Introduction to Philosophy: All I Know is X

This is a 6-week course (one evening a week) suitable for both those with some or no prior experience of philosophy.

All welcome, places are limited, booking form below.

About the course

Socrates said ‘All I can know is that I know nothing’. Two thousand years later Descartes said ‘All I can know is that I am a thinking thing’. These responses to one of the central questions of philosophy along with how that question changed and developed over time, is what we will be exploring in this course.

The course will be divided into two parts. The first part will look in detail at Descartes’ ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, focusing on his formulation of the cogito, his dualism and the problems that arise. We will think about the implicit assumptions operating within Descartes’ arguments and in order to throw light on these the second part of the course will look at the work of two twentieth century philosophers, Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger.

Each part of the course will last three weeks, so six weeks in total. To participate fully people will need to do some reading – as well as the Descartes, we will look at the introductions to both ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’ (Merleau-Ponty) and ‘Being and Time’ (Heidegger). The sessions will be a couple of hours long, the first hour being an informal lecture, the second hour being a directed discussion.

Reading List

Tutor, Dr Matt Lee, is a philosopher, currently lecturing at the University of Greenwich in London, where he teaches a mixture of the so-called ‘Continental’ and ‘Analytic’ traditions and co-organises the ‘volcanic lines – deleuzian research group’. More information can be found on his academic profile page

The venue is Sleepy D’s cafe (the only cafe with a sleeping dinosaur). The cafe has a facebook page here