The PhD seminar for this year will be taught by Timothy Williamson (Oxford University), based on a book he is about to publish with OUP, "Doing Philosophy"; you will find below the course description.
The course will take place on June 11-15, in room 205; 11, 12, 14 and 15 from 15 to 17, 13 from 11 to 13. Please note the unusual venue (2nd floor, Montalegre 6 building) and irregular times; that week the PAAU exams take place and most spaces in the building are taken for that.
As you know, for these courses we invite senior philosophers who recently finished a book, or are about to do it, to present it for discussion. Attending the courses is mandatory for APhil and CCiL PhD students.
Although the educational purpose of these seminars does not of course require that they concern the topics our PhD students are specifically working on, we do try to cover a sufficient diversity of themes.
Doing Philosophy
The course will be on the methods of contemporary philosophy. The emphasis will be on their similarity to the methods of other theoretical sciences, not exclusively the natural sciences, in opposition to the view that philosophy is somehow exceptional. The individual lectures will be:
- Starting from Common Sense
- Disputing and Clarifying
- Thought-Experimenting
- Comparing Theories
- Model-Building