This course is a general introduction about the Chinese and western philosophy of law. Through reading the classics, case and basic theories of Chinese and western political philosophy, this course will lead students to discuss from four aspects: 1)the correlation and difference between natural law and modern law. 2) the evolution of methodologies of philosophy of law after the age of enlightenment. 3) the critique and challenges for contemporary philosophy of law. 4) the traditional resources and future direction of contemporary Chinese philosophy of law.

This course is a general overview of some major modern and contemporary debates in Philosophy of Mind. We will focus in particular on the following main topics: the nature of mind, the mind-body problem, mental causation, consciousness and mental content.

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of science and technology. We will be discussing the nature, aims and methods of science, while critically considering some of the major approaches to these issues in 20th century philosophy of science. We will also be considering the nature of technology, and the relationship between science and technology, especially in 20th-century and present-day contexts, but reaching back into other periods of human history, insofar as it is needed to improve our understanding of our own technological age and its challenges.

This course is a general introduction about philosophy of Taoism. Through reading the classics and latest research of philosophy of Taoism, this course will lead students to discuss from three aspects: 1)the historical context and condition of Taoism. 2) the dialectical relationship between Taoism as philosophy and Taoism as religion. 3) the inspiration from Taoism for the contemporary human civilization.

This course is a general introduction about the history of Chinese and Western political philosophy. Through reading the classics of Chinese and Western political philosophy, this course will lead students to discuss from 4 aspects: 1)the similarities and difference between ancient Chinese and Western political philosophy. 2)the development of methodologies in modern Western political philosophy. 3)the core ideas and social influence of contemporary Western political philosophy.

Many phenomena in real life are random rather than deterministic in nature. Probability Theory is a branch of Mathematics which provides certain mathematically rigorous techniques to study such phenomena. This particular course gives a basic introduction to the modern Probability Theory.

This course is designed to provide background knowledge of public finance in theory and briefly introduce the current fiscal institutions of China. It will start with the important topics on public finance, such as public goods and externalities. Then the second part of the course will be on the introduction of taxation (revenue). We will also discuss China’s fiscal reform, and how it has evolved to its present state and the implication.

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the effects of governments in the market failures in a competitive economy. The course will focus on industry structures and firm behavior, including the strategic interactions between firms. We first review firm behavior in various market settings, and discuss market efficiency, perfectly competitive market, market structure, strategic competition, and production efficiency. We then investigate the economics of regulation, that is, the behavior of a natural monopoly and various tools to regulate a natural monopoly.

This is a survey of the basic numerical methods that are used to solve scientific problems. The emphasis is evenly divided between the theoretical analysis of the methods and their practical applications. Some convergence theorems and error bounds are proved. The course also provides an introduction to Matlab, an interactive program for numerical linear algebra, as well as practice in computer programming. One goal of the course is to show how calculus and linear algebra are used in numerical analysis.

The objective of this course is to provide the students the basic knowledge of the statistical language R. Then they can use R to solve some specific economics or financial problem. We’ll cover R’s functions and data types, then tackle how to operate on vectors and when to use advanced functions like sorting. You will learn a powerful interface of R which is called “R Markdown”. We will also introduce how to apply general programming features like “if-else,” and “for loop” commands, and how to wrangle, analyze and visualize data.