Philosophy

This course constructs a philosophical framework for the interdisciplinary examination of gender. Against a historical outline of the development of contemporary gender studies, it examines biological, sociological, and psychological perspectives on gender. These theoretical perspectives are put into discussion with ethical issues concerning sexuality, self hood, personal identity, and autonomy. The course develops skills to make sense of the interdisciplinary examination of gender and discuss the historical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of what it means to exist with a gender identity. It provides a philosophical foundation for thinking critically about the complexity of human experience of gender. The most important elements of this philosophical foundation are a sense of history, conceptual clarity, and an understanding of interdisciplinary methodology. 

This course examines the modern Japanese sense of cultural, social and national identity, as analyzed by social scientists, cultural historians, and scholars of Japanese thought. Topics include famous studies of the Japanese self by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and socio-linguists, supplemented by a historical perspective focusing on the samurai heritage and the ideas behind the Meiji Restoration. Japanese language is not required.

This course offers in-depth analysis and discussion concerning key texts from the history of aesthetics and addresses current debates in aesthetic theory. Issues covered include the beautiful and the sublime, classicism and romanticism, tragedy and the absurd, modernism and post-modernity.

This course offers contemplative reading and discussion of the works of Copenhagen’s most radical author, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard's thoughts about the struggle for meaning take us through unusual philosophical territory. His works—which are as novelistic as they are philosophical—treat themes like the existential meaning of anxiety and despair, beauty and boredom, humor and seriousness, the sicknesses and health of the soul, the joy and pain of embodiment, and, finally, commitment and love.

In this course, students engage with the major metaphysical systems of Western philosophy, examining how each coordinates subjective experience with objective reality. Philosophers include Plato, Kant, and Mill. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course focuses on different ways of writing about politics through critical analysis. Topics include: the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns; power in suspense and the vertigo of democracy; the literary genres of political thought; philosophy of history and political philosophy; philosophy, politics, and religion in contemporary Spain; totalitarianism and democracy.

The first half of the course explores classic epistemology. It begins with the argument for skepticism about the external world, and in seeking to solve this problem considers a range of positions and arguments in epistemology, including: the JTB account; the causal theory of knowing; reliabilism; internalism and externalism; contextualism, and semantic externalism. The second half of the course focuses on modern formal epistemology. Moving from a qualitative to a quantitative concept of belief, it explores Bayesian epistemology – a powerful account of rational degrees of belief or credence. Students consider a series of puzzles for Bayesian epistemologists: the sleeping beauty problem; imprecise probabilities; awareness growth; and the surprise exam paradox. 

At the zenith of the civil rights movement in the USA and de-colonizing movements in Africa, the Carribean  and Asia, just prior to the advent of second wave feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, and other social movements linking political liberation to embodied physical differences, something new was born. There arose a new vision of the body as precisely the obverse of how we now consider it—a single, universal human body shared by all, ungendered, unraced, unsexed. This new body-in-common, unmarked even by such core physical differences as biological sex, became legible as radically dissident under a new political ideology that has thus far largely escaped historical attention: Eros. As a potent challenge to a number of repressive orthodoxies, not least capitalism, Eros was also, perhaps not surprisingly, a central theme in a number of art works of the period, from Carolee Schneemann’s nude performances to Claes Oldenburg’s erotic public sculpture, Yayoi Kusama’s immersive environments, Helio Oticica’s Tropicales and Kenneth Anger’s films. This course examines the relationship among art, sex, gender and revolution from the vantage point of Eros’ brief historical moment, a vista now largely obscured by our contemporary fixation on a politics of social distinction and bodily difference. Reading the work of Herbert Marcuse, Susan Sontag, Norman O Brown and others, we will also study the art, film and performance of such key figures as Yoko Ono, Jack Smith, Franz Erhardt Walters and Rebecca Horn.  As such, this period constitutes both the theoretical prehistory of the sexual revolution, as well as perhaps the defining episode in our ongoing transubstantiation of flesh into politics.

This course explores questions concerning personal identity and transformation raised by the two Golden-Age writers who hold a pivotal position in Danish cultural heritage: Hans Christian Andersen and Soren Kierkegaard. The course treats the question of searching for one's identity and themes of self-examination, self-definition, inner exploration, as well as understanding one's values, belief's, passions, and purpose in life. Through the works of Andersen and Kierkegaard, these themes are explored in their connection to cultural, social, emotional, and personal dimensions. The course considers how, though both writers are intimately connected to their contemporary society, there is something in their works that far surpasses the limits of the national and historical consciousness to which they adhere, and extend to a wider, global, and modern consciousness. It examines what it is in their writings that merits such a prolonged actuality and such an extensive, modern appeal. Through a vast proliferation of conceptual, fictive, and allegorical narratives, Andersen and Kierkegaard outline a map for the individual to navigate a path toward self-realization, without giving any definite directions nor any fixed points of orientation.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. The course provides in-depth knowledge of how the Italian literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance evolved, with particular reference to the texts that profoundly influenced the subsequent literature and culture, so confirming the canon. The course explains how to best analyze texts, reading them with a critical eye and relating them to various temporal and social-cultural periods. Specifically, this course focuses on the works of Dante Alighieri, which are a landmark of both the Italian and the European medieval literary canon, and have exercised a paramount influence on the Western cultural tradition as a whole. The course introduces a selection of crucial themes and episodes from the Commedia and other minor works. Lectures and seminars explore the context of late medieval Italian culture and society in which Dante's oeuvre has been produced, and examine its afterlife and significance for modern literature and visual culture.