Module Directory

This module offers an opportunity for close study and discussion of key texts in contemporary philosophy, with particular attention to ongoing research and debates around these texts.

The specific focus will vary year-on-year and will typically be either one book-length text divided in chapters or sections, or a series of article-length texts organised around a theme in one or more area(s) of contemporary philosophy.

The aims of this module are:

• To develop a good and critical understanding of a philosophical text or set of texts through attentive reading.


• To gain a better understanding of what it means to attentively read a philosophical text.


• To gain an insight into ways in which contents of a text can be related to its form, within philosophy and beyond.

Skills for your Professional Life (Transferable Skills)

By the end of this module, students will be expected to be able to:

• Define the task in which they are engaged and exclude what is irrelevant.


• Seek and organise the most relevant discussions and sources of information.


• Process a large volume of diverse and sometimes conflicting arguments.


• Compare and evaluate different arguments and assess the limitations of their own position or procedure.


• Write and present verbally a succinct and precise account of positions, arguments, and their presuppositions and implications.


• Be sensitive to the positions of others and communicate their own views in ways that are accessible to them.


• Think 'laterally' and creatively - see interesting connections and possibilities and present these clearly rather than as vague hunches.


• Maintain intellectual flexibility and revise their own position if shown wrong.


• Think critically and constructively.

The focus of this module will vary year-on-year.

This year will be devoted to a close reading of the three essays that make up Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good (1970). In the first essay, ‘The Idea of Perfection’, Murdoch presents a ‘rival soul-picture’ to the one that (she thinks) dominates modern moral philosophy. At the centre of Murdoch’s account is not concepts of will, choice, and action, but the concepts of attention and vision, and the idea of the infinite perfectibility of both. In the second essay, ‘On “God” and “Good” ’, Murdoch, drawing on Freud and Christian thought, identifies the key obstacle to our attaining a clear vision of reality: the self-centred fantasies of the ego. Freedom, on Murdoch’s view, is experienced not in the exercise of the will, but in accuracy of vision. That, Murdoch suggests, requires transcendence of self. In the final essay, ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’, Murdoch suggests that directing our attention outwards - to the natural world, to works of art, to intellectual study, to other people - offers ‘scattered images’ of the Good, and experiences of ‘unselfing’ that are inseparable from virtue.

We shall also read other essays of Murdoch’s, including ‘Vision and Choice in Morality’ (1956); ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ (1957), ‘Against Dryness’ (1961); and ‘Darkness of Practical Reason’ (1966)

This module will be delivered via:

• Lectures.
• Seminars.