Philosophy

This course explores a selection of topics in Buddhist ethics, using a range of sources from historical contexts and contemporary debate. Themes include ecology and animal rights, human rights (including abortion, euthanasia, and issues of equality), war and peace, and economic ethics. The course begins with an introductory discussion of the foundations of Buddhist ethics, including ideas such as karma and rebirth, and key Buddhist virtues and ideals. Ethical topics are then explored in turn, using a range of sources from a variety of Buddhist contexts, historical and contemporary.

This course examines various ethical theories applied to various health care issues. It covers topics such as drug legalization, euthanasia, abortion, addiction, suicide and mental illness.  

The course takes its starting point in the recurrent discussion on how to manage risks and build security to avoid crises in organizations. The course provides the tools to understand risk management, taking into account perspectives from the social sciences, business administration, and the humanities.

This course is an introduction to political philosophy with a special focus on modern society. Students look at how various political theories of democracy have emerged since the 17th century, and how they are now modified and/or challenged by some contemporary authors. 

This course examines philosophical issues concerning knowledge and the mind. These include metaphysical questions about what minds are, such as whether the mind is something non-physical, and questions about what knowledge is and how (and whether) we can obtain it. We will also cover questions about the existence of god, the possibility of free will, and personal identity.

The objective of this course is to offer students a guided exploration of fundamental aspects of argumentation theory in some of its most relevant variants. It is about acquiring the ability to recognize the most important elements of the reasoning structures used in the community of philosophical inquiry.

This course explores various philosophical proposals that attempt to conceptually capture the activity of bullshitting and the mental state of those who engage in it. It addresses suggestions from the psychological debate related to the recipients of bullshit, focusing on the susceptibility to and the detection of bullshit. The focus of the seminar is on interdisciplinary discussion of the weekly seminar readings. Using Harry Frankfurt’s essay “On Bullshit,” questions include what is this phenomenon of misleading speech referred to as bullshit? How can bullshitting be distinguished from lying and deceiving? What are the bullshitter's goals? Who is particularly susceptible to falling for bullshit? And how can bullshit be recognized, exposed, or even overcome?

The extremes of human experience have been contemplated by Eastern and Western thinkers beyond traditional philosophic categories of logic, epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics in a movement we refer to as "existentialism". In this course, students explore Western existential philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Heidegger, as well as existential aspects of Asian philosophies such as Buddhism, Daoism, and the Kyoto School writings of Nishitani Keiji. Students also read the works of existential literary figures, such as Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus, Oe, or Kawabata.