Philosophy

This course asks and answers the question "what are data, and how do they come to be?" The story of data reveals the moral and political values that shape human practices of counting, measuring, and labelling reality, and helps us better understand the growing power of data in today's world. Designed to engage students across the disciplines, this introductory course offers a foundational integration of basic concepts and methods of data science with the historical and philosophical context that reveals their ethical and political dimensions as inseparable from their scientific value. The course draws from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, mathematics, computer science, and the design arts to build up a more comprehensive picture of how data are constructed, interpreted, shared, and used for a growing range of scientific, commercial, public and creative purposes.

This course examines questions such as whether gender matters on the internet; how patriarchy, misogyny, and racism get coded into our digital tools; and if a feminist internet is possible. It engages with feminist scholarship from sociology, communication, and technology studies to discuss key theories about the relationship between technology, power, and gender and consider how they are applied to describe various digital pursuits – from Instagram influencer labor to Google searches to data visualizations. The course investigates how feminist theory makes sense of our digital and technologically mediated world. The last third of the course pivots to reviewing feminism put into practice by communities of technologists, designers, and data scientists.

This course deals with some important metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical questions by looking to philosophers from the ancient Greek tradition. 

This course uncovers a European history about love that has shaped the present in untold ways. It follows love on various historical stages – from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages, the romantic era, the post-romantic period, and into the present – and pays close attention to the stories we have told ourselves about love. Our love stories reveal that we conceive of the human condition as desiring, striving, and longing, but also as avoiding reality and the concrete commitments that tie us to finitude. The course reads responses to this escapism in the form of a moral call to respond to the other, also when this means respecting difference and the other’s independence. Throughout, it provides tools for thinking seriously about love today.

This course examines major events and cycles of Western culture. It identifies the various stages (synchronic perspective) that have constituted Western material culture and, broadly speaking, some historical epochs of Western civilization through its humanistic, religious, artistic, and scientific products. The course imparts the technical, symbolic, artistic, and religious keys (diachronic perspective) that determine the values of Western culture through the interpretation of certain cultural formations. It covers cultures of antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance to modernity, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The course provides an overview of key milestones in the history of philosophy, from classical Greece to contemporary thought, and analyzes its connection with religious thought in its various historical manifestations.

This course examines central issues in metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. It opens with general questions about reality, God, personal identity and free will. The middle section of the unit will consider questions about values, goodness and responsibility. The final part is concerned with the question "what is art", the nature of aesthetic judgment and the role of art in our lives.

Dao 道 (sometimes written Tao) means path or road and extends to mean methods and principles. It has a broad range of usage across different schools, most obviously philosophical and religious Daoism. In this research group, we will be reading and discussing selections from the foundational texts of Daoism, the Laozi (also known as Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi, and their direct historical and current reception. We will read texts of both religious and philosophical Daoism. Reading suggestions from participants are welcome. This research group is open to interested bachelor’s and master’s students of all disciplines. Prior engagement with Chinese philosophy is welcome but not required, as we will be starting with the foundational texts.

Students are constantly challenged by ethical dilemmas: about the future use of technology and artificial intelligence; about the possibilities of genetic and biomedical engineering; about the culture and behavior of global financial institutions; about who decides who should pay for what; about the environment, about migration, about political leadership. Citizens of a democratic society need to make ethically informed decisions about these issues.  The EthicsLab is an innovative way to explore ethical issues, where students learn from professors in different subjects across the university, and engage with leading thinkers about how the major global challenges can be addressed.  Students debate the importance of values and their prioritization, ethical biases and blind-spots, intentions and consequences, and they do this in a lab-environment where everyone is involved in designing solutions for the ethical issues of the day. 

This course introduces students to a range of problems, positions, and arguments in the philosophy of mind - the philosophical study of mental phenomena and their relation to the rest of reality. The first half of term focuses on the mind-body problem - in particular the Problem of Consciousness. The theme for the second half of term is Self and Other - Where am I? Where is my mind? Can I know the minds of others?