This page contains information about resources and readings you can choose to engage with in preparation for your arrival as a new student or returning in the Department of Philosophy.

Please note that you are not required to engage with these resources. These are recommendations just in case you are interested in doing some preparation before you arrive.

In fact, now is a good time to explore your interests widely and with enthusiasm in whatever way you see fit. When you get here we will tell you what you are required to read, but for now just read and engage with the things that make you feel as passionate and excited about philosophy as we do.

Recommended Reading:

As a reminder, all of our Philosophy MA modules running in 2023/24 can be found here.

For PH923 Hegel's Science of Logic:

Hegel, Georg, Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1999)

J. Burbidge, On Hegel's Logic. Fragments of A Commentary (New York: Humanity Books, 1999). S. Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel's Logic. From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006). R. Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). R. Winfield, Hegel’s Science of Logic. A Critical Rethinking in Thirty Lectures (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

For PH997 Topics in Metaphysics and Epistemology:

Donald Davidson, "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (1963/2001)

Elizabeth Anscombe Intention (1957/2000)

Maria Alvarez and John Hyman, "Philosophy of Action" in The Cambridge History of Philosophy 1945-2015, edited by Kelly Becker and Iain d. Thomson

Kieran Setiya. "Practical Knowledge" (2008) and "Practical Knowledge Revisited" (2009); both in Ethics

Sarah Paul. 2009. "How we Know what we're Doing" in Philosophers' Imprint

PH9F6 Critiques of Enlightenment in Post-Kantian German Philosophy

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”’ in Kant, Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, 2 edn (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘Some Lectures concerning the Scholar’s Vocation’, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Early Philosophical Writings, trans. Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), Preface (1944 and 1947) and The Concept of Enlightenment, pp. x-xix and pp. 1-34.

For PH9F7 Topics in Philosophy and the Arts:

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

Ellen Dissanayake, 'Art as a Human Behavior: Toward an Ethological View of Art'

Stephen Davies, The Artful Species

Paul O. Kristeller, 'The Modern System of the Arts'

Kendall Walton, ‘Categories of Art’

Ajume Wingo, 'African Art and the Aesthetics of Hiding and Revealing'

Susan Mullin Vogel, 'Baule: African Art Western Eyes'

Kathleen Higgins, 'Comparative Aesthetics'

John Gibson, 'Cognitivism and the Arts'

Eileen John, 'Literature and Philosophical Progress'

Anne Eaton, 'Robust Immoralism'

Berys Gaut, 'The Ethical Criticism of Art'

PH9GG Democracy: Authority and Resistance:

Plato, The Republic

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism

David Estlund, Democratic Authority

Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of Equality

Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason

Fabienne Peter, Democratic Legitimacy

Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty

Julia Maskivker, The Duty to Vote

For PH9GT Heidegger's Being and Time:

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie/Robinson .

Secondary Literature:
Wrathall’s How to Read Heidegger is a good a introductory work to read alongside Being and Time. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time (edited by Wrathall) contains key research essays on different topics in the book. A compelling reconstruction of Heidegger’s main argument with the help of more recent philosophy is found in Golob’s Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity.

Mark Wrathall, How to Read Heidegger (Granta Books: 2005).

Mark Wrathall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Cambridge UP: 2013).

Sacha Golob, Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity (Cambridge UP: 2014).

PH9GVTime Process and Experience:

Comrie, B. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Kearns, K. 2011. Semantics. New York, Palgrave Macmillan. An introductory text that will be helpful in connection with discussion of perfective and imperfective meaning.

Klein, W. 1994. Time in Language. London, Routledge.

O'Shaughnessy, B. 2000. Consciousness and the World. London, Routledge.

Portner, P. 2005. What is Meaning? Fundamentals of Formal Semantics. Oxford, Blackwell. Another text that is helpful for some of the discussion of the truth conditions of aspectual sentences.

Power, S. E. 2021. The Philosophy of Time: A Contemporary Introduction. London, Routledge. This will be helpful as an introduction to some more general issues in the philosophy of time. See also Sam Baron and Kristie Miller, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Time. Cambridge, Polity. 2019.

Rothstein, S. 2004. Structuring Events. Oxford, Blackwell.

Valberg, J. J. 2007. Dream, Death and Self. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Important source for some ideas about what a temporal perspective might be.

For PH9GV Time, Process and Experience:

Mourelatos, Alexander, 'Events, Processes and States,' in Linguistics and Philosophy, (1978) Vol. 2, No. 3: pp. 415- 434

Gill, Kathleen, 1993. 'On the Metaphysical Distinction between Processes and Events,' in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, (1993) 23(3): pp. 365- 384

Crowther, Thomas, 'The Matter of Events,' in The Review of Metaphysics, (2011) Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 3- 39

PH9HA Embodiment, Art, Nature: Merleau- Ponty's Phenomenology:

The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Lawlor/Toadvine, Northwestern University Press 2007.
Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge 2012.

The relevant chapter in Gutting's French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press 2012) offers a brief historical introduction to Merleau-Ponty. Emmanuel Alloa's Resistance of the Sensible World (Fordham University Press 2017) is a very good book-length introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (ed. Carman/Hansen 2004) holds a number of good essay.

For PH9F2 Research Methods:

Frege, Gottlob, 'The Thought: A Logical Inquiry', in Mind, (1956) Vol. 65, No. 259, pp. 289-311, accessed at https://www.jstor.org/stable/2251513

Strawson, P. F., 'Freedom and Resentment', accessed at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwstrawson1.htm

For PH924 Nietzsche:

Main Reading:

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Translation by Walter Kaufmann recommended (Vintage Books, 1966). The translation by Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2002) is also good.

Background Reading:

Keith Ansell-Pearson and Christa Davis Acampora, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2011).

Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Introduction” to Beyond Good and Evil [in Judith Norman trans. of BGE, Cambridge University Press, 2002)].

Michael Tanner, “Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil” Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 20:197-216 (1986).

For PH948 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A.W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. R. Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1990).

Also worth reading:

Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics that will be able to come forward as Science, in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, ed. H. Allison and P. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Kant, Immanuel, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können, ed. K. Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976).

Secondary Texts:

Wood (2005) provides a very good overview of Kant’s whole system. Allison (2004) and Gardner (1999) are very good studies of the CPR. Caygill (1995) is an invaluable resource at all times.

Allais, Lucy (2015), Manifest Reality. Kant’s Idealism and his Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Allison, Henry (2015), Kant’s Transcendental Deductions. An Analytical-Historical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Allison, Henry E. (2004), Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense, revised and enlarged ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Ameriks, Karl (2000), Kant’s Theory of Mind. An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Ameriks, Karl (2000), Kant and the Fate of Autonomy. Problems in the Appropriation of the Critical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

For PH998 Topics in the Philosophy of Mind and Language:

Michael Tomasello. (2014) A Natural History of Human Thinking.

Michael Tomasello. (2019) Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny.

Donaldson, D. (2001) Subjective, Intersubjective Objective.

Eilan, N., Hoerl, C., McCormack, T., & Roessler, J. (Eds.). (2005). Joint attention: Communication and other minds: Issues in philosophy and psychology. Clarendon Press/Oxford University.

Moran, Richard. (2019)The Exchange of Words: Speech, Testimony, and Intersubjectivity OUP.

Eilan, N. (2014). Special issue: The second person. Philosophical Explorations, 17(3), 265–387.

For PH9A5 Topics in 20th Century French Philosophy:

Simone de Beavoir, The Second Sex

Jacques Derrida, Différance, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Spectres of Marx, Force of Law

Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'

PH9GZ Navigating Time:

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1981). The reality of the past The collected philosophical papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Vol. 2: Metaphysics and the philosophy of mind (pp. 103-119). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Baier, A. (1976). Mixing memory and desire. American Philosophical Quarterly, 13(3), 213-220.

Boyle, A. (2021). Remembering events and representing time. Synthese, 199(1), 2505-2524.

Campbell, J. (1994). Past, space and self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dainton, B. (2023). Temporal consciousness. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2023 ed.).

Hoerl, C., & McCormack, T. (2019a). Thinking in and about time: A dual systems perspective on temporal cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, e244.

Ismael, J. (2017). Passage, flow, and the logic of temporal perspectives. In C. Bouton & P. Huneman (Eds.), Time of Nature and the Nature of Time (pp. 23-38). Berlin: Springer.

PH9HB The Logic of Life:

Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford UP: 1998).

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (UChicago Press: 1999).

Aristotle, On The Soul (De Anima)

Matthew Boyle, 'Essentially Rational Animals’, In Rethinking Epistemology v2, Abel and Conant eds (De Gruyter: 2012, 395-428).

G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic (CUP: 2021).

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (CUP: 2000).

Christine Korsgaard, 'Two Kinds of Matter in Aristotle’s Metaphysics'

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Prometheus: 1998).

For PH9E3 Topics in Moral and Political Philosophy:

R. P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970; 2d ed. 1998).

A. John Simmons, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on Rights and Obligations (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).

A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1979).

Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

George Klosko, The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation, (Savage, Md: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2d ed. 2004).

F. G. Miller and A. Wertheimer (eds), The Ethics of Consent (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010).

Frances Kamm, Intricate Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Brian Feltham and John Cottingham (eds.), Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special
Relationships and the Wider World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

G. Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988).

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).