Ethics, Religion and Philosophy

This module examines some of the central arguments of the philosophical tradition for and against the existence of divinity. From Plato to the 20th Century, we will encounter various arguments for the necessary existence of the immortals, and see how they reconfigure how we understand the meaning of our lives and orient ourselves in the world.

You will study the rich tradition of existentialism, which has asked what it means to exist authentically as an embodied, gendered being in an absurd universe. While looking at the earlier existentialists, the module will concentrate on a close engagement with the writings of some of the most influential 20th century existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Classical philosophy posed some of the fundamental questions of philosophy, questions about what it is to be human, what attitude we should have towards life and death, what is true and what is real. This module will introduce you to these questions and, by examining the distinctive way in which they are posed in the works of the classical philosophers, it will help you to develop the ability to philosophise in response to them.

This module will look at some of the key arguments of early modern philosophers about such issues as the nature of the mind and what it can know with certainty, the relation between the mind and the world, and what nature is. Through a close engagement with the writings of some of these philosophers, it will encourage you to think critically about our view of ourselves and our relation to the world.

Philosophy, no less than religion, is a global phenomenon, not restricted to a handful of European countries. Taking our cue from this insight, in this module we shall focus on a variety of philosophical issues arising in Judaism, Islam, and several African Traditional Religions, such as those of the Akan and Shona peoples.

This module engages you with 'Big Question' debates confronting human society, integrating key interdisciplinary concepts and debates essential to critically understanding and exploring our world. Along with this, you will apply disciplinary specific learning approaches to examine various aspects of past, present and future global societal developments. Topics and questions examined can vary year to year.

This module engages you with 'Big Question' debates confronting human society, integrating key interdisciplinary concepts and debates essential to critically understanding and exploring our world. Along with this, you will apply disciplinary specific learning approaches to examine various aspects of past, present and future global societal development. Topics and questions examined can vary year to year.

What is it for an action to be right or wrong, and why should I be moral in the first place? This module introduces and critically explains the central issues in theoretical ethics in order to enable you to evaluate the arguments, positions, and theories that underpin these questions, and develop your own metaethical position. Throughout, emphasis is placed on developing the critical, analytical and conceptual skills needed to comprehend the complexity of ethical debates in the modern world and to engage with them.

This module explores topics of contemporary ethical interest and provides you with the philosophical tools in feminist ethics required to make informed decisions about them. What is it for an action to be sexist or misogynistic, and why should we be morally concerned about such attitudes in the first place? In developing your own critical stance on such fundamental issues, you may also study the nature and ethics of implicit bias, stereotyping and advanced issues in feminist ontology.

This module focuses on advanced topics in normative and practical ethics from a historical and contemporary perspective, and builds on the analytic skills and knowledge base gained at introductory level. Indicative topics include a critical re-assessment of the distinction between consequentialism and deontology in ethical theory, the nature of moral motivation in moral psychology, and theoretical questions about intrinsic value and the extent of its application to real-life ethical problems.

An innovative module that applies interdisciplinary methods, approaches and perspectives of humanities and social science disciplines to contemporary socio-economic challenges, complementing Engaging the Humanities 1. Each year the module will address a different contemporary issue or theme.

This module focuses on some grounding questions in the philosophy of religion. We will consider some basic definitional questions, as well as some more specific questions regarding philosophical understandings of the nature and attributes of God. We will also consider several proofs for the existence of God and the various ways in which religious belief has been philosophically justified.

This module focuses on various further topics in the philosophy of religion. We will look at topics that build upon those definitional questions that relate to God’s being and the justification of religious belief. You will study topics that include the problem of evil, karmic responses to the problem of evil, philosophical responses to immortality and the philosophical problems of hell. On completing this module, you will be able to critically respond to some of the most pressing philosophical issues that religion affords us with.

The aim of this module is to provide students with a critical understanding of the intersecting concepts of gender, race, and sexuality. Students will engage with the contributions of feminism, gender studies, critical race theory, and queer theory to making sense of identity, oppression, ideology, power, emancipation, justice, and resistance. Students will be introduced to the work of seminal thinkers in these respective areas, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Gayle Rubin, Audré Lorde, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Judith Butler.

An innovative module which applies interdisciplinary methods and perspectives in a professional and/or public setting. Students work in interdisciplinary teams on one of a range of projects to showcase interdisciplinary skills in practice.

On this module, you will study one of the key texts of modern political theory (eg Machiavelli’s Prince, Rousseau’s Social Contract or Locke’s Second Treatise of Government). You will examine in detail some of the basic issues of modern political theory, such as the nature of democracy, the justification for sovereignty and the limits of government, and the origins of inequality and injustice.

What is the relationship between philosophy and art? How can we think philosophically about and with art in order to further both our philosophical and artistic thinking? How have contemporary artists engaged with such philosophical problems as space, time, history, sensation, perception, and representation? This module will allow you to evaluate these central questions in relation to both philosophical texts and recent works of art and art practices. Reading both philosophers on art and artists on philosophy, you will develop an understanding of the complex and generative relationship between philosophy and art.

The Humanities Research Internship module offers students the chance to join a live research project. The aim of the module is to provide History, Politics and Philosophy students with discipline-specific and transferable skills through practical research experience. Students selecting the module will choose one of several research projects offered by staff. Staff will direct and supervise these projects in workshops that include subject content and humanities research skills. The module will equip students with skills to progress to working on their own research projects (the independent project) in the final year.

This module provides a thorough grounding in the central concepts and themes in analytic metaphysics. You will reflect on the metaphysics of personal identity, objects, causation, consciousness, fictional kinds, free will, gender, race, and naturalism. In studying central concepts and themes in analytic metaphysics, you will balance their historical knowledge of Aristotle and Descartes, etc with sustained engagement with the work of contemporary metaphysicians in the Anglo-American tradition.

This course will focus on the writings and ideas of two thinkers: Edmund Husserl (1856-1938), who re-invents phenomenology at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1985), who responds to his writings and constructs a missing dimension, in terms of a concern with ethics, a concern for the self/personal identity, and with a construct called ‘the second sex’.

This module will allow you to investigate the revolutionary impact of Nietzsche’s thinking on the history of philosophy. You will study various short texts or excerpts from Nietzsche’s work in order to understand its continuity with the philosophical tradition, as well as its radical novelty in respect to the consideration of ethical as well as metaphysical thinking.

The module addresses issues in metaphysics through the in-depth study of the key thinkers of the Early to late Modern period. It focuses principally on the Continental European tradition, from Descartes to Leibniz and Kant. In addressing issues such as space and time, substance, reality, causality and personal identity, the module examines the philosophical underpinnings of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. You will come to understand the nature of metaphysical thinking and to comprehend the ways in which philosophical questions develop historically.

This module will focus on one key classical philosophical text (eg Plato’s Republic), examining it in terms of its historical and intellectual context. It gives you the opportunity to study how the earliest thinkers of the Western tradition thought about some of the most fundamental of all questions (eg what reality is and how we know it; what the best kind of life is and how we should best organise our societies).

This module will concern itself with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre through a reading of Being and Nothingness. While being one of the most influential philosophies of the 20th Century, providing a structured account of contemporary life, Sartre’s thought will also allow you to study the historical depth of thought.

Students will take 2x 15 credit Uniwide language modules. Languages available include French, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Standard Arabic or Spanish and at a range of levels, subject to viability. You will be assessed in speaking, listening, reading and writing using an integrated skills approach.

This module allows you to undertake independent work on a topic of your choosing in the area of ethics and/or philosophy of religion. The independent project will focus on a carefully defined area, based on your interests and experience. You will work with an allocated supervisor, but you are expected to engage in independent study and reflection as part of your academic study. These kinds of projects are highly valued by employers, as they demonstrate key transferable skills such as the ability to work independently, bringing together information from various sources and synthesising these into a coherent piece of work.

The study platform of this module is values, relations and professional ethics, with special emphasis on contemporary philosophical issues in bioethics and real-life ethical dilemmas in the medical humanities in view of emerging technologies. Special emphasis is placed on the concept of patient autonomy in medical ethics and the putative difference between fact and value in the philosophy of medicine. Thus, you may study questions ranging from practical issues, such as the ethics of biomedical enhancement, to the philosophical foundations for person-centred health and care.

This module examines advanced issues and challenges in contemporary moral philosophy. Indicative module content includes critical examination of specific moral phenomena, such as moral dilemmas and disagreement, regret and forgiveness. You may also study the recent turn to thick evaluative concepts in metaethics and contemporary neo-Aristotelianism in detail, and discuss the bearing of these approaches for the nature of argument and persuasion in interpersonal moral discourse.

This module looks at a variety of approaches to the philosophy of religion from philosophers who have disrupted the canon and whose work has been marginalised. We will discuss the religious philosophy of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and Benedict Spinoza, for example, as well as the relationship between the philosophy of religion and feminist theory. Turning to such figures and problems as these will allow you to develop a sophisticated and nuanced position on issues surrounding the philosophy of religion beyond traditional debates.

This module raises some of the most significant questions of the philosophy of religion. What is the relation between faith and human freedom? What is religious fundamentalism? What is the relation between the monotheistic religions and paganism? How does Buddhism react to Christianity in the globalised world of the 20th century? What is the difference between animal and human life and what effect does this have on the theory of religion? We will address these questions with the help of some of the most influential philosophical texts from the last 200 years to see how these help us to understand the question of religion in the contemporary world.

This module gives you the opportunity to examine games and gaming as important ways of making sense of a range of contemporary cultural and social issues. Over the course of the module, you will use a range of interdisciplinary frameworks infused with historical, political, and philosophical concepts and perspectives to confront and tackle key questions and subjects about games and gaming.

The aim of this module is to examine the relation between philosophy and education, and to offer you the opportunity to learn how to plan and deliver a philosophy lesson in a local school or college.

The aim of this module is to examine the relation between philosophy and education, with reference to key theorists in the history of philosophy and contemporary theory and practice.

What is art? What is beauty? Does beauty have a relation to truth? What is the relationship between art and society? What is the creative act? This module will introduce students to questions such as these through a study of the history of aesthetics and the philosophy of art.

Since its inception, philosophy has had a critical function, interrogating the basic presuppositions and prejudices of its time, in order to distance itself from them. But what role does philosophy play in actual social and political change? The aim of this module is to examine the link between philosophy and revolution, exploring how philosophy has conceived radical change, and how it has promoted it, contributing to social and political transformations.

The aim of this module is to provide an understanding of the significance of the philosophical concern with the body in 20th century continental philosophy, through the work of Henri Bergson and Michel Foucault.

The aim of the module is to provide students with a thorough critical grounding in pragmatism, one of Western philosophy's most rich and complex traditions.

An analysis of the key concepts of twentieth century linguistics and the philosophical study of literature and language. This module introduces you to the cornerstones of contemporary linguistics and the philosophy of language. Beginning with the influential structuralist linguistic of Ferdinand de Saussure, it goes on to examine, from a philosophical perspective, the privilege accorded to language in the human sciences in the twentieth century. It also explores the ways in which the movements of structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction have overturned the traditional understanding of the relation between philosophy and literature, and thus fundamentally shifted philosophy's own understanding of its nature and function.

The aim of this module to provide students with a thorough grounding in the central concepts of and themes in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Students will reflect on the most important topics in the Critique, such as the problem of metaphysics, Kant's transcendental methodology, the synthetic a priori, Kant's theory of space and time, transcendental idealism, the Discursivity Thesis, the Categories, the Analogies of Experience, the Refutation of Idealism, the Paralogisms, the Antinomies, and the Ideas of Reason.

Martin Heidegger is a key figure in the transformation of philosophy in the twentieth century. Being and Time is the publication in which his challenge to philosophical tradition begins, and the course will familiarise students with some of the moves made there.

This module will investigate one of the most significant texts of the Western philosophical tradition: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Students will take 2x 15 credit Uniwide language modules. Languages available include French, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Modern Standard Arabic or Spanish and at a range of levels, subject to viability. You will be assessed in speaking, listening, reading and writing using an integrated skills approach.