The title links below will take you to html versions of the essays, but unfortunately I have been unable to include the references for quotes in this format. However, the sources are included in the Word (.doc) format.

• According to John Locke there is a natural right to property. Is he right?
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• An explanation and justification of my engagement with philosophy.
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• Are there criteria of the mental?
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• Could there be a private language - a language which could only be understood by one person alone?
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• Critically examine the consciousness-only theory of Vasabandhu.
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• Does perception give us knowledge of the physical world? If so, how?
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• Do proper names have a sense as well as a reference? If so, what is the sense of a proper name?
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• Expound and comment on Nietzsche's account of the role of religion and morality in the formation of human society.
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• "Whether in morally assessing ourselves or others, whether in the court of law or everyday life, we are beset by confusion when we once grant self-deception. For as deceiver one is insincere, guilty; whereas as genuinely deceived, one is the innocent victim. What then shall we make of the self-deceiver, the one who is both the doer and the sufferer? Our fundamental categories are placed squarely at odds with one another." (Fingarette, Self-Deception) How can we posit the existence of self-deception without contradicting ourselves?
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• How does Freud explain the operation of repression? Consider the charge that his account is incoherent.
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• If knowledge is defined as justified true belief, what counts as justification?
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• "Let us not forget this: when 'I raise my arm', my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell 1953, Part 1, §621) Is the correct answer to Wittgenstein's question, "An act of will"?
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• Might you be a brain in a vat? What consequences (if any) does the answer to this question have for the problem of the relation of the mind to the physical world?
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• "The use then of words, is to be the sensible mark of Ideas, and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate signification… Words in their primary and immediate signification, stand for nothing but the Ideas in the mind of him that uses them." (John Locke) Is this a tenable account of the nature and basis of linguistic meaning?
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• What does Saussure mean when he speaks of the 'arbitrary' nature of the sign and why does he attach so much importance to this idea? To what extent is he justified in thinking that this idea is of fundamental importance?
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• What implications would the existence of clairvoyance and/or telepathy have for the philosophy of mind?
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• What is meant by the claim that nature has 'intrinsic value'? Is it coherent?
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• What is Plato's Theory of Forms? How effective a theory is it?
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• What is the import of the teachings about wu-wei ('non-action') in the Lao Tzu (Laozi)?
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  Oral Presentations
  
  
• Kant on Teleology
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• Kant's View of Philosophy
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• Nature, Human and Non-Human
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  Dissertation
  
  
• Has the Cartesian sceptical position been refuted?
  
  

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