Tutor information
Julia Weckend
Julia has taught philosophy at the Universities of Reading and Southampton before joining Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education. She regularly teaches weekly classes as well as courses for Oxford University Summer School for Adults and Oxford Experience. Her academic research focuses on issues in metaphysics and epistemology. She has published papers and edited two volumes in the history of philosophy, and she is a co-author of the Historical Dictionary of Leibniz’s Philosophy (2023).
Courses
Reasoning enables us to acquire knowledge, to persuade others and to evaluate their arguments. But only if we reason well. We shall be learning how to recognise, evaluate, construct and analyse arguments, and how to recognise common fallacies.
Arguments about truth are as old as philosophy itself. Can we get to the truth? Is truth something objective in the world or simply a matter of people’s beliefs? Who decides what is true?
An introduction to metaphysics, the most general investigation of reality. It has been at the centre of philosophy since the beginning of the Western tradition in ancient Greece, and many of its concerns are the same as those of Plato and Aristotle.
Reasoning enables us to acquire knowledge, to persuade others and to evaluate their arguments. But only if we reason well. We shall be learning how to recognise, evaluate, construct and analyse arguments, and how to recognise common fallacies.
Who or what am I? The sense of self is amongst our most basic conceptions of who we are. We experience ourselves as single persisting things. Why, then, is it so difficult to pin down the nature and constitution of the self?
Simone de Beauvoir was a fierce critical thinker who through her ground-breaking philosophical work transformed the way we think about sex and gender. How did she become such a powerful role model for women in the twenty-first century?
What is the nature of perceptual experiences? Do we perceive the world as it is, or are our brains hallucinating reality as cognitive science today suggests? How does philosophy respond to these issues?
This weekend school in Oxford will explore philosophy of art and philosophy through art, including fiction, visual art and cinema. What is art, exactly, and how can it illuminate philosophy?
'What is truth?' is a perplexing and elusive question. A good first response is that truth and falsity are properties of what people say or think. But how is what we think related to actual facts? And what caused the recent corrosion of truth?
In the face of rapid technological surges, do we need to amend our present concepts of selfhood and self-understanding to preserve what is important to us and society? Day school with Dr Julia Weckend. Join us in Oxford or watch online.
What, if anything, distinguishes us from other living creatures on this planet? Are we essentially immaterial minds or just bundles of genes? Will technological progress eventually reshape human nature and change our collective identity as a species?
Metaphysics asks questions about the nature of reality such as 'What is there?', 'What is time?', 'What is necessary or possible?', and it tries to establish the first principles of any human enquiry.
What if anything distinguishes us from other living creatures on this planet? Are we immaterial minds or best understood as bundles of genes? Will technological progress eventually reshape human nature and change our collective identity as a species?