Basic Information

  • Course Code: HS301
  • Course Name: Philosophy
  • Course Offered In: Fall ‘22
  • Instructors: Mrinal Kaul
  • Prerequisites: None
  • Difficulty (on a scale of 5): 3

Course Content

The course content mostly covers Indian and Western philosophies, but it depends a lot on the instructor and his field of research. We had Indian philosophy pre-midsem, and later on shifted our focus to Western philosophy after the midsem. We mostly studied about different schools of thought among philosophers across different eras. Fundamental questions were examined, and how the response of philosophers changed the perception of people was also studied. The instructor gave us book chapters to read and prepare for the exam.

Feedback on Lectures

The lectures were great, and were more discussion and interaction based rather than ‘slide-reading’. Instructor usually comes with an agenda for every class, and does not mind if he is not able to cover the stipulated course content for each lecture, but emphasises a lot on discussions and questioning. I would strongly recommend attending his classes, as his lectures are built upon previous ones.

Feedback on Evaluations

Instructor didn’t give a lot of AAs, but gave a lot of ABs. Overall, this course had the best grading across all other HSS electives. We had 2-3 objective quizzes of 5% each, and 10% for the attendance. The rest was 30% midsem and 50% endsem, both were largely subjective with 300 word answers. The questions were directly based on the book chapters that instructor uploaded on Moodle, and required some amount of rote-learning to frame reasonable answers.

Study Material and Resources

Instructor will upload all required references and reading materials.

Follow-up Courses

Advanced philosophy courses from the HSS department.

Final Takeaway

Instructor is super chill and a great guy. Strongly recommend to take his courses, as he focuses more on the learning aspect and also does reasonably good grading. This course will not take a lot of time commitment to get good grades. Just don’t pile it up till the end.