Oh boy. Every one raaaves about this class lol. it’s partly cause the continental writers are so hard to understand, but the lecturers don’t really do the audience any favours lol. they sometimes mentioned that, because they’re so immersed in the field, it can be hard to translate these ideas to a general audience, so fair enough. But, the class is very complicated. You do get used to it after a while, but there are a lot of technical terms you need to work your way around. I think it’s helpful to keep your storebrand chatgpt open for these lectures and just constantly ask it the definition of words that come up e.g. ‘what does de Beauvoir mean by ambiguity’ or ‘what does Sartre mean by transcendence?’ figures covered include Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, merleau ponty, and de Beauvoir. No nietzche if you were expecting them. if I had any advice for the lecturers it would be to include some more supplemental modern writings, because the few modern writings I read were extremely clear and I got waay more out of them than some of the foundational works. The readings are manageable, but if you want to get a lot out of them you’ll need to google a tonne of technical terms and probably re-read them. While the content is pretty difficult, at the heart of class are really simple concepts – what does it mean to be authentic/what does it mean to be free etc.

Worst Phil subject I've ever done. Lectures had no proper form or structure. Andrew didn't do a good job lecturing as it was both bland and boring. Readings were often too long and taken out of context thus impossible to have a cohesive understanding. The only redeeming quality was the tutor, as she was both helpful in group discussion and assignment feedback. DEFINITELY NOT a wam booster, not recommended for anyone to take this subject.

The hardest subject I've ever done content-wise. Unforuntately it was over zoom, and Andrew's electoral style was quite difficult to appreciate in that context. The texts, although interesting at times, were incredibly dense and hard to understand, especially since they were almost all chapters from books and as such the context of the ideas is lost a little bit. The content being so hard also meant that nobody had anything to say in the tutorials since nobody ever knew what was going on. I think at least half the content needed to be scrapped in order to give appropriate time to the texts.

So confusing and very content heavy. Mainly focused on 4-5 philosophers. First half is about their philosophies, second half is the application of their philosophies onto concepts like freedom, ethics, art ect I'm a philosophy minor and found this subject really difficult to wrap my head around. More abstract than usual, I think you need a lot of theoretical knowledge to do this subject well