Philosophy, Politics, Ethics BA(Hons)

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Top reasons to choose this course

• An intellectual adventure with real-world application: you'll be encouraged to apply theoretical approaches to real-world issues, preparing you to address contemporary global challenges.
• Expert staff: your teaching team includes academics who develop leading research as part of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics.
• Transferable skills: you'll develop knowledge and skills that will help you to achieve your goals, whether in a career or as a citizen.
• Small group assessed seminars: a distinctive feature of this course is its focus on verbal communication, helping you to develop your capacity to discuss and debate ideas, and to speak confidently and clearly in public. Group and individual presentations feature prominently in seminar work and our final year project includes an oral presentation.

• Gain work experience: you have the opportunity to take a placement in year 2 enabling you to put your skills and knowledge into action.
• An interdisciplinary approach: by drawing on, and combining, various disciplines to understand topics you will develop a deep and multilayered approach to contemporary issues.
• An engaging curriculum: our curriculum is designed to be both challenging and stimulating, with a mix of lectures, seminars, debates and collaborative projects. There are no written exams.
• Join a vibrant community: our student and academic community is friendly and diverse. Students are encouraged to join reading groups and attend public lectures and workshops with visiting researchers, politicians, activist and writers

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 subject 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 – either two specialist pathways from the named degree, or one specialist pathway and one from the wider humanities subject area. 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.

Specialist option pathways

• 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 an 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.
• Politics-History-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.

• 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.

Option pathways from wider humanities subject area

• Contemporary Global Challenges
• Global Politics
• Globalisation, History and Identity
• Radical Histories

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:

*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.
• Politics-History-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.

Lab facilities

Mithras House is home to all our School of Humanities and Social Science courses. It has a series of ‘labs’, which may be used for teaching on your course or in your independent research work.

Life lab
A comfortable space with lounge furniture intended for qualitative research with larger groups. Due to its relaxed layout and naturalistic environment, the space is suited to research using focus groups, research using observation-based methods and child research.

The space is also used for teaching on some social science courses, as well as for dissertation research for projects.
 
City lab
A space designed for collaborative student learning. It is used by students and staff involved in the university’s Global Challenges programme, our collective mission to contribute towards solutions to tackling the pressing issues facing our world.

Design lab
A space housing our extensive collection of historic dress and textiles, which are used in some teaching on our History of Art and Design courses. It has the space and equipment to work on textile projects. Displays created by students on these programmes are on view in the social spaces of the building.

Stats lab
A specialist workspace with computing equipment for statistical analysis and projects involving video and audio editing software. The lab is accessible as a study space to students on psychology courses.

It is also available to students studying courses involving video and audio recording and editing, such as politics degrees and our creative writing programmes. The stats lab contains eight soundproof booths for recording or transcribing interviews undertaken as part of dissertation research.

VR and eye tracking lab
This lab is used for psychological research, specifically eye-tracking research and virtual reality research. Equipment includes an electroencephalography (EEG) headset and Electrodermal Activity (EDA) equipment.

Meet the team

Dr Toby Lovat, course leader. Toby has research interests in Kantian epistemology and metaphysics, German idealism, Neo-Kantianism, the Frankfurt School, Critical Realism, Speculative Realism, Marxist political economy and social theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, and the historical and ideological roots of liberalism and conservatism. Read Toby’s full profile.

Dr Zoe Sutherland works on philosophy, critical theory, the history of capitalism, feminist theory, and radical and revolutionary movements. Her current research focuses on disability theory and politics, reproductive politics and eugenics. She has also written on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary artistic practice. Read Zoe’s full profile.

Dr Anthony Leaker teaches on philosophy and literature, cultural politics, and the representation of conflict and violence, as well as the politics of work and labour. His recent research and teaching has been focused on contemporary culture wars and the politics of ‘free speech’. Read Anthony’s full profile here.

Dr Mark Abel teaches in the areas of history, global politics and international relations and is particularly interested in the world order in the post-Cold War period, and the resistance movements of the twenty-first century against corporate globalisation and neo-liberalism. Read Mark’s full profile here.

Dr Vicky Margree works across philosophy and literature. She is particularly interested in feminist theory and politics, technology, gender abolitionism and reproductive politics. Her teaching interests include animal ethics, Posthumanism, and the intersections of philosophy and literature (especially Gothic, science fiction, and utopian/dystopian fictions). Read Vicky’s full profile here.

Dr Eugene Michail works on contemporary European history, and he teaches on: War and Resistance from the early twentieth century to today; Nationalism, Fascism and the modern Far Right; the Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence; Radical Histories, and Refugee Histories. Read Eugene’s full profile here.

Dr Jon Watson teaches on topics including the histories of racism and anti-racism in the United States, France and Britain from the nineteenth century to the present; the intersections of international politics and the national history of the United States; and on peoples’ histories ‘from below’ looking at how such sources as slave interviews, blues music and zoot suits might help us understand histories of power, marginalisation and resistance. Read Jon’s full profile here.

Dr Christian Hogsbjerg’s teaching relates the history of the African diaspora with respect to how ‘slave-powered globalisation’ shaped the Caribbean region. He has specialist research interests in the resulting struggles against racism, slavery and colonialism (including the Haitian Revolution) and ideas of ‘black internationalism’. Read Christian’s full profile here.

Course fees

The fees listed here are for the first year of full-time study if you start your course in the academic year 2025–26.

You will pay fees for each year of your course. Some fees may increase each year.

UK undergraduate and some postgraduate fees are regulated by the UK government and increases will not be more than the maximum amount allowed. Course fees that are not regulated may increase each year by up to 5% or RPI (whichever is higher).

If you are studying part-time your fee will usually be calculated based on the number of modules that you take.

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• Brighton Boost – cost of living help for our new undergrad students. Find out about how we can help with your study, accommodation or travel costs and more...
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• Student finance and budgeting while studying
• Read our student contract and tuition fee policy (pdf) for more on University of Brighton tuition fees.

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