Philosophy **

*Only offered as minor.

The minor in philosophy introduces students to fundamental questions about the world and our place in it, including questions about truth, knowledge, reality, reason, mind, beauty, morality. The minor in philosophy introduces students to fundamental questions about the world and our place in it, including questions about truth, knowledge, reality, reason, mind, beauty, morality, religion, and culture. Students in the minor will learn how to systematically investigate these questions with logic, argumentation, and understanding of the ideas of philosophers who have gone before. They will gain insight into what kind of world we live in, what it means to be a person, whether we have free will, what makes for a good life, etc. They will be able to communicate this insight with clarity and persuasiveness both verbally and in writing.

In keeping with FLAME University's distinctive focus on humanistic inquiry, the Philosophy Minor will help inculcate the habit of life-long learning and inquisitiveness through philosophical investigations in every aspect of the students' lives. The minor courses in philosophy introduce Western and Indian philosophical thoughts and the classic and contemporary thoughts in Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics. Courses like Introduction to Western Philosophy, Introduction to Indian Philosophy, Darsanas, and Modern Philosophy provide a window into philosophical works in Western and Indian traditions. Courses in Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics and the Good Life offer a survey of contemporary ideas in these areas. The course in logic provides an excellent fundamental understanding of argumentation and how to analyze and construct arguments. Courses like Mind and Language, Political philosophy, Hinduism and Buddhism, Phenomenology, and Existence introduce specific philosophical issues and their analysis in these domains. Finally, a course in Metaphilosophy introduces students to an analysis of philosophy by considering its methods, aims, and tools. At the end of the minor, students will have a well-rounded foundation in philosophy, enabling them to pursue further education in philosophy and conduct independent research in various disciplines.

Philosophy teaches one the art of articulation. A philosophy student becomes better at rational thinking and can express an idea with clarity and coherence. Philosophy enables a person to understand and analyze a concept precisely without getting caught in the ambiguities and imperfections of language. Skills learned in philosophy courses are highly versatile and can be applied in every walk of life - personal and professional. The philosophy graduates have done exceedingly well in various fields, including business, law, entrepreneurship, politics, journalism, counselling/therapy, activism, and acting., religion, and culture. Students in the minor will learn how to systematically investigate these questions with logic, argumentation, and understanding of the ideas of philosophers who have gone before. They will gain insight into what kind of world we live in, what it means to be a person, whether we have free will, what makes for a good life, etc. They will be able to communicate this insight with clarity and persuasiveness both verbally and in writing.

SPECIALISATION AIMS

The Philosophy minor intends to:

• Introduce the history of western philosophy and Indian philosophy
• Provide an understanding of contemporary and classical philosophical issues such as knowledge, truth, existence, free will, mind and body, and personal identity
• Provide logical tools to evaluate arguments from a variety of perspectives
• Inculcate the habit of critically reflecting on and developing their worldview by exposing them to opposing philosophies
• Introduce the four significant branches of philosophy – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics
• Engage with other disciplines philosophically, with the issues studied in philosophy, and with other disciplines such as physics, neuroscience, history, economics, and political science
• Sensitize students to identify ethical problems and recognize relevant issues to work through them
• Enable students to pursue independent research in philosophical areas such as metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, etc.

MINOR OUTCOMES: After successful completion of the Minor, the student will be able to:

• Demonstrate understanding of the issues within different frameworks of western philosophy and Indian philosophy
• Analyze a wide range of philosophical texts
• Apply conceptual frameworks and critical skills for problem-solving at a local, national, and global level
• Demonstrate the ability to support a position with arguments and analytical reasoning within the larger philosophical community
• Demonstrate ability to summarize philosophical problems and construct their arguments in a written format

18 MINOR COURSES

1. Introduction to Philosophy

This course will be a broad introduction to Philosophies from around the world. It will introduce core concepts and explore central questions that have engaged philosophers down the ages. The course will focus on the five central philosophical areas of Metaphysics, Logic, Epistemology, Ethics and Aesthetics. The students will need to explore, through reading, and engage with, through group discussions and personal reflection, varied concepts and ideas.

2. Introduction to Western Philosophy

This course is an introduction to the philosophical conversation in the West. We will read and discuss philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Mill. We will learn to identify and understand the ideas and arguments these philosophers are putting forth about the nature of reality, knowledge, value, and the human person. The student will learn to read, understand, and engage with a philosopher’s ideas for themselves, by reading their works firsthand. Assignments will require students to demonstrate their understanding of and engagement with these works in their writing.

3. Introduction to Indian Philosophy

The purpose of this course is to engender an informed appreciation for the principal religious and philosophical traditions that originated in India, as well as to recognize the great variety of philosophies and religious practices among Indian traditions.

4. Introduction to Jainism

Jainism is one of the ancient philosophical traditions of India. Historically, it is traced back to Mahavira, a teacher of the sixth century BCE, a contemporary of the Buddha. Like those of the Buddha, Mahavira’s doctrines were formulated as a reaction to and rejection of the Brahmanism, tradition based on the Vedic texts and because of this, both Jainism and Buddhism are regarded as the unorthodox philosophies, darsanas. The most renowned nonviolent figure of our times Mahatma Gandhi was inspired by nonviolence and other Jain practices. Gandhi in turn inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Dalai Lama, and several other nonviolent movements globally. Today, Jains have a global presence with their hundreds of temples and centers in the USA, Canada, the UK, Belgium, Australia, Kenya, Nepal, Thailand, and Japan.

5. Ethics and the Good Life

Ethics is the study of good, bad, right, and wrong. This course begins with ethical theory, under which falls normative ethics and metaethics. Normative ethics develops and evaluates theories that purport to tell us what criteria make an action right or wrong. We will consider consequentialism, deontology, care ethics, and virtue ethics. Metaethics explores the meaning and nature of moral thought and the underlying nature of moral properties – for example, whether rightness is a particular physical property. After both normative and metaethical theories are on the table, we will investigate the nature of a good life – that is, a good life for the one who lives it. Is it a life filled with pleasure? Is it a life in which your desires are satisfied? Is it obtaining a list of objectively good things, such as knowledge, achievement, friendship, etc.? We will explore these and other accounts of the good life, concluding with an exploration of how being a morally good person could relate to having a good life and a discussion of what it takes to obtain the virtues constitutive of being a morally good person. Readings will be drawn from classic and contemporary sources. Assignments will require students to demonstrate their understanding of the ethical theories and distinctions learned in the course as well as their understanding of the readings.

6. Logic

This course aims to introduce students to the fundamentals of reasoning and symbolic logic. Logic, as a branch of philosophical study, is engaged in argument representation and analysis. Thus, this course will act as an introduction to how philosophers construct and analyze arguments. Students will learn the basics of arguments, the validity of an argument, what makes an argument invalid, and how to avoid fallacies. Furthermore, students will learn formal logical forms of propositional logic and predicate logic - which provides symbolic methods for representing and assessing the logical form of arguments. This will enable the students to understand formal methods of logical analysis and further their understanding of valid and invalid arguments, thus providing them with skills not only to do philosophy in a formal way but to analyze arguments that they may come across in their daily lives. Students will also also be introduced to the main ideas of inductive reasoning and their applications in different areas of enquiry.

7. Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the study of reality in its most general form. It is the foundation of most philosophical problems. This course will begin with an introduction to ontology, a subdiscipline of metaphysics that studies what there is. Then the course will examine some of the classical problems in metaphysics such as problems of universals, time and persistence, abstract and concrete objects, modality, causation, and free will. A brief historical background will be provided for each problem, but the focus will remain on the contemporary debates. Once a topic has been introduced, at least two contemporary competing views will be discussed, and the students will be required to read one original paper on each of the views. The course aims not to find an answer but to understand the depth of the questions and make students wonder about them.

8. Darsanas: Introduction to Indian Philosophical and Religious Traditions

The purpose of this course is to engender an informed appreciation for the principal religious and philosophical traditions that originated in India, as well as to recognize the great variety of philosophies and religious practices among Indian traditions. Practical examples will be used to make the content more relevant, as well as techniques to improve communication, problem-solving, teamwork, and critical inquiry skills required in the industry.

9. Epistemology

Whether we know something or instead merely believe it matters. Knowledge gives us the power to organize our lives and environment to beneficial ends. It also gives us authority in the relevant domain, e.g., a doctor has authority in medicine. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge. This course will orient students to the questions, theories, and arguments of this discipline. Knowledge is commonly taken to be a kind of true belief that is also justified or rational in an appropriate way. We shall examine what these ingredients of knowledge are, how they relate to each other, how far they extend, and the ways they matter. We shall, in this way, discuss the nature, ingredients, structure, extent, and value of knowledge. Readings will be drawn from both classic and contemporary sources. Assignments will require students to demonstrate their understanding of the epistemological ideas and distinctions learned in the course as well as their understanding of the readings. The emphasis of the pedagogy will be on the development of practical skills such as critical reading, writing, and effective communication.

10. Modern Philosophy

Constituting a significant break from Medieval Scholasticism, Descartes started a conversation about knowledge and skepticism, the nature and existence of God, and the nature of the human person which Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, and Kant pushed forward in radically different ways. In an era of bold confidence about the powers of human reason, each of these philosophers built a system that explained what the human person is, how we gain knowledge, and how we should think about God. Understanding these systems will give the student of philosophy insight into how philosophical problems and positions are posed and situated today. We will aim to understand these systems by reading the works of these philosophers closely and discussing them. Assignments will require students to demonstrate, through writing, their understanding of these systems.

11. Mind and Language

This course introduces some of the fundamental issues in philosophy of mind and language and the intersection. The course will begin with an introduction to topics in the philosophy of language: meaning and reference, family resemblance terms, and speech acts. It will then explore applied issues in the philosophy of language such as gender and race terms. Within the philosophy of mind, the course will cover the classical mind-body problem and its various responses, such as substance and property dualism, materialism, emergentism, epiphenomenalism, and panpsychism. The course will then discuss the issues such as qualitative experience, mental states, mental causation, propositional attitude. The course will also introduce a few problems from the philosophy of perception, such as naive realism, disjunctivism, hallucination, and illusion. The course will be based on seminal texts on each of these issues, and students will be encouraged to engage with the texts critically. Upon completing the course, students will critically engage with the texts to understand some philosophical issues. Still, they will also utilize their learnings in other related disciplines such as psychology and linguistics.

12. Political Philosophy

The course introduces students to contemporary ideas in political philosophy. Students will learn Western and Indian political positions such as liberalism, libertarianism, communism, anarchism, democracies, justice, egalitarianism, and feminism. And apply these ideas to specific issues like distributive justice, the state's role, non-cooperation, citizenship, inequality, migration, refugees, and nationalism. Students will consider questions like – what does distributive justice entail? What makes democracies better than other states? Can states ever be legitimate? What gives states their legitimacy? Do we have an obligation to obey the state? What is the basis of citizenship? How do we construe equality? This will be done through an introduction to political thoughts and writings of philosophers like Rousseau, Rawls, Nozick, Cohen, Anderson, Dworkin, Orkin, Butler, Wolff, Marx, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Phule, and Martin Luther King Jr.

13. Philosophy of Religion

This course aims to shed light on questions related to religion by using the tools of philosophical analysis and argument. The first part of the course concerns arguments for and against the existence of God. Is God's existence the best explanation for a universe well-suited for life, or consciousness, or our moral obligations, etc.? Conversely, is God's non-existence the best explanation for the atrocious evil and suffering some people experience? The second part concerns the epistemology of religious experience and religious testimony. Is it possible to experience God perceptually, as one might experience a tree perceptually? When would it make sense to believe another's testimony about God? The course will critically engage with the experiences and testimonies from different religions. The third and concluding part of the course concerns the accounts different religions have of human nature and our destiny or future. Readings are drawn from primary religious texts and both classic and contemporary philosophy. Assignments will require students to demonstrate their understanding of the ideas and distinctions learned in the course as well as their understanding of the readings.

14. Asian Environmental Thought

The current problem of climate change and global warming has forced humans to reassess their relationship to their environment. This course introduces contemporary thoughts in environmental philosophy. Through this course, students will learn the ontological status of the environment as an entity, the relationships we have to it, how we assign value to our environment, and how to ontologically construe the current climate crises. Furthermore, the course will analyze our moral obligation to the natural world – from species to ecosystems, and our moral obligation to other humans regarding the environment we should leave for future generations. The course will also introduce students to the philosophy of preservation and sustainability and different perspectives on preservation and sustainability. This will be done through an introduction to a mix of contemporary western thoughts, and indigenous thoughts on nature – including Indian (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism) thought, African thought, and Native American thought. Thus, the aim would be to think about nature in various ways and understand how different thought systems construe our relationship to the natural world we inhabit.

15. Hinduism and Buddhism

The purpose of this course is to engender an informed appreciation for the principal religious and philosophical traditions that originated in India, as well as to recognize the great variety of philosophies and religious practices among Indian traditions. The pedagogy will place emphasis on development of practical skills of critical reading, writing, and effective communication.

16. Phenomenology and Existentialism

"Existence precedes essence" by Sartre is taken as the tagline of existentialism, developed from phenomenology. This course introduces students to fundamental issues and concepts in phenomenology and existentialism. The course starts with Edmund Husserl's phenomenology as rigorous science and then introduces its essential concepts. Heidegger's phenomenological ontology will be studied, and we will also cover the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Existentialism of Maurice Merleau Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and Frantz Fanon.

17. Metaphilosophy

Most of the courses in philosophy focus on a variety of philosophical problems, but they do not often explain what makes a problem philosophical. This course explores the idea of philosophy, its aims, different ways it is or can be done, how philosophy progresses, and how it differs from progress in other disciplines. This course will also discuss some of the tools used in philosophy, such as intuition, thought experiments, and experimental philosophy. The readings are drawn from philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Nicholas Rescher, Timothy Williamson, David Chalmers, etc. By the end of the course, students should be able to have their understanding of philosophy as an academic discipline, distinguish philosophical problems from non-philosophical ones, and apply appropriate philosophical methods while dealing with a problem. This course will guide the student towards doing philosophy and work independently on any of the philosophical issues.

18. Asian Philosophical and Religious Traditions

Asia is the largest continent in the world, with some of the oldest religious and philosophical traditions. India and China provide some of the longest sustainable examples of pluralistic cultures, potentially valuable models for the world. For the last two centuries, the globalized world has embraced many Asian cultural elements - Buddha, Beatles, Gandhi, Yoga, Ayurveda, Vegetarianism, and new words such as Guru, Mantra, Pundit, Karma, Tao, Zen, and Nirvana, are some examples of such connections. This course provides an insight into some of the indigenous Asian philosophies and religions (APR) such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confucianism, Shinto, and Zen. Based on the survey of Asian concepts, issues, theories, methods, works of literature, and practices, the course will also introduce new ways of defining long-accepted categories such as "god," "religion," "philosophy," "secular," "culture," "myth" and "history."