This course introduces central themes from the Western philosophical tradition, spanning 2,500 years of history from the ancient Greeks to cutting-edge work from our own time. We will become familiar with the issues discussed by philosophers, inquire into their significance and their relation to thought in other disciplines, such as psychology, law, physics, computer science, and political science. Most importantly, we will acquaint ourselves with theoretical methods and tools that have been used by philosophers throughout the ages to support their conclusions and ideas.

Our actions and decisions are structured by the ways we think about values, about what the good is. This course explores theories of moral reasoning, building upon historical and contemporary sources. In the first part of the course, we will examine the main theories in ethics – virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism – as well as questions pertaining to moral knowledge, motivation, responsibility, and the relation of happiness and pleasure to ethics. The second part of the course focuses on practical ethics, touching upon topics such as animal rights, privacy, future generations, war, punishment, euthanasia, disability, racial and gender equality.

In this course, we will focus both on important work from the history of the philosophy of mind and on contributions from recent scholarship. We will begin by taking a close look at Descartes’ dualism and its legacy, exploring dominant approaches to the mind during the past century, and examining the debate concerning the nature of consciousness. Additional topics to be discussed include the possibility of intelligent and conscious machines, animal minds, the identity of persons over time, transformative experiences, and the impact of novel technologies on the ways we experience the world.

Emotions are a basic aspect of human experience, but they have been, throughout the history of philosophy, contrasted with and sidelined by the pursuit of rationality. This course provides the opportunity to engage with key questions in the study of emotions from a philosophical perspective. Topics we explore in the course include the nature of emotions, the role of emotions in ethics, the rationality of emotions, emotions in art. We consider sources from the history of philosophy, as well as contemporary research on the emotions from philosophy and additional disciplines.

What does it mean to be free? How significant is the impact of luck on our decisions and choices? Does affirming the existence of free will involve asserting that the future is genuinely ‘open’? These and related questions resonate throughout the history of philosophy, and are addressed in fascinating new ways in recent thought. In this course, we explore the nature and scope of free will and inquire into relations of the debate on free will to questions concerning the reality and experience of time, and the nature of the self. The term will be divided into three modules, as we examine these issues and their connections.