BA (Hons)
Philosophy

Module Overview

This module aims to prepare students for designing their dissertation (independent study) proposals and for applying to jobs and postgraduate programmes. Students will explore how to prepare for and ensure success in their dissertations, employment, and study/research by identifying and articulating their transferable skills, breadth of knowledge, expertise, and interests. The module will provide information on how to become aware of opportunities, to plan and prepare for the future, and to build on their undergraduate careers.

Module Overview

The aim of this module is to give students a thorough understanding of two intimately related philosophical traditions that came to prominence in the 19th and 20th centuries: existentialism and phenomenology. Each attempts to address the nature and meaning of human existence from the perspective of individual, first-person experience, focusing in particular on fundamental questions of being, meaning, death, nihilism, freedom, responsibility, value, human relations, and religious faith.

The module will examine selected existential themes through the writings of thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Camus. Since existentialism is as much a artistic phenomenon as a philosophical one, students will also be given the opportunity to explore existentialist ideas in the works of various literary figures, such as Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Milan Kundera.

Module Overview

This module builds on the first-year module ‘Mind and Reality,’ focusing in particular on fundamental questions about the nature of reality and how our thought can connect up with it. What and how do words mean? Must the world be the way it is? Are there non-existent things? And why does anything at all exist?

Module Overview

The purpose of this module is to develop students understanding of some of the major issues in contemporary philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. What kind of entity is the mind? How does it relate to the brain? Can we explain consciousness in physical terms? Could a machine ever be conscious? Are we headed for the Singularity—the point in the future at which machine intelligence overtakes human intelligence and goes on to design exponentially more intelligent machines? If so, how intelligent can machine intelligence get? Where does the mind stop and machinery start? For example, could a neural implant or even a smartphone form part of your mind? Are we ourselves thinking machines?

Module Overview

This module explores a range of philosophical questions relating to the nature of science. How are scientific theories developed? Are scientific theories discovered through a ‘flash of genius’ or is something more methodical involved? How much of scientific discovery is down to careful observation? Do scientific theories tell us how the world really is? Do the entities scientific theories postulate – atoms, electromagnetic waves, and so on – really exist? Or are scientific theories merely useful models of reality? Is science independent of its social context? To what extent is scientific inquiry affected by gender, race or politics? Is there such a thing as truth that is not relative to a particular culture, social class or historical era? Drawing on accessible examples from a variety of scientific fields and by answering these and related questions, we shall try to reach an understanding of how science works.

Module Overview

This module builds on the first-year module ‘What is Knowledge?’ to provide students with a more in-depth exploration of epistemology. Students can examine a range of issues in contemporary epistemology, including: the nature of epistemic justification (the internalism/externalism debate, the debates between foundationalists and coherentists), the analysis of knowledge, the role of contextual considerations in dealing with scepticism, social epistemology, virtue epistemology, a priori knowledge, and epistemic naturalism.

Module Overview

The purpose of this module is to enable students to think critically about a range of issues in animal ethics. Do humans have obligations to other animals and, if so, what are those obligations? Do animals matter morally or are they just things? Are animals persons? What follows ethically if animals are things? Does the property status of animals entail that animals cannot be anything other than things? What are some of the leading contemporary moral theories about animal ethics? Does the property status of animals make it impossible to apply the principle of equal consideration to animal interests? Can we justify the use of animals in science? Can we justify the use of animals for food? Can we justify the use of animals in other contexts, such as hunting? Is pet-ownership morally justifiable? What is the relationship between animal ethics and environmental ethics? How should we evaluate issues of animal ethics from various religious perspectives? Is the contemporary animal “movement” sound in terms of its methods?

Module Overview

Explore a wide range of cutting-edge digital approaches to studying the past through a significant and growing area of research, the digital humanities. By studying this module, you can focus on developing the practical skills, techniques, and methodologies that can play a vital role in your future studies and career.

The module provides opportunities to enhance, analyse, and interpret humanistic endeavours through approaches such as social network analysis, digital mapping, data visualisation, and textual analysis. You can also explore the impact and potential of artificial intelligence on the study of humanities in the digital worlds.

Module Overview

This module aims to introduce students to some of the central concepts, issues, theories, and debates in an area of moral philosophy called "normative ethics", thereby providing them with a framework for thinking seriously about moral matters, and to assist them in developing their philosophical and analytical skills. We will distinguish and evaluate the leading positions on these issues through a range of more specific topics in normative ethics.

Module Overview

This module provides an opportunity for History students to spend a term studying at one of the University’s partner institutions in North America or Europe. Students will be expected to cover their own transport, accommodation and living costs.

Module Overview

This module will give students an opportunity to engage in close philosophical study of texts by the most influential ancient philosophers. Texts will be studied in English translation. They will include works by Plato and Aristotle, as well as by less familiar philosophers of the ancient world (c. 500 BC-500 AD Greece and Rome). The focus of the module will be philosophical, not interpretive or historical: students will be expected assess the credibility of the positions and arguments advanced by Plato, Aristotle and others and to develop their own views in dialogue with these thinkers.

Module Overview

This module gives students the opportunity to build and demonstrate problem-solving skills in the context of applied philosophy. Students will be introduced to the interdisciplinary methods of applied ethics and examine together a series of selected applied ethics case studies, drawn from a variety of different areas including health care, climate justice, AI, beginning and end of life. Students will then work on an individual project which they will present in poster form at the end of the module. The module will give students a thorough grounding in applied ethics and enable them to evidence the key employability skill of problem-solving in the context of applied philosophy.

Module Overview

This module will explore the different schools of thought and the political activities of the various groups and individuals that comprised the anarchist movement. Anarchism is a political doctrine based on freedom, egalitarianism and social justice and that developed in Europe as a political movement in the mid-XIX century. Anarchism never reached the ascendancy achieved by liberalism or communism; however, it had a significant influence on the political ideas, social movements, culture, and education of the international labour movement.

Module Overview

This module provides an introduction to Indian philosophy and gives students the opportunity to study some of the classic texts of Indian philosophy in detail. While texts will be studied in English translation students will also gain a familiarity with the elements of classical Indian (principally Sanskrit) philosophical vocabulary. Topics will be drawn from both the astika (orthodox Hindu) schools such as Naya-Vaisheshika and Samkhya-Yoga and nastika schools such as Jainism and Buddhism, and will cover areas such as logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and linguistics.

Module Overview

This module gives students the opportunity to engage with some key issues and contemporary debates in key areas of philosophy, such as epistemological relativism, the nature of consciousness, the nature of causation in science, the nature of the self. The precise topics addressed will vary from year to year and students will have input into the choice of topics. The aim of the module is to explore in-depth some significant contemporary philosophical issues and to enable students to develop and enhance their key philosophical and debating skills.

Module Overview

This module aims to provide an introduction to the basics of Greek for students with little to no prior experience of the language. Students can gain the ability to translate and interpret sentences and short passages in prose and verse up to intermediate difficulty. This can aid sensitive reading of primary sources from the Classical world in translation, as well as in the original at higher levels of study.

Module Overview

This module aims to provide a continued introduction to the basics of Greek for students with little to no prior experience of the language. Students can refine their ability to translate and interpret sentences and short to medium-length passages in prose and verse up to advanced difficulty. This helps develop a foundation for sensitive reading of primary sources from the Classical world in translation, as well as in the original at higher levels of study.

Module Overview

This module aims to provide an introduction to the basics of Latin for students with little to no prior experience of the language. Students can gain the ability to translate and interpret sentences and short passages in prose and verse with confidence. This can aid sensitive reading of primary sources from the Classical world in translation, as well as in the original at higher levels of study.

Please note: those students with A-Level Latin or equivalent, subject to successfully sitting a diagnostic Latin test before the first term of their first year, may choose to take ‘The Medieval World’ or ‘Empire and After: Colonialism and its Consequences’ instead of this module, however, they are required to continue their language studies in Elementary Latin II.

Module Overview

This module aims to provide a continued introduction to the basics of Latin for students with little to no prior experience of the language. Students can refine their ability to translate and interpret sentences and short to medium-length passages in prose and verse up to advanced difficulty. This can aid sensitive reading of primary sources from the Classical world in translation, as well as in the original at higher levels of study.

Module Overview

The purpose of this module is to enable students to examine claims made about what, if anything, makes life meaningful by some of the major figures in the history of philosophy (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx). The module begins by considering the Question of Meaning itself. Is it intelligible? What is it to seek meaning in life? Is God necessary for life as a whole to have meaning? If so, and if God doesn’t exist, what is an appropriate response to life’s “absurdity” or lack of meaning? Is suicide an ethically defensible response? Or can individual lives have meaning even if life as a whole has none? Could a life be meaningful even if it were entirely occupied with selfish or vicious activities? Could, for example, the life of a torturer be meaningful? Or must our lives have an ethical resonance to be meaningful? We will also consider nihilist views that the conditions necessary for meaning do not obtain, and metaethical debates about the nature of value in general.

Module Overview

This module explores the history of science, sexuality and politics in the UK, Continental Europe, the US and Latin America from 1850 to 2000. It will give students an excellent grounding in modern and contemporary history that will complement further modules at level 3 that deal with sexuality, gender, race, science and medicine. It module examines the controversial rise of eugenics movements as a global phenomenon. The purpose of this module is to sustain a balanced and informed discussion about how race, reproduction, and the improvement of human heredity have acquired great political relevance in the modern period. It explores how scientists and different governments became preoccupied with hereditary theories, race, reproduction and sexual behaviour. It examines how societies across the Atlantic developed government policies around areas such as family planning, pronatalism, sterilisation, and race, which culminated in the implementation of euthanasia programmes in Nazi Germany. This module looks at eugenics programmes and politics in a transnational context, exploring how, for example, Nazi Germany’s sterilisation programmes were inspired by those already implemented in the US and how a number of Latin American countries adapted and transformed eugenics policies from Southern Europe and developed whitening policies.

Module Overview

The module will give students practical experience of the workplace. Students will normally define, plan and undertake a specific project. In addition students will gain experience of a range of tasks appropriate to sector-specific professional skills.

Module Overview

This module gives students an opportunity to apply what they have learned in terms of philosophical methodology and analysis to issues involving political and legal institutions. For example, most people use concepts such as rights or justice in their everyday life, but few could articulate what those concepts mean. This makes discourse about political and legal matters difficult because there is no clarity, let alone agreement, about the concepts being used.

Module Overview

This module explores how criminal lunatics - criminals who developed insanity in prison and individuals who committed a crime whilst insane - were represented and treated in nineteenth century Britain. Students can examine why some criminals were deemed insane and others were not; how criminal lunacy was defined in medicine and in law; how and why the institutions, people and practices for treating the criminal and criminal lunatic changed over the period; the role gender and class played in crimes, trials, diagnoses and treatment; and how criminality and criminal insanity were represented by laymen.

Module Overview

The 20th century saw unprecedented social, economic, political and cultural change in Britain. However, the equally dramatic shifts in how sexuality and masculinity were experienced and represented are often ignored. This module aims to enable students to study the history of 20th Century Britain while using the lens of gender and sexuality to understand how ordinary men lived their lives. Students will get the opportunity to work with a wide variety of primary sources such as: court records, newspapers, film, photographs, music, autobiographies, oral history and literature.

Module Overview

This module builds on the second-year module ‘Moral Philosophy’, focusing in particular on the central questions in metaethics: Do moral terms and judgements refer to moral properties, and if so, what are these properties like? Are any moral judgements true, and if so, are they true objectively, in virtue of moral properties that exist in the world? If there are objective moral truths, how can we know what they are? What implications do theories of moral reasoning and moral motivation have for the question of whether there are objective truths in ethics?

Module Overview

This module examines some of the philosophical issues raised by the Newtonian revolution in the natural sciences, such as: What is the nature of Newton’s distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ space? In what sense can forces be said to exist? What is the ontology of force? Is it sufficient to provide a mathematical definition of force (e.g., f=ma)? Is gravity a special kind of force with its own unique set of properties? What is the nature of ‘action at a distance’? Is Newton’s view of space metaphysical? This is an interdisciplinary module that situates Newtonian science in its sociocultural context.

Module Overview

Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed that ‘the death of God’ would lead to a period of ‘nihilism’ – the view that life lacks meaning and value. But Nietzsche also saw the death of God as a liberating opportunity to move beyond traditional moral values, which he regarded as life-denying and stifling the potential of human beings.

A central aim of Nietzsche’s philosophy, therefore, is to make his readers question the value of traditional morality. Are kindness, compassion, altruism, charity, and equality really valuable? Do such values promote the cultivation of great cultures and great human beings? Or are they simply what is most useful to, what Nietzsche called, ‘the herd’? All the major themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy will be considered: art, tragedy, ‘genealogy,’ master and slave moralities, guilt, truth, self-creation, the Übermensch (or ‘superman’), the ‘higher’ individual, life-affirmation, and eternal recurrence.

Module Overview

The aim of this module is to examine some interesting puzzles in the ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics of biology. The module will address such questions as: How does natural selection explain the traits of organisms? How does the ‘scientific method’ support biological science’s success? What are the appropriate aims for conservation biology? Can culture evolve? Is there an objective class of conditions that qualify as ‘disease’? Are there laws of evolution; and if not, is evolutionary biology a science? Are there biological natural kinds? Can Darwinism explain anything interesting about human mental and social life?

Module Overview

This module explores a variety of questions relating to the concept of evil, and introduces students to a range of philosophical theories of the nature of evil. Students can explore the language and ontology of evil, the concepts of ‘radical’ and ‘banal’ evil, and examine how the existence of evil is accounted for by key figures in the history of philosophy. Typically, questions to be considered include: Is evil an irreducibly theological concept? Are notions of evil relative to individuals or cultures? Is evil a positively existing force or is it the absence of some quality, as darkness is the absence of light? Why are humans capable of wickedness?

Module Overview

This module explores a range of philosophical questions that arise in relation to love and sexual desire. Can love be defined, or does it belong to the realm of the ineffable? Is love inherently irrational? Is it reducible to the reproductive or sexual drive? Do we love the other for his/her own sake, or is love always self-serving? Are jealousy and possessiveness really the enemy of successful love? Does all love stem from need or lack? What, if anything, is the difference between love and infatuation? And is, as Plato held, love a form of enslavement?

In this module, students can address such questions through the lens of some of the greatest works in the Western philosophical tradition. We shall mostly consider reciprocal romantic love and investigate, among other things, its capacity to confer meaning and purpose upon life. We shall also explore the Freudian view that love involves regression to a situation in childhood in which we were perfectly safe, the search for love essentially being an attempt to recover this earlier form of security or wholeness. Can this need for wholeness ever be fully and stably fulfilled, or is, as Sartre argued, the project of love impossible? In addition, we shall reflect upon the nature of pornography, sadomasochism, and sexual perversion.

Module Overview

This module focuses on a range of philosophical questions relating to mental illness and its treatment. What makes a person mentally healthy or mentally unhealthy? What makes a conscious state psychotic or delusional? How might mental disorders be distinguished from non-disordered mental states and conditions? Would certain putative mental illnesses be better characterized as “problems with living” rather than as medical conditions? We will also consider questions raised by particular psychopathologies. Questions will be explored through the lens of recent literature in the analytic tradition, as well as seminal texts in the history of the philosophy of mental illness (e.g., Freud, Foucault, R.D. Laing).

Module Overview

The world as we encounter it in visual perception is a world of coloured objects – red buses, yellow daffodils, blue skies, and the like. Colour raises a variety of perplexing philosophical puzzles concerning the nature of physical reality and our epistemic to the mental states of others. This module serves as an introduction to these issues.

Some of the questions to be explored include: Do objects really have the colours we ordinarily take them to possess? If so, what sort of property is colour? Are colours really just ‘impressions’ that exist only in the mind? If so, what causes these impressions? Do such impressions have representational content? What is the relationship between philosophical and scientific theories of colour? This is an interdisciplinary module that also explores issues relating to colour in art history and the history of science.

Module Overview

This module builds on the first-year module ‘Mind and Reality,’ and the second year module ‘Language, Logic, and Reality’, focusing in particular on fundamental questions about the nature of reality, such as the following. Does time have a direction? How do things exist through time? What, in the most general terms, exists? What more is there to causation than simply one event being followed by another? What more is there to laws of nature, than events of one type regularly being followed by events of another type?