A Draft Philosophy GCSE Curriculum
Philosophy encompasses the history of how human communities have understood their universe, themselves and their society. Philosophy inducts students into these still live questions of the nature of reality, of human consciousness, good ethical conduct and just political society by orienting them in the long historical sweep of philosophical debates on these questions. As such philosophy offers ‘powerful knowledge’, knowledge that allows students to build schemas in which large areas of cultural and scientific understanding can be ordered.
One of the key course aims of the curriculum draft for a philosophy GCSE outlined here is that by end of the course the students should have studied philosophical arguments which give them an understanding of the broad overall timeline of the history of humans’ understanding of their cosmos, themselves and their society – ordered into three broad periods, the Classical, Medieval and Modern. Another key aim is to give students the chance to apply the techniques of philosophical argumentation to vital open contemporary questions in discussion, to engage them in thinking for themselves and with each other in determining their stance on these open questions of how we should understand our place in the cosmos, ourselves and our society.
The Classical Age
The understanding of cosmos, humans and society in the classical age and its development from earlier mythological understandings of the universe.
Pre-history to Pre-socratics (BP – Pre-500 BC)
Classical Greece
(500-600 BC)
Roman world
(600 BC – 400 AD)
The Individual and Society
The transition from mythological understanding of the world to a philosophical one.
The Axial age – Karl Jaspers
Socrates and Athens
The Trial – Plato
The Republic – Plato
Stoicism
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
Reason, number and Logic
Pythagoras
Aristotle
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Aristotle’s Logic
Euclid
Humans and The Cosmos
Pre-socratics
Thales and Anaximander
From Myth to Thought
The world of the forms – Plato’s Cave
Aristotle’s – Astronomy – The Crystal Spheres
Lucretius
On the nature of things
The Medieval Age
The understanding of the cosmos, humans and society in Christendom and the Islamic world
Medieval Christendom (400-1200)
Islamic Golden Age
(800-1100)
Medieval Europe
1200-1500
The Individual and Society
St Augustine
The City of God
Averroes and Avicenna (Aristotelianism and Platonism in Islam)
St Anselm and the investiture controversy
The re-discovery of the classical tradition
Ficino
Erasmus and Luther
Reason, number and Logic
Anselm’s proofs of God
Islamic Mathematics
Al Khwarizmi
William of Ockham
Humans and The Cosmos
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica
Islamic Golden Age Cosmology
Al Ghazali
Duns Scotus
Bacon
Dante’s Cosmos
The Modern Age
The understanding of the cosmos, humans and society in the modern scientific view of the universe, humans and society and its development in the early modern period
Early Modern Europe
(1500-1750)
Enlightenment Europe
(1750-1850)
Modern Europe
(1850-1950)
The Individual and Society
Machiavelli’s Virtu and Christian Virtue
Hobbes and Rousseau on Human Nature
The Nation and Cosmopolitanism
Kant and Herder
Burke and Paine on revolution.
The rights of woman
Mary Wollstonecraft
Reason, number and Logic
Copernicus
Newton and Leibniz and Calculus
Cantor and Godel – Infinity and Contradiction
Modern Logic
Frege and Russell
The foundation of computing
Boole and Turing
Humans and The Cosmos
Galileo and the Pope
Descartes and Leibniz
Locke and Hume
Modern Physics and the Cosmos
Einstein’s space-time and its contrasts with newtonian space time
The modern significance of the Cosmos
The Human Condition Hannah Arendt
