Individual courses

Can we be both Christians and genuine philosophers? Are faith and philosophy mutually exclusive, or not?

Can we be both Christians and genuine philosophers? Are faith and philosophy mutually exclusive, or not?

There are many different spiritual pathways that were born in the Indian sub-continent: Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, for example, and others that came to India such as Christian and Muslim. Hindu spirituality which represents the spiritual quest of the vast majority of the people of India is rooted in the relentless and uninterrupted search of the seers from the Indian sub-continent.

Aesthetics is a wider term which includes all kinds of objects and experiences of art, beauty and life. There are many interconnected terms to the process of understanding and the enjoyment of beauty. Artistic experience, philosophy of art, philosophy of beauty, and philosophy of aesthetics are some of the different branches of aesthetics from a general perspective.

This course was born out of an effort to interpret the language of Traditional Africa in terms of Western philosophy, and at the same time to see if the latter did not perhaps have, not only correlations with, but even discernible roots in the former.

This course seeks to introduce students to analytic philosophy. 

and its relevance to eternal happiness.

This course introduces some of the key elements in Aristotle's thought. 

Essential Questions of Philosophy in this very complete course about Being and Knowing.

Legal, Philosophical and Moral dimension

Investigators have a duty to ensure subjects give not only informed, but voluntary consent?

Concerned with restoring and strengthening bonds between professionals, patients and families, not simply dealing with principles like bioethics.

Law is a juridical system that organizes the social aspects of humankind. For that reason the systematic oranization, the content and the governing principle of canon law and its different branches should and do conform to how well the Church’s social dimension and social structures are understood at each moment in time.

To show the implications of normative theories for specific moral issues or contemporary debates on particular ethical issues.

To show the implications of normative theories for specific moral issues or contemporary debates on particular ethical issues.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (henceforth UDHR) is both a point of arrival and a point of departure regarding our contemporary understanding of human rights. As a point of arrival, the UDHR is the result of an attempt to collate the “wisdom of the ages,” in order to find the best way to ensure the protection of the rights of all—especially after the atrocities committed during the two world wars.

This is a comprehensive and systematic course on the philosophy of David Hume – a prominent Scottish Enlightenment philosopher widely known for his influential system of philosophical empiricism, naturalism and scepticism. Based on his influential and extreme Empiricist ideas, Hume can be rightly considered as one of the most important philosophers of all time.

Divine Impassibility: A Thomistic Critique of Jürgen Moltmann’s Staurocentric Trinitarianism

SEM 43 - Philosophy and religious Studies

April 20th - June 15th, 2020

presented by Isaac Mutelo

E-seminar in Philosophy and Law

by Isaac Mutelo

From 3rd October to 28th November 2022

E-seminar in Philosophy/Religion
by Isaac Mutelo
From 02 october to 27 november 2023

SEM - Philosophy 

5th October - 30th November 2020 

presented by Rajen Lakra

E-seminar in Philosophy
by Jaco Kruger
From 17th April to 12th June 2023

E-seminar - Philosophy and Natural Law
by Lorenzo Gallo
From 5th to 26th July 2021 - Summer Course

E-seminar in Philosophy and Social Sciences
by Jaco Kruger
From 11th April to 6th June 2022

Etymologically, the word Epistemology is derived from two Greek words episteme (knowledge) and logos (the science of knowledge). Thus the word ‘Epistemology’ would mean knowledge of knowledge or science of knowledge and is more commonly called a theory of knowledge. This philosophical term is commonly associated with the inquiry of truth and knowledge.

This course will take students through ethical discourse from the time of Plato to Aristotle, then to Kant and utilitarians. 

Ethics, like philosophy, is in search of principles and universals. Ethics reflects on a particular human experience, namely, the experience of the good or of being good, and sets it in the context of the whole. One could also say that ethics reflects on what is the good and how our lives are oriented towards it

An Accommodation for a Christian Approach to the World Religions and Interreligious Dialogue in the Line of Jacques Dupuis

The Hegelian philosophy presents itself as a system, a systematic knowledge. It is not the expression of a feeling or an intuition. Philosophy is a science, a knowledge. It's not a way of life like ancient philosophy...

The main objective of this unit is to get an above all understanding of what Indian Philosophy is and in what circumstances it has developed. Though Indian Philosophy has developed in different parts of India it has many common characteristics hence the student is likely to know a few important ones. Furthermore, one should have a basic understanding of what Indian philosophy is accused of.

By Studying this particular unit one must be able to understand what is the meaning of Upaniṣad, how it was developed from Vedas and what are its main teachings and how they reach their logical culmination in the identity of the self and the Brahman. One must also be able to understand the Upaniṣadic view point of bondage and liberation along with the cosmogony and puruṣārtas.

The main objective of the conclusion is to introduce the students to the different systems of Indian Philosophy as it deals with various philosophical thoughts of several traditions originated in Indian Subcontinent.

Etymologically, the word "Epistemology", from the Greek, means the science of knowledge. It is an investigation of knowledge and its problems. A synonymous term is Criteriology which again from the Greek means to distinguish or judge. It deals with testin g knowledge to find truth or detect error.

The modern epistemological problem has two aspects:

1. The opposition between science and philosophy or truth and error. We find this basically in Descartes and Kant.

2. The conflict between science and science or that of contemporary and classic physics and not an opposition between science and philosophy or truth and error.

We derive our inspiration from at least two distinct traditions: the Jewish and the Christian. It is important that we should be aware of this! A whole set of questions are implied here. What is the relationship between God and the Jewish traditi on, God and Jesus, God and the church?

This course will introduce the students to the historical beginning of bioethics, as well as some of the moral theories employed in bioethics discourse.
 

This course is the second part to Introduction to Moral theories in Bioethics I.
The course will introduce the students to the historical beginning of bioethics, as well as some of the moral theories employed in bioethics discourse.

The course aims to show that from its origins through the early efforts made by the earliest oriental thinkers before the era of ancient great Greek thinkers, philosophy has remained a branch of knowledge concerned with fundamental questions concerning existence, human values, language, knowledge and many other matters.

Important issues in legal philosophy range from abstract conceptual questions about the nature of law and legal systems, to normative questions about the relationship between law and morality, politics and other norms as well as the justification of various legal institutions. Although this course will deal with conceptual themes of philosophy of law especially in the first section, the course generally focusses on the practical and readily applicable aspects of the field.

Plato ranks as one of the most important thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition. This module introduces the student to some of the fundamental ideas that inform his works as well as guiding the student through some developments in his presentation of these ideas.

The course aims at furnishing the student withe the appropriate tools for a meaningful of the Biblical text, with particular reference to its spiritual, liturgical and pastoral context. The course will further aim at providing a basis familiarity with, and a critical assessment of contemporary exegetical methods.

This course introduces you to the debates about the meaning of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke/Acts. What were the theological interests of the authors of the Synoptic Gospels?

What is the Jesus presented in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke like? How did he understand himself? How did the Evangelists understand him? Is that the same or different to the understanding of the disciples?

This course will provide a general introduction to Theology.

The history of the debate about the possibility, nature and validity of knowledge is one of the very oldest, and one about which virtually every great philosopher has had something to say. "Is knowledge possible?" is a very broad question.

A Systematic Review and Hermeneutic Exploration of the Management of Incidental Findings in Genomic Research

John Locke : seventeenth century English philosopher, one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers and forerunner of Liberalism and British Empiricism. 

According to Gibelin in his Foreword to Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Freedom is the central theme of Kant’s philosophy. This course will introduce to Kant, centering on Freedom as a key concept to understand his philosophy, in the three spheres defined by the critical project: Metaphysics, Moral and Aesthetics.

This course presents a comprehensive picture of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Metaphysics is the study of things in their ultimate causes. As such, the specialty of metaphysics is that it seeks the final explanation or the ultimate causes of things precisely in so far as they are, in so far as they exist, or in so far as they are real. Aristotle called it “First Philosophy” or “Theology” since it leads to the first principle or the ultimate explanation of all things.

All human knowledge begins with sense experience but can terminate sometimes in the senses, or in the imagination or in the intellect alone . Accordingly we can distinguish between three levels of scientific knowledge corresponding to the three degrees of abstraction from matter which can be made by the intellect in its examination of reality.

Metaphysics, a discipline with long standing history, has been understood in different ways. Traditionally, it is considered as the most general and fundamental discipline of all other disciplines. Metaphysics or the Philosophy of Being as Being seeks to answer questions about existence. 

The norm is the idea central to the thought of Michel Foucault. It is the point from which he studies modern society. He distinguishes the norm from other forms of power.

An introduction to the Fathers of the Church, from Ignatius of Antioch to John of Damascus: Writers, doctors, pastors, the Fathers of the Church

The term ‘anthropology’ is derived from two Greek words: ἀνθωπος (anthrōpos) and λογος (logos). 

This course has been written to assist the audience to understand the philosophical underpinnings and its relevance to the complex situations of the 21st century, but also to allow learners to determine and appreciate the role of philosophy in education.   

Philosophy of language is an extraordinarily rich field. It has a history stretching back, in the Western tradition, to the preSocratics.

Logic equips individuals with the required skills to identify errors, known as fallacies in an argument. Logic generally studies the relations the mind creates between different products or contents of intellectual knowledge; that is perceptions, propositions and arguments, and seeks to understand the different relations, which arise in the human mind when it knows things. This comprehensible course on logic is divided into two parts: the second part (sections III and IV) on formal logic focus on the core aspects of categorical syllogisms.