English

This course introduces critical legal thinking by studying the nature of “law” and providing an overview of “legal reasoning”.  The course addresses different issues and debates but focuses on the following questions:

• What is the role of law in our society?
• How does law justify itself?
• How does law relate to ethics and morality?
• What happens when opposing rights conflict with each other?
• What defines power in a juridical system?
• What are the strength and weaknesses of democracy?

This course offers a structured chronological framework and a comprehensive introduction to the Victorian era in Great Britain (1837–1901). Through an exploration of political, social, intellectual, and artistic developments, the course examines how the Victorians navigated a world marked by rapid and sometimes unsettling change. Particular attention is paid to the interplay between ideological frameworks, social structures, and cultural production. In addition to lectures, the course includes seminar sessions designed to strengthen students’ analytical and written expression skills. These sessions provide training in core academic practices such as textual commentary and argumentative essay writing.

This course teaches public finance at its introductory level. The course covers topics ranging from normative issues, such as why and how we need the government to intervene in the market economy, and how it intervenes in the economy in reality. An understanding of the recent controversy about the burden of the national debt and the fiscal situation of the Japanese central government is expected by the end of the course.

Required course prerequisite: Basic understanding of introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics. 

This course is not for the faint-hearted. It will look at ghosts and other supernatural phenomena in multiple genres and media: spooky ghost stories, scary movies, body horror stories and films, gothic tales, “romantasies,” and stories of nostalgic haunting. 

Among the questions to be explored will be: What fears do the works provoke and examine? What kinds of longing do hauntings evoke? How might we understand the paranormal socially and psychologically? We look at selected short stories by Edgar Alan Poe, Stephen King, Mariana Enriquez, Mo Yan, Yoko Ogawa, and Bora Chung.

Films to view together (in class) and explore will include the American horror classic The Shining, the baseball fantasy Field of Dreams, the Japanese horror film Ringu, the Spanish tale of haunting and heartbreak The Orphanage, and the recent body-horror hit The Substance. The course will end with selected episodes of the K-drama Goblin. 

This course covers a selection of topics in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, as well as exploring some of the points of contact between aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. Students consider how to understand some distinctive aesthetic experiences, such as awe, amusement, horror, and the experience of the uncanny. Students discuss the nature of fictional representation and, in particular, examine some of the ways in which a fiction's representational content relies on far more than, e.g., the words on the page or the images on screen. This enables students to consider some questions about the ethics of representation, such as: What is an offensive joke? If I like to make my character do terrible things when I play a video game, does my behavior deserve criticism? How  secure is the distinction between an extremely violent film that trivializes violence and an extremely violent film that implicitly critiques the representation of violence? And when, if ever, does the choice to perform a role amount to an endorsement of the actions we are representing?

The course introduces students to a collection of basic programming concepts and techniques, including designing, testing, debugging, and documenting programs.  The course introduces the programming language Java, and is for both absolute beginners and those with prior computing experience. Java is a language used for other components of undergraduate modules. 

The course focuses on a selection from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, along with some writing by Chaucer’s contemporaries, and more recent translators and adaptors such as Patience Agbabi. Students consider such central themes as genre, gender, constructions of the self and community. The lectures provide a context for the selected texts and raise central issues and stimulate debate. Seminars involve workshop elements to help students to read Chaucer’s Middle English and also engage in close reading exercises. 

The philosophy of economics investigates what distinguishes economics as its own discipline, addressing questions about the distinctiveness of the subject matter and the metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical status of its assumptions and methods. In particular, the course examines the core philosophical commitments from the formative stages of the discipline’s development which endure and continue to undergird modern economic theory. As such, the course emphasizes the classical theory that guided the development of economics as a discipline, with a focus on the divergence—oftentimes drastic and premonitory—from the philosophical commitments of other social sciences, in particular sociology.

This course introduces basic statistical concepts to life science students. It provides a conceptual understanding of statistical methods with the help of user-friendly software instead of complicated derivations. Topics include basic numerical and graphical descriptive statistics, basic study designs, estimation and hypothesis testing for population proportions and population means, linear regression, as well as other selected topics. Real cases in life sciences are used to present the materials. 

This course examines the body in relation to religion and identity. The course offers opportunities to examine historical, religious, and philosophical conceptions of the body in relation to broader frameworks of culture and society. It examines how societal norms intersect with embodiment, and may engage critical perspectives such as gender, sexuality, race, power, and/or identity formation.