Philosophy

This course examines the meaning and value of happiness, and the role it plays in making our lives go well for us. It covers a wide range of theories and arguments about what makes lives go well for the people living them including hedonism, desire satisfaction, eudaimonic, and objective list theories.

This course explores the possibility of religious conviction in a secularized world. Questions like these are central: In a world in which religious narratives and doctrines strike the contemporary mind as unbelievable as history or scientific explanation, upon what might the modern, educated person base religious convictions? Are religious sensibilities ultimately expressions of a deep sense of morality? Is the religious attitude better described as a feeling or intuition for the infinite behind the finite world? Is personal religious conviction based on experience of the divine? Is contemporary faith an intellectually indefensible but nonetheless hopeful subjective decision to adopt religious traditions and doctrines? The course follows the evolution of religious thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much of which argues that religion should avoid the distorting demand of justifying itself solely in terms of rationality and that it ought to consider the volitional and experiential aspects of religious life, as well. It develops a critical appreciation of the development of religious thought, with a particular focus on the significance of religious experience, based on a study of a handful of highly influential texts by authors such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, as well as Copenhagen’s most famous philosophical mind, Søren Kierkegaard.

This course highlights how luck has influenced and still influences several aspects of the world we live in. From the beginning of the universe, to our present-day lives, to the end of the universe, random events beyond anyone's control continue to shape our fate. By exploring the various fields that luck manifests itself in, the course ultimately delves into the intriguingly precarious nature of existence.

This course introduces five mainstream Chinese philosophical thoughts of Confucianism, Mohism, law, Taoism and Buddhism, and reflects on the theoretical gains and losses of traditional thoughts and contemporary significance from a critical perspective.

This course examines the historical beginnings of philosophy, especially (though not exclusively) in ancient Greece, and the developments some of its early forms underwent over the succeeding centuries within those traditions. It is also about how those philosophical traditions conceived of beginnings themselves: the beginnings of the world, its primary elements, and the first principles of philosophical enquiry.

This course examines the possibility and sources of our knowledge of other people’s and our own mental lives. The course begins with the classic mid-20th century debate on the "problem of other minds," and its development in more recent debates in cognitive science over mindreading. The course then turns to look at self-knowledge. The course considers introspection models, transparency approaches, and inferentialism. Finally the course discusses the phenomena of sexual objectification, hermeneutical injustice, and the social construction and regulation of emotion, and consider their relation to the themes of the course.

The course is aimed to introduce the basic concept of logic and teachs how to reason things in the world correctly. Two important parts of this course are to talk about deductive reasoning and to teach student to separate the concepts of cognitive language and emotional language.