Methodical recommendations of lectures topics on course “Philosophy”

The course “Philosophy” includes two parts, first the history of philosophy, then the problems of ontology, epistemology, axilogy, social philosophy. The following tips are intended to help students master the course content.

Learning outcomes

1. An understanding of some of the problems and issues addressed in philosophy and of the most important answers to these problems and issues.

2. Critical thinking and analytical abilities, and the ability to use these skills to develop oral and written arguments about philosophical problems.

Required Readings: Almost every lecture will have some ‘required reading’, usually from one of the two text books and primary sources. Students find learning easier and the course more enjoyable if they read the required readings before the relevant lectures.

Optional Readings: The optional readings include authors that take a wide range of approaches to philosophy. If you find one secondary source author hard to understand, there is probably an alternative author on the list who will suit you better.

Many relevant works are listed here, and many other useful books and articles are available online.

Dictionaries of philosophy are available electronically. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy has many useful, introductory articles.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/ is a freely accessible, peer-reviewed, high quality encyclopedia, but can be more difficult to read than Routledge.

Wikipedia, blogs, and random web postings provide useful examples and background reading, but only use peer-reviewed books, articles, and encyclopaedia entries for serious research for essays.

Methodical recommendations for reading philosophical texts

As far as preparing to write a philosophy essay goes, the most important single piece of advice that can be given is: read. Reading these writings will put you in touch with the issues, and it will also acquaint you with the formal aspects of writing philosophy: it will supply you with stylish and grammatically accomplished models of philosophical writing. Active reading of philosophical texts is itself a skill which you should seek to acquire, and one that you will find has wide application beyond the dissection of purely philosophical texts.

How does one read philosophy actively? One well-tried technique is to begin by reading through a text (a difficult article, say) fairly quickly, to get the general idea, and without taking notes. That can be useful if it helps to know where the author is going and what the conclusion being aimed at is; and it very often does help to know that.

When you have finished a cursory reading of the text, you should re-read the same text carefully, taking notes, and trying to understand as much as you can, before moving on to other relevant texts.

If the subject matter you are investigating is a modern topic with no significant distinction between primary and secondary literature, the above guidelines will serve you well just as they stand. But it will often be the case that you are working on a topic where you expected to be familiar with two kinds of material: primary texts (classic statements of a position by one of the great figures in the history of the subject), and secondary texts (modern commentaries on or discussions of these classic positions). In these cases you must read the classic texts first, so that you approach them with an unprejudiced eye (or at least an eye unprejudiced by modern commentary), perhaps in the rapid, surveying manner suggested above, before looking at secondary material.

When you have looked at a reasonable amount of secondary material you should then-if your reading of that material has not already forced you to do so-go back to the primary texts and read them carefully. If you are working with a textbook, which provides only extracts from the great philosophers of the past (and present), it may be necessary to go beyond what the textbook provides and read whole texts or at least larger extracts than your textbook provides.

When you are writing an essay, for instance, you should certainly try to read more widely in relevant primary sources than just the extracts.