Philosophy

This course provides students with a critical understanding of current and emerging ethical concerns in relation to the internet, big data, artificial Intelligence, and robotics, including issues such as privacy, online identity and relationships, and the role of robots in society. Philosophical reflection of core ethical concepts underlie the discussion of emerging concerns in the field. 

Students study aspects of Plato’s ethics, epistemology, moral psychology, political philosophy, meta-ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. They are studying parts of three dialogues: the Protagoras, the Theaetetus, and the Republic. The first two dialogues engage with a position that Plato found deeply unsettling: relativism. Protagoras’ relativism not only encompasses ethics and politics, but also pertains to epistemology and even metaphysics. In both domains, appearance is given a much stronger role than we would expect. The Republic contains a sustained argument to combat the ills of relativism and unenlightened self-interest by developing the blue-print of “the philosopher” whose understanding of the forms enables him or her to navigate the ship of state successfully towards the good.

This course presents world view, values, outlook on life, morality and the concept of the rule of law, to analyze and solve problems. The course provides understanding of the essence of the socialist rule of law system and the rule of law path with Chinese characteristics, to enhance the awareness of the rule of law, to develop the rule of law, to better exercise their legal rights and to fulfill their legal obligations.

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.