Philosophy

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…

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. From the beginning of the universe, to present-day lives, to the end of the universe, random events beyond anyone's control continue to shape fate. By exploring the various fields that luck manifests itself in, the course ultimately delves into the intriguingly precarious nature of existence.