91ÖÆƬ³§

Core modules

History Workshop

What does it take to be a historian? In this module, you will study the process of historical research, learning discipline-specific methods and essential study and writing skills through close engagement with a historical text (usually a work of narrative non-fiction) linked to your tutor's research interests. You will develop skills in critical reading, historiography, essay writing, bibliographic techniques, and reflection.

The assessment for this module is aimed at giving you a strong foundation in the skills you will need throughout your degree and beyond: critical reading and writing, bibliographic techniques, and the ability to reflect on and articulate your skills as a historian.

20 credits

Writing Philosophy

Philosophical writing is a skill that you, the student, must hone early on in order to succeed in your degree. It is also a transferable skill that will serve you in your post-academic career. Philosophical writing combines the general virtues of clarity, organisation, focus and style found in other academic writing with particular philosophical virtues; namely, the ability to expose the implicit assumptions of analysed texts and to make explicit the logical structure of one's own and other people's arguments. A precondition of philosophical writing is a unique form of textual analysis that pays particular attention to its argumentative structure. In this module you will learn and practice philosophical writing. You will learn how to read in preparation for philosophical writing, learn how to plan an essay, learn how to rework your drafts and learn how to use feedback constructively.  Short writing exercises will help you hone specific writing skills. You will bring these skills together by writing a number of complete essays. The lectures in the course will be split between lectures on the art of writing and lectures on philosophical topics in the domain of fact and value. Essay topics will be based on the topical lectures and their associated readings.

20 credits

Thinking Historically

Building upon the foundational skills acquired in the introductory 'History Workshop,' this module will cultivate your ability to critically engage with the past, develop disciplinary awareness, and apply historical thinking. To do so it provides an introduction to the breadth of interests in the school and the way historians have made sense of patterns in historical developments. Moving from the Ancient and Medieval past to the contemporary world, the module shows how 91ÖÆƬ³§ historians approach the periods and places that interest us, whilst provoking you to ponder the issues involved in framing historical questions of your own. In this module, you will explore a recurring set of questions which inform history as a discipline: how and why have historians divided up the past into discrete periods, and with what consequences? How have historians constructed narratives that give shape and meaning to the events of the past? How can we evaluate the truth of historical representations and interpretations? How are they shaped by the availability of sources about past societies, and what determines which sources have survived to the present day? How have relationships of power influenced the sorts of stories that we tell and the voices that we hear from the past, and how do they continue to do so?By the end of the module, you will not only have a strong sense of what it means to see problems through a historical lens, but also a better understanding of the chronological and geographical range of work undertaken by 91ÖÆƬ³§ historians.

20 credits

History of Philosophy

In Philosophy the past can be a guide to the present.  The ideas that shape and guide philosophical thought can be understood by examining their historical development.  This module will introduce students to key debates and the thought of key figures from the history of philosophy. The focus will be on a number of selected readings covering topics of central philosophical importance from philosophy's long past.

20 credits

Optional module examples:

Empire: From the Ancient World to the Middle Ages

Covering the period from the 4th century BC to the 15th century AD, this module invites students to explore the ancient and medieval worlds through the lens of 'empire'. It provides an introduction to ancient and medieval types of empire, their contacts with and legacies to each other, and the connectedness between East and West in this period. Using a wealth of primary evidence and drawing on corresponding historiographical debates, students explore what it meant to live in ancient and medieval empires, what kind of social, cultural and religious encounters they engendered, and whether there was any space for resistance.

20 credits

Common People: Everyday Lives in Modern Britain and Ireland

Who were the 'common people' of modern Britain and Ireland? What was their experience of life? What are their stories, and how are they told? Against a backdrop of vast political and economic changes, this module draws back the curtain on the experience of everyday life in modern Britain and Ireland, asking how ordinary people experienced and understood the transformations happening around them. Moving beyond the traditional focus on elites to the women, working-class men and people of colour who lived in, or migrated to or from, these islands, we will investigate the impacts of the rise and fall of an empire and two world wars on people's lives, and how they responded to, shaped and challenged those impacts. 

At the heart of this module lies the question of how these external forces irrevocably reshaped the culture and society of modern Britain and Ireland. You will learn about changes to the family, welfare, and sexuality in this period, and consider the impact of religion, politics, race, and empire on everyday life. Democracy was forged but could never quite resolve tensions about poverty, inequality and regional division. Empire shaped Britain and Ireland, at its height and at its fall, influencing popular culture and understandings of disability and the body. In an already diverse society, how could minorities carve out their own spaces and identities? From high culture to pop culture, the curation, consumption, and communication of information altered radically over these two centuries, but to what end and with what results?

Above all, this module asks you to consider the experiences of ordinary people in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and Ireland and how diverse these experiences could be. 91ÖÆƬ³§ saw many of these issues first-hand, and provides real, lived case studies in how common people engaged with and understood a world that was changing around them.

20 credits

Mind and World

This module is an introduction to a range of topics in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind. In the first half of the module we consider questions such as: How should we understand knowledge? What implications does cognitive and cultural diversity have for our understanding of knowledge? Should we privilege some points of view? Should we trust others? Can we wrong them if we don't? And what should we say about disagreement? In the second half of the module we ask questions such as: Is the mind a physical thing? Can a machine have a mind? Can you survive the destruction of your body? Do you have free will? And can a machine be responsible for its own actions?

20 credits

Religion, Reason and Reality

Religious traditions typically understand reality as involving more than just the tangible physical world.  This module tackles philosophical questions about religion and reality.  These include questions about different conceptions of God and the justification for religious beliefs, such as belief in God, supernatural forces and an afterlife.  And questions about the nature of religious 'beliefs': are these the same kind of thing as mundane 'beliefs'?   They also include questions about reality, raised by potential technological advances, like the question of whether we are living in a simulation, and how we should think about God if we think we are.  And the question of whether technologies like virtual reality can offer what people have long sought from religion.

20 credits

Death and Killing

This module introduces students to some key philosophical questions about life and death. What is death? What happens to us when we die? Could there be an afterlife? Would it be a good thing if there were? Is it rational to fear death? Do we have moral duties towards the dead? If death is usually bad for us then killing someone, or allowing them to die, is usually wrong. But it is not always wrong. There are exceptions. The module looks at a range of life-and-death situations that may include euthanasia, abortion, killing non-human animals, war and capital punishment.

20 credits

The 'Disenchantment' of Early Modern Europe, c. 1570-1770

This module explores the fundamental shifts in mental attitudes and public behaviour that occurred in Europe between the age of the Reformation and the age of the Enlightenment. The central focus of the course will be the examination of the supernatural - religious beliefs, but also witchcraft and magic. You will explore the changing ways in which beliefs impinged on people's lives at various social levels. You will also have an opportunity to study the impact on people's world views of such changes as rising literacy, urbanisation, state formation and new discoveries about the natural world. All these will be investigated in the institutional contexts of state and church and the ways in which they sought to channel and mould beliefs and behaviour. This module enables you to understand how the early modern period is distinctive from and links medieval and later modern historical studies.

20 credits

Beyond Borders? A Deep History of the Connected World

We live in a moment where the world is more interconnected than ever before, where big brands dominate global economies and imaginations, TikTok shapes trends across the planet, political rhetoric reverberates across borders, and pandemics and climate change offer threats on a planetary scale. We cannot avoid global thinking, and the impacts of international networks - from media to economies to culture and consumption - are so engrained that we barely even notice them. But how did we get here? How did the world become so intensely interconnected? And why do those processes of entanglement matter?

At a time when the rise of this increasingly global outlook is facing challenges from ethnonationalism and isolationism - from Brexit to Trump and Modi's India - this module will equip you to understand the processes at work in global integration (and isolation), not as a linear narrative of 'progress', but as historically contingent, complex and messy. In this module, we will trace the ways in which these global interconnections developed, from the earliest tentative colonies and the rise of empires, enslavement and extraction. Through the lens of global history, we will see revolutions, liberation, and worldwide conflicts, the modern international order of nation states, waves of decolonisation, and ecological crises.

Through the study of transnational structures, cultures and systems which reach from Asia to Europe and from Africa to the Americas, alongside an understanding of the many peoples of every status who were agents in these exchanges, this module will challenge you to ask: what drives nations and individuals together, or pulls them apart? What makes and breaks cultures, states, and communities? And how did we end up in a place where environment; food systems; national security; human rights; political, religious and racial ideologies; culture and language; war and peace, are all so globally determined and yet so locally rooted.

20 credits

The Long View: an introduction to archaeology

This module traces the development of modern humans through to the modern era. It introduces the wide range of materials and methods that archaeologists use to study the past.  The practical laboratory-based classes and field classes provide experience in the basic identification, investigation and interpretation of archaeological evidence. They are supported by lectures that introduce archaeological methods, theories and worldwide case studies. From field to laboratory using examples from throughout the world, you will learn about how archaeology shapes knowledge about the deep and recent human past.

Through this module students will be introduced to debates on the formation and development of archaeological thought through a world-wide perspective from the Palaeolithic to the present. They will be presented with techniques and ideas used by archaeologists to explore the human record and understand the past. It offers an opportunity to explore and discover the archaeological record through practical engagement, using field and laboratory methods, while also highlighting the importance of selecting analytical techniques appropriate to the question posed and the data available. The module will enable students to develop core skills in decoding and critically understanding literature, observation, recording, analysis and interpreting archaeological evidence.

20 credits

Reason and Argument

This module teaches basic philosophical concepts and skills to do with argument.  The first part of the course deals with arguments in ordinary language.  It teaches techniques for recognizing, interpreting, analyzing, and assessing arguments of various kinds.  It also teaches important concepts related to arguments, such as truth, validity, explanation, entailment, consistency, and necessity.  The second part of the course is a basic introduction to formal logic.  It teaches how to translate ordinary-language arguments into formal languages, which enables you to rigorously prove validity, consistency, and so on.

20 credits

Bodies, Sex and Desires

This module introduces students to some key topics in the Philosophy of Sex and Queer Theory. We will begin with the surprisingly difficult questions of what sex is, and what a sexual orientation is, examining these questions from the perspective of contemporary philosophy, and also the history of sexuality and desire. We will consider a range of issues around the nature of embodiment, for example, whether there are only two biological sexes (male and female), as well as social and political implications of these categorisations. We will also discuss the nature of intimacy and relationships, including asexuality, aromanticism, polyamory; 'sexual racism'; how we should understand consent; and whether having power over someone makes it impermissible to have sex with them. Finally, we will think about some issues surrounding sex work, focusing on whether or not it is inherently different from other jobs, and whether there is anything morally problematic about pornography.The readings and perspectives covered in this module are diverse, and include examples from empirical studies, media and popular culture. You can develop knowledge of your favourite topics in the portfolio assessment, engaging with module readings in Philosophy of Sex, and Queer theory.

20 credits

Science, Medicine and Society

This is a module on the relationship between science, society, and values and serves as an introduction to the philosophy of science and bioethics.

Science plays an essential role in modern society. We trust science, and its results, on a day to day basis as we navigate our worlds and interact with each other. Yet, what is it about science, or scientific methodology, that makes it so trustworthy? We will investigate a range of questions that concern the epistemology and social structure of science. These include: What is the relationship between evidence, observation, and theory? Is there a distinctive scientific methodology? Does the social structure of science help or hinder scientific research? After considering these theoretical questions, we will turn to questions of value and a range of problems that arise with the application of science. Some of these problems are historic but many have emerged as we move through the 21st century. In a pandemic, for example, 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? How might the use of artificial intelligence impact trust in the healthcare system? This module thus moves from the theoretical to the practical.

20 credits