Filosofie ( research )

In this Philosophy Research specialisation you will study moral conflicts and ethical issues in contemporary Western culture and how politics is a way of coping with these dilemmas.

During your studies you will unravel the ethical presuppositions that underlie contemporary socio-cultural debates. How fundamental concepts such as freedom, power, justice, and so on are judged and how words and phrases are being used in political debates, has an essential impact on the outcome of a debate. As a social and political philosopher you’ll be geared towards pinpointing where these—often unconscious—assumptions are at work. This will enable you to make people aware of them.

Key authors for this specialisation are: Aristotle, Arendt, Foucault, Hobbes, Kant, Machiavelli, Marx, Rawls, Schmitt, Spinoza, Žižek, Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, Habermas and Taylor.

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You will explore explicit connections to developments in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics and explore the richness of language and communication from a social and evolutionary perspective.

Traditionally, philosophy of mind is part of the analytical tradition in philosophy. Recently, however, a more phenomenological approach to typical questions in the philosophy of mind has provided a refreshing new look on old topics. The advance of cognitive neuroscience is also leaving its trace in the way old questions are posed and answered. Therefore, the research Master’s in Philosophy of Mind and Language combines traditional analytical theorising with insights from phenomenology and the empirical sciences. Language is without doubt one of our most complex achievements, but at the end of the day, it’s all about what we do with it, how we use language to understand, comfort, criticise, and manipulate each other. Language is an immensely complicated tool for doing all these things, and more. We talk all the time. Language is our main form of social interaction. In the Master’s specialisation in Philosophy of Mind Language you’ll explore the richness of language from a social and evolutionary perspective.

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You will study ancient fundamental questions from the perspective of continental philosophy.

The specialisation in Metaphysics and Philosophical Anthropology looks at the age-old fundamental questions regarding being, truth and reality from a contemporary viewpoint with the help of modern philosophers. You’ll study the philosophical significance of questions related to approaches in phenomenological, psychoanalysis and gender and feminist theory. You’ll gain insight into how to ask questions that are significant for the contemporary age and examine them in the light of major thinkers from the continental philosophical tradition. Of course, you’ll also examine these questions in the light of major thinkers from the hermeneutic tradition and from the continental tradition who were critical of these hermeneutic developments in philosophy. But again, with a contemporary aim: What new and original insights can these philosophers of the past give us today?

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