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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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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Hannah Askari took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015. In this post she writes about ‘Individualism’ as a philosophical keyword.

Image from http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8940211/in-defence-of-individualism/

Individualism (a)

‘The habit of being independent and self-reliant; behaviour characterized by the pursuit of one’s own goals without reference to others; free and independent individual action or thought.’[1]

I began my research with a simple Google of ‘individualism.’ It resulted, interestingly, with the discovery of a website titled Individualism. After a few more […]
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Sebastian Packham took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015. In this post he writes about ‘Nihilism’ as a philosophical keyword.

On February 27th, 2015, there began a worldwide debate about the colour of a dress. A picture of the dress in question had appeared on social networking sites the previous day, and divided opinion as to whether it was black and blue, or white and gold. ‘Dressgate’, as the phenomenon was dubbed, evoked distinct reactions from demographics across the globe, […]
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In this post, Nicola Isaacs, who took the ‘Philosophical Britain‘ module at Queen Mary in 2015, writes about ‘Idealism’ as a philosophical keyword.

There is no term so vague as Idealism. No satisfactory definition of the word has ever been made; because since Plato and Aristotle wrote, hundreds of writers on Metaphysics and Philosophy have handled the subject of Idealism in Life and Art and so enmeshed and obscured the matter, that it is of no practical use for the layman […]
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