COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Code of course: BA-ERA-IPH-S-4, MA-ERA-IPH-S-4	
Title of course: The Reconstruction of the Postmodernism	
Lecturer: Endre Kiss	
General aim of the course:
The interpretation of Postmodernism as a historical period. An analytical exploration of postmodernist structures of cognition.  
Content of the course:
Comprehensive exploration of the most important tendencies of postmodernist thinking. Reconstruction of the most important antedecent of this philosophy, the structuralist movement. The specific questions of the legitimacy of Postmodernism.  Postmodernist semantics, The category of difference. The potential postmodernist synthesis (Riceeur). The uprising of deconstructivism. Leading representants of Postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Negri). Postmodern Everyday Consciousness, The empirical and practical achievements of Postmodernism.
Grading criteria, specific requirements:
Paper (written essay) analyzing a post-modernist text or a postmodernist phenomenon. In individual project is also possible.
Required reading:
•	Foucault Michel, Die Ordnung des Diskurses. 1970. (to read also in English or French)
•	Lyotard, Jean-Francois, Das postmoderne Wissen. Ein Bericht. Wien, 1986. (to read also in English or French) 
Suggested further reading:
•	Hardt-Negri, Empire. 2000.
•	A posztmodern gondolkodás rekonstrukciójának alapvonásai. in: Magyar Filozófiai Szemle, 1992/3-4. pp. 461-485.
•	Kiss Endre, Globalizáció és/vagy posztmodern, 2003.
•	Studies of Baudrillard and Virilio
•	Semiologie und Grammatologie in Postmoderne und Dekonstruktion, Stuttgart, 1990.	

Code of course: BA-ERA-IPH-S-5, MA-ERA-IPH-S-5	
Title of course: Introduction to Epistemology	
Lecturer: Jenő Pöntör	
General aim of the course:
The course provides an introduction to some of the main topics in epistemology.
Content of the course:
Topics included in the course are:
1. What is knowledge?
2. Sources of human knowledge.
3. Skepticism.
4. Theories of justification
5. Modern and contemporary anti-skeptical strategies.
6. Religious epistemology.
Grading criteria, specific requirements:
There are no specific requirements for this course. Students are expected to attend all meetings and must write an 5-8 page essay (in English or Hungarian) related to one of the discussed topics, chosen by the student.
Required reading:
1. Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”,Analysis, 23(6): 121–123.
2. Stanford Encyclopaedia entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/
3. Descartes, René (1641) – Meditations, I, II, III.
4. Stanford Encyclopaedia entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/
5. Putnam, Hilary, 1981, “Brains in a Vat”, in Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 1: 1–21
6. Stanford Encyclopaedia entry:  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/
7. Stanford Encyclopaedia entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/ 
8. Goldman, Alvin, 1967, “A Causal Theory of Knowing” https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/078a/d2b9117693dbab0739ab2001a25b10a5ef35.pdf
9. Plantinga, Alvin, “Is Belief in God Properly Basic?,” Noûs 15 (1981): 41-51.
Suggested further reading:
Dancy, Jonathan, 1987, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University Press	

Code of course: BA-ERA-IPH-S-9, MA-ERA-IPH-S-9	
Title of course: Fundamental Concepts of Poststructuralist Philosophy	
Lecturer: James Cartlidge	
General aim of the course: To get an understanding of poststructuralist philosophy through looking at some of the central concepts of its associated philosophers. Much of poststructuralism consists in an interrogation and subversion of philosophy’s concepts and methods, an attempt to re-evaluate and transform the way we think about language, meaning, culture, music and much else. Students will encounter Derrida’s ‘Differance’, Lyotard’s ‘Differend’, Butler’s ‘Gender Performativity’, Foucault’s ‘Power/Knowledge’, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘deterritorialization’ and others, and get a sense of how the movement of poststructuralism was famously criticised by Sokal/Bricmont in ‘Fashionable Nonsense’.
Content of the course: Combination of lecturing and class discussion about the readings and central concepts involved. 
Grading criteria, specific requirements: 1 Essay and 1 short (5-10 minute) class presentation.
Required reading: 
•	Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’
•	Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘The Differend’ (excerpts)
•	Deleuze and Guattari: ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ (excerpts)
•	Judith Butler, ‘Gender Trouble’
•	Sokal and Bricmont, ‘Fashionable Nonsense’ (excerpts)
Suggested further reading: 
•	Catherine Belsey, ‘Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction’
•	James Williams, ‘Understanding Poststructuralism’	

Code of course: BA-ERA-IPH-S-10, MA-ERA-IPH-S-10	
Title of course: Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’	
Lecturer: James Cartlidge	
General aim of the course: To introduce students to one of the most significant works of Continental philosophy of the past two centuries, an entry-point into the fields of phenomenology and existentialism. In it, Heidegger investigates what he sees as philosophy’s most fundamental question: what does ‘Being’ mean? Answering this question leads Heidegger to an ‘analysis of Dasein’, which contains a compelling analysis of the nature and structure of our existence. Through close reading and discussion of the text, students will encounter Heidegger’s discussions of, among other things: what the world is, our social being, our emotions, language, anxiety and the meaning of death. This will give students a chance to engage with some important complexities and tensions at the core of Heidegger’s thinking, gain the necessary skills for engaging with his work in the future, come to appreciate the lasting impact of his phenomenology of human existence and its conceptual vocabulary, and understand some of the reasons that his work has had such an impact on subsequent philosophy.
Content of the course: A close reading of ‘Division 1’ of ‘Being and Time’, through a combination of lectures, class discussion and short student presentations. Time will be allocated to other Heidegger texts that are relevant to certain discussions in ‘Being and Time’.
Grading criteria, specific requirements: 1 Essay and 1 short (5-10 minute) class presentation per student.
Required reading: 
•	‘Being and Time’, Martin Heidegger, Maquarrie/Robinson Translation. 
PDF available here: http://pdf-objects.com/files/Heidegger-Martin-Being-and-Time-trans.-Macquarrie-Robinson-Blackwell-1962.pdf
Suggested further reading:
•	Richard Polt, ‘Heidegger: An Introduction’
•	Stephen Mulhall, ‘The Routledge Guidebook to Heidegger and ‘Being and Time’
•	Thomas Sheehan, ‘Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift’	

Code of course: BA-ERA-IPH-S-11, MA-ERA-IPH-S-11	
Title of course:  The Syntax of the Noun Phrase	
Lecturer: Éva Dékány	
General aim of the course: 
This course gives an introduction to the structure of nominal expressions in generative syntactic theory. We aim to identify the sequence of functional heads and the phrases that can fill their specifier positions.
Content of the course: 
Adjective ordering restrictions, the positions of classifiers, numerals and demonstratives, the structure of possessive phrases and relative clauses. Movements in the noun phrase.
Grading criteria, specific requirements: 
The grade is based on active participation in the classes and an end of term essay.
Required reading:
•	Abels, Klaus & Ad Neeleman 2009. Universal 20 without the LCA. In Jose M. Brucart, Anna Gavarro & Jaume Sola (eds.), Merging features: computation, interpretation, and acquisition, 60-79. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
•	Bernstein, Judy B. 1997. Demonstratives and reinforcers in Romance and Germanic languages. Lingua 102. 87-113.
•	Bianchi, Valentina 2000a. The raising analysis of relative clauses: A reply to Borsley. Linguistic Inquiry 31 (1) 123-140.
•	Boskovic, Zeljko 2005. On the locality of left-branch extraction and the structure of the NP. Studia Liguistica 59. 1-45.
•	Cheng, Lisa L.-S. & Rint Sybesma 1999. Bare and not-so-bare nouns and the structure of NP. Linguistic Inquiry 30 (4) 509-542.
•	Cinque, Guglielmo 1994. On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance DP. In Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi & Rafaella Zanuttini (eds.), Paths towards Universal Grammar: Studies in honor of Richard S. Kayne, 85-110. Washington, DC, Georgetown University Press.
•	Cinque, Guglielmo 2005. Deriving Greenberg's Universal 20 and its exceptions. Linguistic Inquiry 36 (3) 315-332. doi:10.1162/0024389054396917.
•	Laenzlinger, Christopher 2004. French adjective ordering: perspectives on DP-internal movement types. Lingua 115. 645-689.
•	Longobardi, Giuseppe 1994. Reference and proper names: A theory of N-movement in syntax and logical form. Linguistic Inquiry 25 (4) 609-665.
•	Ritter, Elizabeth 1988. A head-movement approach to construct-state noun phrases. Linguistics 26 (6) 909-929. doi:10.1515/ling.1988.26.6.909.
•	Scott, G. J. 2002. Stacked adjectival modication and the structure of nominal phrases. In Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP. The cartography of syntactic structures 1, 91-120. New York, Oxford University Press.
•	Szabolcsi, Anna 1994. The Noun Phrase. In Ferenc Kiefer & Katalin E. Kiss (eds.), The syntactic structure of Hungarian Syntax and Semantics 27, 179-275. New York, Academic Press.
Suggested further reading:
•	Bruge, Laura 2002. The positions of demonstratives in the extended nominal projection. In Guglielmo Cinque (ed.), Functional structure in DP and IP, 15-53. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
•	Cheng, Lisa L.-S. & Rint Sybesma 1998. Yi-wan tang, yi-ge tang: Classiers and massifiers. Tsing-Hua Journal of Chinese Studies 28 (3) 385-412.	

Code of course: BA-ERA-IPH-S-12, MA-ERA-IPH-S-12	
Title of course: Introduction to Plato’s dialogues	
Lecturer: István Bárány	
General aim of the course:
The course provides a philosophical introduction to Plato’ dialogues. 
Content of the course:
We will read and study a number of dialogues (Apology, Meno, Phaedo, Symposium, parts of the Republic, Phaedrus), charting the development of specific core ideas in Plato’s philosophy. 
We will also raise questions pertaining to the dialogue form, to a putative authorial voice, to the personas of the dialogues and to the diverse fictional and historical facets of Socrates.
Grading criteria, specific requirements:
Week-to-week work on texts, short synopses and papers, participation in discussion. (50%)
Paper on chosen topic at the end of the semester. (50%)
Required reading:
Primary reading: the specified dialogues of Plato in English translation (as in the Complete Works of Plato,Hackett). 
Secondary reading:
The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. by R. Kraut (1992).
Ferrari, G.R.F. (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Plato's Republic. Cambridge, Cambridge UP., 2007.
Ahbel-Rappe, Sara; Kamtekar, Rachana, Companion to Socrates. Malden, Blackwell, 2009
Morrison, Donald R. (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Socrates. New York, Cambridge UP., 2011.