Philosophy

This course will guide students toward an understanding of the intellectual challenges and debates of gender in the discipline of philosophy. It will seek to explore how the assumptions of gender have shaped philosophical discourse, and how feminist thought has destabilised and reconfigured the parameters of debates in epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy.

This course will discuss temporal logic, deontic logic and epistemic logic. For temporal logic, apart from philosophical issues about time we will focus on the treatment of temporal aspects of natural language in formal linguistics. For deontic logic, we will especially focus on strategies for the solution of paradoxes related to the system of standard deontic logic. 
 

This course examines the philosophy OF film, the philosophy IN film, and philosophy AS film. The course includes film theory, philosophy in films as abstract ideas and arguments, and has a different film genre each week to review.

This course introduces the essential concepts and techniques of critical reasoning, formal propositional logic, and basic predicate logic. Among the central questions are these: what distinguishes an argument from a mere rhetorical ploy? What makes an argument a good one? How can we formally prove that a conclusion follows from some premises? In addressing these questions, students also cover topics such as argumentative fallacies, ambiguity, argument forms and analyses, induction versus deduction, counterexamples, truth-tables, truth-trees (tableaux), natural deduction, and quantification.

This course mainly explains Plato's dialogue (Fido and Socrates' Defense) and Descartes' First Collection of Philosophy and other classic Western philosophical texts, so that students can understand the way philosophers explore the world order and the inherent tension of philosophical life. 

This course introduces students to the relations between philosophy and theology in thought about God, with particular attention to the Western tradition from Plato to the present, including themes in metaphysics and epistemology. It examines traditional and revisionary approaches to thinking about the reality of God, and the interplay of claims that God is both knowable and ultimately beyond comprehension.

This course teaches students certain key literary texts and the philosophical topics they explore. It also allows students to explore certain key conceptual issues concerning the relations between philosophy and literature. Topics include: what is the distinctive contribution that literature and philosophy each make towards an understanding of religion and morality in the broadest senses of these terms? Are there topics which can best be understood from a philosophical, rather than literary, point of view, or vice versa? What kinds of critical concepts does one need in exploring philosophical, alternatively, literary texts? Can one even speak of texts as "literary" and "philosophical" in such a broad-brush way? And, most importantly, what are the respective contributions of philosophy and literature to a humane education? There is no requirement to read foreign language texts in the original languages, but students are encouraged to do so if possible.

This course explores the opportunities and threats presented through cyberculture in our information society. It discusses the possibilities and limitations of improving living conditions inherent to scientific-technological development. This course analyzes the links between technology, law, philosophy, and social interests of the groups that promote and develop it. Topics include: the new information economy; human rights on the internet; expansion of beliefs, fundamentalism, and political phenomena such as populism via social networks; the new digital economy.

This course provides a general overview of how the relationship between thought, knowledge and feeling (judgment of the beautiful or the sublime) is considered in modern Western philosophy. By learning to distinguish not only between thought and knowledge but also between cognitive judgment and aesthetic judgment, students are expected to become capable of reflecting critically on their own presupposed knowledge and discovering the role of imagination.

This class will focus on the topic of "how to understand the traditional Taijiquan", and both philosophical and practical perspectives will be discussed by mind and felt by body. On the philosophical side, the Taijiquan's special concepts (inner Qi - inner energy), methods("If you feel comfortable then you are right"), thinking way (forget yourself and just follow your opponent), theory system (get a will by your mind, get Qi by your will, to move by your Qi ) will be discussed to show a panoramic view of traditional Taijiquan, which also with the comparative discussion between Chinese "Gongfu (kung fu) philosophy" and western philosophy.