(BA) (4-year-programme) - The University of Hong Kong

168PHIL2140.Philosophy of social science (6 credits)How should we understand and explain human life and activities? This course will examine differentmodels of explanation in the social sciences, and will proceed by case studies. Which cases are takenwill depend on the interests and knowledge of those who enrol for the course.Assessment: 100% coursework.PHIL2150.Philosophy and biology (6 credits)Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had a huge impact on the way we think about mankind’s placein the world. In this course we will discuss some of the philosophical consequences of this impact. Noprevious knowledge of the theory is required as we will begin with a critical introduction to itsdevelopment and main features. Later in the course we will also consider the contemporary debateconcerning the scope and limits of evolutionary theory.Assessment: 100% coursework.PHIL2210.Metaphysics (6 credits)This course covers both the nature of reality and the nature of knowledge of it and treats the twoquestions as intrinsically connected. We shall examine a number of important theories of metaphysics,as well as anti-metaphysics, including those of Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger,and contemporary philosophers such as Habermas, Rorty and Putnam. We will treat these theories notonly as representing different views on metaphysics but also as forming a logical order ofdevelopment.Assessment: 100% coursework.PHIL2420.Chinese philosophy: metaphysics (6 credits)We study Chinese views of reality, human nature, language, wisdom and the relation of each tohuman society. Our main texts will be Daoist texts from the classical period, but we shall also discussNeo-Daoism, Buddhism and Neo-Confucian metaphysics.Assessment: 100% coursework.Group II: Mind and LanguagePHIL2070.Pragmatism (6 credits)This course is in two unequal parts. In the first and longer part, we shall study the writings of theclassical pragmatists: Peirce, Dewey and James; in the second, we shall look more briefly at some ofthe so-called ‘neo-pragmatists’ such as Quine, Davidson and Putnam. We shall then consider thequestion of the relationship between these two schools, and think seriously about the recentsuggestion that the earlier is in fact the better.Topics to be discussed include: truth and knowledge; religion and science; and rationality, personalityand aesthetics.Assessment: 100% coursework.PHIL2075.The semantics/pragmatics distinction (6 credits)One of the central issues in contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics concerns whetherand where one should draw the line between semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning, or the