Philosophy

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.

Trust is a central part of our daily lives as social and rational animals: we trust friends and partners, experts, and our devices; sometimes we even say that our devices trust other devices. But what is trust? What is it good for, and under what conditions? When is trust warranted? How is trusting agents different from trusting artifacts or institutions? Our readings and discussions will range widely, covering the significance of trust for our lives in general but especially for inquiry, drawing from psychological literature on trust, extending to applied questions, and comparing trust with similar things such as faith, reliance, and the ancient Greek concept of pistis (together with a discussion in Plato of misology as a disease of trust).

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 topics for this course differ each term. In spring 2024, the course focused on a close reading of selections from Niccolò Machiavelli’s major works. This course focuses on the major topics, ideas, problems, and authors of Western Political Philosophy and its history. The course introduces an advanced level of reading, analyzing, and deep understanding of key themes and concepts in the Western tradition of political philosophy. The course develops strong skills in critical reading, including describing and analyzing the conceptual framework of and the specific historiographical debates on some of the major texts in the field, in their historical and cultural context. The course also focuses on Machiavelli's historical background and influence. The course pays particularly detailed attention to the questions of power, violence, ontology’s relationship with politics, and Machiavelli’s reading of his classical and medieval sources.

The course begins with a simple system called sentential or propositional logic, which despite its simplicity captures a significant range of important arguments. The course then focuses on (first-order) predicate logic, which is much more powerful and provides the logical basis for analysing a great variety of arguments and theories.

This course traces the conception of authentic existence in the works of thinkers from the Existentialist tradition, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and Copenhagen’s own Søren Kierkegaard. Among other things, the course observes how ethical thinking has moved from the language of duty to that of personal answerability, and how the search for meaningful personal existence has increasingly become the responsibility of the individual. The unique vocabulary of these authors appears not only in works of philosophy, theology, and psychology, but also literature and theater, which illustrates that we understand ourselves via the stories we tell, and that these narratives are necessarily told in dialogue with “the Other,” our fellow human beings.

The technological advances associated with Virtual Reality (VR), as well as its close cousins such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Extended Reality (XR), represent a fundamental shift in how humans experience the digital realm. Using devices such as VR-headsets, we can now access digital environments full of computer-generated simulations in a way that allows for a more intuitive kind of interactive experience than is typically afforded by more familiar uses of computers. In recent years, via devices such as the Oculus Rift, VR-technology has become increasingly accessible in the home and it is anticipated to become even more ubiquitous in the near future.

This class aims to examine a range of philosophical questions associatedwith VR. As we shall see, VR gives us new ways to both articulate classic philosophical problems and also to sharpen those problems. The relevant philosophical questions are wide-ranging, encompassing topics in epistemology (“Can you know you are not in a virtual world?”), metaphysics (“Are virtual worlds real?”), and value theory (“Can you live a good life in a virtual world?”). In examining these issues, we will focus on David Chalmers’ (2022) treatment of VR in his pioneering book Reality+, where Chalmers argues for a range of bold answers to these questions (and others): that we cannot know that we are not in a virtual world, that virtual worlds are just as real as non-virtual worlds, and that it is possible to lead a meaningful and valuable life in a virtual reality. By the end of the class, students will not only have been introduced to many of the most central philosophical problems, but will have further evaluated both the ways in which technology can shed light on old problems in philosophy and the ways in which philosophy can shed light on new problems about technology.