Hello everyone,

It was a pleasure to meet some of you at our last open day, I hope all involved enjoyed the day and hopefully gained valuable insight into life at Lancaster, ideally helping you to make that big decision. Thanks to all for your interesting questions, I hope myself and the department did a good job at answering them; if not, feel free to get in touch and we’ll do the best we can. I continue looking forward to meeting more of you in the coming weeks, perhaps this coming Saturday.

We’re now in Week 7 of second term, meaning deadlines are approaching quickly. I mentioned in my last blog that my intention was to start summarising the content I’ve been learning over the past weeks, in preparation for essay writing. I kept my word, and have started this, along with supplementary readings with intention to start planning this week; giving me around three weeks to get my essays done.

I received a few grades back last week, which was incredibly relieving, particularly as I wasn’t feeling too confident about them. It was difficult to know where I stood, having written over 14,000 words during the Christmas period; so the results felt like a great weight off my shoulders. I was concerned mostly about getting my grade back for Moral Philosophy, the specialist module on Parfit’s Reasons and Persons I took in first term to challenge myself, since I struggled understanding his work since first year – when Sam Clark introduced Parfit’s work in his module on Death. Although I found it very difficult, I thought the module to be worthwhile, as I ended up with a grade I’m more than content with.

I’m really enjoying Aesthetics this term, in fact it feels like the most enjoyable module I’ve taken in part II, which makes the prospect of essay writing enjoyable. If I could give some advice to students starting out, it would be to ensure you’ve read and researched the course/module descriptions before enrolling in them. This is good practice, particularly in first and second year, as you can select modules of interest to you, and if you find they are as enjoyable as you assumed, you can select similar ones in Part II/ third year; meaning you can pursue a more in depth study of what interests you. Nonetheless, not knowing what interests you is equally as fruitful, and now is an opportunity to experiment and find out.

In Reading Political Theory, we’ve moved on from Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and we’re now studying Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference. Until this point, I couldn’t find a flaw in Rawls’s work. What is so interesting about Young’s work is that it questions the real life applicability of Justice; which Rawls’s work seems to skirt. Young talks about injustice manifesting in the relations we have in society, between people. Because we are born into society with immediate relations with other people (i.e. if we are fortunate enough to have parents or caregivers, already we are in relation to other people from birth), justice must concern these relations. Rawls, in a way, asks us to ignore these relations and rather to imagine what life would be like from any point of view, in abstraction from these relations, from an Original Position. In contrast, Young thinks that injustice is manifested by the culmination of actions and choices of many different people, who all might be following the rules. Those who are victims of injustice may even be contributing to their own suffering unknowingly by following those “rules”, which might be implicit social rules, which, when followed by all, although oftentimes unconsciously, cause injustice.

The above on Rawls and Young is sketchy and introductory in nature, don’t take my word as gospel: I only intend to give some insight into what I’ve been reading recently.

Sunday afternoon my flat and I visited Williamson Park, it was beautiful weather as its starting to look a lot like spring here. We took a tapestry to sit on and had a picnic under the sun. From where I live Williamson Park is only a few minutes walk.

Very best of luck to all of you who have began revising for your summertime exams, and I hope everyone had a nice half term.

I’ll speak to you all soon,

Ellie