Courses Winter Semester 2025-26

For Students

Sustainability in Practice

This seminar will invite guest speakers from different NGOs, government organizations, research institutions, development organizations, and companies around the region and beyond to present their practical work with sustainability. The seminar offers insights into different career options in sustainability, development, and conservation. The course will also engage with different concepts, paradigms and values of sustainability and theories of change within organizations. A core purpose of the seminar is to put students in contact with sustainability ideas outside of a universtiy setting to explore future career options and practice-based challenges, and to engage in critical discussions with invited individuals and organizations.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Stefan Partelow

Time: Mondays, 12:15–13:45

Location: Center for Life Ethics, Schaumburg-Lippe-Straße 7, 53113 Bonn (access not barrier-free!)

Theories of Collective Responsibility

Do collectives possess their own intentions that cannot be attributed to their members? Can collectives develop their own plans? Can a collective act independently, and can it also assume moral responsibility for these actions? These socially and ontologically contentious questions are essential to ethics and political philosophy. Only on this basis can collective action problems—such as responsibility for climate change, economic crises, or the consequences of AI—be meaningfully addressed. In such contexts, are corporations, social structures, politicians, or every individual responsible? In this seminar, theories of collective responsibility by authors such as John Searle, Michael Bratman, Iris Marion Young, and others will be critically examined.

Lecturer: Dr. Sebastian Müller

Time: Tuesdays, 10:15–11:45

Location: Center for Life Ethics, Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 7, 53113 Bonn (access not barrier-free!)

Living Together in the Future

The future is a central dimension of experience in societies shaped by linear conceptions of time. Alongside narratives of origin, a society’s respective visions of the future are fundamental to the creation of meaning and the continued existence of social coexistence.

Whether divine providence as a history of salvation aimed at restoring the communion between humanity and God, the ideals of the Enlightenment for a better society organized according to reason, or the hope that innovative technologies will drive social change—these paradigmatic examples always point to the current state of a society and its normative self-understanding.

Using concrete future scenarios and practices—some of which have already been realized—the seminar explores the question of the current state of social coexistence and the ethical implications that arise from it. Drawing on relevant academic literature and practical use cases, students will learn to philosophically contextualize and ethically evaluate phenomena such as prepper logic, elitist nomadism in pop-up cities, fantasies of colonizing extraterrestrial habitats, or AI accelerationism as a promise of salvation for social problems.

Lecturer: Peter Bröckerhoff, M. A.

Time: Wednesdays, 10:15–11:45

Location: Center for Life Ethics, Schaumburg-Lippe-Str. 7, 53113 Bonn (access not barrier-free!)

Environmental Governance

Governance is a set of social processes and structures guiding individual, group and organizational behavior. The course provides a detailed overview of different governance theories and approaches to address environmental and sustainability challenges. The course examines why collective action problems arise between individual and group interests, and how different governance theories help explain different ways of organizing society and social institutions to shape our behavior, incentives and outcomes. A variety of different governance theories will be reviewed to compare their analytical potential and challenges, and furthermore examine how different governance theories from different disciplinary perspectives are useful for understanding the current complexity of environmental and sustainability problems. The role of interdisciplinary science will be explored in order to advance the understanding of complex human-environmental systems and their governance.

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Stefan Partelow

Time and Location: Wednesdays 12:15–13:45, Seminar rooms 1.006 und 1.007 (INRES, Pflanzenbau), Katzenburgweg 5 and Thursdays 12:15-13:45, Seminar room 1, Friedrich-Hirzebruch-Allee 5 - Hörsaalzentrum

Immanuel Kant’s Political Philosophy

Kant addresses questions of freedom and justice, political order, historical development, and international peace through a systematic integration of moral philosophy, legal theory, and historical thought.
This seminar offers an introduction to Kant’s political philosophy based on selected key texts. Starting from the intellectual-historical foundations laid by Montesquieu, Locke, and Rousseau, as well as Kant’s moral philosophy, the seminar explores the foundations of Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment, history, and political reason. The focus is on Kant’s reflections on law, the state, and community, as well as the relationship between individual freedom and legal order.

Further thematic focuses include Kant’s theories of law and virtue, his conception of an ethical community, and his philosophical concepts of history. Finally, Kant’s political philosophy is discussed from an international perspective in the essay Toward Perpetual Peace, particularly with regard to the idea of a cosmopolitan legal order.

The aim of the seminar is to trace the central lines of argument in Kant’s political philosophy closely following the text and to understand their systematic significance. At the same time, the seminar will reflect on their relevance to contemporary issues in political philosophy. The seminar is intended for philosophy students with an interest in political theory, practical philosophy, and the history of ideas, and requires a willingness to engage in intensive reading and group discussion of philosophical texts. Prior knowledge of Kant is explicitly not required!

Lecturer: Nicolas Knecht, M. A.

Time: Fridays, 10:15–11:45

Location: Department of Philosophy, Room U1.003, Heinrich-von-Kleist-Str. 22-28, 53113 Bonn

For Students and the Interested Public

Societal Diversity and Social Justice

The class ‘Societal Diversity and Social Justice’ deals with the challenges of an increasingly diverse society. This social diversity coincides with the polarization and sequencing of different social groups, combined with growing political pressure in the international arena. Solving these challenges requires conceptual analysis, theoretical foundations, and social debate. In this seminar, various philosophical and judicial approaches and concepts in a local and global context will be examined and discussed with participants. Selected topics and their role in promoting democratic discourse while ensuring social justice will be examined. The event is open to students from all faculties and to the interested public.

Lecturers: Prof. Dr. Christiane Woopen/Dr. Björn Schmitz-Luhn

Time: Tuesdays, 14:15 p.m.–15:45 p.m., 14.04.2026–21.07.2026

Location: Center for Life Ethics, Schaumburg-Lippe-Straße 7, 53113 Bonn (access not barrier-free!)

Registration: please click here
 

ThinkJourney: Towards What Future do We Want to Live?

Together with recognized experts from science and society, we go on a weekly ThinkJourney to explore desirable futures in different areas of life, spanning the semester. Our guests present their research and discuss with students, young researchers and interested members of the public. At the end of the semester, the journeys of thought are followed by a joint journey in real life to a thematically relevant place or institution.