Philosophy

This course introduces students to contemporary feminist ideas and key feminist debates, specifically feminist legal theory. The course illustrates the ideas by focusing on specific campaigns that relate to women and girls’ human rights and gender justice in both Irish national and global arenas. The course focuses on some important areas of contention, debate, and power struggles to see how feminist approaches to legal issues are deployed in important campaigns relating to: reproductive justice; prostitution/sex work; lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) issues; and redress and restorative justice for survivors of trauma and abuse relating to gender violence. Through case studies the course offers an introduction to feminist concepts and to international conventions relevant to gender justice such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), United Nations Conventions on Human Rights and relevant Security Council Resolutions as well the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the Yogyarkarta Principles. The case studies are also used to introduce and illustrate key concepts of feminist legal theorists such as Martha Fineman, Catharine MacKinnon, Suan Moller Okin, Martha Nussbaum, and Janet Halley.

When you talk to ChatGPT, does it talk back? Does it really understand, or is it just a sophisticated sort of autocomplete? When DALL*E makes an image from your description, in the style of an author you like, is it plagiarizing that artist? Could a machine be conscious? Will AI revolutionize the economy? These are among the most interesting questions to ask at the moment. In this class, we'll ask them. We'll take a tour through 70 or so years of philosophical thought about artificial intelligence, from Turing to OpenAI, learning the concepts and theories that have been used to make sense of artificial intelligence. In the first part of the course, we'll look at more 'technical' material, about the nature of meaning and mind; in the second part, we'll turn to applied ethical and social issues. 

This course explores the relationship between Transcendentalism and women's rights, family relations, and perceptions of childhood and education. It draws almost exclusively on writings from the period.

An individual project on the ethics of nature.

This course is intended for students who wish to gain an introduction to Indian philosophy that looks carefully at the high standard of logic, epistemology, metaphysics and linguistics that grounded the various philosophical systems. The course examines the schools of Mīmāmsā, Sānkhya, Nyāya and Vaiśeshika, and assesses their defence against attacks from the schools of Buddhism, Jainism, and Advaita Vedānta. The examination of these schools makes use of translations of the primary texts and focuses upon the vigorous debate over conceptual analysis and argumentative strategies by which the schools presented their philosophical positions, defended them against attacks by other schools, and mounted in turn their own attacks.

This course takes its title from a series of letters and papers that Dietrich Bonhoeffer composed while imprisoned in Berlin from 1943-1945. The theological questions posed by Bonhoeffer in these personal letters will set the tone for this course, as well as its overall aims. Specifically, those aims are to identify and to critically assess a variety of challenges that have been posed against religious thought and belief by the rapid development of secular culture and its rising influence in the modern, Western world. In doing so, this course will explore a wide range of political, social, and personal/existential ideas and provocations that theologians, philosophers, and religious thinkers have been made to confront in this “world come of age”.

This course discusses the intercultural relationship between philosophy and communication. It has the form of a two-sided program that reflects the observation that, in the intercultural context, communication and philosophy are in fact two sides of the same coin. The first side approaches the phenomenon of communication between cultures from a philosophical point of view. Not only the possibility and appearance of communication between civilizations are debated but also the typical philosophical mindsets and attitudes of the different cultures are addressed. The second side relates this all to the question of how to understand, describe, and evaluate the meeting between world philosophies as a phenomenon of intercultural communication. The general framework of the discussion is delivered by some classical models that were developed within the Theory of Communication. They function as tools that enable one to understand why and how culturally dissimilar philosophies can influence the process of intercultural communication and why and how the form and appearance of this kind of communication can or should be regarded as a kind of intercultural philosophy itself.

Moral Psychology is a field of study between philosophy and psychology that studies human functioning in Moral contexts and the way this has an impact in ethical theory. This course is an Introduction to some of the main topics and methods in the field of Moral Psychology, including moral judgment, moral reasoning, moral responsibility and moral emotions.

Philosophers, and non-philosophers alike, have fought over the meanings, values and consequences of love and sexual desire from philosophy’s very beginning. The seminar addresses some of these controversial issues, their aporias and paradoxes, and encourages students to find their own interpretations and answers. We will discuss questions such as: Are there different forms of love? What are the differences, if any, between e.g. love and friendship? Is sex or sexual desire essential for love? Do we lose or find ourselves in love relationships? How do we change when we fall in love? Are we free or unfree when we are in a love relationship? How do power and love relate? How much aggressivity, hate and mastery are entailed in love bonds? The seminar will address these (and further) questions by concentrating on four models of love: (1) Love as union or fusion; (2) Love as knowledge; (3) Love as work on oneself; (4) Love as struggle. As conceptual basis for these models, two texts in particular will be read, analysed and discussed, an ancient one, Plato’s Symposium, and a modern one, which however draws upon ancient myths, Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea. The two texts will be studied in light of modern and contemporary insights and issues, as for example those raised by Hegel (and especially his master/slave figure), psychoanalysis, feminism, polyamory theory, and others. There will be space for students to (partially) participate in the articulation of the programme, and for practicing philosophy in some more ‘creative’ ways than usual (by for example staging philosophical theatrical scenes).