Philosophy

This course is devoted to the notion of freedom as it is thought of in philosophy. The first part of the course focuses on the ancient idea of freedom as opposed to slavery, or as free will (as in Saint Augustine) to provide the sources from which modern reflections on freedom have been drawn, especially in German idealism. The course then follows the evolution of theories of freedom from Kant, Hegel, and Schelling to Isaiah Berlin, Sartre, Butler, and Axel Honneth, and to the re-emergence of the question of slavery in contemporary thought. An important part of the course is devoted to an in-depth study of F.G.J. Schelling's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO HUMAN FREEDOM (1809) to confront a seemingly difficult text with the keys to understanding the complex intellectual edifices that underpin our modern vision of freedom.

This course examines the question of the good life as it surfaces in key texts from Continental philosophy, with particular focus on human freedom and the search for meaning, fulfilment, and happiness. The course explores the works of European thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, and Camus, who shared an insight into the existential conditions of despair, anxiety, and meaninglessness, seeing these trials as occasions to examine how we live. With them, the course invokes inquiry into relationships, activities, and commitments; considers the importance of personal responsibility and active engagement; and discusses whether freedom is key to the good life, and, if so, the freedom to do what? The course may not discover the secret to happiness, but does partake in an age-old pilgrimage in search of the good life.

This course is designed to deal with a variety of topics in epistemology – the philosophical study of knowledge. The curriculum varies from year to year. Topics include theories of knowledge; theories of justification or warrant; skepticism; contextualism; and sources of knowledge: perception, memory, introspection, testimony.

This course examines the ambivalent role of digital technologies in our societies and questions our future by questioning their relevance. It first considers where we come from and how the pre-web world prepared us for this new reality, notably through science fiction. It then invites us to understand what is happening in our daily lives by deciphering the announced technological advances and their effects on reality. Finally, the course imagines a horizon that seems most desirable for all.

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.