B

A

W

o

r

l

d

P

h

i

l

o

s

o

p

h

i

e

s

This module is designed as a stimulating introduction to the basic concepts of formal logic and to various methods of argument analysis and evaluation. The objective of the module is to equip students with the necessary intellectual tools to understand and engage critically with philosophical texts, as well as to write and reason in an ordered and rigorous way. You will learn about rudimentary logical concepts such as inference, deduction and induction, validity, and soundness, and apply such knowledge in your engagement with a range of philosophical texts produced in the Global North and in the Global South.

This module examines approaches to a number of metaphysical questions from both Global North and Global South traditions. Students will critically approach metaphysical arguments in a comparative way, emphasising the permeable, cross-cultural way of thinking about topics such as personhood, the nature of gender, and the relationship between normativity and nature.

This module is designed to introduce you to the intellectual discourse of morality and ethics from various philosophical traditions and perspectives.

‘Comparative Ethics’ is designed to provide a decolonised moral theory curriculum that compares, contrasts, and examines approaches to moral philosophy from a global perspective. The module, specifically, focuses on important Global South and Global North discourses about normative, meta-, and applied ethics.

This module is designed to provide students with an introduction to critique of the hegemonic understanding of philosophy, and to engage with core issues, debates and challenges that the acknowledgement and discourse of philosophy as a global discipline involves. The module will introduce students to some key debates, methodological challenges, and major themes that have emerged since the deliberate or non-deliberate recognition of non-Western philosophies beyond the predominant European philosophy in global academia. Some of the debates to be examined include the place of place and the inter in philosophy, the universality and particularities of philosophy, and the problem of accent and the superiority contest among philosophical traditions. The question of method is also examined focussing on such topics as dialogue, comparison, self-critique and language. The module also critically engages with several philosophical traditions by analysing the defining features of a philosophical tradition such as textuality and individual authorship, the gender problem in historicising philosophy, and non-conventional forms of philosophy such as music as philosophy and street philosophy. The module also offers ways in which students can approach practical and theoretical philosophical issues such as bioethical issues, gender issues, and epistemological issues by drawing comparatively from several traditions of philosophy. Thus, this module will prepare students for topics and thematic issues they will encounter in other modules throughout the programme.   

The module begins by developing the central tasks of epistemology which include the formulation and analysis of theories and sources of knowledge, and the analysis of related concepts such as justification, belief, opinion and truth. It also examines the politics of epistemology which consists of the masculinisation and colonisation of the epistemology agenda evident in mainstream epistemology and how the emergence of alternative epistemologies in the last century or so has advanced the feminisation and decolonisation of the epistemology agenda. The module also examines various theories of knowledge in the various philosophical traditions such as Socratic, Cartesian, and Kantian epistemology from the West, communitarian epistemology from Africa, and the Pramana epistemology in India.

This module supports students with their transition to Higher Education. It delves into the study of Humanities, with a focus on questions concerning the colonial genealogy of Humanities and the ways of decolonising Humanities, and skills acquired in the various disciplines in the college. Students learn to identify and describe the skills they acquire in this module and during their studies in the Humanities. Students are introduced to research, reading, listening, writing, performance and communication skills through multiple disciplinary lenses, addressing the planetary questions of this age. They compare different disciplinary approaches and are encouraged to reflect on interdisciplinary approaches to studying the Humanities, grounded in different regions. This enables students to make more informed decisions in the designing of their individual educational journey. Students practice their skills and reflect on their skills through real-world projects, drawing on critical content from all disciplines in the College of Humanities at SOAS.

Of all the disciplines within the humanities, Philosophy has been one of the most reluctant to confront its own history of racism and the support that it has lent to racist practices and structures. This module will provide an introduction to the key questions, debates and challenges to current philosophical thinking on race and the opportunities for reform and revision offered by critical race, decolonial, and Black thought. We will begin by establishing key terms and the questions raised by the historical development and contemporary practices of the discipline, particularly focusing on processes of canon formation and the racism of canonical philosophers, as well as the marginalisation of non-European thought from its conceptual priorities and lexicon. The second half of the module foregrounds the challenges and opportunities offered by critical race and decolonial theory and Black thought to the discipline of Philosophy.

The aim of this module is to provide students with an engaging intellectual treatment of Global and Transnational Feminisms. The specific focus is on Islamic, Chinese, South Asian, Latinx, and African feminist perspectives - five deeply important branches of feminist thought that are rarely centred either in mainstream Global North Anglo-American or Continental European undergraduate philosophy programmes or more critically-minded Global North undergraduate philosophy programmes. Students will not just learn about transformational and radical thinkers writing on Global South feminisms. Students will also see how feminist theory and feminist praxis mutually support one another, nourishing, and shaping radical and more inclusive feminist movements in both the Global North and the Global South. This module, crucially, philosophies feminism from a global and decolonial perspective, equipping students with an array of sophisticated and discursive tools for applying philosophical insights from Islamic, Chinese, South Asian, Latinx, and African feminisms to a range of historical and contemporary social and political case-studies.

The philosophy of language is the branch of philosophical inquiry concerned with questions related to the nature, use and limits of language as a medium between language-users and between them and the world.

Do words merely describe non-linguistic things in the world, or does language have more to do with expressing intentions, vulnerabilities, and the like? This module looks at a range of Anglo-American, critical theoretic, and African takes on language - with particular attention devoted to language's interrelations with a range of power dynamics.

Students will learn how these various perspectives stand in conversation with each other, how the analysis of language has been linked to and conditioned by metaphysical commitments, and how language's imbrication with power buttresses different self-understandings of the aim of philosophical discussion.

This module is designed to provide students with broad and inclusive philosophical perspectives from which to interrogate and analyse the perennial issues and debates around questions of justice and human rights. The philosophical discourse of human rights and justice consists of analysing ontological, epistemological and ethical issues arising from taken-for-granted and operational assumptions about human rights and justice. Such issues include the ontological question of the ‘human’ in human rights, the epistemic challenge of pursuing transnational and global justice, the ethics and psychoanalysis of memory, collective and transgenerational trauma in reparative and restorative justice, the moral limits of human rights vis-à-vis the non-human, the prospects and limits of cosmopolitanism, and the ethical imbalance between rights and duties. Approaches to exploring these issues often rest heavily on theories from the Global North such as egalitarianism, libertarianism, natural rights, and deontology by philosophers such as Kant, Rousseau, Rawls, Dworkin, and Nozick. But there is a lot to learn from non-European philosophies of the human and of justice that can enrich our understanding of human rights and justice. This module thus explores such themes as the Western and Global Southern ontologies and epistemologies of the human, the hermeneutics of justice, relational and communitarian approaches to (in)justice, and analyses of duties in relation to rights, It takes seriously non-Western philosophical perspectives on human rights and justice promoting inclusivity and diversity in the hermeneutics of these important concepts that essentially defines our lived experiences.

This module examines the nature, theories, key themes and debates in philosophical hermeneutics from different philosophical traditions. It also applies theories in these traditions to global issues and lived experiences. Philosophical hermeneutics takes an important place in philosophical discourses, and philosophy, by its very nature and essence, is interpretive and an attempt to understand and interpret being, knowledge and action. Therefore, an important metaphilosophical perspective is the conception of philosophy as an interpretive. But the philosophy of, and philosophy as, interpretation and understanding has often been conceived, approached, and taught in several HE curricula from a purely Western, Anglo-European perspective. This deprives students of richer multi-cultural, multi-place perspectives from various philosophical traditions such as theories and concepts of interpretation and understanding from African philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, and Islamic philosophy. This module is designed to fill this gap by focusing on philosophies (rather than philosophy) of interpretation and understanding. It focuses on several philosophical traditions of interpretation and understanding and the dialogue and intersection between these traditions. It also applies the theories in philosophical hermeneutics to some important issues and lived experiences such as race, alterity, social media, gender, healthcare, beauty and nature.

This course explores the origin, development and diversity of Buddhist philosophical thought in India (5th century BCE to 6th century CE). It examines the Buddhist interpretations of reality, the position of the individual within the wider ontological framework, idealist trends, epistemology and logic.

This module will examine the historical development of African philosophy focusing on the two key periods or phases: the precolonial period and the postcolonial period of African philosophy as well as the key approaches and trends within these periods.

It will also examine the primary concerns and key themes in African metaphysics, African epistemology and African ethics. The module will also explore some other aspects of African philosophy such as African political philosophy, African existentialism, African feminism, African philosophy of difference and disability.

This module is an introduction to the main themes, arguments and debates of classical Chinese thought. We will look at its initial formative period, approximately between the sixth and the third centuries BCE, later developments during the Imperial time, and the relevance and traces in modern and contemporary China.

The purpose of the course is to analyse different representations of the Holocaust in 20th and 21st century theology, literature, film, and art. The impossibility of adequately expressing the horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust stands in contrast to the need to transmit knowledge about the Holocaust to later generations. How and to what extent is it legitimate to write fiction and poetry about the Holocaust, to address the Holocaust in art, and to make movies about it which are non-documentary and sometimes even have the form of comedy?

This course will discuss the many different ways in which Jews have expressed their ethnic, cultural, and religious identity historically from antiquity to modern times. Jewish identity formation and expression needs to be explored within the context of the respective historical, political, social, and economic circumstances in which Jews lived. For the respective time periods under discussion here, the various forms of acculturation and assimilation to surrounding societies and cultures will be examined. Even the more traditional religiously defined forms of Judaism functioned within and in reaction to the non-Jewish cultures Jews had contact with. We shall analyse the significance of ethnicity, nationalism, culture and religion in the definitions of Jewishness and trace developments in the expression of Jewish identity. Our approach is primarily historical and sociological. For some subject areas literary criticism and gender studies approaches will be employed.

This module offers an introductory intellectual history of Islam with especial focus on the different religio-philosophical strands that constitute Muslim worldviews. It will introduce students to the academic, particularly historical study of Islamic thought. The module will start with outlining the emergence and early development of Islam within its wider historical context, will introduce its principal textual sources and doctrines, and will then turn to major religio-philosophical disciplines, such as theology, jurisprudence and philosophy, and to some of the diverse schools of thought and movements that developed in Muslim societies. Attention will be given to the plurality of interpretations of textual sources attested among these schools of thought and to the interplay between religious texts and reasoning in various religious and intellectual contexts

This module introduces students to central concepts of the Zoroastrian world view. Using primary and secondary sources, the students will engage with the debate on the interpretation of the sources and the scholarly debate. Topics covered include Zoroastrian concepts of dualism, monotheism, Good and Evil, cosmology and eschatology.

This module allows students to synthesise their learning in a single project that demonstrates their fulfilment of the programme’s learning outcomes. It integrates their academic knowledge with experiences beyond the classroom and combines their developing knowledge, skills, and personal interests. The project is conceived, designed, and carried out independently, with support and supervision.

This course builds on ‘The Margins of Philosophy’ module in order to foreground perspectives traditionally marginalised by mainstream philosophy, many of which originate outside a western normative context. These perspectives—post- and de-colonial, gender, queer, disability, critical race, and feminist theory—pose profound challenges to the self-understanding and boundaries of Philosophy, particularly its epistemological assumptions and status, and are preoccupied with the nature of justice and freedom. Moreover, they make specific claims about the models and systems of power that underwrite philosophy’s claims to provide a holistic, universal account of the world.  We specifically attend to who the philosopher may be–racialised, gendered, embodied, political–and why the biography of the philosopher matters in order to challenge the normative ontology of western thought. Taking a lead from bell hooks’ claim that the ‘margin is a site of radical possibility’, we examine closely the importance of marginalised voices for reconfiguring the discipline of Philosophy and for offering a site ‘from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds’ (bell hooks (2015).

This course introduces the structuralist and poststructuralist paradigm that informs the work of Jacques Derrida in order to familiarise students with the main tools of his philosophical project, and his role in inaugurating poststructuralism. We will pay attention to the intellectual oeuvres of other influential theorists of the poststructuralist school which will be shown to offer a wide-ranging, internal critique of the self-identity of Philosophy and its constitutive exclusions. The thinkers we examine pay particular attention to questions of power and knowledge in the construction of subjectivity and pose a strong challenge to the European humanist concepts of the self and western knowledge systems.

This module explores ideas developed by the most influential systems of East Asia Buddhism, with specific attention to Japan. It will interrogate the ontological, epistemological and logical positions of the Tendai, Zen and Tantric traditions, considering the discrete terminology through which each school articulates its signification of reality, as well as the concerns and interpretations they shared.

This module focuses on aspects of the intellectual history of the medieval Islamic world, above all the history of philosophy and systematic theology. It will examine various thinkers and schools of thought of the classical and post-classical periods, including Aristotelianism, Mu‘tazilism and Ash‘arism, and will introduce key concepts, problems and debates, particularly in metaphysics, natural philosophy, epistemology, ethics and anthropology. These topics will be approached analytically, situated and interpreted within their broader contexts, and read through representative primary texts in translation. Attention will be given to contemporary scholarly methodologies and debates in the field.

This module introduces students to the major aspects of the Zoroastrian philosophy through an overview of its religious features, the engagement with relevant texts, and the study of its development from ancient to modern history. We will begin by identifying key philosophical aspects such as such as Good and Evil, the creation of the world and death as they emerge from textual sources of different historical periods. The second half of the module will engage with critical aspects of epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and ontology in the light of a community-engaged learning that entails the involvement of Zoroastrian community members in our seminars, providing opportunities for lively debates and engaging dialogues.

This module explores the impact of modernity, colonialism and Orientalism on the representation and framing of Indian Brahmanical (Hindu") and Buddhist thought in the modern period. The modern exclusion of Indian thought from the category of "Philosophy" will be explored through a range of theoretical and postcolonial approaches, examining the formation of "Hinduism" and "Buddhism" as "world religions" and the role that taken for granted concepts such as religion, mysticism and spirituality have played in the normalisation of a Eurocentric framing of South Asian intellectual traditions and identities in the late colonial/modern era. "

The module explores different attitudes towards death, dying and the meaning of life in contemporary cultural, religious and philosophical traditions. It starts from the recognition that in many cultures death is not seen as the end of life, but as a starting point to inquire about what life means. As Robert Hertz (1907) has pointed out in his classical study, it is an episode in a journey which integrates life and death. 

Death and death rituals are central concerns of most cultural and religious systems. Their specific interpretations across cultures are intrinsically connected with prevalent conceptions of the self, the person, the body, and with definitions of life, including visions of the good life, which are transmitted through ritual and (oral) literature. Students will explore notions of meaningful life and good death through an introduction to the main theoretical debates in religious studies on the topics of voluntary death, sacrifice, rites of mourning, as well as ancestor worship, the idea of the self, and the quest for immortality. 

This module is intended to complement modules on individual religious and philosophical traditions in the Department of History, Religions and Philosophies. It will also be of interest for students interested in religions and politics and cultural aspects of medicine.