PKC-F01 — Foundations of Philosophy

What this course is about

Philosophy is useful in a specific and unglamorous way: it improves the quality of questions. This foundation course is built around that claim. Rather than surveying schools of thought for their own sake, it works through the problems that keep recurring in any serious intellectual life — what counts as knowing something, how claims are justified, what makes an argument valid, and how to reason about right action when principles conflict.

How the course is structured

The first sessions cover argument itself: structure, validity, soundness, and the difference between an argument being persuasive and being good. Students learn to reconstruct someone else’s position in its strongest form before responding to it, a discipline that changes how they read everything afterwards.

The second block covers epistemology — belief, justification, the problem of induction, the status of testimony and expertise. This section has direct practical consequences for anyone assessing evidence, and it connects closely to research training elsewhere in the Academy.

The third block covers ethics, approached through cases rather than through the memorisation of positions. Students confront situations where consequentialist and duty-based reasoning give incompatible answers, and are required to decide and justify rather than to note the tension and move on.

The closing sessions consider knowledge as a civilisational project: how traditions of learning are transmitted, what happens when they are interrupted, and why intellectual pluralism has historically been a condition of intellectual productivity.

What you will be able to do

You should be able to identify the structure of an argument and locate its weakest premise, distinguish disagreement about facts from disagreement about values, articulate a position you hold and the strongest objection to it, and write with the precision that philosophical work demands.

Who it suits

Students in any discipline who want firmer conceptual ground, teachers who must handle contested questions in a classroom, professionals facing genuine ethical difficulty, and readers who have come to philosophy through curiosity rather than requirement. No prior study is needed.

The course opens the sequence in the School of Philosophy, Knowledge & Civilization and supports work in the School of Knowledge Systems. Further pathways are listed in the Academy.