PI489: Epistemology and Global Politics

Course description

Global politics is greatly complicated. The extent to which one can grasp such complication depends upon one’s ability to read those globally political phenomena. One’s ability, in turn, depends upon one’s conceptual, theoretical, or epistemological strategies used in reading those phenomena. This course mainly focuses on epistemology. It is a branch of philosophy and its basic question is: How do we know that which we claim to know? The course explores five sets of epistemologies popularly employed in constructing knowledge in social sciences or humanities. They are empiricism/positivism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, and poststructuralism. In order to ensure students’ ability to adequately comprehend the course’s content, both theoretical lecture and application exercise are the pedagogical modes. In the process, students are encouraged to use all kinds of media: image (still or moving), text, and music etc., as case studies for their applications.

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