Konstens ontologi

Nivå: B
Lärare: Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann

Vad (eller var) är ett musikstycke? Hur finns ett litterärt konstverk i världen? Är Dostojevskijs Brott och Straff eller Beethovens femte symfoni själva boken eller notskriften eller ett abstrakt objekt? Vi studerar frågor om konstverkets metafysiska ställning, hur restaurering påverkar denna ställning, hur kopior förhåller sig till det ursprungliga konstverket samt hur konceptkonst som ifrågasätter konstverket som något slags objekt förvandlar konstens ontologi. Är konst en handling istället för ett ting och vad innebär den möjligheten?

Mind and the Institutions of Meaning

Nivå: C och M
Lärare: Sharon Rider

Holism is the idea that an object or phenomenon is more than the sum of its parts. But analysis, which is crucial to human comprehension, involves the mind breaking down an object of thought into its components, dismantling the whole in order to grasp it bit by bit and relationally. In this course, we will study meaning,  not fundamentally as a property of mental representations, but as something arising in social existence, and tied to practices involved in ordinary speech and action. On this account, to understand what an individual “believes” or “wants”(to apply psychological words to a person), we must take into account the full historical and institutional context in which what he says or does is embedded. We will address issues such as to what extent it is possible that two people share the same thought if they do not share the same conceptual framework.  In order to answer such questions, we will consider a logic of relations that can explain the human ability to analyze structures based on their parts, by looking at ideas and studies from anthropology, linguistics, and social theory, as well as philosophy.

Models in Philosophy

Nivå: C och M
Lärare: Sebastian Lutz

Model theory plays a central role in philosophical methodology, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and in many more debates in philosophy. Many philosophical contributions to these debates therefore cannot be fully understood without some understanding of model theory. In this course, we will go through a gentle, mostly picture-based introduction to the central concepts of model theory that will already suffice for the critical evaluation of many a contribution to the philosophical literature. Along the way, we will encounter the central ideas of definition theory and a surprisingly simple way into the beginnings of higher order logic. The course will be in English and does not require a background in model theory, definition theory, or higher order logic.

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