Celtic Civilisation/Philosophy

Celtic Civilisation and Philosophy make an intellectually rewarding combination, because the Celtic world raises philosophical questions in particularly striking forms. How do oral traditions encode knowledge and value? What does the relationship between language, landscape and identity tell us about how meaning is made?

How do we understand societies whose conceptual frameworks are substantially different from our own? Celtic Civilisation draws you into the history, literature, art, material culture and religion of the Celtic peoples from their origins on the European continent to their contemporary presence in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and beyond. Philosophy brings rigorous analytical tools to bear on fundamental questions about knowledge, reality, ethics, language and mind.

At Glasgow you will explore the development of Celtic societies, their vernacular literatures in Old Irish, Middle Welsh and related languages, their visual culture and their spiritual traditions. Alongside this you will engage with the core branches of philosophy, from logic and epistemology to moral philosophy, political thought and the philosophy of language. The programme runs over four years of full-time study and includes a year abroad, providing the opportunity to pursue specialist research in a Celtic-speaking region or to study philosophy in a different educational context.

Your training will move between close reading of primary texts, historical contextualisation and the kind of precisely argued analysis that philosophy demands.

Graduates combine a distinctive and rare specialisation in Celtic culture and languages with the broad intellectual skills that philosophy develops. Career paths include heritage and museum work, archival research, education, publishing, journalism, community language promotion, the civil service and the charitable sector. Those who wish to continue in academia are well placed for postgraduate study in Celtic languages and literatures, medieval history, philosophy of language, ethics or the philosophy of mind, and the combination of disciplines opens doors in cultural policy, interfaith dialogue and the academic study of minority traditions.