second year course outlines 2012-2013 - School of Social Sciences ...

Feedback
The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate
feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling
students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development
effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a
student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate fora
is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this
course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.
We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on
this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office
hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions of the lecturer (before and
after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Blackboard; and obtaining
feedback from your peers during tutorials.
Assessed Essay Topics
1. Critically assess Frege’s theory of Thought.
2. Has Moore refuted the doctrine of internal relations?
3. Has Russell’s theory of descriptions successfully solved all the puzzles Russell
intended it to solve?
4. Has Ayer successfully eliminated metaphysics?
5. COURSE OUTLINE
Week 1 Introduction: Logical and Philosophical Background
Week 2 Frege on Thought
Week 3 Moore’s Attack on Idealism
Week 4 Russell’s Theory of Descriptions
Week 5 Logical Positivism: Ayer’s Elimination of Metaphysics
Week 6 READING WEEK
Week 7 Ordinary-Language Philosophy: Austin’s Sense & Sensibila
Week 8 Quine’s Attack on the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
Week 9 Davidson’s Anomalous Monism
Week 10 Kripke on Identity and Necessity
Week 11 Putnam on Meaning and Reference
Week 12 Lewis on Time Travel
6. READING LIST
A web-based version of this reading list, with links to catalogue entries, is available on The
University of Manchester Library web site. (Click on 'Reading Lists' on the left of the main
catalogue page.) Detailed bibliographies for each week’s philosophical topic will be given on
the tutorial worksheets (available on Blackboard). But, in addition, the following books also
have helpful material in them.
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