Subject Area: Philosophy

This course concerns one of philosophy's core areas — metaphysics. The aim of the course is to give students an awareness of some historically and philosophically important ideas and ways of thinking, along with an increased ability to engage critically and imaginatively with those ideas and those ways of thinking. Metaphysics is the philosophical study of what it is for something to exist — and of what fundamental kinds of thing do and can exist. And so we will consider some possible fundamental categories of being -- such as actuality, possibility, freedom, determinism, agency, identity, existence.