This course aims to introduce key debates in Western philosophy and provide an overview of the works of some of the discipline’s most important thinkers. It highlights the enduring traditions of Western philosophical thought and their implications for contemporary intellectual discourse. Students will learn to critically engage with philosophical issues, analyze them comparatively, and interpret their relevance to the present. Through this process, students will acquire a critical analytical vocabulary to thoughtfully reflect on our current socio-political predicament in a philosophically informed manner. This course provides a systematic introduction to the history of Western Philosophy while exploring some of the key philosophical questions that have emerged over time, such as: “What’s the right thing to do, and why should I do it? Do I exist, and if so, what am I? What is my mind? Do I have free will? And what’s the meaning of life? What can we know?” “What ought we do?” and “What can we hope?” We will examine the answers from various perspectives and schools of thought in the Western philosophical tradition. These questions touch on the main branches of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. The course engages with several important issues concerning the nature of knowledge, truth, self, reality, consciousness, freedom, morality, language, and God. Along with reading texts by classic figures such as Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mill, Marx, Kant and Hegel, students will also study contemporary thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum, Sandel, Sloterdijk, and Baudrillard.
