Netherlands

This course covers some of the most pressing social inequality issues as they relate to welfare and health. By focusing on European societies, the course compares and contrasts social inequality patterns, as well as societal and policy responses to social inequality. Questions posed in this course include: How do various societies respond to enduring, growing, or changing inequalities? Do these challenges lead to an erosion of solidarity, in an 'us versus them' rhetoric? When and why do people stand up for social justice (or not)? And to what extent are we accepting of social inequality? Taking a sociological, psychological, and political philosophical approach to these topics, this course offers an interdisciplinary approach to understanding social inequality and the societal as well as social policy responses in contemporary Europe.

This course offers a study of personality and difference from a psychological perspective. This course examines why and when a person behaves in a different way than someone else and how personality impacts what will happen to us in our life. The course also discusses practical applications of theory and research findings and learns to apply measurement techniques for assessing individual differences. The course explores the different theoretical conceptualizations and measurement approaches of personality and intelligence. Based on the purpose of the assessment, different methods may prove more or less useful. The course discovers different explanations for why people differ in their personality and their level of intelligence. The course looks at physiological, evolutionary-genetic, as well as contextual explanations. Further, the course analyzes the relationship between personality, intelligence, and meaningful life events. What personality traits are important for marital satisfaction and what characteristics make us become a criminal? But also, how does becoming a parent or getting a new job change our personality? Lastly the course introduces real life applications of knowledge on personality and intelligence. Specifically, the course discusses how this knowledge is used in clinical settings (e.g., when having patients with a personality disorders) and in organizational settings (e.g., for personnel selection purposes).

This course provides an advanced introduction to the field of human rights by exploring and parsing out disagreement on divisive and polemical issues. The course analyzes how a variety of key issues of legal concern, such as hate speech, social welfare, dignity, the death penalty, and discrimination, are addressed by a variety of domestic and international institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the UN, and the Supreme Court of the United States. This course is predominantly legal in character, social scientific explanation and understanding are not the focus of the course. Rather, the course concentrates on analyzing the justification of legal decisions in accordance with legal rules and principles.

Medicine is trending towards advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMP), which include biomolecules and cells, focusing on disease modification and on personal differences: personalized medicine. But a better understanding of a person’s characteristics or disease characteristics can also be exploited by repurposing of old medicines. This course studies personalized medicine at several levels: Molecular, cellular, organ, organism, and population. The course starts with an individual assignment of a recent first in class medicine and ends with group assignments on future medicines. Course topics include the latest medicines and how they were developed; Drug repurposing; Cell and gene therapy and regenerative medicine; the self; our compatibility gene; and Glycomics and related diseases. Class attendance is monitored during the six weeks of teamwork. Students who do not participate in the presentation and Q&A of their team (which is essentially an exam) or do not meet the attendance requirement do not get a grade. Previous knowledge in (bio)chemistry, cell biology, pharmacology, and immunology are required.

This course examines how the tragic worldview is expressed in the great dramas of Greek antiquity, such as Aeschylus’ Prometheus, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and Antigone and Euripides’ Bacchae.  Attention is paid – through the study of the Old Testament book of Job and Marlowe’s Faust – to the continuing importance of the tragic worldview in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Finally, after exploring the political and philosophical conditions that caused the ever-decreasing importance of tragic modes of thought in modern times, the course turns to the remarkable new meaning the tragic legacy of the Greeks took on at the end of the nineteenth century. Through Friedrich Nietzsche’s mightily influential The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and a series of important works it inspired, it will be shown how the tragic worldview of the Greeks inspired artists to reject the dogmatism of reason and to find beauty, happiness, and truth in the irrational, subconscious and at times dark recesses of the human soul.