Philosophy

This course examines some key issues relating to value and normativity, and explores some of the central themes within normative ethics, covering its historical underpinnings and contemporary debate. 

This course is an introduction to propositional logic and predicate logic. It acquaints students with the notions of logical consistency and logical validity, syllogisms, the languages of propositional logic and predicate logic, truth-tables for propositional, logic, and introduces the truth-tree method to check for logical validity of arguments and consistency of sets of sentences in both logics.

This course focuses on Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on technology as they developed post-war and increasingly became part of the French and European landscape. It examines Heidegger’s thoughts as well as those of others that debated in the 1940s and 1950s, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Hans Jonas and Arnold Gehlen; and current thinkers like Giorgio Agamben or Harmut Rosa. The course provides a critical reflection on technology, modernism, and the notion of progress.

This course first discusses seminal texts on labor and work from the history of philosophy, including, but not limited to, Marx, Weber, and Arendt. These readings provide an indispensable conceptual foundation. Subsequently, the course examines contemporary texts in normative political theory, critical theory, and philosophical anthropology that allow the course to discuss and assess pressing issues of labor and work under current social and economic conditions.

This course offers an introduction to philosophy. Topics include: truth and error; reality, language, and concepts; the concept of self; freedom, mind, and body; good and evil; justice and politics; beauty, experience, and wisdom; death and ultimate questions.

This course facilitates students in the formulation of their own, critically aware, understanding of the nature of law and its features. Students develop their ability to articulate a reasoned position on distinctive features of law and a legal system and on questions such as the relationship between law and morality, law’s legitimacy and function in a social order. Among topics that may be explored are the concept of law, the rule of law, authority, and connections between law and morality. 

Course goals

After successful completion of this course, the student has:
 
•          developed a critical understanding of theories and philosophies dealing with visuality and the hierarchy of the senses 
•          developed a critical understanding of theories of visual culture and the relation they has with the visual arts
•          practiced with making critical understanding of visual culture theories and theories, criticism and philosophies dealing with visuality, the senses and the hierarchy of the senses
 

Content

The aim of this course is to make students familiar with and learn them to look critically at theories of visuality and theories that consider the senses, the importance of sight and the anti-ocular impulse. Today sight seems to be the most importance sense in our culture. But has this, from a historical point of view, always been so? Which theories and philosophies have questioned the dominance of sight and why? How has modern and contemporary art dealt with its own historically grown inclinations towards the eye? We will be considering ideas developed by philosophers such as Rene Descartes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord; psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan and look at art from amongst others Gustave Courbet, impressionists, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Martin Kippenberger…