Philosophy

Course Summary

• Type: BA (Hons)
• Location: Preston, Lancashire
• Duration: 3 Years FT, 5 Years PT
• Deadline: Ongoing

Course Description

Education should be for life, not just for work. Higher education, in particular, is not just about extending our knowledge, and developing skills, but also about pursuing more searching questions – questions about what is really worth striving for, about how we should conduct ourselves, about the place of thought and reasoning in a successful human life, and about the nature and limits of our knowledge. Philosophers have a longstanding and uniquely-focused intellectual interest in these questions, and this makes philosophy the higher education subject par excellence. The above questions challenge us to learn how to really think. Addressing them requires an approach that differs from the approaches of the natural and social sciences: not observation and experiment, but the analysis of concepts, and the exercise of autonomous reason. Studying philosophy also helps to develop more general transferable skills - such as the ability to construct analytically well-honed arguments, to express ourselves unambiguously, and to defend our views rigorously.

The UCLan Philosophy course covers traditional areas of theoretical philosophy such as moral theory, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind and language. The course also offers modules in modern European philosophy, and in applied ethics – the latter dealing with real-world ethical issues. The UCLan Philosophy teaching team are all active researchers, in areas such as bioethics, environmental ethics and professional ethics, philosophy of mind and mental health, and philosophy and popular culture. In many cases their research activities feed directly into the content of the modules they teach. 

UCLan Philosophy students can build a work placement into their studies, via modules offered through the Centre for Volunteering and Community Action. These modules offer placements with a wide range of community groups and voluntary organisations in areas such as music and the arts, environment and conservation, crime prevention, health and social welfare, sports, youth work, culture and heritage, ICT, PR and fundraising.