Philosophy

This module will focus on a key debate, topic or dilemma in Western thought to collectively develop your academic skills. These skills will include textual analysis, research, note taking and academic writing. This module will show how lectures, reading and independent work might be utilised for effective written assessment. Students will be trained to read primary and secondary texts, and work within the parameters of Higher Education with increased confidence. Important topics for your success at university such as what constitutes good essay structure, understanding assessment criteria and how your work is marks, along with how to reference texts and avoid committing plagiarism will be introduced through this module.

This module is designed to provide a thorough grounding in the academic study of ethics. Students will explore a range of current moral issues and debates in some or all of the following areas: science, technology and medicine; animals and ecological concern; gender, sexuality and intimate relationships; political, economic and social life. Students will develop skills in analysing such debates through the study of selected philosophical, theological and/or religious approaches to moral reasoning. The module will give students an opportunity to develop a critical understanding of key historical and contemporary thinkers and traditions in ethics, and will explore some of the ways in which philosophical, theological and religious forms of moral reasoning have interacted in different times and places.

This module will explore philosophy by looking at its establishment in a movement in Ancient Greece. We will focus particularly on the key figures of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. We will pay attention to what philosophy is and what characterises a philosopher, along with key questions relating to metaphysics, epistemology, politics and the polis. Beyond the core figure we will look at earlier Pre-Socratic philosophers and Sophists and ahead to the major Hellenistic schools of philosophy and the philosophers of the Roman Empire.

This module we will explore a series of classic philosophical paradoxes and puzzles along with the solutions philosophers have offered to them over the ages. Through doing this, students will study basic logic and theories of ontology, along with developing a range of critical reasoning skills. Puzzles considered might include The Liar’s Paradox, The Ship of Theseus, The Paradox of the Heap, Russell’s paradox, whether God could create an immovable object, and a range of puzzles from science fiction involving time travel, cloning and mind reading.

The Early-Modern period was a time when parts of Classical thought were being rejected while others were being rediscovered. This module will look at how a renewed focus on epistemology along with developments in the natural sciences led to a new confidence in the power of reason against superstition and illusion. To develop our skills and knowledge of the diverging rationalist and empiricist traditions that succeeded medieval scholasticism, we will focus in particular on the conceptual accounts and proofs of the existence of God, Soul and World that developed in the succession of debates sparked by Descartes. By investigating their proofs for the existence of God, the immortal soul and the reality of the external world, their explanations for the existence of evil and their accounts of freedom, we will learn to analyse texts carefully and form persuasive arguments with and against them.

This module introduces significant themes, theoretical perspectives and concepts in political philosophy, and aims to develop an initial understanding of the methodologies and practices of the discipline of political philosophy where it comes into contact with related subject areas such as international relations, economics, the environment and religion. This module examines the philosophical underpinnings of differing systems of government by looking at ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, communism and socialism that originated in the Western world and comparing and contrasting systems of government elsewhere in the world where such beliefs have been used, adapted or rejected.

Philosophical and theological debates do not only take place in the academic sphere but also in the public realm. In this module students will be asked to engage with a range of different forms of contemporary media – such as journalism, films, literature, radio, music and podcasts – in order for students to learn how to deploy their developing academic skills in the criticism of the contemporary world. Topics discussed in a particular year will include contemporary events, such as climate crisis, Black Lives Matter and struggles relating to sexual identity. To do this this module will also cover some classic works of critical theory and public engagement carried out by philosophers and theologians in the past, both learning from their methodologies and developing an appreciation of the cultural power of these disciplines.

This module is designed to help students reflect on the nature of their chosen discipline(s), to identify particular methods and skills relevant to their disciple from a wide range of methods and skills, and to develop those skills in order to produce a research proposal.

This module focuses on one of the most important books ever written, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.  Beginning from the intellectual milieu it emerged from – Rationalism vs. Empiricism, Hume’s scepticism and Rousseau’s view of freedom – this module will focus on understanding the text’s general importance, along with focusing in detail on particular key sections of its argument. These might include the notion of transcendental idealism and the thing-in-itself, Kant’s account of the nature of space and time, Kant’s defence of causal reasoning, the limitations Kant imposes on our knowledge of metaphysical entities – such as God, freedom and the self – and the role of non-epistemic forms of assertion such as faith and hope in these domains.

This module will track the unfolding of atheist thought from ancient atomism to the contemporary New Atheist movement. However, it will focus particularly on two influential atheist thinkers whose thought mark the cusp of the Twentieth Century – Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Their controversial methods of genealogical analysis and psychoanalysis exist in a critical relationship to western society, its values and the philosophical tradition, diagnosing forms of sickness at the heart of many of our most cherished institutions. It is for this that they earned the title “masters of suspicion”, but what characterises such suspicious discourses? We will turn in particular to the suggestion that traditional notions of truth and falseness might be replaced in philosophy by a vocabulary of health and sickness.

With the publication of Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807, Hegel offered the world a radically different image of what was truly at stake in the historical development of philosophical thought, politics, art and religion through enacting a fundamental break with the system of logic first defined by Aristotle. The new understanding of history and progress that dialectical thought offered might seem arcane and mysterious, yet it proved itself incredibly powerful in offering new ways of seeing what was going on in our culture. Perhaps the most famous inheritor of Hegel’s method was Karl Marx, who claimed to be turning the dialectical method on its head with his materialist account of the inevitable coming of communism. In this module we will investigate how dialectical thought works, paying particular attention to those thinkers who have used it to understand political and economic development.

• Aesthetics  15 credits
• Angels and Demons  15 credits
• Bioethics  15 credits
• Christianity, Race and Colonialism  15 credits
• Early Christian Spirituality and Neoplatonism  15 credits
• Gender, Sexuality and the Bible  15 credits
• Great Philosophical Texts  15 credits
• Political Theology  15 credits
• Questions in Metaphysics  15 credits
• Religion, Ethics and War  15 credits
• Science and Religion - 15 credits
• Volunteering for Theology, Religion and Philosophy  15 credits
• Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language  15 credits
• Improving Communities through Social Action  15 credits
• Interpersonal Communication and Conflict Management  15 credits
• Exploring Teaching as a Career  15 Credits

In conversation with a member of academic staff, students select an appropriate area of investigation. In 8-10,000 words, students must engage with their chosen topic using critical methodologies, evidence and argument. The topic chosen must be one which relates to the subject matter of their programme and which permits the demonstration of independent research, study and reflection.

As the Second World War ravaged the globe, the existentialism movement formulated itself as a wave that would transform post-war values and culture. With one foot in the phenomenological method of philosophical investigation and the other in more literary works, a series of thinkers produced a set of works that are still being responded to. In this module we will look at some of those works by thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Levinas, Camus and Merleau-Ponty – along with some of their critics. We will see how the very notion of what it is “to be” and particularly “to be human” was put in question by these thinkers, what it meant to live “authentically” and how these thinkers rethought human finitude and freedom. This will be related to developments beyond philosophy, such as the role of such thinking in art, politics and religion.

In this module students will engage in detail with a particular philosopher whose major works date from the late-Twentieth Century onwards or with a philosophical theme that is discussed in contemporary philosophy. This module will be research-led, with the tutor presenting a thinker or theme that they themselves are currently or recently engaged in researching. Students will be expected to engage with the tutor’s research work alongside other material over the course of the module. Examples of recent versions of this module include looking at Foucault’s History of Madness in relation to debates surrounding anti-psychiatry or looking at the gaze in contemporary cinema using the works of Derrida and Lacan.

• Aesthetics  15 credits
• Angels and Demons  15 credits
• Bioethics  15 credits
• Christianity, Race and Colonialism  15 credits
• Early Christian Spirituality and Neoplatonism  15 credits
• Gender, Sexuality and the Bible  15 credits
• Great Philosophical Texts  15 credits
• Political Theology  15 credits
• Questions in Metaphysics -15 credits
• Religion, Ethics and War  15 credits
• Science and Religion  15 credits
• Senior Seminar  15 credits
• Volunteering for Theology, Religion and Philosophy  15 credits
• Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language  15 credits
• Improving Communities through Social Action  15 credits
• Interpersonal Communication and Conflict Management  15 credits