Philosophy has been foundational for every system of knowledge. The present course would highlight this by introducing how philosophy helps in understanding three core concepts of every intellectual activity: thinking (the very activity one engages in), knowledge (one of the outcomes of the activity) and reality (that which the activity attempts to grasp). Through the structured exploration of the major philosophical questions present in Indian and Western traditions, the course aims to enable doing of philosophy.
Course Instructor: Varun S Bhatta

Science is one of the prominent contemporary disciplines that has not only shaped the growth of other disciplines, but also has profound social, political and economic implications on our current societies. Given this centrality of science, it is pertinent to critically understand the foundational aspects of the discipline, such as: how is science able to reveal the "secrets" of nature?, how different is science from other disciplines?, what are the kinds of questions that science cannot answer? Philosophy provides the necessary toolkit to explore the above questions. Drawing from one of the major subdisciplines of philosophy -- philosophy of science -- this course begins by analysing the basic concepts used in science (like "theory", "observation", "laws", "models", etc.). Subsequently, the central characteristics of scientific knowledge and reality are discussed. Exploration of these and other larger questions about science provides a holistic perspective of the discipline.
Course Instructor: Varun S Bhatta

Ethics, in spite of its centrality to human society, is usually perceived and practised merely as a set of rules without any critical understanding of it. This superficial attitude does not provide the required motivation to be ethical as it is unable to answer even the basic questions like: why should a person be ethical in the first place? Can an action be absolutely good? Is it possible to arrive at a common set of rules that is good for everyone? This course enables to clarify these and other important questions by introducing the foundational ethical theories from Eastern and Western traditions of moral philosophy. Subsequently, the course will explore how this philosophical approach equips to address the moral dilemmas that arise specifically in the context of research.
Course Instructor: Varun S Bhatta

Logic, broadly speaking, is the science of reasoning, with the specific aim of differentiating good from bad arguments. This course will cover various deductive techniques which will help students develop the ability to think critically by recognising and evaluating different kinds of arguments and using logic to solve a variety of problems. It will develop their analytical, quantitative, linguistic, and critical skills. After completion of the course, students will gain an appreciation for the complexities and nuances of language, be able to use formal languages to express the logical structure of English sentences, and be able to reduce ordinary language to symbolic structures that can be mechanically manipulated. They will be able to analyse arguments by breaking them down into their simplest components and discerning whether and how these components relate to each other. They will understand the construction of arguments, how and why one thing follows from another, and thus gain the capability of clearly articulating various arguments as well as conveying the process by which certain conclusions are reached. They will be able to identify common fallacies in arguments. They will develop a set of skills that allow them to analyse and assess a variety of arguments and be able to discern whether the arguments are properly supported, fallacious, valid or invalid. They will learn how to employ various strategies for proving the deductive validity of arguments through methods from classical, propositional, and predicate logic (FOL).
Course Instructor: Adity Singh

Around 6th Century BC a new kind of thinking appeared in Greece, dedicated to finding the origins of the world and its constituents, its structure, and its alterations, using observation and reason rather than tradition and myth. The philosophers that inaugurated this new brand of thought are considered the first philosophers of the Western tradition, as well as the forerunners of scientific thinking. This course will trace the coeval emergence of philosophy and science in the ancient world, from the early reflections on matter and motion by the Milesians to the development of a nascent atomic theory by Democritus. We will study multiple original sources in translation, with the help of modern commentaries, in order to arrive at a nuanced understanding of the varied hypotheses about the formation and the constitution of the universe.
Course Instructor: Adity Singh

This course offers an introduction to two major strands of 20th-century Critical Theory: the Frankfurt School and the French Antihumanist tradition, through a selection of readings from Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida. The readings have been chosen to explore specifically competing conceptions of critique and power. Some of the other key issues discussed will be the concept of ideology, the critique of modernity and capitalist society, the decentering of the human subject, and the idea of emancipation and social empowerment. This course is foundational to social and political Critical Theory, and thus serves as a point of departure into more recent critical discourses including feminist and queer theories, critical race analysis, postcolonial theories, critiques of ideology, and cultural studies. The texts included have been selected for their impact beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries on thinkers from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields.
Course Instructor: Adity Singh

This course offers an introduction to a major strand of contemporary Critical Theory tradition that developed through the intersection of Freudian psychoanalysis and French structuralism and poststructuralism. The focus of this course is on the exploration, transformation, and decentering of the controversial notion of the subject, particularly as it relates to the problems of structure, sign, narrative, and sexuality. This decentering of the subject led to a paradigmatic shift in contemporary theoretical discourse, with impact beyond the narrow domain of poststructuralist theory into a wide range of fields including literary and cultural criticism, feminist and queer politics, film studies, and Marxist theory. This course will cover a variety of readings from Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Copjec, Žižek, and Zupančič. The readings will be accompanied by a selection of films from Hitchcock, Lynch, Pasolini, Antonioni, Fiennes, and Nolan, amongst others, which will be discussed and analysed along with the readings.
Course Instructor: Adity Singh

This course offers an overview of a representative sample of eight key thinkers—Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Freud—in the critical tradition by working through a set of dense but rewarding texts. This course is designed primarily to provide a necessary training to students who plan to work on one or several contemporary critical theorists, but do not have enough knowledge—usually assumed by contemporary thinkers—of their precursors. The texts selected are both critical in themselves, and act as a groundwork for further research in the theoretical humanities. Critical Theory takes as its aim a critique of society as a whole with the express purpose of not merely “interpreting” the world but changing it, and thus, broadly speaking, includes the trends of political theory, psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism, critiques of ideology, deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, and post-colonialism. The thinkers included have therefore been selected for their impact beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries on thinkers from a wide range of disciplines and interdisciplinary fields.
Course Instructor: Adity Singh