Philosophy

Logic is the study of valid argument. Each logical system puts forward its own definition of validity, which purports to approximate our informal notion. This course provides an introduction to classical logic. The first half of the course focuses on propositional logic, and the second half on first-order predicate logic, a natural development of the former.

This course explores contemporary metaethics, a discipline which asks philosophical questions about ethics. The four questions at the center of the course are: Are there truths about ethics – about what is good, bad, right, wrong, and so on? Are these truths objective? Are these truths part of the natural world? How does our ethical thought and language work? Students investigate these questions by learning about the major theories defended in contemporary metaethics, and as part of this they learn about various specific problems and questions investigated by contemporary philosophers in this area.

This course provides a systematic overview of the philosophical thinking of each philosopher, school of thought, or classic, presenting the inherent theoretical structure of each, and emphasizes the connections displayed in the mutual inheritance and criticism of each philosopher and school of thought. The class teaches philosophical issues through interpretation of the classical literature, and how to analyze and discuss these issues. The content of this course includes: Confucius and the Confucianists, Laozi and the Taoists, Micius and the Mohists, Gongsun Long and the Logicians, Han Fei and the Legalists, and Qin and Han Dynasty philosophy.

This course analyzes the fundamental aspects of three great proposals on human action: the Aristotelian conception of voluntary action, the Kantian description of motivation, and the phenomenological distinctions between desire and will, and motives and causes.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale program. The course is intended for advanced level students only. Enrollment is by consent of the instructor. The course focuses on some of the main aesthetic traditions of the past century. Students acquire the conceptual and methodological tools enabling them to analyze the key issues that are central to the contemporary aesthetic debate, according to a mainly theoretical and problematic approach. The new paradigms provided by the theory of mind suggest today a remodeling of the notion of the aesthetic experience starting from a reconsideration of the traditional conceptions of perception and expression. Merleau-Ponty's thought considered a turning point in the passage. The course aims to examine this phenomenological reflection by comparing it with current outcomes that also derive from cognitive sciences and studies on evolutionism that can contribute to shedding new light on the particularity of the aesthetic dimension.

This course debates contemporary issues in a Socratic manner inspired by Michel Sandel's lectures and Ian Shapiro's views on Enlightenment philosophy, which placed great faith in the power of human reason to understand the true nature of our circumstances and the idea of progress in human affairs as means to control, and perhaps even improve, our environments and our lives. Through different roles, students adopt different positions to think about sensitive issues related to conflictual situations from points of view that are not necessarily based on their personal convictions. Topics are inspired from the Council of Foreign Affairs: What is a Moral Foreign Policy.