Advanced and Special Topics Courses

PHIL 441 - Philosophical Foundations of Biology

Instructor:  Matthew Barker
Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy or permission of the Department. This course helps students critically engage biology’s philosophical foundations. Topics typically include the nature of scientific reasoning, testing, and evidence in biology; how best to discover, define, and apply biological concepts; and how to structure the aims of biology to fit our diverse and changing societies. 

NOTE: Students who have received credit for BIOL 421 may not take this course for credit.

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PHIL 465 - Honours Seminar in Metaphysics

Instructor:  Murray Clarke
Prerequisite: PHIL 263 or 265 or 364 or 365, and 12 credits in Philosophy, or permission of the Department. This course begins by evaluating a range of theories about the nature of concepts: Definitionism, Prototype Theory, the Theory-Theory, and Conceptual Atomism. Later, we consider different theories concerning the nature of our cognitive architecture. Examples of such models include: Cosmides and Tooby's massivemodularity view, Fodor's restricted modularity account, and dual-process theories by Evans, Stanovich. Finally, we consider how culture and our evolutionary history might be integrated with an account of concepts and cognition.

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PHIL 473 - Advanced Topics in Continental Philosophy: Antigone in the Anthropocene

Instructor:  Matthias Fritsch
Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 374 or 377, or permission of the Department. Ever since Hegel’s and Heidegger’s influential discussions, there has been a noticeable resurgence of interest in Sophocles’s Antigone of late, especially in Continental-European thought. The main foci of recent discussions have been feminist politics, kinship structures, the politics of mourning, demands for individual autonomy in relation to state power, ethical and political conflict, and the background of slavery. In this course, we will focus on what the play can teach us today in our political, environmental, and intergenerational crisis. In particular, we will be interested in the human and political relation to death, to the earth, and civil disobedience in the face of political power that does not appear to fully recognize obligations to non-present generations, that is, the dead as well as the unborn. We will in particular study interpretations of the play by Hegel, Heidegger, Irigaray, Derrida, Cavarero, Butler, and Chanter.

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PHIL 483 - Advanced Topics in the History of Philosophy: Dante and Philosophy, from the Convivio to the Commedia

Intstructor:  Andrea Falcon
Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy, or permission of the Department. Dante (1265-1321) was not a professional philosopher but was seriously engaged with philosophy, and this engagement was essential to his literary work as a whole. More to the point: Dante lived at a very special time. This is the time when Aristotle’s science and philosophy became available for the first time to the Latin Word. For the above reasons, we will try to reconstruct Dante’s philosophical outlook, with a concentration on his views on the nature of philosophy, love and knowledge, intellectual and practical happiness, god and the world, free will. We will read the four books of the Convivio and selections from the Commedia. We will reflect on the relation between the Convivio and the Commedia and the reasons that led Dante to interrupt the Convivio in order to turn to the Commedia.

Nota Bene: knowledge of Italian and Latin is not required to do well in this class. However, willingness to engage in close and attentive reading of complex texts, as well as ability to engage in independent research outside class, are absolutely essential to your success in this class.                                         

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PHIL 485 - Kant: Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment

Instructor:  Nabeel Hamid
Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy, or permission of the Department. This course will be a close study of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, and its central topics: aesthetics, philosophy of biology, and the unity of theoretical and practical reason.

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PHIL 498 DD - Advanced Topics in Philosophy: Anscombe’s Moral Philosophy

Instructor:  Katharina Nieswandt
Prerequisite: PHIL 232 or 330, or permission of the Department. Anscombe’s writings in practical philosophy are among the most profound and original that the 20th century has to offer. We’ll cover her moral epistemology (topics such as “consideration zero”—i.e., the role of certainties in moral thinking), her criticism of consequentialism and Kantianism, her social ontology (especially her conventionalist theory of rights, rules and promises), her moral psychology (e.g. the role of motives, will and intentions in acting), as well as topics from her applied ethics (e.g. euthanasia and abortion) and political philosophy (in particular her justification of state power).