Philosophy

Core modules:

Dissertation

Contact department for more information.

60 credits

Research modules:

Cognitive Studies Seminar

Cognitive science is a research field in which philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, and anthropology come together to discover how the mind works. This module aims to:
1. Introduce students to major theoretical issues in cognitive science.
2. Help students to see how empirical evidence drawn from different disciplines is relevant to key issues in cognitive science.
3. Equip students with an understanding of the philosophical importance of cognitive science.

30 credits

Political Philosophy Research Seminar

Students on this module will attend a two-hour seminar every week (except reading week). The objectives of the module are to: (i) read and discuss certain key texts in political philosophy; and (ii) have each student develop a writing project, on which they will be evaluated. The selection of texts will reflect the expertise of the staff involved. The seminars will be discussion orientated and students will on occasion be expected to deliver informal presentations. Students are entitled to advisory tutorials with the staff members involved, depending on which topic they want to focus on in their writing assignment.

30 credits

Moral and Other Values Research Seminar

This module will have a two-hour seminar every week except writing week. The objectives of the module are (i) to read and discuss certain key short philosophical texts in ethics and aesthetics; and (ii) to have each student develop a writing project, on which he or she will be evalulated for the course. The selection of texts will reflect the expertise of the staff involved, and interests of the students enrolled. The meetings are discussion orientated and students will be expected to give informal presentations on occasion. Students are entitled to advisory tutorials with the staff members involved, depending on which text they want to focus on in their writing assignment.

30 credits

Taught modules:

Philosophical Foundations

This module will introduce students to key ideas and arguments in philosophy, across a wide range of debates such as moral and political philosophy, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. Students keen to consolidate their foundational understandings in Philosophy are strongly advised to take this module.

30 credits

Ethics and Belief

We know things as individuals, but we also know things collectively. And what we know individually can depend on our relation to other knowers and collective knowledge. These relations are not merely epistemic, they are also practical and ethical. Knowledge can, for instance, be based on trust, while a failure to recognize someone as a knower can be a matter of injustice. Knowledge thereby has a social character and an ethical dimension. This course will introduce a broad range of topics in epistemology that explore this social and ethical turn.

30 credits

Bodies and Souls

The course will focus on metaphysical themes of perennial interest such as parts and wholes, the nature of people, and the passage of time. Readings will be drawn mainly from recent and contemporary sources.

30 credits

Guided Reading

This module is intended to enable students to develop a research project of their own, in a flexible manner. Each student on the module will be assigned a supervisor, with whom they will meet for one hour every two weeks. They will also be encouraged to attend those reading groups run in the department (of which there are typically about 10 per semester) which fit with their project. The objectives of the module are (i) to identify a suitable research topic, in consultation with the supervisor (ii) to develop this project through supervisions and drafts (iii) to complete the project.

30 credits

Advanced Political Philosophy

This module aims will investigate a broad range of topics and issues in political philosophy and explore these questions in some detail. It will include both historical and foundational matters and recent state of the art research.

30 credits

Ancient Chinese Philosophy

This course will introduce students to ancient Chinese philosophy through a study of some of its classical texts.

30 credits

The Science of Consciousness

Our memories of our personal past (i.e. our episodic memories) play animportant role in our lives. They help us perform mundane tasks like finding our keys, butthey arguably also form the foundation of our sense of self and personal identity. They let usknow who we are by recording what we've done and experienced. In this module we will tryto better understand what episodic memory is and to what extent it grounds our understandingof the self. This module will introduce students to the cognitive science of memory and tocore issues in the philosophical foundations of cognitive science.In the first part of the module, we will look at methodological issues that arise when weattempt to describe the mind's structure within philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Inthe second part of the module, we will look towards the cognitive sciences to betterunderstand what sort of thing episodic memory is. In the final part of the module, we willconsider the relationship between episodic memory and our sense of the self.This is an interdisciplinary module. Understanding how the mind is structured is a complexproject. In order to make progress we need to appeal to both empirical and philosophicalwork (and work that blurs this distinction). We'll read scientific and philosophical papers;however, no prior knowledge of cognitive science (or neuroscience) will be presumed.

30 credits

Feminist and Queer Studies in Religion, Global Perspectives

This module applies feminism, queer studies and trans philosophy in analysis of genders and sexualities in religious traditions and cultures around the world. We will examine deities and goddesses, gendered language in religions, cisheteropatriarchy, and LGBTQIA life in e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as in Chinese, and Japanese cultures. We will discuss genders, rituals, spirituality, sexual practices, procreation, abstinence, and asexuality, reading a range of feminist, queer and trans philosophical works, and texts ranging from the Kama Sutra to Confucius and the Vatican documents, Scriptures, and empirical research. Assignments allow students in Philosophy, Humanities, and Social Sciences develop their expertise using their preferred methods and topics, on religions of their choice.

30 credits

Moral Theory and Moral Psychology

This course examines the relationship of moral theory and moral psychology. We discuss the relationship of science and ethics, examine the nature of self-interest, altruism, sympathy, the will, and moral intuitions, explore psychological arguments for and against familiar moral theories including utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontology and relativism, and confront the proposal that understanding the origins of moral thought 'debunks' the authority of ethics. In doing so, we will engage with readings from historical philosophers, including Hobbes, Butler, Hume, Smith, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche and Moore, as well as contemporary authors in philosophy and empirical psychology.

30 credits

Philosophy of the Arts

This module introduces students to a broad range of issues in the philosophy of art. The first half asks 'What is art?'. It examines three approaches: expression theories, institutional accounts, and the cluster account. This is followed by two critiques focusing on the lack of women in the canon and problems surrounding 'primitive' art. The evolutionary approach to art is discussed, and two borderline cases: craft and pornography. The second half examines four issues: cultural appropriation of art, pictorial representation, aesthetic experience and the everyday, and the supposed link between artistic creativity and madness.

30 credits

Free Will & Religion

This module focuses on philosophical questions about the relationship between free will and religion. Historically, theistic religions have been dogged by questions concerning the nature of human agency, for instance on account of the traditional conception of God as omniscient and hence as having full foreknowledge. The module will examine philosophical conceptions of the relationship between religious states of affairs and positions regarding the status of human action, by considering relevant historical developments within theology and philosophy.

30 credits

Bioethics

Bioethics arose in response to the moral challenges thrown up by technological advances of the twentieth century. As we move through the 21st century, new moral problems are emerging, even as old one still concern us.

How should we allocate resource for medical care and research? Are there limits to what can be done to our bodies, or does consent permit everything? In a pandemic, how should we balance concerns for liberty and protecting the vulnerable? Should we try to 'enhance' human beings, or should we be happy with the way we are?

This module will introduce a range of practical bioethical problems, as well as some methods for approaching them. Our emphasis will be on doing philosophy practically, with a view to the implications of philosophical argument in the real world of healthcare, research and bioscience.

20 credits

Philosophy of Law

Law is a pervasive feature of modern societies and governs most aspects of our lives. This module is about some of the philosophical questions raised by life under a legal system. The first part of the module investigates the nature of law. Is law simply a method of social control? For example, the group calling itself Islamic State issued commands over a defined territory and backed up these commands with deadly force. Was that a legal system? Or is law necessarily concerned with justice? Do legal systems contain only rules or do they also contain underlying principles? Is 'international law' really law?
The second part of the module investigates the relationship between law and individual rights. What kinds of laws should we have? Do we have the moral right to break the law through acts of civil disobedience? What is the justification of punishment? Is there any justification for capital punishment? Are we right to legally differentiate between intended crimes (like murder) and unintended crimes (like manslaughter), or does this involve the unjustified punishment of 'thought crime'? Are we right to legally differentiate between murder and attempted murder, despite the fact that both crimes involve the same intent to kill?

30 credits

Pain, Pleasure, and Emotions

In this module, we will discuss the nature of affective states like pleasures, pains, and emotions. We will focus on three problems: (1) The constitution problem: What all and only affective states have in common? E.g., what makes pains and joys, but not visual experiences, affective states? (2) The distinction problem: What makes each type of affective state the particular type it is? E.g., what makes an orgasm a sensory pleasure and fear an emotion? (3)The problem of affective phenomenology: Some affective states feel good, others feel bad. In virtue of what affective states have this distinctive phenomenal character?

30 credits

Feminism

Feminists have famously claimed that the personal is political. This module takes up various topics with that methodological idea in mind: the family, cultural critique, language. We examine feminist methodologies - how these topics might be addressed by a feminism that is inclusive of all women - and also turn attention to social structures within which personal choices are made - capitalism, and climate crisis.

30 credits

Phenomenology

This module introduces students to Phenomenology - a philosophical tradition in continental European philosophy, which is closely related to Existentialism. Phenomenology seeks to understand the human condition. Its starting-point is everyday experience, where this includes both mundane and less ordinary forms of experience such as those typically associated with conditions such as schizophrenia. Whilst Phenomenology encompasses a diverse range of thinkers and ideas, there tends to be a focus on consciousness as embodied, situated in a particular physical, social, and cultural environment, essentially related to other people, and existing in time. (This is in contrast to the disembodied, universal, and isolated notion of the subject that comes largely from the Cartesian tradition.) There is a corresponding emphasis on the world we inhabit as a distinctively human environment that depends in certain ways on us for its character and existence. Some of the central topics addressed by Phenomenology include: embodiment; ageing and death; the lived experience of oppression; human freedom; our relations with and knowledge of, other people; the experience of time; and the nature of the world. In this module, we will discuss a selection of these and related topics, examining them through the work of key figures in the Phenomenological Movement, such as Edmund Husserl, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Edith Stein.

30 credits

Philosophical Problems I: People, Organisations and Technology

Much of moral and political philosophy is devoted to the study of people's relations to other people, or to political entities such as the state. Yet people also stand in morally significant relations mediated by other entities, such as charitable organisations, business corporations, and the products of information technology, including 'artificial intelligence'. This module introduces the student to some of the most important questions currently faced by human beings in our relation to artificial agents, whether in the guise of organisations or advanced technologies.

Questions discussed in the module will include: are organisations or machines capable of moral agency, and if so, are they candidates for the same kinds of responsibility as individual human beings? Do moral norms that apply to the relations between humans, such as truthfulness or integrity, apply equally to organisations or information technology? To what extent do our relationships with organisations and technology undermine individual freedom or autonomy and our sense who we are? Does the development of large-scale organisations or the technological advances promised by artificial intelligence represent an opportunity for ecological preservation and control, or is it an existential threat to existing ecosystems and human life as we know it?

In this module, these and similar questions are addressed by the application of philosophical theory to real world examples.

30 credits

Plato's Symposium

The Symposium is a vivid, funny and moving dramatic dialogue in which a wide variety of characters - orators, doctor, comic poet, tragic poet, soldier-cum-statesman, philosopher and others - give widely differing accounts of the nature of erotic love (eros) at a banquet. Students should be willing to engage in close textual study, although no previous knowledge of either ancient philosophy or ancient Greek is required. We will be exploring the origins, definition, aims, objects and effects of eros, and asking whether it is viewed as a predominantly beneficial or harmful force. Are some manifestations of eros better than others? Is re-channelling either possible or desirable, and if so, how and in what contexts? What happens to eros if it is consummated? We will in addition explore the issues that the dialogue raises about relations between philosophy and literature, and the influence it has had on Western thought (e.g. Freud). The edition we will use is Rowe, C. J., 1998, Plato Symposium. Oxford: Aris and Phillips Classical texts.

30 credits

The Sacred and the Sexual: Gender, Sex, and the Bible

There has been no piece of literature more influential on Western and colonial understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality than the Bible. This module will teach you how to read the biblical text closely and to engage with theorists whose approaches to the Bible yield new understandings of this ancient text. Topics include masculinity, femininity, queer and trans identities, sexual pleasure, and gender-based violence. As we explore these topics together, you'll have the opportunity to focus on a particular area of interest and develop your own research. It is not expected that you have deep or broad familiarity with the biblical text before taking the module; only that you are able to perform close analytical readings.

30 credits

PhD Proposal

To provide both general and subject-specific research training for those intending to pursue research in philosophy or political theory. There is a short course dealing with topics such as study and writing skills, choosing and planning a research project; conducting a literature search, delivering a seminar presentation and chairing a discussion. Students also meet with their research supervisor to plan and produce a detailed PhD proposal and annotated bibliography (6,000 to 8,000 words), outlining their proposed project and locating it in relation to established positions in the discipline.

30 credits