General Education: Global Challenges

The general education component is called ‘Global Challenges’ and is aimed at educating students to understand the complexity of Global Challenges. All students are therefore required to take four general education courses which not only introduce the various disciplines that can be used to approach these problems, but also how they have to work together to consider solutions. The courses expand the students' perspective of these challenges as well as introducing them to several fi elds of study. They discover through interdisciplinary co-operation how they can contribute to global challenges. The fifth course in General Education is aimed at training interdisciplinary skills.

Global Challenges 1: Peace (5 EC)

This course examines not only the legal, historical, and political aspects of the theme, but also looks at the causes and conclusions of war, and it discusses the philosophical dimensions. Students will apply this general knowledge in a case study of a single conflict in a region, country, or nation around the world. While learning more about the case, they will train their academic skills, such as searching and evaluating literature, academic reasoning and critical thinking, as well as interdisciplinary skills.

Global Challenges 2: Sustainability-Energy (5 EC)

Based on a similar concept to Global Challenges 1, this course focuses on aspects of energy. What is energy, how is it created and used, and how can we fi nd new sources of energy to sustain our world? This course contains experiments related to energy as well as providing you with the basic skills you need to address this very important topic in any future career.

Global Challenges 3: Justice (5 EC)

The third Global Challenges course continues to build on the topics raised previously. Justice has more than only legal aspects. When does a person feel that justice has been done? Does this differ from culture to culture? These questions and others are topics of discussion in this course.

Global Challenges 4: Sustainability-Earth (5 EC)

Building up the knowledge acquired in Global Challenges 2, in this course students will learn about the primary processes in System Earth, its main global cycles (e.g. water, nutrients, and carbon) and its energy balance. Furthermore, they will study how humans interfere with these global cycles and with the energy balance, and how this leads to the environmental problems we are confronted with and how these balance with economical growth.

History of Philosophy (5 EC)

One of the key problematics in the kind of Liberal Arts and Sciences programme offered by LUC is that of the ways in which knowledge has been created, organised and legitimised throughout history and across the world. To help initiate students into the process of thinking about how historical and cultural contexts have shaped what it means to be knowledgeable in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences as well as the meaning and parameters of those categories themselves, History of Philosophy will consider how the shape and signifi cance of critical ideas have changed over time and through space; 'History of Philosophy' is a course in the history and sociology of philosophy and science. This course provides a natural complement to the more practically focussed Academic Skills course 'Designing Academic Inquiry.'