Department of Philosophy
Welcome to the Department of Philosophy
The Department of Philosophy offers an exciting range of courses and programmes from undergraduate to PhD level, led by internationally recognised researchers with expertise in a wide range of fields, including moral philosophy, philosophy of science, critical social theory and more. We ask fundamental questions about the world and our place in it, such as: What is real? How can we know with any certainty? What is right and what is wrong? Does God exist? What would a better society look like? Do animals have rights? Students are encouraged to develop their own philosophical reasoning skills, to navigate radical uncertainty, and to embark on an intellectual adventure in which everything is up for questioning and reassessment.
Philosophy teaches critical reading, thinking, and reasoning skills, making it an ideal companion to a large variety of other areas of study, including law, politics, history and journalism.
What is Philosophy?
Philosophy is first of all a way of thinking rather than a fixed body of knowledge. Specifically, philosophy is the practice of thinking about what, why and how we think. This “thinking about thinking” involves asking questions about what we know and believe, about what we think is true and false, right and wrong, just and unjust, real and unreal, valuable and valueless, the relationship between language and reality, the nature of consciousness, freedom, justice, truth, happiness, goodness and a host of other topics.
The purpose of this philosophical questioning is both to clarify our own thinking and to determine whether we have good reasons for thinking as we do. The reasons for our beliefs, and the validity of those reasons, have a direct impact on the reliability of those beliefs. And once they are presented, these reasons make themselves available for evaluation by others. Philosophy therefore does not offer comfortable certainties, but an intellectual adventure in which everything is up for questioning and reassessment.
At the same time, philosophy provides us with the means for dealing with – rather than overcoming or denying – radical uncertainty. The value of philosophy is that it teaches us to recognise the limits of what we know, without succumbing to despair in the face of what we do not know.
