BA (Hons) Philosophy Bachelor's degree at the University of Sheffield

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 peop

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

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 ordinar

This module introduces students to some core questions in ethics, political philosophy, and social philosophy. We ask questions such as: What is a good life for you? What is a morally good life? Does being virtuous matter? What kind of moral consideration do we owe to non-human animals and the environment? Turning to political philosophy, we consider how societies should be organised if they are to realise values such as freedom, equality, and community. How should we understand these values? An

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, rai

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 imp

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 eu

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 scien

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.

The previous sentence was false, yet you understood its meaning. And it had meaning although it was just a bunch of marks on a page or pixels on a screen. One key question this module investigates is then: What it is that makes such arrangements of matter meaningful. One suggestion is that we give meaning to language by thinking. But this seems to merely move the problem. Thinking depends on what goes on in our brains, and our brains are also arrangements of matter. In fact, brains do more than

Ethical values shape our world and the lives we lead - from how we relate to our friends and community, to our social and political attitudes, to the aspirations and goals that guide our life choices. But ethics is also challenging. When our values clash, or we face unfamiliar problems, or we reflect on the objectionable values of people in the past, it becomes unclear what to do. Ethical theories attempt to help us solve these problems by giving a precise, unified and systematic account of mora

Knowing and Being tackles questions about the nature of things and about our knowledge of things. The first set of questions are metaphysical. They ask about the world independent of thought. What, for example, is the nature of possibility, objects, numbers, colour and time? The second set of questions are epistemological. They ask how thought can have access to how things are. For example, we seem to know about objects and colour by perception, so how does perception support knowledge? Similar

This module will explore a range of key concepts concerning the self, the world, and our relations to it and to each other, as these have been understood in different philosophical schools from the ancient world until the present. We will ask questions such as: how did the world come about? Is our will free? Can we ever really know the world? Some topics under discussion could include: Ubuntu understandings of community and liberation, or Buddhist no-self approaches. The module will focus on a s

The birth of modern philosophy is intimately linked to major developments in logic that began at the end of the 19th century, and logical ideas have continued to shape philosophy during the 150 or so years since that time. Indeed, formal logic is one of the crucial sources of the greatest role that modern philosophy has played in shaping the modern world, via its influence on the development of computers. The module will start by introducing some elementary concepts from set theory; along the wa