One of my favourite things about my Philosophy degree at Edinburgh was the huge choice of modules available to study at Honours level, here are some of my favourites.

 

Applied Ethics

The study of ethics generally comes in three broad forms: normative ethics (e.g. how can I behave morally?), meta-ethics (what does it even mean to say something is moral?), and applied ethics (e.g. is X activity moral?). In other words, studying Applied Ethics means examining controversial subjects such as abortion, disability, euthanasia, death, etc.

I think philosophy gets a bad reputation for being practically useless, but in Applied Ethics, you’re able to get up close and personal with some really gritty topics with real-world implications. If that thought interests you, then I’d think about taking this course.

 

Logic 2

Love it or hate it, the consensus is that logic’s pretty important in academic philosophy. Logic 2 steps off right where Logic 1 left off but focuses on modal logic, i.e. logic concerned with possibility and necessity as it relates to possible worlds.

If you: enjoyed Logic 1, like doing derivations, and find it satisfying to have definitive right answers, then this could be for you.

 

 

 

Belief, Desire, and Rational Choice

This is the philosophy course that has the greatest overlap with economics out of all of the available modules in the school of PPLS.

Game theory, decision matrixes, and probability theory all come into play in this course designed to help you better understand how a rational agent should behave when faced with varying kinds of puzzles and problems. I found this course to be a fantastic introduction to many subjects that I never thought that I’d get to study in a philosophy degree and it is taught by the extremely competent Wolfgang Schwarz.  All in all, this is definitely one that I valued having taken at Edinburgh.

 

 

 

Philosophy of Time AND Philosophy of Time Travel

These are two courses that were incredibly memorable. Both in terms of the content covered, (which provided the most entertaining subjects for essays that I have ever written), but also in terms of the fantastic teaching by Alasdair Richmond.

In these courses, you’ll cover related subjects from the nature and reality of time to Kurt Gödel’s solutions to Einstein’s field equations for general relativity. Of all the courses that I’ve taken, nothing has warped my mind like the study of time and I would recommend anyone to enquire further.

 

 

Hopefully, this list was able to give you a little bit more information about some of the modules that you might be looking at studying. Whatever you decide to take, the teaching at Edinburgh is fantastic and I’m sure you’ll have a great time regardless.