King's College London

Students study aspects of Plato’s ethics, epistemology, moral psychology, political philosophy, meta-ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. They are studying parts of three dialogues: the Protagoras, the Theaetetus, and the Republic. The first two dialogues engage with a position that Plato found deeply unsettling: relativism. Protagoras’ relativism not only encompasses ethics and politics, but also pertains to epistemology and even metaphysics. In both domains, appearance is given a much stronger role than we would expect. The Republic contains a sustained argument to combat the ills of relativism and unenlightened self-interest by developing the blue-print of “the philosopher” whose understanding of the forms enables him or her to navigate the ship of state successfully towards the good.

The course provides students with a fundamental grounding in the theoretical and computational skills required to apply machine learning tools to real-world problems. It will provide an understanding of the application of these skills to explore complex high-dimensional data sets; providing an overview of active research areas in machine learning, with biomedical applications.

This course introduces the students to the universe of graphic novels in the Global Iberian World. The focus is on the transnational understanding of the main themes, styles and influences emerging from different disciplinary and national traditions, as well across media. It provides conceptual and analytical tools for students to systematise their experience as critical readers of graphic novels, moving beyond the Western fictional universe to the expanding field of Portuguese speaking Africa and Latin America.

This course examines some key issues relating to value and normativity, and explores some of the central themes within normative ethics, covering its historical underpinnings and contemporary debate. 

This course is an introduction to propositional logic and predicate logic. It acquaints students with the notions of logical consistency and logical validity, syllogisms, the languages of propositional logic and predicate logic, truth-tables for propositional, logic, and introduces the truth-tree method to check for logical validity of arguments and consistency of sets of sentences in both logics.

The fear of conspiracy functions as a recurring motif in many American cultural forms including novels, film, television, certain genres of music like hip-hop and rap, graphic novels, and social media. After considering early articulations of conspiracism in the US, this course focuses on 20th and 21st Century mediations and figurations of conspiracy fears and theories. The course considers conspiracism through key events that have unsettled epistemic certainty and fuelled hermeneutic activity, including the assassination of JFK, 9/11, the election of Barack Obama, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

This course looks at key social movements from the 20th and 21st century and the ways in which culture and cultural expression have been central to representing social causes, communicating concerns, and engendering public support for social change. It examines how technologies have changed the shape of cultural expression, often defining the texture and possibilities of activist practices. The course explores a wide range of cultural practices and their relationship with activism including the visual arts, performing arts, and music. It draws from examples across time and geographic locations.