TUITION FEES:
There is no tuition fee for the state subsidized places. These places are available for EU, EEA and Swiss Confederation nationals
For paying students:
– 5200 RON / year for Romanian students and for students coming from EU, EEA member states and from the Swiss Confederation
– 2500 € / year for non EU nationals

APPLICATIONS:

Application package, statement of purpose and interview
filosofie.unibuc.ro/studii_masterat/

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Prof. Dr. Constantin STOENESCU:
constantin.stoenescu@filosofie.unibuc.ro

Asist.univ. dr. Andrei Ionuț MĂRĂȘOIU:
andrei.marasoiu@filosofie.unibuc.ro

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COURSE DESCRIPTIONS

Here are a sample of courses and seminars we will do together in the following two years:

Year 1 (2023-2024)

1. Dissertation seminar: An introduction into academic writing (Dana Jalobeanu)

Research in philosophy is all about writing up your ideas and letting them sail in print – in journals, in book-chapters or monographs. But how do you transform a good idea into a publishable text? What are the steps in the process of writing? This hands-on course and seminar will give you not only tips and ideas, but full training into how to become a researcher. We will learn about communities of practice; we will learn to identify colleagues and the “voices that matter” for each individual subject. We will learn how to turn ideas into projects and projects into papers. We will learn to evaluate and “peer-review” philosophical texts and our own work. We will learn to plan and execute the successive steps of writing, rewriting, and incorporating feed-back into our texts.

2. Fundamental texts in philosophy I (Gheorghe Ștefanov)

This course aims to give you the basics of doing research-oriented-reading through spending a whole semester with one of the major philosophical books. The books vary from one year to the other. For 2023-2024, Gheorghe Stefanov will work with you on David Hume, An Enquiry concerning human understanding (1748), one of the most important books of modernity. The students are expected to engage in discussions during class meetings and also to do high-level, independent research in the field of modern philosophy. The course is focused on reading, discussing and interpreting David Hume’s seminal work from 1748, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. It is a „hands-on” course, with a reading-group seminar, intended to help students understand not only Hume’s text and idea but also, more generally, how to read, analyze and investigate a philosophical text and how to work on it until reaching the level of writing an individual research paper.

3. Philosophical Logic (Mircea Dumitru)

Currently, there are several competing ways of conceiving philosophical logic. One of them consists in developing philosophical logic as that part of formal logic which covers extensions of or alternatives to classical logic. The main purpose of this class is to introduce the students to philosophical logic in this sense, focusing on new advances in quantified modal logic in connections with topics in metaphysics and philosophy of language. Half of the class will be devoted to this introduction to the more formal stuff, which will provide the notions, tools and techniques required to follow applications in more advanced work in analytic philosophy. The other half will be a thorough study and evaluation of Kit Fine’s new ground-breaking work in philosophical logic / philosophy of language on representation in language and thought recently published in his Semantic Relationism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, 2009).

4. Ethics and integrity (Alexandru Dragomir)

There are many important aspects in life that belong to this field and were never taught in school before. Academic life, and especially the life of the researcher requires you to know how to collaborate, how and when to trust your colleagues, and how to become a trusted colleague. The course on ethics and integrity is a transversal course, for all our master students, regarding of the profile. It teaches the elements of academic ethics, and the skills needed for the academic life everywhere in the world.

5. Epistemology (Constantin Stoenescu)

Contemporary epistemology is a research field in turmoil. There are so many new “epistemologies”. Social epistemology, political epistemology, historical epistemology, virtue epistemology are some of the research fields that were developed in the past twenty years – some even talk about “alternative epistemologies.” Where does all that come from? What are the roots of the turmoil and dissatisfaction that gave rise to the multiplication of epistemologies? This course addresses some of the problems we believe to be at the roots of this twentieth and twenty-first century developments. It discusses a diversity of approaches to the problem of knowledge, showing the open-end-ness of the two major problems we have, when we think of knowledge acquisition: the problem of grounding and that of skepticism.

6. Philosophy of technology (Gheorghe Ștefanov)

This course reflects new trends in philosophy, in a field that addresses some of the challenges of our world. It looks into the main problems in philosophy of technology, focusing on the core concepts, views, topics and arguments developed within this disciplinary field. When possible, we will also try to discover traces of some of the analyzed philosophical views in contemporary pop culture (particularly, in the cyberpunk genre). Bruno Latour, Mario Bunge, Hans Jonas, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Wiebe Bijker and Andrew Feenberg are some of the authors we will study. The main purpose of this course is for students to develop specialized practical abilities, allowing them to understand and take part in current debates concerning technological progress and its associated risks.

7. Topics in contemporary metaphysics (Laurentiu Staicu)

This course will address some of the trendy topics in contemporary metaphysics: we will discuss free will and the persistence of the self, the nature of time, the many-worlds debates and many more. We will see together how old questions have received new clothes in the twentieth century, we will understand where and how were contemporary debates shaped and what it is still being discussed (and how) in the twentieth century.

8. Optional courses

A research master is also about choice. Students will be free to choose from a range of courses in English offered by the University of Bucharest – either in the other masters of the Faculty of Philosophy (PPE, Cognitive science) or by other faculties of the University. Each year, some of our professors or invited guests are offering specialized optional courses or master class, so keep an eye open for that as well!

9. Internships (Practică de specialitate)

Here, again, students are free to choose what kind of internship will suit them best. They can do an internship in one of the research centers of the Faculty of Philosophy, or at the ICUB – Institute of Research of the University of Bucharest, or in other research institutions. There is a lot about research which is hands-on practice. It is your choice to develop your skills into the direction it suits you best.

Year two (2024-2025)

10. Philosophy of mind and cognitive science (Gabriel Vacariu)

In the last 20 years, using mainly fMRI (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) but also EEG and other scan apparatus like PET) there have been great accomplishments in Cognitive Neuroscience regarding the relationship between mind and brain. These researches refer to the correlations between a mental state and certain neuronal patterns of activation. In this course, after investigating the main approaches in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science, we will study the very recent experiments (last four years) using fMRI in Cognitive Neuroscience. We will argue that the identity theory has to be abandoned, and the identity between a mental state and certain neuronal patterns has to be replaced with correspondences/correlations.

11. Philosophy of scientific experimentation (Dana Jalobeanu)

In the twentieth century, philosophy of science was mainly about theories and their modes of justification. In the twenty-first century, both history of science and philosophy of science focus on practices. Scientific experiments are complex sets of practices; and disentangling some of them has yielded fascinating results in the past two decades. In this course we are going to learn about some of the main results in this relatively new field of study. We will adopt a trans-disciplinary perspective, looking at experiments from both a historical and a philosophical point of view. We will talk about famous experiments and experimental programs in physics (in the past four hundred years), looking at their main functions in theory construction, concept creation, classification and understanding.

12. Fundamental texts in philosophy II

This is another hands-on, reading and research course centered upon one of the fundamental texts in philosophy. It will be given, alternatively, by different members of our department. Here are some versions we have on offer.

Anscombe – Intention (Gheorghe Stefanov)

The course is designed as a slow reading group dedicated to the study of G. E. M. Anscombe’s book, Intention. It is assumed that all participants have good critical thinking abilities and are also familiar with basic concepts, views and arguments from contemporary epistemology and philosophy of language. Some acquaintance with the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein might be useful, but is not required. The main objective of this course is to help students develop research and writing skills by studying a single philosophical work, fundamental for the development of an entire philosophical discipline, i. e. philosophy of action.

Francis Bacon, Novum organum/The New Organon (Dana Jalobeanu)

It is one of the most widely cited philosophical texts; everyone has heard of it. It is a text that stood for centuries at the origin of any philosophical discussion about the nature of (scientific) method, the origins or error, and the nature of human mind. And yet, Bacon’s Novum organum is not an easy read. It is a deeply puzzling and challenging text. In this course we will learn how to read it and how to decipher its mysteries. By the end of our course the students will not only know Bacon’s philosophy; they will also acquire some skills of reading and interpreting early modern texts in a more general sense. They will understand how to recognize early modern genres and techniques of reading and research; they will learn how to place Bacon’s philosophical ideas in context; they will learn how to identify some of the fundamental questions that shaped European modernity in philosophy and the sciences.

13. Optional course I
14. Optional course II
15. Philosophy of language

The course provides a particular perspective in philosophy of language by focusing on semantic projects based on a pragmatist view of language (intentional, conceptual role and inferential theories) and their relations to speech act theory. Among the thinkers we will study are H. P. Grice, G. Harman, P. Horwich, Robert B. Brandom, J. L. Austin, John R. Searle and Wilfrid Sellars. The course aims to help students develop research and writing skills within the discipline. Since this is a course for graduate students, participants will be expected to engage in discussions during class meetings and also to do some high-level, independent research.