Philosophy

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. 

In this course, students are introduced to current philosophical debates about the nature of mind and its place in the natural world. Prominent theories of the mind are considered with particular attention paid to their capacity to capture the first-personal, the apparently private, and experientially rich nature of mental life.

The course offers an overview of Western philosophy and analyses the questions treated in its main branches. This course studies the Greeks as the founders of the Western philosophical tradition, key texts, and ideas relating to Presocratic philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, emphasizing on metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and of the soul.  The course covers the medieval era through the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, emphasizing on his use of an Aristotelian approach to metaphysical notions of substance and soul, as well as his arguments for the existence of God. The study of modern philosophy focuses on Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein. In this part of the course, students explore the views of these thinkers on questions like: What is knowledge, and is it possible? How is the mind related to the body? What is meant by virtue ethics? What is the relation between language and the world?

This course examines the utopian, dystopian, and ambivalent implications of artificial intelligence. Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies, students will study how bodies, subjectivity, life, households, work, and the environment are being transformed by technoscience and artificial intelligence. It will investigate how artificial intelligence, and technoscience more broadly, blurs the boundaries between humans and machines to equip students with the knowledge and skills to critically analyze historical, social, ethical, economic, and philosophical implications of past, present, and emerging technologies. Topics may include cyborgs, biotechnologies, pharmaceuticals, cyberspace, surveillance, and technosolutionism.

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 offers students the philosophical and critical theoretical tools to analyze the complex phenomenon of violence by exploring the contemporary field of the Environmental Post humanities. Assembling perspectives from contemporary feminist and political philosophy with environmental post humanist approaches, violence here is examined as an (im)material socio-political phenomenon that is impacted by categories such as gender, race/ethnicity, dis/ability, class, sexuality, age, and others and the societal power relations that have been engendered by these – and other intersecting – categories. The course focuses on the analysis of eco-violence, the more-than-human, and processes of de/humanization.

This course explores the relationship between religion and violence through a close reading of one of the foundational texts for the understanding of this relationship - R. Girard's Violence and the Sacred. The course analyzes this text, while examining criticisms or developments of Girard's thought from William Cavanaugh, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Coakley, and John Milbank. 

This course provides an introduction to philosophical issues in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. These include questions such as: What is the relation between the mind and the material world? Is the mind a part of the scientific, law-governed material world? If so, can I really act freely? If the mind is part of the material world, how could a material thing be conscious? What, fundamentally, are material things and their properties? What is it for one event to cause another? What is time, and what is change? How can physical objects persist through change? Can a person persist through time and change and still be the same person?