Philosophy

This course provides a foundational and comprehensive introduction to key philosophical texts and concepts that have shaped Western culture. Students acquire the conceptual tools to analyze and understand major works of philosophy through a historical journey covering key moments in Hellenistic, Christian, Renaissance, Modern, Post-Enlightenment, and Contemporary thought.

This course explores key elements in the formation of Western thought: the rationalization of Greek myths. It examines how rational thought emerged from mythological frameworks and how similar processes continue today, particularly in relation to information and communication technologies.

This course examines the intersection of ethics and culture within the context of urban sustainability. It addresses ethical reasoning models, cultural identity, and moral dilemmas in contemporary urban life. This course critically analyzes real-world ethical challenges related to cultural diversity, social justice, environmental ethics, and governance in urban settings.

This course provides an an overview of the most influential philosophical traditions that originated in China and India and spread through Asia: Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.

In this course, students examine the nature of the mind, including insights from metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. This relates to empirical work in the cognitive sciences (psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, linguistics and robotics). Topics students explore include the mind-body relation, problem of other minds, creature and machine consciousness, the nature and causal efficacy of the mental, self-knowledge, mental representation, and embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive cognition. An emphasis is placed on critical examination of arguments for and against competing accounts of the mind. 

Existentialism is an approach to philosophical questions that can be found in the writings of 19th-century authors such as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche, and more explicitly in 20th-century philosophers Heidegger, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. Existentialist thought focuses on the meaning—for our individual lives—of lived experience, value, freedom, responsibility, and commitment, and is often associated with an ethics of authenticity. In this course students consider a selection of writings by these authors, looking at how existentialist ideas have been represented in both philosophy and literature.

In 17th and 18th century Europe, philosophers turned old ways of thinking upside down. “Man” went from being the center of the medieval cosmos to living nowhere special. Philosophers replaced the old Aristotelian world of nested spheres with an austere vision of the universe as an indifferent machine without a center. They stripped value and purpose from nature, along with color and other qualitative properties, reinterpreting many of these phenomena as mere human projections. Claims to knowledge and authority became fragile and suspect. Traditional religious beliefs came under increasing scrutiny as philosophers tried to reconcile belief in the existence of God with the manifest fact of evil in the world. Arguments for the education and equality of women picked up steam. Through these and other developments, a recognizably modern worldview was born. In this course, students will trace one or two philosophical problems—such as problems about the nature of the material world, the mind, skepticism, knowledge, God, human equality, and the problem of evil—through this period, with an eye towards the history of these problem and their lasting philosophical significance.

This survey course addresses fundamental questions in the history of political philosophy. Questions about government, justice, property and rights are addressed through the work of a range of historical and contemporary thinkers. Philosophers to be studied may include Aristotle, Hobbes, Marx, Rawls, and others. 

The course is concerned with the nature of mind and its relation to the natural physical world. It divides into roughly two parts, the first dealing with metaphysical and epistemological issues associated with the mind and mental states, the second dealing with specific issues that arise regarding explanations of consciousness and qualia. The course addresses traditional approaches to the metaphysics of mind, such as Dualism, Physicalism and Functionalism, as well as more contemporary positions, such as Illusionism and Panpsychism.