Meaning, experience and social criticism

Part 4 · Knowledge, freedom and a changing world

A philosophical problem can change when we change how we approach it. We might ask what an idea does in practice, examine its logical form, describe an experience or question the social categories in which it is expressed.

Pragmatism, early analytic philosophy and Wittgenstein open the sequence with questions of practice, logic and language. Phenomenology then examines how things appear in experience, and existentialism asks how people act in circumstances they did not choose. The module ends with critical theory, interpretation and the ways social power shapes the categories we use. Along the way, earlier problems of knowledge and freedom take new forms. The next module follows related questions through other modern histories, whose arguments deserve to be considered on their own terms.

Time, place and approach. These conversations, mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, overlap with one another and with those of the next module. Each approach has its own aims and limits, and comparing them shows how a method can bring one side of a problem into view while leaving another unresolved.

After these lessons

• Explain what a philosophical method asks us to attend to.
• Distinguish criticizing one use of reason from rejecting reasoning altogether.
• Compare two approaches to a problem and identify what each leaves unresolved.

Useful preparation

The earlier lessons on doubt, social systems and becoming an individual offer ways into these discussions, but you can begin with whichever question interests you. Each reading explains its approach and introduces the terms you need.

• Review: How far can doubt take us?
• Review: What does a social system make of a person?
• Review: Becoming an individual: two challenges to inherited values