The study programme in a nutshell
This website is under construction. The study contents and course programme may be further adjusted and specified.
Throughout the year you will follow different courses building up to the Bachelor thesis. You are offered substantive courses in which philosophical theories and methods are provided and applied to current challenges and debates. You will learn to approach these in a critically constructive way, you are encouraged to incorporate multiple perspectives and develop your own vision and philosophical thinking style.
You will follow a continuous learning track throughout the year, where you’ll acquire and refine academic skills and reflect on your own learning process and personal development with mentors and peers. Your individual learning goals within these tracks will be tailored to your individual pre-knowledge and skills.
What the programme entails
The programme includes a set of mandatory and elective courses providing you with fundamental philosophical knowledge and offering insights into their application to concrete societal challenges and topical questions. Parallel to the core courses, you will follow a philosophical skills track, combined with personal mentoring, throughout the year. In combination with the substantive courses, this track prepares you for your Bachelor thesis, in which you will discuss a concrete societal problem, or a contemporary philosophical question of your own choice linked to one of the four clusters of the MA “Philosophy .
Courses
Block 1
You will be introduced into the essentials of the specific academic skills that will be further trained during courses, tutorials, mentoring and individual assessment: Close Reading of philosophical literature; Academic philosophical writing; Debating and philosophical argumentation; Critical reflection; Presentation and application skills (form philosophical theory to public philosophy / policy advice);
What does it mean to be a philosopher today? What can we as philosophers contribute to pressing debates on societal issues? Shall we try to offer solutions or rather ask the right questions? What can we learn from the philosophical tradition in current crisis situations?
This course aims to promote philosophical reflection on contemporary challenges through exploring various dilemmas and possible responses.
In this course, you will be introduced to the key concepts of philosophical anthropology, learn to distinguish the differences between mechanistic, organismic, and hermeneutic approaches in the study of human nature, and acquire a basic knowledge of the history and the possible futures of the human life from an evolutionary (Darwin), historical (Dilthey), and philosophical-anthropological (Plessner) perspective.
Block 2
In this second part of ‘Human Conditions’ you will focus on Phenomenological & Hermeneutical approaches. The point of departure will be the fortuitousness of western philosophy and the unsolved, but ever tentalising question, how we may comprehend the phenomenon of human existence while simultaniously being 'subject' and 'object' of this attempt toward comprehension ourselves. Key figures in this course will be Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer and Levinas.
In this course, you will analyse the transition from a linear, oppositional, externalising, anthropocentric discourse on nature to a circular, inclusive discourse on ecology that is based on an ecosophical perspective that focuses on differences and relations. Connecting the domains of art, science and politics to philosophy, a threefold ecology is explored and fed back into current debates on ecology.
You can choose one of four courses that provide you with an advanced training of academic skills. In these courses, students develop their own research projects. Pre-Master students will complete the course with a special assignment: a presentation of their research results either translated into ‘public philosophy’ or into ‘policy advice’. This prepares you for the “From Theory to Practice” track of the MA Philosophy.
You will be introduced into the essentials of the specific academic skills that will be further trained during courses, tutorials, mentoring and individual assessment: Close Reading of philosophical literature; Academic philosophical writing; Debating and philosophical argumentation; Critical reflection; Presentation and application skills (form philosophical theory to public philosophy / policy advice);
Block 3
By 1750s the French Enlightenment in particular takes off its gloves. Diderot and D’Holbach start propagating a ‘Spinozist’ materialism, which raises the issue of the origins of the Radical Enlightenment. Simultaneously Rousseau singlehandedly revolutionizes French political thought. Meanwhile, the German Enlightenment (Thomasius, Wolff, Lessing) gets under way and the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility spreads throughout Europe. Following the French Revolution, Burke and De Maistre launch their Counter-Enlightenment, the echoes of which can still be traced in twentieth-century critical accounts of the Enlightenment such as Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment. In this course you will acquire knowledge on ‘radical Enlightenment’, French and German Enlightenment and some of the most important critical assessments of the Enlightenment, put forward during the late eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.
This course focusses on Immanuel Kant’s enormous contribution to Enlightenment philosophy. He was a demolisher of the truth of metaphysics, and developed a new philosophy in which causality is no longer a property of the world outside us, but rather a concept in our minds that assists us in making sense of the world (the “Copernican Revolution”). In his ethics he defended morality in the form of a law that demands to be obeyed for its own sake, the commands of which are not issued by some alien authority but the voice of reason that the moral subject can recognize as his own. In this course you will gain a basic understanding of Kant’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of war and peace, and his philosophy of history.
Block 4
To finalize your studies, you can choose between two electives:
Moral Philosophy (Elective 1)
What is right and wrong, virtue or vice? What ought we to do? What is the (Highest) Good? This course considers normative ethics and discusses four major moral theories that attempt to formulate basic principles of morality: virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism and contractualism. Further foundational issues in meta-ethics and moral psychology will be discussed and applied to so called “moral dilemma cases”. : What are the background assumptions of the moral theories? Where do they show their limits? And what about their applicability to concrete moral problems in different fields of moral agency?
Aesthetics (Elective 2)
This course offers an introduction to a diversity of philosophical perspectives on art. Besides the classical points of view (Plato, Aristoteles, Kant, and Hegel), you will focus on 20th century philosophers who have elaborated a new complicity between art and philosophy. Instead of speaking about art, they have started a dialogue between art and philosophy that in some cases even culminates in an aestheticization of thought and a self-reflective turn towards the artificiality of philosophy. The course is organized around three thematic clusters: 1) art and truth; 2) Marxist cultural critique; 3) modernist philosophies of art.
For your graduation you will write a philosophical thesis, addressing a concrete societal problem or contemporary philosophical question of your own choice linked to one of the four clusters of the MA “Philosophy Now”. You will be guided through the graduation procedure step by step in a “Milestones System”, supported by individual mentoring and peer mentoring.
Continuing throughout the year
In the ‘Philosophical Studio’ you will learn how to use the specific tools and strategies of philosophical thinking. You will acquire and refine specific academic writing skills and become familiar with a range of writing styles from different philosophical traditions. You will train philosophical critical reflection, argumentation, and discussion skills, develop professional and creative forms of philosophical presentations, and acquire the capacity to understand philosophical views from different traditions and to argue from different philosophical perspectives. Personal learning goals for the academic skills training will be developed individually, based on your academic background, and the level and type of your methodological skills and philosophical pre-knowledge.
You will critically reflect on your personal development and competencies during regular one two one mentoring meetings with ESPhil teaching staff members, guiding you through the Pre-Master and your graduation procedure, as well as in group meetings with your peers. During regular peer meetings and socializing activities you will be enabled to organise mutual support for your learning journey and mutual assessment of already achieved learning goals. We will create a safe and inclusive learning environment that helps each individual student to bring in their personal background, know-how and talents in a constructive manner.
In this course you will study the basic concepts and theories of social and political philosophy, and more specifically of political theory, based on the conviction that social and political thought always also has to be understood from the social and political context from which it arose. Central themes will include: modernity, state, citizenship, nationalism, power, protest, ideology, freedom, equality, civil society, discipline, feminism, orientialism, postcolonialism. Contemporary views will be discussed in relation to classic insights from the history of philosophy.