Great Ideas is a course reflecting on some of the most exciting, important and revolutionary ideas that have shaped society and culture as it is today. It also considers how those ideas have an ongoing influence. It’s an interdisciplinary course look...

This course is an introduction to philosophical questions about the nature of minds and how they relate to brains and persons. Topics may include: What is consciousness? What can science tell us about the mind? What is a person? In virtue of what do ...

This course considers some of the most difficult questions about life, the universe, and everything. Possible topics: What is the meaning of life? Would it be good to live forever? Can we ever know anything with certainty? Does God exist? What is hum...

An introduction to issues in applied ethics. Topics may include: the morality of the death penalty, war, cloning, abortion and euthanasia, and the moral status of non-human animals.

This course approaches mental health and mental disorder from various disciplinary perspectives. It considers definitions of mental disorder, representations of mental illness in film and literature, cultural and scientific conceptions of the healthy...

An introduction to the philosophy of art, focusing on philosophical issues concerning popular culture, film, fiction, music and the visual arts.

PHIL 123 is offered over January and February 2022 (which is part of the 2021 academic year). This course provides an introduction to the theory of critical thinking. Students will learn how to evaluate arguments and weigh up the evidence in support ...

This course will consist of a survey of contemporary metaphysics (reality) and epistemology (the theory of knowledge). Questions to be discussed may include: What is knowledge? How are beliefs justified? When should we believe something on the basis ...

This course is an examination of the 20th century approaches to ethics. Topics that may be discussed include: What is the nature of ethics and morality? Are our ethical judgments systematically mistaken? How and why have we evolved to make moral judg...

This course is an introduction to classical Asian philosophy, with a focus on views about ethics, political philosophy, education, and human nature.

Workforces are changing at a rapid pace with various predictions regarding the future nature of work. In this interdisciplinary course, students will critically examine the changing nature of the work and employment from a range of perspectives inclu...

The course examines some of the toughest questions about the nature of reality, including questions about the nature of time, free will, causation, and what objects really are. There is also some room for students to suggest topics of special interes...

An examination of the foundations of ethics. What is distinctive about moral language? Are moral properties real? Are our moral judgements justified (and if so how)? Topics related to moral psychology and the evolution of moral cognition may also be ...

An introduction to the analysis of arguments using the methods of symbolic logic. Students are introduced to the use of techniques such as truth tables, trees and natural deduction to test arguments for validity.

This course surveys the historical and philosophical development of international relations theory and political theory. It will examine foundational texts drawn from thinkers across the range of western political theory, from ancient Greece to the t...

This course examines important topics at the intersection of international relations and moral philosophy, including: just-war theory, humanitarian aid and intervention, nationalism, immigration, historical injustice, human rights and climate change....

This course explores the nature of the mental by investigating accounts of the mind and cognition. Topics that may be discussed include the relationship between the mind and the body, consciousness, perception, intentionality, and mental content.

This course covers western philosophy from the presocratic thinkers, through Plato adn Aristotle, and then passing to the modern period to cover Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Reid.

This course presents a series of contemporary philosophical controversies and questions raised by art and culture.

Data ethics is a new branch of ethics. Students who enrol in this course will study new and emerging ethical problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing and use), algorithms (including artif...

An examination of the foundations of ethics. What is distinctive about moral language? Are moral properties real? Are our moral judgements justified (and if so how)? Topics related to moral psychology and the evolution of moral cognition may also be ...

This course examines major positions and issues in contemporary political philosophy, including questions about rights, equality, justice, freedom, and democracy. This course is also able to be taken towards a major in POLS. See major requirements fo...

An introduction to the semantics and proof theory of symbolic languages, explaining the role of logic in describing mathematical structures and formalising reasoning about them. Topics covered include propositional logic, first-order logic of quantif...

Data ethics is a new branch of ethics. Students who enrol in this course will study new and emerging ethical problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing and use), algorithms (including artif...

This course addresses a variety of challenges to predicting and preparing for the future. It takes an essentially interdisciplinary approach, drawing on a wide variety of sources of information about the future. Among its focuses are the biases that ...

This course introduces students to the thought of the existentialist school of the 20th Century, such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. We will discuss the ideas of these thinkers both in relation to their o...

This course will examine a series of contemporary philosophical issues concerning what art is, whether there are objective standards of taste, objective aesthetic properties, when works of art start and finish, collaborations and art, morality and ar...

This course surveys the issues and positions in modern philosophy of science, beginning with a discussion of the history of philosophy of science from Logical Positivism to the present. We then discuss particular problems such as the problem of induc...

An introduction to some central problems in metaphysics, focusing on issues in the philosophy of time.

This course examines the conceptual development of the theories of meaning and reference to the present. We discuss the problem of interpreting what others say and the role of context in the understanding of language.

This course covers central systems of extra-classical and non-classical (or 'deviant') logic. A selection of the following logics will be studied in this course: temporal logic, modal logic, intuitionist logic, relevant logic and many-valued logic.

This course will introduce students to some central questions in bioethics. Topics covered may include the ethical issues associated with assisted reproduction, severely disabled newborns, euthanasia, informed consent, human cloning, stem cell therap...