
- UCAS course code
- VL53
- UCAS institution code
- M20
Course unit details:
Metaethics and Religious Language
Unit code | PHIL30842 |
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Credit rating | 20 |
Unit level | Level 3 |
Teaching period(s) | Semester 2 |
Offered by | School of Social Sciences |
Available as a free choice unit? | Yes |
Overview
The course will introduce and engage with contemporary work on ethical and religious language and psychology. The questions that we will address include: Are ethical or religious commitments essentially motivational? Does religious faith require belief? Do any ethical properties or facts exist? Does ethical or religious thinking make useful fiction, even if it is untrue?
Pre/co-requisites
Aims
The unit aims to:
- Help students to engage with some of the central problems in metaethics and understand interconnections between questions about ethical and religious language;
- Enhance students' power of critical analysis, reasoning and independent thought, and their ability to bring those powers to bear on important philosophical issues;
- Improve students' ability to understand, articulate and evaluate distinctions and arguments;
- Familiarise students with some of the most interesting and provocative texts in contemporary work on philosophy of psychology.
Learning outcomes
Students should be able to:
- Show a detailed knowledge and understanding of range of core issues in contemporary metaethics and topics on religious langauge.
- Demonstrate a grasp of complex arguments, distinctions and theories, and express this understanding through presentations and on paper.
- Demonstrate improved transferrable critical and evaluative skills, both verbally and in writing.
Teaching and learning methods
One 2-hour lecture and one 1-hour tutorial every week.
Employability skills
- Analytical skills
- Group/team working
- Innovation/creativity
- Oral communication
- Problem solving
- Research
- Written communication
Assessment methods
Method | Weight |
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Written exam | 67% |
Written assignment (inc essay) | 33% |
Feedback methods
The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate fora is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.
We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Blackboard; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.
Recommended reading
Alexander Miller Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction 2nd ed (Polity Press, 2013)
Study hours
Scheduled activity hours | |
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Lectures | 20 |
Tutorials | 10 |
Independent study hours | |
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Independent study | 170 |
Teaching staff
Staff member | Role |
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Michael Scott | Unit coordinator |