WEA Courses

In the second of our series of study days charting the history and development of western philosophy, we look at the towering figure of Aristotle. We consider some of the key elements in his thought – considering among other things his views on language and logic, change and cause, and the notion of “happiness”. In subsequent study days, we will continue our journey through to the great modern philosophers - Descartes, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hobbes and Marx.

The century after 1550 saw many newly wealthy families, who had often benefitted from the dissolution of the monasteries, create splendid new country houses such as Longleat to show their wealth and power. These houses were increasingly influenced by ideas from the Renaissance. We will see how these houses reflected their owners’ lives and aspirations, including the Cecil family as chief ministers to Elizabeth I and James I, builders of great houses including Burghley and Hatfield.

In 1921 C P Scott of ‘The Manchester Guardian’ wrote that ‘comment is free, but facts are sacred’. In 2017 Collins’ Dictionaries made ‘Fake News’ their word of the year. In this course we will investigate how ‘facts’ are presented in the news and how words and images can influence our perceptions. Through close analysis of print, online and broadcast items we will discuss whether the news stories presented can ever be truly factual or entirely fake.

This course will examine major civil unrest in Britain from the Georgian period up to the early twenty-first century. Beginning with the Gordon Riots and then looking at Victorian strike action, Edwardian suffragette protests, anti-fascism and the police-public violence of the 1970s and 1980s, this will challenge the notion that British politics was fundamentally and intrinsically ‘peaceful’.

The Czech symphony is not all about Dvořák’s New World! Though, undoubtedly a key figure in internationalising his country’s music, Dvořák was certainly not alone in composing Czech symphonic masterpieces. In this course, we trace the history of the symphony in Bohemia and Moravia from the eighteenth century to the present day, looking at composers such as Smetana, Janáček and Martinů, and exploring Mozart’s Czech associates who played a vital role in raising the symphony to such heights.

Thomas Jefferson brought Palladio’s style to the architecture of US government. Chicago was the world’s proving ground for high-rise building techniques – as well as being the cradle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style. Mies van der Rohe demonstrated how “less is more” and Philip Johnson and others tried out Post-Modernism before Frank Gehry exploited computer aided design to make fantastic shapes buildable.

GM crops have been hailed by some as an essential tool in the fight against a range of problems now facing humanity, from hunger to climate change to ‘superweeds’ and ‘superpests’; all this while being safe for both the environment and human health. Is this too good to be true? Are there dangers in meddling with nature? We will debunk the myths surrounding GM crops by considering what these crops are, how they are regulated, and the different social, economic, and environmental effects they have across the world.