This third art and ideas module deepens your existing thematic and historiographical knowledge building on Art and Ideas 2. We’ll be looking back at ‘the history of art history’ before the twentieth century. We’ll also look forward, to new cutting-edge theoretical approaches to arts, visual and material cultures.

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.

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.

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 will allow third year students to do their final year project in an innovative and interdisciplinary way. The module seeks to give students the possibility to better understand their community, the issues it confronts and how to address them. Through the five step training of Citizens UK (1. Organise 2. Listen 3. Plan 4. Act 5. Negotiate) the students will learn the basics of community building and organising, which they will be able to practice and experience for themselves. Students will learn to build power and negotiate with local government on issues of local concern such as hate crime, transport, mental health and housing.

his module introduces the work of the 19thcentury Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard, against the background of debates around ‘the crisis of modernity’. Topics covered include: melancholy, boredom, the limits of reason, subjectivity and truth.

How should theory and theorists relate to real politics? What are the competing approaches in contemporary philosophy? What are the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches? How do these approaches relate to each other? In this term, we start with scrutinizing the assumptions underpinning the dominant approach in contemporary political philosophy, the liberal, ideal theoretical approach shaped by John Rawls, to then consider a range of alternative ways of doing political philosophy.

What is the mind? In this module, we consider different ways of understanding the mind, mental states, mental processes, and mental abilities. We will begin with a survey of different positions that have been taken on the so-called mind-body problem, considering various forms of dualism, behaviourism, mind-body identity theory, functionalism, anomalous monism and eliminative materialism. We will consider accounts of the role of the mind in (a) judgment and (b) action. We will use philosophical resources to examine some classic disturbances of the mind such as hallucinations and delusions. We will consider the phenomenon of mind-reading (which is not confined to magic shows and carnivals!), and conclude with a consideration of the laws distinctive interest in the mental – whether in considering a person’s intent to commit a crime, the presence or absence of mental disorder, or what is known in law as mental capacity.

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.

What does it mean for a state or government to have authority? What is politics all about? What happens to our freedom when we live under government? Is democracy a desirable form of political organisation? What are the origins of inequality and why does inequality matter? In this module, we will consider these and further fundamental questions of political philosophy by engaging with some of the most influential modern answers to them.

Discover the philosophical questions that are raised by everyday medical practice and recent developments in medical science. You consider topics including reproductive ethics, resource allocation, the ethics of enhancement, and biopolitics.

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.

Existentialism encompasses a variety of different thinkers unified by a.) the belief that human existence cannot be fully understood using the categories provided by the philosophical tradition or the natural sciences, and b.) a commitment to taking seriously the first-person quality of experience as it is lived. For this reason Existentialism has close ties to Phenomenology, which is a philosophical methodology defined by its insistence on examining meaning as it is experienced first-personally in order to uncover the structures governing the possibility of those meaningful experiences. In this module we will closely study one or more of the leading figures of these two inter-related philosophical movements. In 2022-3 we will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s major work The Phenomenology of Perception.

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.