Spanish

In this course, students analyze and discuss the different cultural forms (literature, film, art, philosophy, etc.) of the last 200 years that have influenced Western tradition, from Goethe to Miyazaki. The course aims to be a theoretical, practical, and experiential journey that helps students question and reflect on the humanities and their current relationship with nature, creating a baseline for analyzing any other discipline with ecological thought. This course is taught in Spanish and requires level B2 Spanish language background.

This course explores different perspectives of contemporary democracy. The original investigations and categories of political science, those developed by Greek civilization, are proposed as a category of analysis. The course then reviews the construction of democracy; its corruption, and its demagogic implementation in contemporary regime. 

Indigenous peoples are present in the economic participation and cultural wealth of their nations.  A variety of languages can still be heard and seen, and uprisings, such as those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, can be observed.  This second semester course analyzes the cultural knowledge and original philosophies of each of the most important groups in Mexico: Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha, and Quechua and Aymara of Peru and Bolivia, including a few other Mexican and Latin American philosophers.  

To understand the general orientation of the kind of thought known as German idealism, this course contextualizes Kant and the post-Kantian philosophers in Leibniz's project to: (1) Recover the Platonic tradition as an antidote to the nominalist theism of Locke and Berkeley; (2) Take as a formula the Kantian claim that his philosophy, transcendental philosophy, is idealist regarding the form of experience, but not its matter.  The full development of the meaning involved in this escape from (Berkeley's) material idealism leads the course gradually from the old Kant's Critique of the Faculty of Judgment to the Nietzsche's declared death of criticism, allowing one to distinguish the unity of this important intellectual development.

The objective of epistemology is to discuss or determine the nature, limits, scope, presuppositions, and bases of human knowledge.  Its importance is extreme because it is the branch of philosophy that places very severe limits on free speculation.  For example, metaphysics and ontology can argue coherently and convincingly about the existence of anything; epistemology refers to the way in which it aims to know and justify what it proposes.  Epistemology is what determines what is mere metaphysical speculation; what seems to be able to be confirmed as part of reality; how well the claims to know something are founded; how many forms of knowledge there are; what their degrees of doubt or certainty as well as their scope, limits, sources, justifications, etc.  This course aims to give students the necessary foundations to be able to introduce some of the disturbing questions immersed in the attempt to define what human knowledge is and how it is obtained and justified.  The course, therefore, aims that students are able to understand, reflect on, and discuss the problems they face. 

This course provides a general overview of indigenous groups during the Postclassic period, prior to the first Hispanic expeditions in the territory.  The course offers a series of basic methodological and monographic tools for the study of the Indigenous past, which is considered the foundation of Mexican History. The course aims to provide a general overview of the Epiclassical period, and the Postclassic in Mesoamerica; provide the tools and basic concepts for the study of ancient México, and to bring one closer closer to the documentary corpus written during the New Spain period, through which Mesoamerican cultures can be studied.

This course explores the main Mexican philosophical currents, as well as the problems they have attempted to solve, through the study and exposition of the controversies in which prominent Mexican philosophers have expressed their ideas, from the ancient indigenous peoples to the present day (focusing on humanistic, political, and scientific thought).  

The course covers the following topics: Nahuatl philosophy; Mayan philosophy; the invention of America and the conquest; the Valladolid controversy; controversy about Potestas or Dominus and political philosophy; controversy about identity and modernity; controversy about natualista; controversies of the 21st century (independent discourse); controversies regarding the best way to teach (positivism, liberalism and anarchism; Philosophy of Mexico to Mexican Philosophy (the "feeling of inferiority" and its history); Zea Villoro controversy (about the best way to do philosophy), and Canadian multiculturalism versus Mexican intercultural philosophy.
 

This course aims to read, understand and interpret poetry and prose from the so-called "colonial" period in regions where a way of life and expression was imposed on native societies and communities by viceroyalties. In addition, the very notions of "conquest" and "colonization" are discussed from the perspective of Latin American studies, focusing on the political, social and cultural processes of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and their impact on the communities and peoples that experienced colonial violence and subordination.