Course info

Module Outline (updated 30.08.18)

This 5-week module, held in the Summer term, offers an opportunity for close study and discussion of key texts in the broad area of practical philosophy (e.g. in ethics or political philosophy). The projected programme for this year is to closely examine in lectures, seminars, reading classes and a workshop the significance of aesthetics for our personal, socia, moral and political life. Our primary focus will be Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). This text was highly influential for Romanticism and German Idealism, makes major contributions to the understanding of the aesthetic, demonstrates its relevance for morality and politics, and develops a unique notion of freedom. The aim of the module is to foster reading and research skills and deep understanding of a text or texts in practical philosophy, through a mixture of assessment means, including oral presentation, discussion, and lectures.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the module, students should also have acquired a set of transferable skills, and in particular be able to:

1. define the task in which they are engaged and exclude what is irrelevant;
2. seek and organise the most relevant discussions and sources of information;
3. process a large volume of diverse and sometimes conflicting arguments;
4. compare and evaluate different arguments and assess the limitations of their own position or procedure;
5. write and present verbally a succinct and precise account of positions, arguments, and their presuppositions and implications;
6. be sensitive to the positions of others and communicate their own views in ways that are accessible to them;
7. think 'laterally' and creatively - see interesting connections and possibilities and present these clearly rather than as vague hunches;
8. maintain intellectual flexibility and revise their own position if shown wrong;
9. think critically and constructively.