom faces an uncertain future amidst the growing push for autocratic and/or technocratic climate ‘solutions.’ Within the Global South, the urgent need for de-carbonisation has compounded the challenges of decolonisation: for example, fossil fuel technologies helped end of the global slave trade and facilitate postcolonial independence. Our readings in this class are drawn from a wide range of sources, encompassing early philosophical critiques of technology to the latest debates in social theory and climate science.

PHIL40960 The Cultural Mind (Dr Meredith Plug)

This course will look at recent research on the interdependence between culture and mind. Two aspects of culture that the course will particularly focus on are language and moral norms. One of the broad themes that we will explore is relativity. So called ‘linguistic relativity’ is the view that (a) languages affect our thinking as well as our experiences of the world and (b) vastly different languages will give rise to very different, possibly incommensurable, ways of thinking about the world. We will look at recent empirical evidence for this view, and its philosophical implications. We will also look at empirical evidence for and philosophical discussion of variance in moral norms across different cultures. An opposing thought is that language or moral norms are to some extent universal. We’ll examine empirical evidence that bears on and philosophical discussion of this hypothesis.

PHIL40970  Topics in Mind and Cognition (Previously Consciousness, Agency & the Self) (Assistant Professor Keith Wilson)

This Masters-level module examines one or more topics arising from recent empirically-informed philosophy of mind, action, perception and/or cognition. Through guided reading, critical argument and classroom discussion, students will develop an understanding of some key philosophical issues in the philosophy of mind and how these relate to broader questions in the study of the mind and cognition.

Note: While the module assumes some basic familiarity with some of the methods of philosophy and/or cognitive science, such as might be gained from an introductory undergraduate course, no prior knowledge of the philosophy of mind is required or assumed.

PHIL41320 Topics in Continental Philosophy (Associate Professor Danielle Petherbridge)

How do we understand encounters between self and other? What is the relation between subjectivity and intersubjective life? This module examines different philosophical perspectives for analyzing encounters between self and other, and investigates alternative theories of recognition and intersubjectivity in the tradition of continental philosophy. Themes covered will include the subject, intersubjectivity, recognition, difference, power, domination, and self/other relations.

In order to address these questions, we generally begin by tracing major theories of intersubjectivity and recognition in the German philosophical tradition, such as those developed by Fichte and Hegel. We contrast these to phenomenological accounts such as those offered by Husserl, or the existential-phenomenological accounts of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. We also consider accounts of recognition and relationality offered by contemporary philosophers such as Honneth and Foucault, as well as postcolonial and feminist philosophers. We therefore consider not only face-to-face encounters but the way in which intersubjective relations are constitutive of subjects. We also examine the way in which patterns of interaction form a background of norms and meanings that constitute the lifeworld, as well as the ways in which recognition is employed as a means to understand forms of human relationality and sociality.

PHIL41330 Philosophy of Time (Associate Professor Daniel Esmonde Deasy)

This course addresses some fundamental questions about time. We will think about questions such as: is the distinction between past, present and future moments absolute or merely relative? What sort of picture of time do we get from comtemporary physics, and should we be willing to modify that picture for purely philosophical reasons? What is change? What is it for time to pass? Could there be time without change? Do past and future objects and events exist? If so, are they as 'real' as present objects and events? If not, how do we account for the truth of facts that seem to require thier existence, such as the fact that yesterday's earthquake casued today's building collapse Is the existence of the future consistent with our being free? Do ordinary persisting things have temporal as well as spatial parts? is time travel possible? And what is the nature of our experience of time?

PHIL41660 Moral Agency (Assistant Professor Ruth Boeker)

Are all human beings moral agents? How can we best grow and develop as persons and moral agents? In what senses does moral agency require freedom? What role do reason and emotions play in moral actions? In what ways do we and should we depend and rely on family members, friends, and others in society for personal and moral development? What role does education play? Did 17th and 18th century women face practical hurdles that restricted their freedom and moral agency?

Questions like these will be the main focus of this seminar, which focuses on seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophical debates concerning moral agency. We will discuss selected texts by John Locke, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Adam Smith, Sophie de Grouchy, Thomas Reid, and their contemporaries. Through a close study of their writings we will examine issues concerning agency that continue to be relevant in philosophical debates in ethics, social philosophy, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.

PHIL41880 Reading Nietzsche (Professor Brian O'Connor)

This module will engage closely with several major works by Friedrich Nietzsche. Each year students work through two or three of his books from cover to cover. This year’s texts will be chosen from:
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Untimely Meditations (1876)
The Gay Science (1882)
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
Twilight of the Idols (1888)