NOTE: Almost all tutorial descriptions are taken from the University of Oxford website and are copyright University of Oxford.  Only the selection and matter for tutorials which reflect the research interests of SCIO staff members are copyright SCIO.

Philosophy of Religion (philosophy emphasis)
The subject will include an examination of claims about the existence of God, and God's relation to the world: their meaning, the possibility of their truth, and the kind of justification which can or needs to be provided for them. God is said to be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, a source of moral obligation and so on. But what does it mean to say that God has these properties, and are they consistent with each other? Could God change the past, or choose to do evil? Does it make sense to say that God is outside time? Students will have the opportunity to study arguments for the existence of God—for example, the teleological argument from the fact that the universe is governed by scientific laws, and the argument from people's religious experiences. Other issues are whether the fact of pain and suffering counts strongly, or even conclusively, against the existence of God, whether there could be evidence for miracles, whether it could be shown that prayer ‘works’, whether there could be life after death, and what philosophical problems are raised by the existence of different religions.  One or two essay questions may also be set on central claims peculiar to Christianity, such as the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the atonement.  Students should state at the time of choosing this tutorial whether they want a philosophy or a theology emphasis.

Philosophical Theology (philosophy emphasis)
Students will study the philosophical assumptions and implications of Christian doctrines such as those involving the Trinity, the Incarnation, the nature of revelation, and the power of prayer.  Students may address questions such as: Does it make sense to say that the life and death of Jesus atoned for the sins of the world, and could one know this?  How can one know that a purportedly divine revelation is indeed genuine?  In what sense is God both three and one?  Can we change God’s mind by petitioning God through prayer?

Students should state at the time of choosing this tutorial whether they want a philosophy or a theology emphasis.

Knowledge and Reality
Students will examine central questions about the nature of the world and the extent to which we can have knowledge of it.  In considering knowledge students will examine whether it is possible to attain knowledge of what the world is really like. Is our knowledge of the world necessarily limited to what we can observe to be the case? Indeed, are even our observational beliefs about the world around us justified?  In considering reality students will focus on questions such as: Does the world really contain the three-dimensional objects and their properties—such as red buses or black horses —which we appear to encounter in everyday life? Or is it made up rather of the somewhat different entities studied by science, such as colourless atoms or four-dimensional space-time worms? Is it correct to think of the objects and their properties that make up the world as being what they are independently of our preferred ways of dividing up reality? These issues are discussed with reference to a variety of specific questions such as 'What is time?', 'What is the nature of causation?', and 'What are substances?'.

Ethics
Students will address questions such as: How should we decide what is best to do, and how best to lead our lives? Are our value judgments on these and other matters objective or do they merely reflect our subjective preferences and viewpoints? Are we in fact free to make these choices, or have our decisions already been determined by antecedent features of our environment and genetic endowment? In considering these issues students will explore a variety of ethical concepts, such as those of justice, rights, equality, virtue, and happiness, which are widely used in moral and political argument. There will also be an opportunity to discuss some applied ethical issues.

Philosophy of Mind
Students will examine a variety of questions about the nature of persons and their psychological states, including such general questions as: What is the relation between persons and their minds? Could robots or automata be persons? What is the relation between our minds and our brains? If we understood everything about the brain, would we understand everything about consciousness and rational thought? If not, why not? Several of these issues focus on the relation between our common sense understanding of ourselves and others, and the view of the mind developed in scientific psychology and neuroscience. Other more specific questions concern memory, thought, belief, emotion, and perception.

Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Psychology and Neuroscience
Students will study topics in the philosophy of science in general, and topics in the philosophy of psychology and neuroscience in particular. In the broadest sense the philosophy of science is concerned with the theory of knowledge and with associated questions in metaphysics. What is distinctive about the field is the focus on "scientific" knowledge, and metaphysical questions—concerning space, time, causation, probability, possibility, necessity, realism and idealism—that follow in their train. As such it is concerned with distinctive traits of science: testability, objectivity, scientific explanation, and the nature of scientific theories. The philosophy of psychology and neuroscience addresses questions that arise from the scientific study of the mind.  Such questions relate to key notions that are used in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, such as representation, computation, tacit knowledge, implicit rules and modularity. There are also questions that focus on specific aspects of contemporary research into topics such as consciousness, perception, memory, reasoning, and the way that cognitive abilities break down after brain damage.

Philosophy of Science and Social Science
Students will study topics in the philosophy of science in general, and topics in the philosophy of social science in particular. Science in general is concerned with such things as testability, objectivity, scientific explanation, and the nature of scientific theories. In line with general scientific approaches, philosophers of social science have asked whether human action is to be explained causally or non-causally, whether predictions are self-refuting, whether we can only explain behaviour that is in some sense rational—and if so, what that sense is. Other central issues include social relativism, the role of ideology, value-neutrality, and the relationship between the particular social sciences, in particular whether economics provides a model for other social science.

The Philosophy of Logic and Language
Students will study fundamental questions relating to reasoning and language, most notably the question 'What is truth?'. Central also are questions about the status of basic logical laws and the nature of logical necessity. What, if anything, makes it true that nothing can be at the same time both green and not green all over? Is that necessity the result of our conventions or stipulations, or the reflection of how things have to be independently of us? Philosophy of language is closely related. It covers the very general question of how language can describe reality at all: What makes our sentences meaningful and, on occasion, true?

Aesthetics
Students will study a number of questions about the nature and value of beauty and of the arts. For example, do we enjoy sights and sounds because they are beautiful, or are they beautiful because we enjoy them? Does the enjoyment of beauty involve a particular sort of experience, and if so, how should we define it and what psychological capacities does it presuppose? Is a work of art a physical object, an abstract object, or what? As well as general questions such as these, the course also addresses questions raised by particular art forms. For example, what is the difference between a picture and a description in words? Can fiction embody truths about its subject-matter? How does music express emotions?

Augustine: Life and Thought
Students will study Augustine's major works in the context of his life and Late Antique culture. Augustine was a leading bishop in a seminal period, and his dogmatic works, commentaries, and sermons played an important role in shaping the Latin west. A prolific writer known best for his works, The Confessions and The City of God, he provides significant and far-ranging discussions. Attention will be paid to the relationship between the church and the world, the nature of the person, the problem of evil, the nature of culture, the relationship between church and state, implications for political philosophy, and the debates with Manichaeans, Donatists, and Pelagians.

Medieval Philosophy
This course provides an opportunity critically to study some of the writings of either Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus and Ockham.  Study of Aquinas will cover his commentaries on such questions as: Does God exist? What is the nature of God? Are we immortal? Are we free? How does human action differ from the behaviour of animals? What is happiness, and where can we find it - on earth or in heaven? Should I do what my conscience tells me is right or what is in fact right? Study of the philosophy of Duns Scotus and Ockham focuses on issues in logic and metaphysics.

Continental Philosophy from Descartes to Leibniz
Students will focus on the metaphysical ideas, and the theories of knowledge, of a group of seventeenth-century philosophers, themselves deeply influenced by Platonism, whose work has influenced everything that has been done since.  Specifically, the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz will be examined.  These philosophers are often called "rationalists" because they all held that we have a capacity for purely rational thought, independent of sense-experience, by which we can achieve an understanding of the world and of our place in it.  Students will examine this philosophical tradition and its effects on subsequent philosophical inquiry.

History of Philosophy from Descartes to Kant
The purpose of this subject is to enable students to gain a critical understanding of some of the metaphysical and epistemological ideas of some of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, between the 1630s and the 1780s.  Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, often collectively referred to as ‘the rationalists’, placed the new ‘corpuscularian’ science within grand metaphysical systems which certified our God-given capacity to reason our way to the laws of nature (as well as to many other, often astonishing conclusions about the world). Locke wrote in a different, empiricist tradition. He argued that, since our concepts all ultimately derive from experience, our knowledge is necessarily limited. Berkeley and Hume developed this empiricism in the direction of a kind of idealism, according to which the world studied by science is in some sense mind-dependent and mind-constructed. Kant subsequently sought to arbitrate between the rationalists and the empiricists, by rooting out some assumptions common to them and trying thereby to salvage and to reconcile some of their apparently irreconcilable insights.

The Philosophy of Kant
Students will study Kant’s account of human knowledge and his account of morality.  Kant’s account of human knowledge is found in his Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of looking at human knowledge by starting from what is known, we should start from ourselves as knowing subjects and ask how the world must be for us to have the kind of knowledge and experience that we have.  In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant develops his very distinctive and highly influential moral philosophy. He argues that morality is grounded in reason. What we ought to do is what we would do if we acted in a way that was purely rational. To act in a way that is purely rational is to act in accordance with the famous ‘categorical imperative’, which Kant expresses as follows: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.

Post-Kantian Philosophy
Many of the questions raised by German and French philosophers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were thought to arise directly out of Kant's metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.  Students will study such philosophers as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.  In studying these philosophers students will explore some of the developments of, and departures from, Kantian themes.

Theory of Politics
This course enables students to look at the main ideas we use when we think about politics: Why do we have competing views of social justice and what makes a particular view persuasive, possibly even right? Is power desirable or harmful? Would feminists or nationalists give a different answer to that question? Political theory is concerned with developing good responses to problems such as: When should we obey, and when should we disobey, the state? Students will also explore ideologies—such as liberalism, conservatism, and socialism—in order to understand their main arguments and why each of them will direct us to different political solutions and arrangements.

Plato: Republic
This course enables students to make a critical study of The Republic, which is perhaps Plato’s most important and most influential work. Written as a dialogue between Socrates and others, including the outspoken immoralist Thrasymachus, it is primarily concerned with questions of the nature of justice and of what is the best kind of life to lead. These questions prompt discussions of the ideal city of education and art, of the nature of knowledge, the Theory of Forms and the immortality of the soul.

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics
Students will have the opportunity to make a critical study of Aristotle’s hugely influential work, Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle is concerned in this work with the question: What is the best possible sort of life? Whereas this leads Plato to pose grand questions in metaphysics and political theory, it leads Aristotle to offer close analyses of the structure of human action, responsibility, the virtues, the nature of moral knowledge, weakness of will, pleasure, friendship, and other related issues. 

Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein
The purpose of this course is to enable students to study some classic texts from which emerged modern logic and philosophy of language. Frege invented and explained the logic of multiple generality (quantification theory) and applied this apparatus to the analysis of arithmetic. Russell continued this programme, adding some refinements (the theory of types, the theory of descriptions), and he applied logic to many traditional problems in epistemology. Wittgenstein's Tractatus outlined an ambitious project for giving a logical account of truths of logic (as tautologies). Ability to understand logical symbolism is important, and previous work in philosophical logic would be advantageous.

The Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein
The main texts for this course are Wittgenstein's posthumously-published Philosophical Investigations and The Blue and Brown Books. Wittgenstein covers in these works a great range of issues, principally in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In philosophy of language, one key topic is the nature of rules and rule-following. What is involved in grasping a rule?; and how can I tell, in a new case, what I have to do to apply the rule correctly? Other topics include whether language is systematic, the relation between linguistic meaning and non-linguistic activities, and whether concepts can be illuminatingly analysed. In the philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein is especially famous for the ‘private language argument’, which tries to show that words for sensations cannot get their meanings by being attached to purely internal, introspective, ‘private objects’.

Philosophy of Mathematics
Students will address such questions as: What is the relation of mathematical knowledge to other kinds of knowledge? Is it of a special kind, concerning objects of a special kind? If so, what is the nature of those objects and how do we come to know anything about them? If not, how do we explain the seeming difference between proving a theorem in mathematics and establishing something about the physical world? While no specific knowledge of mathematics is required for this course, it will be helpful to have taken previous classes in mathematics and/or logic.

Introduction to Logic
Subjects studied in this course include propositional and predicate languages, truth tables, tableaux, relations, the critical application of logic to the analysis of English sentences and inferences (i.e., problems of symbolization, scope, truth-functionality, quantification, identity, and descriptions.)  The logical symbols and tableaux rules to be used are those found in Wilfred Hodges, Logic.  Philosophical questions about logic may be studied by reading Mark Sainsbury, Logical Forms, chapters, 1, 2, and 4.