Philosophy

This course provides an introduction to interdisciplinarity and in particular, its role in breaking down traditional boundaries and creating new kinds of knowledge. The course addresses issues facing those conducting interdisciplinary work and look into how they play out in practice. Students examine how and why disciplines exist alongside issues that can impede the integration of different disciplinary perspectives through, for example, different conceptions of truth, power and evidence. The course combines this with looking at different ways of overcoming these issues including by means of '‘superconcepts."

This course is an introduction to continental philosophy, with special focuses on problems of experience, objectivity and value. The textbook is 'Introduction to Phenomenology' by Dermot Moran. Philosophers who discussed in this course include Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The course focuses on issues in applied ethics, the distinction between individual and public ethics, as well as the main debates in the field. Special attention is placed on the relationship between different approaches in moral philosophy (normative, virtue, and care ethics) and the multiple connections between moral reflection and cultural studies, political science, and humanities. Students are introduced to relevant literature in the field and the proper terminology in the field. The Spring 2022 topic is on Aristotle’s ethics, moral psychology, and, in particular, the physiology of moral development, the difference between natural and moral virtues, and the role of emotions in character formation.