PHIL2031: Early Modern Mavericks

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• To acquaint students with key questions and figures within 17th and early 18th century philosophy.
• Acquire history of philosophy skills, including close textual reading, and crafting scholarly arguments regarding philosophical interpretations

• The course covers a variety of questions, which may include:
• What exists? Material bodies, minds, living beings?
• Are there many things in the world, or just one?
• How do we obtain ideas, and how can we know the world?
• How do minds relate to bodies?
• What are space and time?
• The course covers a range of early modern philosophers, which may include Ren Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Anne Conway, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Elisabeth of Bohemia, and Isaac Newton.

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• By the end of the module students will have knowledge and understanding of key arguments in the texts, of historical and contextual information bearing on their topics and style, and of some modern critical reactions to them.

Subject-specific Skills:

• grasp, analyse, evaluate and deploy subject-specific concepts and arguments
• locate, understand, assess and utilise pertinent philosophical (and, where appropriate, historical) sources
• interpret and criticise relevant texts.

Key Skills:

• express themselves clearly and succinctly in writing
• comprehend complex ideas, propositions and theories
• defend their opinions by reasoned argument
• seek out and identify appropriate sources of evidence and information
• tackle problems in a clear-sighted and logical fashion.

• Lectures deliver basic module-specific information, and provide a framework for further study.
• Discussion groups provide opportunities for students to test their own understanding of the material studied, and defend and debate different opinions.
• Guided reading provides a structure within which students exercise and extend their abilities to make use of available learning resources.
• The summative essay plan provides the opportunity for students to test their knowledge and understanding of the module content, and their ability to present and defend relevant arguments and theories, prior to writing a full essay.
• The summative essay tests knowledge and understanding of the course material, and the ability to identify and explain issues covered in the module, and, using relevant research material, to present different approaches to those issues, and make reasoned judgement on the merits and demerits of such approaches.

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