Philosophy

This course covers key Concepts of Hermeneutics: Dialogue, Fusion of Horizons, Crossover, 2nd Person, and Naturalism and Deconstructionism. This course is a survey of the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, which make up most of what is known as hermeneutics, or the philosophy of interpretation. 

This course is an introduction to Chinese Classics.
The core content of this course is texts of Zhuang Zi inner 7 chapters.
Through analyzing the texts of the Classic, let students understand the texts of Zhuang Zi and his system of philosophy.

This course explores the main problems, themes, and foundations of political aesthetics, particularly the tense and diffuse relationship between aesthetics and politics.

This course explores one or more key issues in Value Theory through the close reading of two or more central works by key historical thinkers in the area and by the critical analysis of the ideas and arguments these works present. The course also introduces students to some of the key secondary literature on the relevant texts and consider how the ideas presented in these texts relate to each other and to issues in the modern philosophical debate.

This course provides both a first contact with the law and a critical reflection on it. It takes certain generalizations about the law that are often encountered in philosophy, politics, or economics, and shows that what may seem obvious is in fact more complex. Rather than presenting what the law is supposed to be or do, the course reveals its paradoxes by constructing problems dialectically. Course readings are chosen by preference from the corpus of philosophy and art (literature, cinema) to provide material for reflection and discussion that is common and interesting to all. It also addresses a few points of legal theory and technique to demonstrate the complexity of the issues and the difficulty of finding non-simplistic solutions. In all cases, the choice of texts demonstrates the diversity, even contrariness, of the opinions expressed and the theories elaborated, to avoid confirming unquestioned convictions.

This course explores the origin of quantum physics within the philosophical, historical, scientific, and socio-political framework of the 20th century. It discusses the interpretative problems of quantum mechanics, the possible solutions within its philosophical framework, and the consequences of the quantum revolution for the logic of the living and our conception of the world.

This course introduces students to key thinkers and ideas in the history of western philosophy. Since ancient philosophy is so central to this history, the first half of the course is devoted to some of its most important achievements in the work of the pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. Attention is then turned to aspects of medieval philosophy, and the great rationalist and empiricist traditions of modern philosophy. Lectures are also offered on Nietzsche, and the American Pragmatists. 

This course reviews and discusses the history of the notion of philosophy (as tetsugaku) within the history of modern Japan. In doing so, difficult questions relating to the very notion of philosophy itself will be asked. What is philosophy and what can make it “Japanese”? Is all philosophy done on Japanese shores “Japanese philosophy”? Otherwise, are there certain core or essential characteristics that make philosophy Japanese? In tackling these questions, the course seeks to learn more about the history of philosophical thought in modern Japan and seeks to reach a deeper understanding of the notion of philosophy itself. 

This course introduces various types of linguistic mechanisms and ways of thinking that can be harmful or defective. It considers pejorative terms that are used to denigrate other people based on their social identity, such as race, ethnic group, nationality, religious group, and sexual orientation. The course also discusses issues related to conceptual ethics, which considers concepts that are not the most useful for describing reality and how to revise or modify them to achieve different theoretical or practical objectives. Finally, the course examines the mechanism of silencing, which consists of speech acts aimed at incapacitating the audience from performing certain types of speech acts, altering the meaning of their words or the type of actions they can perform with them.