On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:

1. identify key philosophical frameworks from the modern era
2. summarise key concepts in the modern philosophical tradition
3. describe enduring philosophical issues from the modern tradition
4. apply skills in argument, reasoning and critical analysis to written work
5. apply skills in reading, understanding and interpretation to primary philosophical texts and commentaries.

The subject will analyse key texts from a variety of philosophical traditions. These might include:
- Continental rationalism (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz; problems of methods, the criterion of truth and certainty)
- British Empiricism - Locke, Berkeley, Hume; approaches to knowledge and scepticism
- Kantian and post-Kantian idealism - Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel: gnoseological concerns, The relation between self and World
- Nietzsche and influence: Truth and knowledge, nihilism, will to power, The critique of religion and morality, Aesthetic experience, The critique of subjectivity
- Existentialism and Phenomenology - Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty Jaspers, Marcel: Issues on existence, freedom, Individualism, values of life, suicide, political commitment, love, alienation, mind/body distinction
- The Frankfurt school - Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Issues on rationality, Technology, political domination, Fascism, Critical theory, The Project of enlightenment and Modernity
- Later Heidegger on technology and progress; language and meaning
- Frege, Wittgenstein, AJ Ayer on philosophy and language
- Benjamin on violence and politics, history, Modernity
- DeBeauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, on Continental philosophy of sex and gender
- The structuralist innovations - Barthes, Jacobsen, Lacan, Levi-Strauss
- Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas on ethics and The other