BASS Social Anthropology and Criminology

The course unit will cover a variety of philosophical figures and texts from the ancient to the early modern period, from both Western and non-Western traditions - drawing connections between them, and bringing other philosophers from history to bear on the issues, where appropriate. All texts are read in translation, and no knowledge of languages other than English is either assumed or required.

The unit aims to:

Introduce students to the history of philosophy, and to foster the skills of close scrutiny of philosophical texts, developing a critical understanding of translated texts not originally written in contemporary English, and interpretation.

One two-hour lecture and one one-hour tutorial per week.

Students should be able to:

• Identify, explain and analyse key philosophical concepts and theories in historical texts and different philosophical traditions;
• Compare and evaluate philosophical arguments throughout the history of philosophy.

Students should be able to:

• Analyse complex lines of argument;
• Interpret texts in the history of philosophy;
• Construct and assess extended arguments.

Students should be able to:

• Use research tools to effectively select resources in the preparation of assessments on the history of philosophy;
• Clearly communicate ideas in the history of philosophy.

Weekly online exercise (25 words weekly) 10%

Essay (750 words) 40%

Exam (1 hour) 50%

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 time is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.

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 lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Canvas; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

• Selections from Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (ed.) A Source Book in Indian Philosophy (Princeton, 1989)
• Julia Annas: Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2000) 
• René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy (any edition)
• Zhuang Zhou: the Zhuangzi (any edition)
• John Mbiti: African Religions and Philosophy (Heineman 1990), ch. 2 on nature of time.