In this post, Alfie Turner, who took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015, writes about ‘Orwellian’ as a philosophical keyword.

Aged 17, I got my first paid job washing-up in my local village pub. Describing working conditions on the phone to my aunt – the anti-Semitic chef and the cohort of Slovenian dogsbodies, jumping to every foul-mouthed order, – my aunt remarked, “it sounds Orwellian!”  Later that year she gave me ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. […]
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Charlie Roden took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2016. In this post she writes about ‘happiness’ as a philosophical keyword, with the help of Charlie Brown.

Extract from the comic-strip ‘Peanuts’. Image from http://www.philipchircop.com/post/15448312238/incidentally-what-is-happiness-do-whatever

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘happiness’ is defined as ‘the state of being happy’, that is, ‘feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.’[1]  Happiness is a universal concept which, I believe, most people aspire to achieve. However, since happiness is so subjective, everyone interprets it in different […]
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Muhammad Domun took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2016. In this post he writes about ‘radical’ – one of the most politically charged of philosophical keywords.

“I was determined that my Radicalism should not be called in question.”

-Charles Dickens ( The letters of Charles Dickens)

From the new elected FIFA president to make radical realignment to football to David Cameron’s nonsensical arguments on the “traditional submissiveness of Muslim women”  being key to the radicalisation […]
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Maya Bhogal took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2016. In this post she writes about ‘mystic’ as a philosophical keyword.

Today, when someone says the word mystic, the most common connotation might be the figure of Mystic Meg, astrologist and psychic for The Sun. As in the picture below, Meg is often depicted holding a crystal ball in an ethereal setting. She is the archetype of a popular understanding of the word mystic. However, the original ‘mystics’ would be somewhat […]
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Emmeline Wilcox took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2016. In this post she writes about ‘moral’ as a philosophical keyword.

Growing up as a Harry Potter fanatic, I lapped up all the moral messages that littered the books. The importance of empathy, friendship, loyalty, love, and acceptance were set out as qualities that should be fostered. Finding moral lessons in stories is not unfamiliar ground when you’re a child. In fact, as children we are bombarded with moral messages. A […]
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Chloe Pritchard took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2016. In this post she writes about ‘Aesthetics’ as a philosophical keyword.

Aesthetics has been defined by the Oxford English dictionary as ‘a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty, or the branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste’.

Appreciation of pleasing aesthetics, or ‘beauty’, has been perceived by some academics as a means of communicating that begins as early as childhood. As Barbara Herberholz hypothesises, aesthetic […]
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Lauren Purchase took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2016. In this post she writes about ‘Vegetarian’ as a philosophical keyword.

Undoubtedly, I was just one of the 1.2 million individuals who the Vegetarian society recognises to abstain from both meat and fish within the United Kingdom who were recently targeted by the January 2016 advertising campaign for the restaurant chain Gourmet Burger Kitchen. The marketing campaign perpetuated the dominant societal attitude that eating meat is both the tastiest and most […]
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Katherine Angel is the author of Unmastered: A Book On Desire, Most Difficult To Tell (Penguin/Allen Lane, Farrar Straus & Giroux). She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University, and is completing her second book, an exploration of subjectivity and selfhood in contemporary sex research. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge’s History and Philosophy of Science Department, and has held Wellcome Trust and Leverhulme research fellowships at the University of Warwick and Queen Mary, University of London. Her writing […]
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Lawrence Charlesworth took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015. In this post he writes about ‘Agnosticism’ as a philosophical keyword.

We are quite familiar in twenty first century Britain with talk of the existence or non-existence of God. It is no surprise to us if, while browsing the Guardian website, we find an article describing Stephen Fry’s thoughts on God: “utterly evil, capricious and monstrous” – as though He were a dictator criticised for human rights abuses. You can watch […]
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Kloe Fowler took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015. In this post she writes about ‘Humanism’ as a philosophical keyword.

Professor Richard Dawkins on a London bus displaying the Atheist message.Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA

You may remember, back in 2009, seeing London buses adorned with a message reading ‘there probably is no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’. The campaign was the creation of the British Humanist Association (BHA), a national Humanist group whose campaigners felt that the […]
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