A222 - Exploring Philosophy : Day School

Day school for A222 last  weekend, and it was a bit of a mixed bag.

I had a reasonably short drive to the venue, but others had driven for several hours, and at least one person had taken flights to get there, and I wonder if at the end of the day they thought it was worth the bother and the cost ?

 

The first session was Philosophy of Religion taken by the author of book 2. The most interesting aspect of this section, in my opinion, was the impromptu discussion on The Mind before the presentation on Religion. The presentation on religion seemed to be more of a plug for the book he was writing rather than anything which I could take as useful for the exam. I now know, and this was laboured at some point, that small-t theism is different from large-T Theism, and large-T Theism is about one divine and all-powerful god - but there then seemed to be a massive and completely unexplained assumption that this large-T Theistic god was in fact the Christian god. So this element of the day, as far as I was concerned, was not that interesting or useful for the exam.

The next session was to be on the Philosophy of Politics, but as we have not yet covered this subject in our reading (it is book 6) this was always going to be a odd session. It was not helped by the presenter encouraging the previous speaker to over run considerably and was then left with little more than 30 mins to rush through some power point slides. A bit disappointing really.

This brought us to the lunch break, and all-in-all was pretty disappointing so far. Luckily the afternoon was much better.

The first session in the afternoon was an entertaining, well produced and fast paced session on Ethics. This was certainly interesting and definitely of use come the exam. So a complete contrast to the morning's proceedings.

This session was then followed by a good session on logic, looking at if conclusions are valid and/or sound, given the premises that they are based on. A useful session as the examples provided provoked much discussion and were not always as straight forward as they first seemed.

So as with all tutorials so far, some goods bits, some bad bits and most of all I am very thankful that I am lucky enough not to have to travel too far or spend a lot of money getting to these events. I do admire those who traveled for hours to get there,  and spent a considerable amount to participate and I would love to know if they considered it worth the cost, time and effort needed to attend.....