Liberal Arts

Degree programme objectives

The study of Liberal Arts offers students an opportunity to get acquainted with foundational disciplines of humanities and social studies. It is modelled upon a general approach to these disciplines viewed as interconnected forms of knowledge and research methods, which are enriching in combination both the the students and the disciplines themselves. The core disciplines include philosophy, with an emphasis on logic, ethics and the foundations of critical thinking; linguistics and literary studies, with an emphasis on understanding principles of language as a system of communication and the literary text as a material for a critical discussion; sociology and political sciences as methodologically rigorous approaches to an understanding of the human society and forces operating within; economics, as a special case of the study of human interactions with a crucial role in the human society.

First, the students will learn the basics of approaching various phenomena of the core disciplines of the program, which are listed above. They will learn about basic approaches in these disciplines and their specific treatment of their objects of study, adopt elementary research and methodological background, and develop an understanding of the richness of diverse approaches within various disciplines of the humanities and social studies. This concludes the study of the Liberal Arts as a minor program of studies.

If the students continue further in their studies and take the program as their major program of studies, they focus on one of these areas in a greater depth: English language and literature, media and political studies, or economics. They will further cultivate their basic theoretical and methodological acquaintance with the disciplines with the most recent developments. The students' research of a selected phenomenon from the selected profiling discipline will reach beyond the narrow confinement of the disciplines itself into a broader grasp rooted in the knowledge of other disciplines of the humanities and social studies and their specific foci and methods.

Liberal Arts has established itself as a standard general-purpose bachelor-level program of studies in the recent tradition of the (mainly Anglo-American) tertiary education. It trains the students to be able to critically approach a variety of texts and cultural phenomena (from non-literary texts and pieces of literature, to social institutions and economic transactions), cultivates their analytical thinking and broadens their horizons, so that they can find a practical placement in any area dealing with the above, as well as pursue their studies of these particular and related areas of studies on graduate and post-graduate levels.