A222 - Exploring Philosophy : Course Review

Although I'm waiting on the result for this course, it is effectively over and so that is the second course of the six courses necessary to complete the PPE degree completed, so 2 down, 4 to go.

This was my first brush with philosophy as an academic subject, and now that I have had time to let the dust settle after the exam, and look back on the course, I can say that it has been well worthwhile. Quite apart from the actual 6 subject areas we looked at, the additional aspects of the course regarding constructing and deconstructing arguments has been very useful.

The other thing that I noticed was that the TMA essays were very different from the essays required for the DD101 course.  I either had a strict tutor this time round or a lax tutor for the first course, or maybe it is just that more is expected at Level 2, but my TMA marks were down by roughly 10% which was slightly annoying because if anything I put more effort in to these TMAs.

The final classification of this degree is based on the two Level 3 course results and the best two of the three Level 2 courses, so this course is not necessarily counting towards the final result, but of course there is no way of knowing that until the other two Level 2 courses have been completed.

So to the actual course.

It is emphasised that to fully engage with the course it is necessary not only to read philosophy, but to actually do philosophy. This means thought and discussion. The discussion part can be quite tricky, as not everyone in your social circle has the time or interest to engage with what can be abstract or emotional subjects, and those that do may not discuss in as ‘philosophical’ a manner as you would hope, parting comments of “well that is clearly bollocks” do not move the discussion forward in any meaningful way.

The course FORUM can be useful, but it can also be dominated by a few individuals, some of whom contribute knowledgeable and lengthy (sometimes very lengthy)  discussions, and some of whom just post a stream of what is effectively just SPAM

SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, boiled eggs….. and SPAM.

The Forum discussions also seemed to start before the point that the study planner would indicate that they should, so by the time I had read the course text and felt ready to contribute to the discussion the discussion was either well underway and covered all the points I wanted to make, or had effectively moved on to other subjects. I think that the Forum tutors/moderators should grip this a bit better as it must put loads of people off of contributing. For these reasons the Facebook group was really good and was used more than the OU Forum was.

The tutorials were a mixture of Face to Face tutorials and online ‘Elluminate’ tutorials. The Face to Face tutorials never really seemed long enough, and there was too much time spent covering what people should have already read before getting discussions underway. I think these could be better structured to do what we cannot do on our own, i.e. have large discussions and debates on the subject at hand. The Elluminate tutorials were only an hour and to be fair by the time everyone had logged in and sorted out minor IT problems with speakers and microphones, not a great deal got done – but at least this could be done (not done) from the comfort of your own home.

I thought it was worth attending to get some Face to Face communication with the tutor, as it always makes further email communication easier if you have met in person. Other than that it was no great problem for me to attend as they were only 40mins away, but any further for the next course and I will have to think twice about the value of such tutorials.

The course books were…..

The Self : Interesting discussion in to what makes me – me. Short introduction book to get onto the course and after a short discussion three very identifiable theorists which made it an obvious choice for the exam. I can’t understand those who did not choose this book.

Religion : Sort of skirted round the reasons to believe there is a God and the reasons not to, but it didn’t really get in to any significant depth on the subject. It did show however that long held views received without any proof from authority figures are very hard to change and indeed those that hold these views will protect them by ignoring self evident proof that is all around us. From a philosophical point of view it shows that science has a question and searches for the answer, whereas religion has the answer and modifies the question to ensure the answer remains.

Ethics : I was looking forward to this, but there was too much Bentham and Mills and not enough Kant. I had hoped for a course similar to Michael Sandel’s ‘Justice’ for Harvard University – check it out on YouTube – but this was not that.

Knowledge : I didn’t really do this book justice. All we needed for the TMA was Descartes and this book coincided with a  very busy period and I just did not have time to look at Hume and Popper and the rest of the Knowledge chapters.

The Mind : This book was completely spoilt by the nonsense that was the Chapter on the extended mind which was also the TMA. Their ‘paper’ had more holes in it than you would expect from an academic paper and the author does not seem to have moved his argument on in 15 years or so since it was published.

Politics : Excellent, interesting and useful for my next course. Challenges your ideas of both egalitarianism and libertarianism, and makes you questions your long held views. After reading this book, I’m really looking forward to my next course.


If there is a criticism of the course it is that it can be very compartmentalised and if you are short of time you can skip large chunks of reading in order to get the TMAs done and maybe not have to revisit the books again depending on what exam questions you pick.

The exam is another thing. Six books, two questions from each book, choose three questions to answer, but not from the same book, complete in three hours. Three hours is about as long an exam as it is possible to sit. I was OK after the exam but really fatigued later in the evening – it sort of caught up with me. So after writing TMAs that took hours of planning let alone writing, cobbling together an essay in an hour is never going to be up to the standard of a TMA. I am still thinking of things I should have added, but as I was basically writing for most of the three hours how could I have included these extra ideas.


So my advice to anybody thinking of doing this course is that it is a great course, but what you get out of it depends on what you put in (as with many things). It also helps if you have a good tutor and your regional forum is active – but don’t rely on that. Get stuck in to the reading early, note down all relevant theorists and ideas as revision notes from the word go. As you move through the course return to the previously read books and revision notes, all of the books either made more sense or became more obvious on second reading and there were some ideas and strands that worked across different books that you would not be aware of at the start. I will certainly try to do this for the next course, and it makes the revision not seem quite so daunting a task once the final TMA is out of the way.

So if you are going to study A222 – Exploring Philosophy, good luck, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.