General epistemology [ LFILO1190 ]

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- The processes of thinking (conception, judgment, reasoning etc.).

- The obstacles to knowledge (doubt, error, contradiction etc.) and means of overcoming them.

- The fundamental notions and concepts as well as the main trends in the theory of knowledge.

By the end of this course, students will have acquired the basic concepts from the main theories of knowledge in the philosophical tradition. They will be able to understand how discourse can claim to be truthful, from a logical and critical perspective. They will understand the multiplicity of answers to the question « What can I know » and its implications.

End of year oral examination. Students are required to recognise and explain a short extract from the texts which have been studied.

Although this is a lecture course, it will be fairly interactive and will often involve dialogue. (Certain lectures, such as the one on Kant, are more formal).

This course presents the different schools simply by following the chronological order in which they appeared and in such a way as to demonstrate the philosophical thinking in the way they succeeded each other. This internal development of the course means that we start with Plato and finish with different strands of 20^th century thought.  Each week students are required to read texts (between ten and thirty pages long) in preparation for the following week.

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Aids : course notes, documents on iCampus