Philosophy

This course examines theoretical ethics and applied ethics. The focal point of the first part is an explication of some basic moral principles and theories. Theoretical ethics is concerned with understanding the nature of ethics, ethical language and ethical reasoning. On the other hand, the focus of applied ethics is more practical—it seeks to reach a practical judgment about what should be done in particular situations, or what is the most coherent ethical view to take towards a serious issue, such as abortion or euthanasia.

On the standard conception of the place of linguistic meaning and mental content in the world, there are facts about what speakers mean by linguistic expressions and about what people believe and desire. Interpretation is the process by which we gain access to these facts—we use the evidence at our disposal to determine what people mean by what they say and the contents of their mental states. On this standard conception, facts about meaning and content are generated by connections between language and the mind, on the one hand, and the world, on the other. These facts do not depend in any way on the interpretative procedures by which we seek to discover them. Since the last few decades of the 20th century, several philosophers have challenged this conception, arguing that facts about linguistic meaning and mental content are somehow produced by the procedures that we employ for ascribing meanings and contents. The goal of this course is to provide a general introduction to this approach. 

This course introduces the historical evolution of ancient Chinese philosophy, the representative philosophical schools in each period, and their representative propositions and views. It covers the history and development of ancient Chinese philosophy from the perspective of global culture.

According to a dominant historiography, philosophy is a Western endeavor. Its roots are to be found in Europe, more precisely in Ancient Greece, and its most significant developments are due to Western thinkers. In recent years, however, this narrative has been challenged by scholars and criticized from various sides. The narrative, it is argued, has itself a history: it was born at the end of the eighteenth century and came together with a marginalization of non-Western contributions to the origins and developments of the discipline. The process of appropriation of philosophy by Western historians, it is further argued, was not independent of racist prejudices and theories. This seminar is devoted to the recent literature on these topics. It aims to see how issues about race and racism have shaped current historiography of philosophy and explores alternative narratives that have been suggested to change this historiography.

This course covers the reconstruction and criticism of the central problems of human knowledge from its fundamental concepts and different approaches. It examines the notions of conscience, mind, belief, truth, justification, doubt, and science. This course also discusses rationalism, empiricism, and critical philosophy. 

This course introduces anthropological approaches to time, temporality, and history. Ideas about time have been part of anthropology ever since anthropologists began theorizing human development, and analyzing the ways in which people conceive of time can illuminate fundamental questions about how humans make sense of their world and act within it. This course focuses on the relationship between cultural conceptions of time and power, and examines a few theoretical concepts that help to analyze this relationship The course studies ways in which time was built into core anthropological concepts of difference (particularly between the West and the rest) and then explores the relationship between time and political possibility, or how politics must make historical sense in order to be effective. In addition to the study of such uses of the past, the course examines nostalgia, identifies its cultural foundations, and shows its politics as well as its limits as a way of thinking about history.

This seminar offers a survey of the intellectual tradition that takes for its object the interrogation and theorization of systems of power whereby inequality is associated with gender, sex, and sexuality. A range of key work are explored, mainly from western authors, that exemplify the intellectual history of feminist and queer theory. Through works of philosophy, political, and psychoanalytic theory about gender and sexuality, the course traces the foundations and development of some major strands of recent and contemporary thought about gender and sexuality including: liberal feminism, with its emphasis on sameness and equality; cultural, separatist, and lesbian feminisms with their focus on difference; radical, Marxist, socialist, and anarchist feminisms with their political and material analysis of gender; intersectional feminisms with their questioning of such identity categories as woman; postcolonial and transnational theories of gender and sexuality; queer theory and its mobilization of deconstructive modes of thought; and trans theory with its shift of emphasis back to embodiment and identity.