What is emotional intelligence?

Plato associated emotion with the passions and appetites which he saw as counterproductive to intelligent understanding. Aristotle claimed that emotional intelligence was a case of having the 'right emotion' in relation to the 'right object' and the 'right degree'. This definition is not the one that the relatively recent crop of writers has agreed. How might emotional intelligence give us a survival advantage?

What's the good of philosophy?

Philosophy means 'lover of wisdom' .... Philo sophia but does Philosophy make one wise?  Philosophers are often seen as having their heads in the clouds or quibbling over the meanings of words. The central questions of philosophy were first asked about 2,500 years ago and are still being asked now, so one might ask why philosophers have not found the answers.  Philosophy it may be argued  is a process of helping us to think clearly but think about what?  These questions and others will be addressed during this workshop.

Aesthetics;  the philosophy of beauty.

Is there any such thing as objective beauty e.g. the beauty of a sunset?  Or is beauty purely subjective, as the saying goes ‘In the mind of the beholder’?  William James reported that when he first saw George Eliot he thought her a ‘horse faced bluestocking’ but after she had talked to him he was left with an ‘abiding sense of her beauty’.  So what is beauty and how do we come to recognise it?

What is History?

What makes the story of Queen Victoria true, but one of Sherlock Holmes false? Why is history important to us? Why should we be interested in what happened in the past? And can we ever know exactly what happened? What is the purpose of the study of history and how should it be conducted?