Philosophy

This course introduces how games serve as a medium for communicating philosophical ideas. The course answers questions such as what is freedom? Are moral dilemmas possible? and What is reality? Equally, philosophy can shed light on the nature of games. For instance, can games be art? What is skill and luck? What is the nature of artificial intelligence? This course serves to explore some of these issues, using games and philosophical texts in tandem to explore various issues about what it is to be a human, and what it is to be a gamer.

This course provides a pluralistic introduction to philosophy and education though a broad survey of the diverse philosophical perspectives, problems, and approaches to education and educational research around the world.

This course surveys the history of Indian philosophy both classical and modern. The course begins with lectures on the Rig Veda and the Upanishads, followed by a presentation of the main metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of some of the major schools of classical Indian philosophy such as Vedanta, Samkhya, Nyaya, Jainism, and Buddhism. The course concludes by considering the philosophical contributions of some of the architects of modern India such as Rammohan Ray, Rabindrananth Tagore, and Mohandas Gandhi.

This course develops students’ familiarity with modern philosophy through an examination of the thought of Spinoza and Leibniz. Students are introduced to the central metaphysical, epistemological, and moral claims of each philosopher, through a reading of primary texts. They develop an appreciation of the historical context within which the thought of Spinoza and Leibniz developed. The course examines the similarities and differences between these two crucial thinkers in the modern period, and set out their approaches to topics such as the nature of substance, knowledge, and morality.

This course examines the rise of humanitarianism as a dominant way in which both powerful and weak actors conceptualize and respond to a range of social problems and processes, such as political conflict, emancipation, poverty, and migration. This is core terrain for anthropology, because the figure of the human lies at the center of humanitarian discourses and forms of action.  In this course we historicize humanitarianism and ethnographically investigate the possibilities and limits of humanitarian frameworks and action as ways of confronting the challenges that face our world.

This course takes a geographical approach to some of the world’s most complex moral issues. It gives students the chance to explore a range of moral questions from a geographical perspective. Arguably a geographical perspective, which embraces knowledge from other disciplines and not only its own, is well-placed to "join the dots" and grapple with the complexity of the world as it is, not how we want it to be. It explores these complex issues using a multi-scalar, place-sensitive approach, embracing not only key geographical thinkers, but also philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists. 

In this course, students explore the origins of Western philosophy by examining the thoughts and ideas of ancient Greek thinkers. In the first part of the course, the main ideas and theories of pre-Socratic philosophers regarding the natures of reality, soul, and knowledge are  discussed. During the next two parts of the course, the main ideas of Plato and Aristotle are discussed in more detail. Through analysis of some of their major works, students examine their views on some of the most important issues in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Most of the reading materials of the course are from primary sources whose translations are available in English.

This course performs micro-genealogies of various strands of “practical philosophy” and “philosophical practice,” both ancient and modern, to rethink how philosophy can provide the conceptual tools needed to tarry with the complexities of individual and social life. It addresses questions such as what is happiness and the good life; at what expense do we find happiness; what are the conditions for freedom; and how to engage with death, illness, and finitude. This course critically examines how happiness has been imagined in the past and the present, from virtue and duty to wellness and bliss.

Are time and space substances, or is there nothing more to them than the relations between objects or events? How is time different from space? Does time have a direction? If it does, what gives it its direction? If it doesn't, why does it seem to us that it does? Does space have a direction? This course investigates the nature of time and space and objects (including persons) within space and time.