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.
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.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere we look. But what do we mean by "intelligent"? Do machines "think"? Does AI have the potential of becoming self-aware or conscious? Do we need to fear the singularity? Can we align AI with our human values and ethics?
Who or what can develop a first-person perspective? Our sense of self is an integral and fundamental part of conscious life, even in light of the fact that the maturation of the self appears to involve complex social processes.
'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?
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?
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?