Philosophy

About this programme

A degree in Philosophy is taught via a selection of compulsory and optional courses to enhance your learning and prepare you for a future career or further study. Philosophy is the study of argument and its application to a wide variety of questions of fundamental importance to human life and intellectual activity. Philosophers attempt to answer questions such as: What is knowledge? What is the nature of truth? Could the existence of God be proved? The University of Aberdeen is delighted to offer eligible self-funded international on-campus undergraduate students a £6,000 scholarship for every year of their programme. This course, which is prescribed for level 1 undergraduate students and articulating students who are in their first year at the University, is studied entirely online, takes approximately 2-3 hours to complete and can be taken in one sitting, or spread across the first 4 weeks of term. Topics include University orientation overview, equality & diversity, MySkills, health, safety and cyber security, and academic integrity. Successful completion of this course will be recorded on your Transcript as ‘Achieved’. How “real” is reality? How does the mind relate to the world? This course introduces two approaches to answering these questions: rationalism and empiricism. By reading Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, we learn about Descartes’ rationalist approach to knowledge, reality, mind-body dualism, and God’s necessary existence. Through David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, we see how Hume grounds knowledge in experience. We re