English

This course examines wicked, or complex, problems in health, including human health impacts from climate change and addressing it through perspectives from medicine and epidemiology, law and governance, and health and natural resource economics.

This course introduces central problems and concepts in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. In the philosophy of mind, it tackles questions like: Is the mind ultimately the same thing as the brain, or is it some non-physical entity, unlike what current science tells us is real? Can a computer be conscious? To what extent are our thoughts really inside our heads? In the philosophy of language, the course tackles questions like: What is meaning? How can our language not merely describe the world, but also change it? How is speech oppressive?

This course discusses theoretical and methodological knowledge of continuous and discrete-time signals and linear and time-invariant (LTI) systems in the frequency domain. . 

This course is an introduction to ethics. It is structured around twelve topics, such as: Do you have a moral duty to donate most of your money to charity? Are we unfree and thus not responsible for anything? Is moral virtue a matter of luck? If someone you love dies and you’re not upset, does that mean you never really cared about them? In addition to thinking about particular ethical issues, the course discusses some of the most powerful and persuasive theories in moral philosophy, including utilitarianism (the view that an action is right if it promotes happiness), deontology (the view that an action is right if it is done from duty), and virtue ethics (the view that an action is right if one has the right moral character or virtues).

Full course description

This course aims to introduce students to the general content of modern law and to the discipline of legal reasoning. These two go together. Law cannot be fully understood in abstraction of the particular way that lawyers, judges and other expert operators of the legal system look at it. Coming  out of the course, students should be able to understand what law is and how it is different from (and similar to) morality, identify the main branches of Law and their basic institutions, recognize and differentiate the principal values underlying those branches and understand the nature of legal  reasoning and be able to apply it to legal problems. 

It is often assumed that to study law means essentially to study the law of a particular jurisdiction. A Dutch lawyer studies Dutch law and a German lawyer studies German law, and there is little that they share beyond the name of their chosen profession. This picture is misleading. Despite the fact that every country establishes its own legal system, there is much less diversity in law than what one would imagine. A key theme of this course is that law arises naturally as a solution to various social problems and, to the extent that human societies face the same problems, similar responses appear almost everywhere. Even though details may vary, contract, property, inheritance, marriage, constitutions and crimes exist in almost all modern societies. Instead of focusing on specific sets of rules like the Dutch Civil Code, or the French Criminal Code, this course focuses on these widely shared problems and widely shared institutional responses. 

With regards to legal reasoning, the course asks students to create a tax, which will help them understand how law can be used as a policy tool for regulatory and redistributive purposes. In this connection, the course will also include a “workshop” where students will be asked to go through a high profile judgment and identify the logical moves taken by a court to justify its decision.

Course objectives

• To introduce students to the basic areas of law (contracts, property, torts, criminal law, international law etc.). 

• To familiarize students with the methods of legal reasoning. 

• To illustrate to students how law arises in response to social problem and how it is different from other domains such as politics and morality.