Persian and Pholosophy

Persian, also known as Farsi, is the language of one of the world's great civilisations and the key to a literary tradition of extraordinary richness, spanning the poetry of Hafez and Rumi, the prose of Saadi, and the literature of modern Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It is also a living language of enormous contemporary significance, spoken by over 100 million people and central to understanding the politics, culture and history of the Middle East and Central Asia. Philosophy, meanwhile, is the discipline of careful reasoning about the most fundamental questions: what can be known, what exists, what is right, and what it means to be human.

The Persian tradition has its own deep philosophical dimension, and combining formal philosophy with Persian language and literature gives you a distinctive lens on human thought across very different cultural and intellectual traditions.

At the University of St Andrews, this four-year full-time degree allows you to develop your Persian language skills from the appropriate entry point, building reading and conversational proficiency alongside engagement with Persian literary texts and the cultural and historical contexts in which they were produced. The philosophy component introduces you to the major questions and methods of the discipline across epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy, developing the rigorous analytical skills that the subject demands. A year abroad is built into the programme, giving you the opportunity to spend time in a Persian-speaking environment or at an international academic institution.

Typical entry is around 168 UCAS tariff points.

Graduates from Persian and philosophy combinations go on to careers in diplomacy and international organisations, journalism and area studies research, translation, the civil service and intelligence services, academic research in philosophy or Islamic and Iranian studies, and NGO and humanitarian work in the Middle East and Central Asia. The combination of linguistic expertise and philosophical rigour is rare and valued wherever precise thinking about complex cross-cultural questions is needed.