BA (Hons) Philosophy and Ethics with Humanities Integrated Foundation Year

Skills and Scholarship in Humanities

This module provides you with an introduction to and practice of the key skills associated with the success in Humanities. Foregrounded areas will include: defining research questions; accessing research (using libraries, archives, galleries, and online sources); engaged reading of different materials (including a substantial range of sources); constructing arguments and developing structure in communication; communication in written and oral formats, including concise and longer formats.

This module is a toolkit for the skills and scholarship needed to thrive and to enjoy the humanities.

Understanding Ideas, Images and Creativity: Reading Humanities through concepts, objects and pictures

Humanities used to be primarily engaged with written materials and the production of analytical new research in written forms. This is no longer the case (in fact since about circa 1975).

Humanities engage with multiple non-text based sources including: paintings, objects, advertising, film and television, music and sound, posters, photography, graphic narratives, landscapes, and digital materials (including AI generated sources).

This module aims to introduce you to this space and support you to use it as part of your development as a scholar. It also consciously asks you to contextualize and explore non-text sources in their frequently changing multiple and global contexts.

Global Skills for the twenty-first century

Humanities scholarship today is no longer bound by national frameworks. Ideas of frontiers and borders no longer limit the questions we ask. However, what are the skills for understanding this ‘world’ and how are they practised in inclusive and reflective approaches that are democratic and thoughtful?

This module therefore explores: questions of translation, cultural influence and power; cultural intersections and cultural differences, framing the global north and the global south after empire, unpacking where experiences are globalizing and hybrid or that are valued for their specificity and localized meaning and value.

It will ask how did views of the world get things wrong (e.g. early anthropology) and how do scholars think of ‘the world’ today.

Engaging with the ‘Cultural Life’

This module prepares you for exploring and working with ‘culture’ – meaning all forms of public expression associated with the humanities.

It asks what it means to be interested in culture? How we learn to access and explore culture and what barriers may limit access?

It will offer you a chance to define and pursue your own form of cultural activity – ranging from engaging with a form (e.g. writing or blogging criticism) or making new culture (creative writing; curation).

Research Project or Making Humanities Work for You

This module allows you to engage in either an independent research project in any area of the Humanities (subject to staff approval) or to engage in an equivalent 10 days of work experience.

It offers you the chance to pursue your own interest in your preferred humanities area or explore work experience targeted to a future career.

Faith and Reason

This module explores the relationship between faith and reason. When are beliefs justified? Are some beliefs beyond rational explanation? Why do people hold such beliefs? What cultural assumptions inform the way that we think about belief, reason and God?

Introduction to Political Ideas

This module introduces you to the academic analysis of politics, where you will gain an understanding of politics both as an activity and as a discipline. The module also focuses on the space of politics, and the conceptual approaches, ideology, schools and methods in politics.

Law and Society

This module provides an interdisciplinary view of the law, which looks at what is meant by both law and society, as well as how the law can be used as a mechanism of social control. You will also consider how the law adapts to changing social norms and opinions, and study the role of the law in promoting and protecting individual rights, equality and diversity.

Religion, Ethics and Violence

This module will introduce you to the historical study of religion and ethics and investigate the important contemporary question of the relationship between religion, ethics and violence.

Subverting the Subject: Ideas in Literature From Barthes to Butler

This module explores the ideas of a key set of thinkers who have sought to subvert traditional conceptions of ‘the subject’. Using literary fiction as a foundation, you will consider all the ways in which the concept of the subject might be determined by outside forces, rather than solely through the individual.

The Problem of Human Nature

The module investigates different understandings of human nature. What makes humanity distinct? Are we rational animals? Do we have souls? What is the relationship between thinking and our embodied existence? We will explore a range of understandings with particular attention to the wider philosophical implications.

The Quest for Truth

The module investigates the relationship between philosophy and science by examining debates about different conceptions of truth. Is truth something that can be measured? Is there reality beyond the material world? Contemporary society values the explanatory powers of social and natural sciences – is there still a place for a distinctively philosophical approach to questions of truth?

What Is the Good Life?

The module will introduce you to classical and contemporary ideas about the nature of happiness and its implications for living well. It will begin with an introduction to Aristotle’s idea of virtue ethics discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. This will then be compared with contemporary ideas such as Layard’s study of happiness, religious discussions of the same topic, and significant alternate ideas such emotional intelligence, and self-actualisation.

Bio-Ethics

This module introduces you to the concept and debates of bio-ethics. You will become acquainted with the major problems in bio-ethics, especially those relating to the beginning and ending of life and discuss them multiple ethical approaches.

Critique, Suspicion and Revolution

This module traces the development of Western philosophical ideas from the height of modern thought through the deconstructive methods of postmodernism, as you explore the challenges to modern concepts of being, reality, knowledge and subjectivity.

You will investigate questions surrounding the place of philosophy in the modern world as you evaluate the legacy of modern and postmodern philosophy and its ability to address contemporary issues.

Enlightenment Europe: 1688-1789

The ideas of the Enlightenment provided new ways of thinking about science, religion, education, politics and society and the place of ‘mankind’ in the world, but to what extent did the ‘philosophers’ transform society and how enlightened were they?

You will explore these ideas as you engage with the works of Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Beccaria and Wollstonecraft.

Environment and State in Britain Since 1945

This module explores the British state’s evolving stewardship over the environment since the end of the Second World War.

You will examine the connected environmental challenges that the state has faced in this time including pollution, urban change, resource depletion, species conservation and control, epidemics, extreme weather, the threat of nuclear war, and climate change.

Fascism and Post-Fascism in Europe

By looking at a variety of case studies from across Europe throughout the first half of the 20th century, we will discuss the way in which fascism was both embraced and fought against.

In addition, by using literary and cultural forms of post-fascism you will explore how many of the core messages of ideological fascism survived despite being politically discredited.

Freedom and Justice

The module investigates different philosophical approaches to freedom and justice. What constitutes a free action? Can freedom be granted? What are the key components of a just society? We explore different traditions with careful attention to their historical and cultural context while considering their ability to illuminate contemporary issues and debates.

Ideologies, Politics, and Culture

This module aims to provide you with a robust understanding of the nature of ideology, its operation within different political and cultural contexts, including Marxist, liberal, and conservative approaches.
You will also explore and analyse a range of indicative political ideologies, including conservatism, socialism, fascism, feminism and ecologism, enhanced through analysis of historical and contemporary case studies, and discussion of a diverse range of texts.

Re-Litigating the Past: State, Media and Historical Injustice in Contemporary Britain

This module focuses on how public histories have been rewritten in Britain over the past three decades, through the interventions of state, media, and voluntary sector institutions.

By studying these forms of investigations, you will learn about how private traumas are integrated into or transformed public memory, the ways in which and reasons why silences are maintained or broken, and the place of ‘the past’ in judicial processes.

Saints or Sinners: Politics and Religion in the Contemporary Era

This module examines critically the role of religious ideas in contemporary political life, in particular the ways in which a variety of theological perspectives shape and influence contemporary political movements. As such, you will examine the role of religion in politics and its re-emergence as a political force and key influence on identity. The focus will be on the UK and USA with reference made to the place of religious belief in global politics.

Work Placement

This optional module allows you to undertake a work placement to apply your academic learning in a related employment setting and for you to gain experience that will be useful in pursuing your future career or profession. Emphasis will be placed upon the development of vocational and employability skills, knowledge of self-reflexive work, an ability to use subject knowledge beyond the classroom and the development of skills for lifelong learning.

British Culture Wars

This module explores conflict within British culture from the start of the 19th century to the turn of the new millennium.

You will consider the reaction to obscene publications and other literary controversies and moral panics of Victorian Britain, through to the liberal reforms in the 1960s and the self-censorship and the baleful influence of Hollywood on British cinema.

Dictatorship, Conformity and Resistance in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Russia

This module explores the distinctive ideologies of Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, and to consider if and how these were in fact new forms of religion. The module will also examine the construction of these ‘totalitarian’ states in practice, and the experiences of individual and institutions caught up within these contexts, with particular reference to the churches and to cultural movements.

Dissertation

The dissertation is the culmination of your degree, as you produce a research project on a specific aspect of theology.

The dissertation consists of a study of 9,000 words on a topic agreed between the student and the module coordinator.

Globalisation and Its Malcontents

This module looks at key moments in the development of globalization focusing on moments in which the world came together, such as the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, when the terms of global trade were outlined after the rupture of the Second World War.

You will use these examples to contextualise the work of theorists like Arjun Appadurai to develop your understanding of how globalization has shaped 20th-century history and politics.

Philosophy and the Future

This module investigates different philosophical conceptions of the future. Beginning with religious understandings of eschatology, messianism, millennialism and apocalypticism we will see how these ideas relate to philosophical notions of progress, utopianism and dystopianism. We will ask how we think of the future today, examining a range of philosophical texts as well as film, television, music and visual art.

Political Theology

This module asks how theological and religious concepts shape our understanding of a range of political ideas. Does this mean that Western society is fundamentally religious? Or do theological and religious ideas take on new meaning in secular or post-secular society? We will look at these issue from a variety of theological, sociological and philosophical perspectives.

Revisioning Religion, Gender and Sexuality

The module will begin by examining the development of feminist theologies, theologies and feminist studies of religion in the Jewish and Christian traditions.
This will lead to an exploration of a range of the further developments which have emerged as result of these early developments such as womanist, mujerista, body and queer theologies as well as diverse feminist spiritualties across a range of traditions.

The Theology and Politics of Paul the Apostle

Paul’s letters in the New Testament have had a major influence on the formation of Christianity as well as on political, ethical and philosophical questions more generally. This module varies between close readings of key Pauline letters and discussion of key problems – such as gender, social change, and freedom – raised by the Pauline texts throughout history.