Introduction to philosophy 1

About this site

This site is intended for University of Edinburgh students in Zoë Payne's tutorial groups for Introduction to Philosophy. Some general course and tutorial information is given below, and the menu to the left includes links to a list of useful web sites for this course, presentation schedules and tutorial worksheets.

You can email me using the link at the top of the menu to the right. The menu also includes links to some generally useful external sites, including the home page for Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Click on a category heading to expand the menu of links in that category.

Note: The site contains links to some University of Edinburgh pages that are restricted to members of the University. To access these sites, you will need to either be using a University of Edinburgh computer or have your home PC set up to use the University of Edinburgh proxy cache service. Details of how to do the latter can be found at http://webhelp.ucs.ed.ac.uk/docs/proxycache.html.

Course and tutorial information

If you are registered for the tutorials it is important that you attend. If, for any reason, you cannot attend a tutorial then please email me to let me know why. If you do not, then your absence will be marked as unexplained, and if you have unexplained absences then you may not be able to get an exemption from the degree exam or, in extreme cases, be permitted to sit the exam at all.

The website for this course is at http://www.philosophy.ed.ac.uk/ug_study/ug_intro/ug_intro_05-06.html. From this page, you can access the course guide and lecture notes, as well as some additional useful information. To get at some of the info, you'll need to be accessing the site from an ed.ac.uk domain, or, if you're accessing the site from home, be using the university proxy cache service (see http://webhelp.ucs.ed.ac.uk/docs/proxycache.html for details of how to set this up).

Using the internet to research philosophy can be risky - there are many crank sites out there. However, there are some useful encyclopaedias that can be handy for getting the definition of a bit of philosophical jargon or an introduction to a topic, though by no means can these replace attending lectures or doing the assigned reading for the course. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has excellent peer-reviewed articles, but is still in production so many entries remain to be published. Another potentially useful resource is The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.