Final Year, Component 04

This third art and ideas module deepens your existing thematic and historiographical knowledge building on Art and Ideas II. In this module, we will familiarise ourselves with some of the most influential and insightful theoretical approaches to art in the 20th and 21st Century.

Gain hands-on experience in community organising and civic leadership through a unique, practice-based module. Using the Citizens UK organising framework, you’ll learn how to build collective power, engage communities and negotiate with decision-makers on real local issues such as housing, transport and mental health. By combining theory with action, the module develops your confidence, communication, teamwork and project management skills, helping you apply academic learning in meaningful real-world contexts and strengthen your employability.

This course examines the social, political and ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence. Students explore how AI shapes power, decision making and human values, and learn to critically assess its impact on society from philosophical and political perspectives.

This module offers final year students a unique opportunity to work together in an interdisciplinary team on a real-world project for a local partner organisation. It enables you to use the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired during your degree to address a real-world challenge, while sharing and developing your creative, organisational and practical abilities. By doing so, this module will prepare you for entering the graduate labour market or going on to post-graduate study. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

Is Montaigne right to wonder whether Westerners are worse off morally than tribes who practice cannibalism? What kind of writing does George Orwell champion? What did Marx and Engels achieve with ‘The Communist Manifesto’? Examine the ‘dangerous ideas’ presented in a range of subversive essays and manifestos. Study how they challenge and satirise existing ideas and social arrangements. Experiment with writing, thus broadening the approach of your own essays.

Is Montaigne right to wonder whether Westerners are worse off morally than tribes who practice cannibalism? What kind of writing does George Orwell champion? What did Marx and Engels achieve with ‘The Communist Manifesto’? Examine the ‘dangerous ideas’ presented in a range of subversive essays and manifestos. Study how they challenge and satirise existing ideas and social arrangements. Experiment with writing, thus broadening the approach of your own essays.

Is Montaigne right to wonder whether Westerners are worse off morally than tribes who practice cannibalism? What kind of writing does George Orwell champion? What did Marx and Engels achieve with ‘The Communist Manifesto’? Examine the ‘dangerous ideas’ presented in a range of subversive essays and manifestos. Study how they challenge and satirise existing ideas and social arrangements. Experiment with writing, thus broadening the approach of your own essays.

This course supports students as they prepare for life after university. It focuses on advanced professional skills, independent learning and personal development, helping students navigate work, further study and wider life challenges with confidence.

Access to water is one of the most urgent global challenges facing us today. Vital for health and well-being, as well as integral to indigenous cultures and industrial processes, water is a threatened commons and contested commodity. In this module, we will explore global and local case studies that highlight challenges of scarcity, contamination, privatization, and climate change, and the cultural importance of bodies of water for diverse communities. We will examine water-related problems, such as economic and urban development, grassroots activism, political conflict, community relations, heritage and public health. This module has been designed to enable students to integrate their subject knowledge with an understanding of sustainable development, acquiring the skills and competencies essential for addressing the urgent sustainability challenges of the 21st century.

What is politics (is it about justice or power)? How does political philosophy relate to real politics? What are competing approaches in contemporary philosophy? What are the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches?

Develop your research and written skills through writing a dissertation on a philosophical topic studied in either your second year or the autumn term of your final year.

This module examines the relationships between faith and reason, religion and philosophy. We shall approach these topics, historically, by considering how they were discussed by some key figures in nineteenth-century European philosophy.

Devote yourself to a close study of Nietzsche`s 1887 On the Genealogy of Morality. You explore many of the most significant themes in Nietzsche`s work, including his account master and slave moralities, ressentiment, guilt, and nihilism.

This module brings philosophical reflections to bear on questions to do with mental health and psychiatry, exploring key existential and social issues of our time. The exact content will vary from year to year, but questions that can be the focus include: What is mental health and its absence (various understood as distress or mental illness or mental disorder or as difficult experiences and troubled or troubling behaviour)? How do we best conceptualise them? What is it like to experience a disordered mind – what are the key structures and features of such experiences? And what can we learn from this about the functioning of our mind when it is not disordered? What is the ontology and epistemology underlying psychiatry? Have they changed over history and if so, why and how? What is the social context of distress and how can we address it? Does bio-medical psychiatry obscure that context? What are the ethical and political issues raised by our mental health system? Is it ever permissible to admit or treat people because of mental health issues against their will, and if so, under what conditions? What is ‘mad studies’? Who and what does it study? We will bring to bear different philosophical thinkers (such as Michel Foucault) or research traditions (such as Phenomenology) or ethical-political frameworks (like Republicanism) in exploring these and similar questions. In 2025-26, the focus will be on the crises inherent in our psychiatric present, informed by Foucault’s critical reflections about the beginning of psychiatry.

How and why are women oppressed? What is a “woman”, and should we even use the term? This module will look at some of the main strands in modern feminist theory, and explore the different ways in which they understand the nature, role and objectives of feminism. Along the way, we will discuss the intersection between gender and other axes of oppression, such as race and class.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason initiates a new 'critical' method in philosophy which has been highly influential in both continental and analytic philosophy. His critical method establishes a new way of thinking about the relation in which we stand to the world, and the role played by knowledge and judgement within that world.