University of Edinburgh

David Lewis (1941-2001) was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, decision theory, epistemology, meta-ethics and aesthetics, and most significantly to philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Despite the wide range of issues addressed in Lewis' work there is a unifying method and systematicity. This course provides an overview of Lewis' contributions by focusing on some of his key writings on various topics such as modal metaphysics, human supervienience, analytic functionalism, counterfactuals, counterpart theory, de se content, contextualism about knowledge, scorekeeping in a language game, etc. The course is oriented around a single philosopher and his work, but attention is also given to the connections between Lewis' philosophy and the enduring problems of traditional philosophy.

This course introduces students to essential notions in topology, such as topological spaces, continuous functions, and compactness.

This course explores the interactions between organisms, the dynamics of populations, and the environment. It deals with animal, plant, and pathogenic organisms, and the structuring and function of communities and develops both a quantitative and qualitative understanding of interactions between organisms and their consequences.  The course is broken down into three parts: population biology, species interactions, and community ecology, and it consists of lectures and several extended practicals lasting two to three weeks.

The course examines a range of English prose and narrative forms. It examines issues including the rise of the novel and narrative history; distinctions between story and discourse; realism; narrators and narrative "frames"; free indirect style and other means of transcribing consciousness; irony and tone; temporality, structure and form; genre; fictionality and metafiction. The implications of such issues for primary critical analysis are demonstrated and explored.

This course explores the theme of the three-dimensional or physical manifestations of Scotland's traditional culture systems through a series of thematic case studies. Emphasis is placed upon the examination of material culture exchange and development in relation to such issues as status, ethnicity and identity. Within this framework, form and function, aesthetics and semiotics are explored from an ethnological stance. 

This course has four parts: firstly, it sets the scene by introducing a series of analytical categories and dimensions that can be employed to examine social policy in comparative perspective; secondly, it illustrates similarities and differences in the social policies of high-income countries by reviewing in detail selected national models of welfare state; thirdly, it moves from the national to the supranational level by examining the role of selected supranational institutions in shaping social policies in the Global North and the Global South (e.g. European Union; World Bank; ILO); fourthly, it reviews some key challenges that welfare states are currently faced with and the opportunities for renewal that these challenges may offer.