Course Descriptions

This course aims at an in depth discussion of selected works of major philosophers in modern Western philosophy such as Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Hegel. Emphasis of the seminar may vary from year to year.

Discussion of selected issues and figures in contemporary Anglo-American thought. The content of the course will vary from year to year and may cover such writers as Brandom, Carnap, Davidson, Dennett, Dretske, Dummett, Dworkin, Fodor, Kripke, MacIntyre, McDowell, Millikan, Nagel, Nozick, Parfit, Putnam, Quine, Rawls, Rorty, Russell, Sellars, Taylor, and Wittgenstein, among others.

This course is devoted to the study of a selected topic in the domain of Continental European Philosophy, such as Post-Hegelian philosophy, Neo-Kantianism, Phenomenology, Philosophies of Existence, Hermeneutics, Post-structuralism and Critical Theory. Continental European approaches to the study of philosophy of language, philosophy of history, and social and political philosophy may also be themes of the seminar.

This course investigates some major philosophical problems, conceptual distinctions, and controversies underlying the development of Western philosophy and explores how these issues might interrelate and how they have been approached in various historical settings. Main topics will include: the history of philosophy as Begriffsgeschichte and Problemgeschichte; Ionianism vs. Eleatism; the double criteria of truth: reason and belief; the primacy debate: intellectualism vs. voluntarism; the Head-Heart distinction or the relation between reason and passion; theodicy and the problem of evil; universals and individuals; the physis-nomos distinction and its various philosophical implications; categories and schemata; subjectivism and personalism and questions concerning periodization.

Discussion of selected issues in contemporary ethical and political philosophy. The content of the course will vary from year to year and may include such topics as deontological, consequentialist, and contractarian ethical theories; virtue ethics; ethical egoism; the nature of value and the good; ethical realism, relativism, and intuitionism; the role of rights in ethical and political theory; theories of justice; the debate between liberalism and communitarianism; Marxism; feminist critiques of contemporary moral and political theory; and the relation of Confucianism to recent ethical and political thought.

This course will survey major issues and theories in philosophy of language, covering topics such as meaning, reference, articulation, speech acts, understanding and interpretation, the social and communicative aspects of language, phonology, syntax and semantics, the possibility of a private language, metaphor, and metonymy. Writers discussed may include Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, Humboldt, Frege, Saussure, Benveniste, Russell, Wittgenstein, Jakobson, Gadamer, Strawson, Quine, Austin, Grice, Davidson, Dummett, Chomsky, Fodor, Kripke, Brandom, among others.

This course is conducted either from the historical approach or the analytic approach, or a combination of both. The historical approach discusses such themes as Parmenides and the beginning of metaphysical questioning, Plato and Aristotle’s metaphysical systems, Descartes’s metaphysics of subjectivity, Hume’s critique of metaphysics, Kant and the possibility of metaphysics as a science, Hegel’s metaphysical idealism, and Nietzsche and the end of metaphysics. Themes discussed from the analytic approach includes: the problem of universals, the status of particulars, modality and possible world, the problem of self and identity, freedom and causality, realism and anti-realism, etc.

Analytic philosophers aim at obtaining insight into the traditional problems of philosophy by logical, linguistic, and conceptual analysis. This course will introduce students to the key concepts of the method of analysis from the analytic approach. Taking some central issues in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language, this course will also demonstrate how philosophical problems can be tackled using the skills of philosophical analysis.

A survey of selected topics in contemporary philosophy of mind. Problems discussed will include: What sorts of things are “mental”? How are mental phenomena to be classified? How are minds related to our bodies? What is the nature of consciousness? Can science explain what consciousness is? What is the criterion for personal identity? How intimate is the connection between possessing a mind and operating a language. Will it ever be possible to build a conscious, thinking machine? How do we know that other people have mind?

This course will survey major issues and main figures in contemporary philosophical theories of interpretation, i.e., hermeneutics. The main problems discussed will include: what is the nature of a text? what is the relationship between human existence and human understanding? Is the truth of interpretation subjective or objective? What is the relationship between tradition, language and interpretation? What is the role played by difference in interpretation and understanding? What is human communicative action and how is it possible? Thinkers discussed include Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Riceour, Derrida, Habermas and other major contemporary European philosophers.