The master programme is structured around three themes. These three themes are the main thrust of the MA, using the existing expertise of ESPhil's academic staff, while at the same time, keeping the MA relatively open for a broad range of students.
- Philosophy and Technology
- Philosophy and Social Change
- Philosophy and History
Each of these themes will consist of two core courses which are well-aligned and have two additional electives which can go into depth on a more specific or adjacent topic.
Practical information
Each of the themes will consist of two core courses which are well-aligned and have two additional electives which can go into depth on a more specific or adjacent topic. However, from the student perspective, as they only take 60EC of the total on offer, the program will look slightly different. Students will take 15 EC per block, which means that for the first two blocks, they will have to choose two out of three (core) courses. These courses are pre-aligned so that coherent themes emerge (see below) but also link through the different themes so that students can tailor their own program depending on their interest and possible expertise.
Students only have to take two electives in block 3 (7.5 EC) as From Theory to Practice (5 EC) and the Thesis tutorials (2.5 EC) will technically be hosted in block 3 as well (even though From Theory to Practice will start earlier, the technical designation of the EC, as well as the rounding off of the course with a final product, will take place there).
MA students will start the From Theory to Practice trajectory in which we will offer several ways in which the student can engage with practices related to philosophy such as public policy, (transformative) education, and academic research. These sections will consist of multiple specialized meetings in smaller groups as the students work towards domain-specific assignments – such a policy proposal or a contribution to the public sphere.
Furthermore, students will start their thesis preparation in block 3, as they work towards the final block which is dedicated to thesis writing and meetings with the supervisor.
To facilitate part-time students, the classes of two of the three themes are programmed on Mondays. This pertains to blocks 1-3.
Learning objectives
The MA Philosophy Now aims to prepare you for careers in- and outside academia. It provides you with a thorough grounding in subjects of interest within the four clusters and with analytical and research skills required for doctoral study or a wide range of careers.
Mode of education
Education in the Master in Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam is organised on a small-scale basis. Besides lectures you will have group tutorials and non-academic workshops. There is ample room for debate and discussion with fellow students, but we also expect you to work individually, for instance by writing essays. During the process of writing your master thesis you will be closely supervised.
Themes
Theme 1: Philosophy and Technology: Technics in the Cosmos
Digital technologies have become an indispensable part of our society. They open up new possibilities and applications, from entertainment to healthcare. But they also raise political, ecological, and philosophical questions. Technologies are not neutral artifacts but are co-constitutive of the world — in which human and non-human live and act. To this extent, technology could be considered to define the human condition. This requires a reinterpretation of the historical and contemporary role of technology in philosophy. To intervene in the ecological, political, and technological crises today we must understand the phenomenon of technology on its own terms, forming a progressive understanding of (digital) technologies and how they can contribute to societal advancements.
Theme 2: Philosophy and Social Change: The Everyday Politics of Social Change
Surely the moment is at hand for some revolutionary change! Or is it? Our assumptions concerning the grandeur of social change often obscure the everyday politics that shape our reality. Concepts like normality, resilience, activism, representation, solidarity, and collectivity will be central to understanding our predicament. We argue that the supposedly mundane aspects of everyday life have a much more profound impact on society — both in terms of how it is constituted now, and what is possible.
Theme 3: Philosophy and History: Philosophy in History, from Antiquity to Enlightenment
We will explore new ways of understanding the history of philosophy in order to develop enriched perspectives for dealing with current philosophical issues. Rather than follow chronological developments, we shine a light on specific moments in history in which concepts get elaborated, reflecting the effects of a historical crisis or turning point. Bringing in lesser-known thinkers and traditions, women philosophers, and non-Western traditions, we examine past philosophers as contributing to a laboratory of thought that never ceased to question and challenge the ideas, habits and ideologies that shape human life.
Curriculum - Master Philosophy Now
Click on the course links below to view the course syllabus. (This overview describes the curriculum of the 2024-2025 academic year and may be subject to revision during upcoming years.)
Cluster: Representation: Politics, Science, and Culture
Cluster: Environment, Life and Technology
Cluster: Subjectivity and Response-Ability
Cluster: The Politics of Inequality: Wealth, Capitalism, Exploitation
Master Thesis & Milestones
Curriculum overview
Theme 1: Philosophy and Technology
Core Course I
This course examines the relationship between philosophy and technology, demonstrating that technology has been integral to philosophical inquiry since its inception and remains so –constituting, in this sense, a form of first philosophy. It undertakes both a re-reading of the history of philosophy and a re-interpretation of the history of technology to elucidate their intrinsic interrelation. Through this systematic inquiry, the course asks how philosophy might engage critically with technology in the present and how technological phenomena offer novel perspectives for understanding philosophical problems. In addition to reassessing the conceptual and historical relation between philosophy and technology, the course addresses contemporary technological developments and their socio-political, ontological and epistemological reverberations.
Literature
- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins university Press, 1997.
- Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017/
- Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time Vol.1 The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Core Course II
This course explores the human condition in the context of the disruption of society by digital technologies like Artificial Intelligence. It takes a philosophical anthropological perspective on the human-technology relation to provide a philosophically and scientifically informed answer to the question: what is it to be human in the digital era? To this end, we consult three philosophers – Arendt, Heidegger and Anders – and consider, first, their respective philosophical anthropologies and, second, their philosophy of technology. As a third step, we explore their theories in the context of contemporary technological developments, like Human-centered AI (Anders); the virtualization of human life (Heidegger); and attention eroding and enhancing technologies in education settings (Arendt). With this approach, the course aims to familiarize students with the philosophical anthropological approach and to evaluate what the role of philosophical anthropology is and can be in the contemporary philosophical landscape. In particular, we look at potential contributions of philosophical anthropology to philosophy of technology.
Because many of the questions involved are still open-ended, this course seeks to contribute to asking these questions in a systematic and more or less unified manner. Students are asked to write a final essay at the conclusion of the course in an attempt to contribute to and/or critique a philosophical anthropological perspective on contemporary debates in philosophy of technology.
Literature
- Anders, G. The outdatedness of human Beings
- Arendt, H. The human Condition
- Blok, V. The critique of AI: Why it is questionable and calls for a radical transformation of the human-AI relation.
Elective I
Introduced by Michel Foucault, the notion of dispositif is an indispensable concept to describe how (bio)power has a strategic and productive hold on life through heterogenous networks of discourses, institutions, laws, technologies, architectures forms, scientific statements etc. In this course we revisit the analysis of dispositives in terms of their (plastic) powers of repetition, that is, the recursive ways in which our lives, subjectivities, and worlds are molded, violated, produced, transformed, over and through time. After an introduction to anarchist critiques of institutions and technologies (including the pharmacological ontologization and infinitization of technology à la Stiegler), we turn to Aristotle's notion of hexis, the spontaneous recursive patterning and machinism through which life gets a hold of itself, and its reception in modern philosophy (Hume, Hegel, Ravaisson, Nietzsche, James etc). We then focus how the forms of our worlds have acquired a certain sovereign power of managing over the self-organizing powers of life.
Literature
- Donna Haraway – A Cyborg Manifesto
- Catherine Malabou – The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity
- Matteo Pasquinelli – The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence
Elective II
Freud and Lacan deliberately describe psychoanalysis as a technique, rather than as a theory or as a metaphysical system. The unconscious must be approached through a technique. This perspective not only sheds surprising light on the nature of consciousness, but also raises fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of technique itself.
In this master's course, we examine how the technique of psychoanalysis reshapes philosophical conceptions of subjectivity, language, and truth, and we consider its implications for contemporary debates in philosophy. Central to our inquiry will be a close reading of Lacan’s Second Seminar: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, alongside the relevant key primary texts by Freud.
Literature
- Lacan – The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis.
- Freud – The Penguin Freud Reader (Adam Phillips)
Theme 2: Political and Social Philosophy
Core Course I
In times of crisis, disorientation, and escalating (geo)political conflict, the concepts of ‘normality’ and ‘resilience’ are on everybody’s lips. When everyday practices, social interactions, and implicit assumptions about the world lose their apparent consensus, it becomes painfully clear what used to be 'normal'. People are searching for the ‘new normal’, longing for the ‘old normal’, and what seemed unthinkable, undoable or undesirable is ‘normalized’ astonishingly quickly.
By contrast, ‘resilience’ seems to be the gold standard in many public discussions and policy documents – especially in the city of Rotterdam. It is suggested that we should foster capacities to restabilize and reorganize after disruptions to make individuals, communities, democracy, the economy more resilient. What is meant by ‘normality’ and ‘resilience’ in different contexts? Are they only ‘buzzwords’ of conservativism and neoliberalism? Where are ideals of normality and resilience desirable and where do they come with the price of stabilizing failing systems and buck-passing responsibility to individuals?
In this course, we want to investigate the seemingly unphilosophical concepts of “normality” and “resilience” from different philosophical perspectives. We will look into the history of both concepts, discuss if and how these concepts are related, and how they can be applied and refined at the crossroads between philosophy and other disciplines. To what extent and how do both concepts help to understand the same / different phenomena or respond to the same crises? What are the normative assumptions around both concepts? What is the lived experience behind them? Do we need more or rather less normality and resilience?
Literature
- Wehrle, Maren (2024). Normality, as a concept in Phenomenology. In: T. Toadvine and N. de Warren (Eds.): Encyclopedia of phenomenology (online/living reference work).
- Weiss, Gail (2015). The normal, the natural, and the normative: A Merleau-Pontian legacy to feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability studies.Continental Philosophy Review 48: 77-93.
- Bauer, Katharina (2025). Adapt or die? – Adaptation, resilience, and identity. Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics. 18 (2).
- Breyer, Thiemo (2022). Resilience – Its connections to vulnerability and crisis from analytic and phenomenological perspectives. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 83 (5):381-392.
Elective I
Media Aesthetics names a hybrid and shifting constellation. Combining the Latin media with the Greek aisthesis, it signals the entanglement of mediation and sensuous experience. This seminar investigates how perception is shaped through media—not as neutral channels of communication, but as active conditions of sensing, knowing, and acting.
Rather than centering on art or the beautiful, the course foregrounds the “making of perception”—how media technologies configure sensibility, attention, and affect. Today’s media ecologies are not simply tools for entertainment or communication; they form environments that modulate bodily experience, shape behavior, and entangle us in complex networks of power. We will approach media not only as communicative forms, but as operative forces that organize and shape collective life—through algorithmic infrastructures, surveillance, mobile devices, and the aesthetic strategies of protest or platform capitalism.
Throughout the seminar, we will engage critically with canonical texts and their contestations, with particular attention to feminist, queer, Black, and decolonial interventions that reorient the field of aesthetics and media theory. The aim is to develop a nuanced, historically grounded, and politically sensitive understanding of how perception is conditioned, crafted, and contested.
Literature
Gilles Deleuze, “What is the Creative Act”, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and
Interviews 19975 – 1995, Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2007, pp. 312-324.
Bradley, Rizvana, “Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics“, in Anteaesthetics: Black
Aesthetics and the Critique of Form, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2023, pp. 53-
104.
Povinelli, Elizabeth, “Downloading the Dreaming”, in Geontologies: A Requiem for
Late Liberalism, Durham: Duke University Press (2016), pp. 144-167.
Elective II
From the 18th century onwards, liberal philosophers have stressed the importance of a ‘sentimental education’ for the enlightened and rational subject. Such a sentimental education did what rationality could not: it made men sociable, capable of sympathy (fellow-feeling). Art was thus tasked with the responsibility to stimulate a sympathetic union between fellow human beings. New literary modes such as sentimentalism and later on realism (and its most famous examples such as Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Charles Dickens Hard Times) helped shape a liberal culture in which the ‘rational’ underpinnings of liberal politics were ‘softened’ by fiction which appealed to the readers ‘heart’.
This course highlights how philosophers and artists have made the case for and against ‘liberal empathy’ in the arts. We look at definitions of empathy, and related terms such as sympathy, pity and compassion. More generally, we piece together a history starting with the 18th century notion of ‘moral sentiments’ (of which sympathy/pity was the one considered to make humans sociable) to more recent affect-theory (Berlant, Ahmed).
Literature
- Babette Hellemans, Understanding Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
Theme 3: Philosophy and History, from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
Core Course I
This course looks at the notion of pleasure at the heart of ancient philosophical debates whose various conclusions are the starting point for reflection on morality and metaphysics. The course explores the debate initiated by Plato in his book The Republic, in which a natural human need for satisfaction of desires leads to moral and political corruption depending on different conceptions of pleasure.
Plato’s analysis involves a radical account of knowledge and reality which imposes a separation between sensation and intellect, initiating a debate on the distinction between intellectual and physical pleasure. The critique of Platonism in antiquity will be scrutinised through the lens of the reception of this distinction. Reactions from Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans as well as less well-known schools of thought such as the Cynics and the Cyrenaics will be analysed in depth.
The course will be centred on the ancient debate with one weekly lecture-type session and one seminar-like session per week, in which selected passages are read and discussed together, thereby also initiating students to high academic standards of textual analysis.
We will see that the ancient texts are not to be read as historical curiosities but as addressing the contemporary problems in a different context, destabilizing because of its unfamiliarity but all the more stimulating for reflection on contemporary questions.
Topics for course-essays need not be restricted to the ancient context, rather students will be encouraged, in the spirit of the philosophy-now MA programme, to think about contemporary issues through the lens of ancient debates.
Literature
- Plato – The Republic
- Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics
- Epicurus – Letter to Menoeceus
- A. Long and D.N. Sedley – The Hellenistic Philosophers
Elective I
Europe, from the late Middle Ages onward the concept of ‘race’ was used in order to distinguish different kinds of people. As a rule the distinctions drawn between human races were accompanied by clear cut moral hierarchies. Most early modern Europeans appear to have considered racial differences the result of a variety of external circumstances, but during the Enlightenment as a result of taxonomical attempts to classify man within the wider context of nature a modern, allegedly scientific racism arose, according to which these distinctions had a biological basis.
In this course we will concentrate on the way in which European authors active prior to Darwin, who denied the reality of different human ‘species’, and to such 19th- and 20th-century racists as Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Rosenberg tried to meet the challenge implied by the discovery of peoples and cultures that looked fundamentally different from the ones early modern Europeans had been accustomed to, born as they were into a world which only recently had started to globalize. Some of the texts involved take the superiority of the inhabitants of Europe for granted. Other early modern authors, however, reveal an evident fascination sometimes coupled with genuine admiration for indigenous ‘natives’.
Literature
- Michel de Montaigne – Essais
- Denis Diderot – Political Writings
- Jon Mikkelsen – Kant and the Concept of Race
Elective II
A recurrent theme in Indian philosophy concerns the transformation of ordinary experience and its liberation from egoistic attitudes. Drawing on a wide range of contemplative practices, Indian philosophy has explored questions related to why and how to deconstruct selfhood and gain access to wider realms of conscious experience. Some of these reflections find structural parallels in Baruch Spinoza’s own philosophical proposal. In this course we will explore how themes and approaches from Indian philosophy can shed new light on Spinoza’s own aims, and how his philosophy can raise new questions and challenges for our understanding of Indian philosophical and contemplative discussions.
Literature
- B. Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader. The Ethcis and Other Works, ed. and transl. by E. Curley, Princeton University Press, 1994
- Sangiacomo, Spinoza’s Yoga. Practice of Power and Experience of the Infinite. Groningen University Press, 2025 (OA): https://books.ugp.rug.nl/ugp/catalog/book/202
Compulsory
In this skills course you learn how to bring philosophy into practice and are prepared for possible careers with or in philosophy.
These master thesis tutorials are designed to help you gain a head start with your master thesis, which is a substantial piece of work (about 20,000 words) in an area related to the Master in Philosophy and the research that is conducted by the faculty.