BASS Social Anthropology and Sociology

The course unit aims to: introduce students to some of the foundational debates of early and mid analytic philosophy concerning the relationship of language to the world: logical and linguistic analysis, ontology, and modal language. Students will closely read and interpret some classic texts on language, analysis, and language-world relations, as well as some lesser-known but worthwhile texts by marginalised female figures of the period. Students will also dissect and assess the arguments of those texts, compare them to contemporary accounts, and form and defend their own views on the course themes in language and analysis. 

The unit aims to: 

The course unit aims to: introduce students to some of the foundational debates of early and mid analytic philosophy concerning the relationship of language to the world: logical and linguistic analysis, ontology, and modal language. 

-Tutorials (10 hours): small group discussion will facilitate student engagement 

-Office Hours: students will have access to the course convenor through regular office hours 

-VLE: learning materials (reading lists, lecture slides, etc.) available online (asynchronous) 

-Essay Plans: students will be encouraged to submit essay plans for formative feedback

-identify the main philosophical questions of the set texts 

-trace historical influences among philosophers of the early to mid analytic period 

-evaluate the philosophical arguments of the set texts 

-relate these arguments to other areas of philosophical inquiry 

- interpret and criticise both primary and secondary texts

-present complex material

-Essay 1, 1500 words, 35%

-Essay 2, 1500 words, 35%

-Presentation, 10 mins, 20%

-Online Exercise, 10%

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate fora is it possible for us to feed back on the student’s work.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lectures); and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

The following reading list is indicative, and students are not required to read all the publications listed.

-Constance Jones `A New Law of Thought' Proc. Arist. Soc 1910-11. 

-Susan Stebbing, `The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics', 

-Alice Ambrose, `Linguistic Approaches to Philosophical Problems' J. Phil 1952.  

-Ruth Barcan Marcus `Nominalism and the Substitutional Quantifier', Nous 1978. 

-Jane Heal, `Replication and Functionalism' reprinted in her Mind, Reason and Imagination, CUP 2003.