Philosophy, Politics, Ethics BA(Hons)

Course structure 

You will be taught in small, participatory seminar groups to foster skills in oral presentation, debating and listening. Every seminar is supported by a preceding lecture.

Your academic work will be supported by workshops that develop your academic and independent research skills.

Year 1
All degrees within the humanities programme area share a first year. Students take six modules that develop the skills central to our courses. These include topics such as historical and philosophical inquiry, cultures, democracy, narrative and society

Year 2 
In year 2, students choose two option pathways to follow for the rest of the degree. Pathways are a set of modules in a specialised area that give students a deep, critical engagement with the subject.

Final year
Students complete their year 2 option pathways and undertake a dissertation. Project findings are presented in an oral exam that tests skills of presentation, communication, discussion and debate.

Our courses are reviewed and enhanced on an ongoing basis in order to make sure that what you learn with us is relevant and that your course enables you to develop appropriate skills. When you apply to study with us, we will inform you of any new developments in your chosen programme through Student View.

Year 1

In year 1 of the Philosophy, Politics, Ethics degree course you take six modules that help develop the skills central to your course.

Modules

• Philosophical Inquiry

  This module introduces you to key topics in philosophy. Studying moral and political philosophy will enable you to explore questions such as How can I act ethically? and Could a more equal society be built? Philosophy of science and epistemology will empower you to interrogate arguments behind various truth claims encountered today. You will explore Plato, Hume, Kant, Utilitarianism; inquire into the nature of art and freedom; and interrogate philosophy’s historical complicity in sexism and racism.

• Democracy

  This module introduces you to the histories and contexts within which the concept and practice of democracy developed. You will study classical, republican, liberal, anarchist, Marxist, communitarian and global conceptualisations of democracy, in each case examining their relevance to our current political circumstances. You will explore the cultural preconditions for democratic freedoms and the representation of democratic values in different social and political movements.

• Globalisation, Conflict and the Environment

  This module introduces key concepts, theories and questions in international relations and global studies. You will interrogate and evaluate the political implications of different approaches for the study of key aspects of our contemporary world. You will explore how concepts and theories are applied to contested global issues, such as environmental sustainability and war/conflict. 

• The Politics of Representation

  This module introduces you to political, historical and structural approaches to the study of narrative and representation. You will critically reflect upon how the stories we encounter construct particular visions of our world. Focusing on issues of narrative, ideology, language and semiotics, you will explore textual and visual forms, including television and film, news media, the internet, imaginative fiction and photography.

• Historical Inquiry

  This module will introduce you to the practice of historical inquiry through an exploration of various approaches to the study of crisis and conflict in the mid-twentieth century. You will explore the dilemmas that the study of conflict poses for global and transnational history; the impact of war and crisis on social, gender and race relations, and the international order; and the ways in which memories of this period act in the contemporary world.

• Studying Cultures

  This module introduces fundamental concepts and methods in cultural studies. Through a case study of Britain in the counter-cultural period of 1968–74, you will explore conflicts involving questions of ‘race’, national identity, gender, class and youth. Focusing on the distinction between lived cultures and cultural texts, you will relate the practices and values of everyday life to the workings of ideology within narrative forms including girls’ magazines, a novel by Angela Carter and a James Bond film.

Year 2

In year 2 you will choose two option pathways to follow for the rest of your degree – one specialist pathway from the named degree and one from the wider humanities programme. As well as the pathways, you’ll take core modules and start the research for your final-year dissertation project.

Core modules
Critical Traditions in Western Thought 1 and 2 explore some of the key debates and concepts in history, culture, politics, and philosophy since the Enlightenment.

Option pathways
Choose one specialist pathway from:

• Self and Society
  This pathway examines the roots of genocide and natural selection in Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the advances offered by Freudian psychoanalysis. From there you will consider the way the ‘respectable’ self is constituted through resistance to negative concepts such as madness, criminality and sexual perversion in the work of Foucault, and policed by the war on terror, torture and bioethics.
• Morality, Politics and the Good Life
  This option begins by considering how Plato mapped out a ethical worldview in The Republic and asks what social justice requires of us in a contemporary global context. You then explore the moral and philosophical aspects of pressing social and political issues relating to the human body.
• Critical Theory and Radical Politics
  This pathway introduces you to the history of critical theory and radical resistance movements. You start the emergence of critical thought in the Enlightenment and explore the development of this tradition through the French Revolution and the emergence of Marxism right up to the turbulent postwar era of the 1960s and 70s.
• Politics, History and Ideology
  This option examines the dominant role and effects of ideology in modern world history. The year starts with a close study of the rise and fall of European global hegemony from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. It then moves to an exploration of the multi-faceted history of the Cold War.

Watch this film about the Politics, History and Ideology pathway – click on the YouTube logo to watch other films about modules within our humanities programme.

• Race and Resistance
  This option focuses on racism, what it is, how it works and how it can be contested. You will start by studying the evolving conceptualisation of ‘race’, racism and strategies of resistance, and from there you will examine the diverse histories of racism and resistance through case studies, and study the post-imperial experience of ‘race’ in France and Britain.

• Philosophy and Literature
  How do literary texts – fiction, drama and poetry – ‘do’ philosophy? In what ways do philosophical works engage with literature? Focusing on the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, you critically explore these questions in relation to shifting concepts of the individual in relation to ideas of reason, faith and freedom, liberty, transgression and expression.

And one from the wider humanities programme – you will either follow this option for all of year 2 or you can choose the Humanities Placement: Active Citizenship module and study the option pathway for a semester:

• War, Violence and Mass Killing
• Culture and Conflict
• Terror and Terrorism
• Literature, History and Social Change
• Globalisation, History and Identity
• Global Politics
• Politics of the Past
• Radical Histories
• Contemporary Global Challenges

*Option modules are indicative and may change, depending on timetabling and staff availability.

Placement

During your second year you can choose to take the Active Citizenship module. This is a 50-hour professional work placement at a not-for-profit organisation.

Your placement could be at a local charity, a non-governmental organisation or a community organisation. Students have taken roles at organisations including Art in Mind, Pathways to Independence and Screen Archive South East.

The university’s Active Student service will help you to find the right placement opportunity, and you will be offered support in putting together your application and your CV and cover letter.

You will have fortnightly academic seminars where you reflect on the links between academic theory and practice, and on the skills you have developed on placement.

Final year

In your final year, you continue studying your option pathways developing and extending the work started in year 2, inviting deeper engaged reflection through seminar discussion and coursework essays on the broader themes you have examined.

Specialist option pathways

• Self and Society
  This module begins by looking at Marxist and post-Marxist theories, concentrating on developments in Marx’s own thought and subsequent post-Marxist critique in the areas of art and aesthetics, culture, and education, and horizontalist social movements. We then focus on feminisms, from classical liberal feminism and second wave feminism in liberal, socialist and radical forms, to more recent developments in Black feminism, postmodernism and ‘queer theory’, ‘French feminism’ and the phenomenon of ‘post-feminism’.
• Morality, Politics and the Good Life
  In the first term you'll explore surveillance, education, gender, welfare and poverty, and extremism and our everyday complicity in sweatshop labour, torture and war. The second term focuses on military intervention, female sweatshop labour, urban gentrification/slummification and peasant dispossession.
• Critical Theory and Radical Politics
  During the first term, you'll focus on the emancipatory and political potential of bodies acting together, and the emergence of bio-political, materialist and post-feminist, queer and critical race theories. The second term is an exploration of emerging transnational resistance to dominant forms of globalisation; focusing on contemporary populist struggle between left and right in the Americas and Europe; decolonial studies and the politics of affect and identity.
• Politics History and Ideology
  What is the role of the US as the dominant world power? This module explores the rise of the US global dominance in through the bipolarism of the Cold War and the subsequent era of neoliberalism, examining key debates about the end of the USSR, the effect of globalisation on the world order, and the strength of US power today.

• Race and Resistance
  This module considers the politics of inclusion and exclusion through the study of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the place of the Irish in Britain, contemporary Islamophobia and the politics of ‘race’ in the United States. Drawing on the black Marxism, Black Feminism, Critical Race Theory and ‘Whiteness Studies” we evaluate the Civil Rights movement; and other landmark events such as Hurricane Katrina; the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in 2008 and the rise of #blacklivesmatter.
• Philosophy and Literature
  How and why does philosophy become pre-occupied with language, structure and its own status as text, and how does this lead a number of thinkers to explicitly theorise philosophy through literary writing? What would it mean to think the human through the condition that we share with (non-human) animals, rather than in opposition to them? What is a cyborg, and why has much contemporary literature and philosophy become preoccupied with this figure? What are the politics behind this decentring of the traditional subject of humanism?

In your final year of the Philosophy, Politics, Ethics degree you will also complete and submit a dissertation, developing specialist knowledge on your chosen subject and learning valuable research method skills. You also take part in an oral exam: drawing from a theme in your dissertation, you will prepare and deliver a presentation and take questions. In preparing for this you learn presentation, communication, discussion and debate skills, invaluable for job interviews and future employment.

Meet the team

Our staff are widely published in global politics, philosophy and history. You will be designated a personal tutor (normally the same throughout the degree) with whom you will meet regularly to discuss your academic progress.

Dr Clare Woodford, joint course leader

Clare’s research is primarily motivated by concern about the relationship between inequality and violence and unrest and how this plays out in advanced capitalist democracy. In a more general sense she is fascinated by concepts of social order and disorder; finitude and the edges of being and knowledge; the inter-play of faith, reason, belief and action; performance and politics and the varied ways in which social animals communicate with one another and both make themselves (or fail to make themselves) understood and how we seek (or fail to seek) to understand others. See Clare's full profile.

Podcast: listen to Dr Clare Woodford, Principal Lecturer in Political Philosophy in the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE), discuss some of the issues in politics today and the undergraduate and postgraduate courses Brighton offers in politics and philosophy.

Dr Mark Devenney, joint course leader

Mark's main research interests are in contemporary political philosophy, with research expertise on critical theory. Mark has presented this work at conferences, in summer schools and in the form of publication across the world – his first book was Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory, an edited collection of works on terrorism and contemporary political theory. He has a forthcoming book entitled Towards an Improper Politics. He has been a visiting lecturer at Victoria University, New Zealand, and at the University of Essex. He has also been invited to present papers in the United States. See Mark's full profile.

Other staff who teach on the course include Dr Michael Neu, Dr Zoe Sutherland, Dr Joanna Kellond and Dr German Primera Villamizar.

International requirements and visas

We can help you meet our English language or academic entry requirements.

Visas and immigration advice

Course fees

Info

The fees listed here are for full-time courses beginning in the academic year 2023–24.

Further tuition fees are payable for each subsequent year of study and are subject to an annual increase of no more than 5% or RPI (whichever is the greater). The annual increase for UK students, who are subject to regulated fees, will increase no more than the statutory maximum fee.

You can find out more about our fees in the university's student contract and tuition fee policy (pdf).

The tuition fee you have to pay depends on a number of factors including the kind of course you take, and whether you study full-time or part-time. If you are studying part-time you will normally be charged on a pro rata basis depending on the number of modules you take.

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