Free Modules SOMLAL.pdf

infringe by killing them or making them suffer? What, if anything, do we owe to the starving of the
world? This course is designed to encourage students to think carefully and constructively about
range of life-­‐and-­‐death moral dilemmas, developing skills of analysis and critical reasoning. Topics
discussed will include: death; suicide; euthanasia; abortion; animals; and famine relief. Arguments
for and against various positions on these questions will be looked at; and some use will be made of
moral theory to illuminate the issues.
Staff Contact: Dr Chris Bennett
Lectures: Thursday 10-­‐10.50, Friday 12.10-­‐1.00
Tutorials: By arrangement
PHI126 Mind, Brain and Personal Identity
20 Credits AUTUMN
Prerequisite qualification: None
Description: What makes me the person that I am? Am I a non-­‐physical soul attached, somehow, to
a physical body? Or am I identical with that body, or with one of its parts, such as the brain? Is it
possible for me to survive death—either disembodied, resurrected, or reincarnated into a new
body? What makes me, now, the same person as I was when I was a young child? Or am I perhaps
not really the same person at all? What is it to be a person? Are there traits, qualities, or capacities
that are distinctively human—perhaps, for example, our use of language, or culture and cultural
artifacts, or our rationality, or our capacity for self-­‐consciousness? This course will examine these
issues and some historical and contemporary attempts to understand them.
Staff contact: Professor Stephen Laurence
Teaching Methods: Lectures, Tutorials
Assessments: Formal Examination, Coursework
PHI128 Philosophy of Art and Literature
20 Credits SPRING
Prerequisite qualification: None
Description: What is art? Can it be defined at all? What do we find so valuable about it? Are
judgments of beauty entirely subjective, or might there be an objective standard to which we can
appeal? What are we doing when we ascribe emotional states (like sadness) to music? Why do we
have emotional reactions to characters and events that we know are fictional? In particular, why
would we go out of our way to have a negative emotional reaction, like pity or fear? This course is
an introduction to aesthetics. Drawing on both historical and contemporary sources, we examine,
from a philosophical point of view, a variety of puzzles posed by art and literature. Further topics
include the nature of pictorial representation, forgery, tragedy, comedy, and horror. Though
focused on art, many topics of general philosophical relevance will be raised, and the course will
develop students' capacities for careful analysis and reasoned argument.
Staff Contact: Professor Robert Hopkins
Lectures: Thursday 5.10-­‐6, Friday 11.10-­‐12
Tutorials: By arrangement
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