PHI000000 Archives

Critical Thinking for the Arts and Humanities

This textbook provides multi-disciplinary introduction to critical thinking skills as applied to the arts and humanities. It includes fifteen case studies, each based on research conducted at UCL to illustrate critical thinking skills within a specific discipline, guiding students through the research process and offering inspiration and example for wider research design and practice. The case studies are introduced by a summary of the main concepts and skills, and the research methodologies applied. Accompanying exercises provide opportunities to apply the skills illustrated in the study to real-world contexts.

This book avoids promoting a view of critical thinking as a set of generic skills that apply across academia. Instead, it encourages students to understand the skills they will be expected to apply in their own study of the arts and humanities. Approaches to knowledge vary across academic disciplines – and this book equips students with the ability to think critically in their own work.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 14

This volume, which supplements the main chronological series of The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, contains 252 letters written to and from Jeremy Bentham, 19 letters written to and from individuals other than Bentham but containing material of biographical interest, and the will made by Bentham on 17 August 1785. The letters have either never before been published or been only partially published in previous volumes of The Correspondence. A large number of the letters were written by Bentham’s brother Samuel on his journey to Russia and during his sojourn in Russia, covering the years 1779 to 1791. This meticulously researched and richly annotated volume contains much new information of biographical interest and deepens our knowledge of Bentham’s relationship with his family, with the panopticon penitentiary scheme, and with such ‘disciples’ as Étienne Dumont, Henry Bickersteth, and Leicester Stanhope. Of particular interest will be correspondence with Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, Sir Samuel Romilly, Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, and John Quincy Adams.

Lockdown Cultures

Lockdown Cultures is both a cultural response to our extraordinary times and a manifesto for the arts and humanities and their role in our post-pandemic society.

This book offers a unique response to the question of how the humanities commented on and were impacted by one of the dominant crises of our times: the Covid-19 pandemic. While the role of engineers, epidemiologists and, of course, medics is assumed, Lockdown Cultures illustrates some of the ways in which the humanities understood and analysed 2020–21, the year of lockdown and plague. Though the impulse behind the book was topical, underpinning the richly varied and individual essays is a lasting concern with the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Each contributor approaches this differently but there are two dominant strands: how art and culture can help us understand the Covid crisis; and how the value of the humanities can be demonstrated by engaging with cultural products from the past.

The result is a book that serves as testament to the humanities’ reinvigorated and reforged sense of identity, from the perspective of UCL and one of the leading arts and humanities faculties in the world. It bears witness to a globally impactful event while showcasing interdisciplinary thinking and examining how the pandemic has changed how we read, watch, write and educate. More than thirty individual contributions collectively reassert the importance of the arts and humanities for contemporary society.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 3

The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief. Against the background of the debates on the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, to which he made significant contributions, Bentham worked first on producing a complete penal code, which involved him in detailed explorations of fundamental legal ideas, and then on his panopticon prison scheme. Despite developing a host of original and ground-breaking ideas, contained in a mass of manuscripts, he published little during these years, and remained, at the close of this period, a relatively obscure individual. Nevertheless, these volumes reveal how the foundations were laid for the remarkable rise of Benthamite utilitarianism in the early nineteenth century.

The letters in this volume document Bentham’s meeting and friendship with the Earl of Shelburne (later the Marquis of Lansdowne), which opened a whole new set of opportunities for him, as well as his extraordinary journey, by way of the Mediterranean, to visit his brother Samuel in Russia.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 5

Bentham’s life in the mid-1790s was dominated by the panopticon, both as a prison and as a network of workhouses for the indigent. The letters in this volume document in excruciating detail Bentham’s attempt to build a panopticon prison in London, and the opposition he faced from local aristocratic landowners. His brother Samuel was appointed as Inspector-General of Naval Works and in September 1796 married Mary Sophia Fordyce.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 4

In 1789 Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, which remains his most famous work, but which had little impact at the time, followed in 1791 by The Panopticon: or, The Inspection-House, in which he proposed the building of a circular penitentiary house. Bentham’s correspondence unfolds against the backdrop of the increasingly violent French Revolution, and shows his initial sympathy for France turning into hostility. On a personal level, in 1791 his brother Samuel returned from Russia, and in 1792 he inherited his father’s house in Queen’s Square Place, Westminster together with a significant property portfolio.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 2

The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief. The early letters deal with Bentham’s education at Oxford University, where he was sent at the age of 12 and graduated at the age of 16, and his legal training before being admitted to the bar at the age of 21. He soon afterwards turned his back on the practice of the law and, allying himself with the more radical and sceptical figures of the continental Enlightenment, embarked on a career of law reform.

Against the background of the debates on the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, to which he made significantcontributions, Bentham worked first on producing a complete penal code, and then on his panopticon prison scheme. Despite developing a host of original and ground-breaking ideas, contained in a mass of manuscripts, he published little during these years, and remained, at the close of this period, a relatively obscure individual. Nevertheless, these volumes reveal how the foundations were laid for the remarkable rise of Benthamite utilitarianism in the early nineteenth century.

Bentham’s educational ideas were the inspiration for the founding of UCL. The vast majority of Bentham’s papers, consisting of around 60,000 folios, are held in UCL Library.

Bentham’s correspondence reveals that in the late 1770s he was working intensively on the development of a code of penal law, but also expanding his acquaintance and, to a moderate degree, enhancing his reputation as a legal thinker. A significant family event took place in 1779, when his brother Samuel went to Russia in order to make his fortune.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 1

Bentham’s early life is marked by his extraordinary precociousness, but also family tragedy: by the age of 10 he had lost five infant siblings and his mother. The letters in this volume document his difficult relationship with his father and his increasing attachment to his surviving younger brother Samuel, his education, his interest in chemistry and botany, and his committing himself to a life of philosophy and legal reform.

Picturing the Invisible

Picturing the Invisible presents different disciplinary approaches to articulating the invisible, that which is not known or that which is not provable. The challenge that we have seen is how to articulate these concepts, not only to those within a particular academic field but beyond, to other disciplines and society at large. As our understanding of the complexity of the world grows incrementally, so does our realisation that issues and problems can rarely be resolved within neat demarcations. Therefore, the importance of finding means of communicating across disciplines and fields becomes a priority. Whilst acknowledging the essential importance of the specialist academic, the capacity to understand other disciplines, their priorities, methodologies and even the language used can become crucial in being an effective instrument for change.
This book brings together insights from leading academics from a wide range of disciplines including Art and Design, Curatorial Practice, Literature, Forensic Science, Fashion, Medical Science, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Philosophy, Astrophysics and Architecture with a shared interest in exploring how, in each discipline, we strive to find expression for the invisible or unknown, and to draw out and articulate some of the explicit and tacit ways of communicating those concepts that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

On Learning, Volume 2

This edited book, as you can see from its title, is about learning, or at least about the concept and practice of learning. The contributors to this volume are focusing on two meta-concepts, knowledge and learning, on the relationship between the two, and the way these can be framed in epistemic, social, political and economic terms. Knowledge and learning, as meta-concepts, are positioned in various networks or constellations of meaning, principally: the antecedents of the concepts, their relations to other relevant concepts, and the way the concepts are used in the lifeworld.

In this book the various authors explore a number of important concepts that are relevant to the idea of learning. These are meta-concepts such as epistemology, inferential role semantics, phenomenology, rationality, thinking, hermeneutics, critical realism and pragmatism, and meso-concepts such as probability, woman, training, assessment, education, system, race, friendship, Bildung, curriculum, ecology and pedagogy. Like David Scott’s first volume of On Learning, this collection focusing on philosophy, concepts and practices is a response to empiricist and positivist conceptions of knowledge. It challenges detheorised and reductionist ideas of learning that have filtered through to the management of our schools, colleges and universities; over-simplified messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment; and fostered the denial that values are central to understanding how we live and how we should live – the normative dimension to social policy and social theorising. This book is also an attempt at a Bildungstheorie.