PHIL42130: Current Issues in Environmental Philosophy

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• To help students to:
• identify key philosophical questions raised by environmental issues
• understand and critically assess the ways others have addressed those questions
• understand and critically assess the answers others have provided
• formulate, communicate and defend their own answers to the relevant questions

• The module's ten seminars will address some of the following questions:
• 1. What are the proper aims of environmental philosophy?
• 2. Do we have direct moral duties to any nonhuman sentient beings?
• 3. Are biocentrists right to claim that we can have such duties to non-sentient organisms such as plants?
• 4. Are we morally obliged to preserve endangered species? If so, why?
• 5. What moral duties, if any, can we have to ecosystems and other environmental wholes? What sorts of values can such wholes have?
• 6. What, if anything, can environmental ethicists learn from the tradition of virtue ethics?
• 7. Is ecologism a viable political ideology?
• 8. What philosophical issues are raised by environmental science?
• 9. What is wilderness? What moral and political questions are raised by claims that it ought to be preserved?
• 10. What can be said for or against the use of phenomenological approaches in environmental philosophy?
• 11. What does it mean to say that something is natural? Is naturalness, in any of its various senses, a value-adding property?
• 12. What epistemic and moral issues are raised by anthropogenic climate change?

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• By the end of the module students should be familiar with:
• key philosophical questions raised by environmental issues
• the ways others have addressed those questions and the answers they have provided

Subject-specific Skills:

• By the end of the module students should be able to:
• Identify key philosophical questions raised by environmental issues
• Critically assess the ways others have addressed those questions and the answers they have provided
• Formulate, communicate and defend their own answers to those questions

Key Skills:

• By the end of the module students should be able to:
• Clearly articulate and defend their views, both orally and on paper
• Manage their time effectively
• Use their own initiative to choose an essay topic
• Exercise self-discipline, responsibility and autonomy in writing an essay

• This module will be taught in 10 two-hour seminars. In addition to this, each student will be entitled to 2 hours supervision on the topic of their summative essay. This supervision will involve discussion of the chosen essay topic, guidance on relevant literature, development of an essay plan, and feedback on essay drafts. Please note that supervisions will not be centrally timetabled and should be organised directly between students and tutors as schedules permit.
• Each seminar will include a short introduction to the topic by the seminar leader, one or more student presentations, and a structured discussion guided by the seminar leader.
• To assess the skills listed above, students will be required to write a summative essay.
• Feedback on the formative assignment will assist students in preparing the summative assignment.

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