Philosophy

In this course, students explore some of the most difficult questions about life and subject them to careful philosophical examination, including What is the meaning of life? Does anything really matter? Can I know anything with 100% certainty? Would it be good to live forever? What is happiness? Does God exist? Is time travel possible?

Arithmetic is the branch of mathematics which studies the natural numbers — i.e. the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on — and operations on the numbers — like addition and multiplication. This course explores the features that make arithmetic distinctive, and pose unique philosophical challenges. 

This course introduces ongoing debates on human rights by returning to their philosophical sources, in particular theories of natural law and their long intellectual history. Why were natural law theories the original source of the idea of human rights? Why did they
cease to be the dominant theoretical framework from the nineteenth century onward? What replaced them? Can human rights be conceived without reference to natural law? Do human rights retain their validity if one abandons the idea of a universal human nature? The course is structured around three methodological choices. First, it is situated at the interface of philosophy, legal theory, and legal history. Second, it adopts a long-term historical perspective, ranging from ancient philosophy through the Middle Ages to contemporary theories. Third, it sheds light on present-day debates concerning human rights.

 

The course starts in Ancient China at the time of the Warring States Period. Several schools of thought flourished during these 250 years: Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism or Legalism. Next, the course takes students to south Asia, at the beginning of Buddhism. Buddhist ethics promotes a deep-rooted work on human behavior through ethical conduct, meditation and perception of the world. Walking in the Spaniards’ footsteps, students witness the "Destruction of the Indies" through war, genocide, enslavement and colonization. The course ends in Africa where post-colonial philosophers ask fundamental questions about the definition and purpose of philosophy. Students then focus on the work of Nkiru Nzegwu; she argues that the feminist movement is a Western construct that may adequately identify and address the issues of women in the West, but that is not adapted to the status and role of women in a society such as the Igbo one.

With the dual objective of introducing contemporary political philosophy and reflecting on often heated public controversies, this course focuses on the challenges posed by pluralism, as it is, in fact and in law, an essential characteristic of liberal democratic societies. First, it studies how the state and public institutions can manage the antagonistic plurality of worldviews and conceptions of the good, focusing on three models: tolerance, recognition, and the governance of diversity. The course then asks on what basis it is possible to reach agreement in a context of pluralism. Is it possible to reach public agreement while respecting the disagreements and even conflicts that are an inevitable manifestation of pluralism? Or is it not the very nature of a pluralistic democracy to break with any quest for unanimity, or even consensus? Finally, the course analyzes the concrete challenges that arise when pluralism is taken into account in different areas of public policy: moral and civic education, the management of religious diversity (secularism), the integration of foreigners (from reception to naturalization), and European integration as embodied by the EU. From these different angles, the course considers what a liberal-democratic citizenship that takes pluralism seriously, both in theory and in practice, would consist of.

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition that began in the 20th century with thinkers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is also a method focused on describing and analyzing conscious experience. In this course, students examine claims about the methodology of phenomenology and explore topics that have been central to phenomenology, which may include perception, time-consciousness, the lived body, moods and intersubjectivity.

This course introduces students to the ethical theories of various 17th & 18th century moral philosophers and explains their significance for modern ethical theory. The course relates their thought to continuing debates about moral rationality, sentiment, moral objectivity, moral virtue, and moral obligation.

This course addresses the ethics and politics of the social sciences, and the role of the social sciences in ethics and political philosophy. Students address questions such as: Are the social sciences inferior to the natural sciences? Should citizens, scientists, or the market decide what gets researched? Are some topics ethically, or politically, out of bounds for scientific research? How should science guide policy and what would evidence-based policy look like? Is cost-benefit analysis the best way to choose a policy? Does everything have a price? Should our ethics be informed by the findings of social science? And what should the relationship between political philosophy and political science be like? The course has two overall aims: first, to encourage critical reflection on the social sciences and, second, to explore the relationship of ethics and political philosophy to the social sciences.

This introductory level course provides a critical review of the evolution of notions of the human to the present day from a philosophical, anthropological, historical, social, and technological perspective.

The course investigates current problems from a posthumanist dimension articulated with at least two of the following perspectives: social, cultural, technological, or ethical, to highlight possible individual and collective impacts, in a way that promotes metacognitive reflection and action on the student's responsibility as an agent of change. Class discussions will focus on personal learning experiences and the usefulness of the post humanist perspective in one's daily reality.

This course introduces contemporary issues in democratic theory and philosophy and public policy. It draws on political and moral philosophy as well as philosophy of law in order to examine the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary political debates over civil rights and liberties, democratic institutions and procedures, inequality and disadvantage and human rights. It combines the study of contemporary philosophy with analysis of particular cases, through a mixture of academic articles, newspaper articles, public policy reports and recently published works by distinguished academics.