Philosophy

The course aims to philosophically analyze series and films in order to develop critical thinking in light of their content and the issues they address within the scope of philosophical reflection. Students analyze fragments of representative films or series of pop culture and explain the philosophical aspects of the topics covered in them. Students acquire tools that allow them to analyze, question, and understand the meaning and relevance of the issues addressed in these cultural products.

In recent years, academic misconduct has occurred frequently, partly due to a lack of understanding of relevant ethics and norms among researchers. To address this, Fudan University has launched a specialized course on bioethics, filling a gap in this field in mainland China. The course aims to help students plan their research paths, adhere to fundamental ethical principles, and become honest, responsible, and creative researchers who enjoy their work. It also teaches them how to contribute to human civilization while protecting their intellectual achievements. The course is divided into nine main sections and employs a teaching approach that combines case studies, discussions, and instructor summaries to guide students in deeply understanding and practically applying the course content.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the course, students master some of the main notions of philosophical aesthetics in order to use them as tools to account for contemporary phenomena in which the aesthetic plays a crucial role on the cultural and experiential levels. Students acquire a good degree of autonomy in analyzing aesthetic-philosophical texts concerning discussions carried out over the last few decades. In particular, the course stresses topics and problems that have emerged more recently in the international discourse and that pertain to the nexus between the experiential dimension, the elaboration of expressive languages, and the formal and design-related articulations taking place within the field of the aesthetics. The aim of the course is to reflect on the (dis-)continuity and the (a-)symmetry between the conceptual-theoretical and the operative-experiential levels, and thus contribute to the development of a critical and non-dogmatic attitude toward the contemporary horizon that characterizes the aesthetic.

The course addresses a category which has traditionally been either problematic for, or foreign to, aesthetics: function. The course shows that, when understood as something operative and transformative and not merely contemplative and conservative, the aesthetic possesses an inherent functional character. Aesthetic function is dealt with through different philosophical perspectives, ranging from pragmatism to critical theory, to the more recent everyday aesthetics.

This course discusses political philosophy in general and the conception of justice in particular. The most prominent issues in political philosophy are ethical and political controversies as there are various theories proposed throughout history to solve them. In ethical and political theories, nothing is more important than the explication of justice. The conception of Justice is extremely complicated that it has become a subject of philosophy since its beginning in the world of ancient Greece.  

This course addresses justice as a virtue due to the following three characteristics:  

1. It is the only virtue that needs others to admit is validity; there is no concept of justice to be defined by any person alone. 
2. It is a perennial issue in political philosophy. The debates about justice have lasted more than 2500 years. 

3. It has been an issue in philosophy without a definite solution or even improvement. 

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. At the end of the course, the student has a clear understanding of the main problems of contemporary epistemology and a detailed knowledge of some of the views that shape current debates on the structure of epistemic justification, the skeptical paradoxes and the interplay between evidential and pragmatic factors in ascriptions of knowledge. The student will have built up an ability to reconstruct and critically evaluate the arguments offered in support of competing epistemological views.

This course introduces three kinds of genealogical arguments – neutral, vindicatory, and debunking – acquiring a clear understanding of the logical structure and epistemic force of each of them. The first series of lectures addresses the 'state of nature' theory by which Edward Craig attempts to illuminate some key concepts and problems of epistemology. The second series of lectures covers Bernard Williams' vindicatory genealogy of the intrinsic value of the virtues associated with truth, namely, sincerity and accuracy. And the third series of lectures tackles the genealogical arguments by which Nietzsche and other philosophers attempt to debunk our moral concepts and beliefs.

This course introduces students to ethical issues, arguments, and disagreements. The course covers contemporary and historical ideas about morality and explores 1) what attitude is to be taken, 2) which factors are morally relevant, 3) how to apply philosophical reasoning. 

Students examine various ethical topics and schools of thought related to how people should act and live.  Students explore moral reasoning that philosophers have discovered (or made explicit) in the course of daily lives, how conflicts between them occur, and how we sometimes fail.   

Topics include characteristics of moral reasoning, responses to subjective or relativistic morality, basic moral theories and principles, analyses, and evaluation of arguments. 

The course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities, providing insight into this dynamic and emerging area and demonstrating how to integrate humanities subjects and perspectives into other domains of research and policy. Through a series of case studies (e.g., what can be learned from literature, history, and philosophy about climate change, the human relationship with nature, and the role of emotions in sustainability debates), the course offers basic knowledge on how to broaden, understand, and critically examine environmental issues and sustainability efforts.

This course introduces philosophical ethics. It studies in depth three classic works that defined the discipline: John Stuart Mill‘s Utilitarianism, Aristotle‘s Nicomachean Ethics, and Kant‘s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Students also read modern works that expand on, employ, or criticize these classics.

What are people asking for when they say they want freedom? The class begins by considering what it means to be free. Is a person free when they can act without being interfered with? Or does freedom require abundant options? Or independence from the will of others? Then the class turns to the social aspect inherent in the initial question. When people demand freedom, they usually don’t just want it for themselves; they want freedom for everyone. The second part of the course explores the conditions in a free society. Is a society free when it’s members can act as they choose, compatibly with everyone else doing likewise? Or must a society provide its members with more or different freedoms? A particular emphasis is placed on the sources of, problems with, and responses to unfreedom.