Course offerings

PHIL 612 – Ancient Philosophy: The Art-Nature Polarity in Ancient Greek Philosophy (A)

Instructor: Emily Perry
This course examines the analogy and polarity between the natural and the artificial in several Greek authors. Texts will likely include Empedocles's On Nature; selections of the Timaeus and Laws X; selections of the Physics and Generation of Animals; Ennead III.8.

PHIL 621 – Value Theory: Moral Emotions and Moral Responsibility (B)

Instructor: Jing Hu
This class will focus on the discussion of moral emotions and moral virtues such as empathy, anger, shame, guilt, grief, and so on. We will be introduced to literature in moral psychology, virtue ethics, Chinese philosophy, and feminist philosophy.

PHIL 641 – Philosophical Foundations of Biology (C)

Instructor: Matthew Barker
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. 

PHIL 649 – Phenomenology: Reflection & History (C)

Instructor: David Morris
We will begin with a study of the first three meditations in Husserl’s Cartesians Meditations, to introduce the project and method of phenomenology. We will then turn to a close study of Merleau-Ponty’s radicalization of Husserl’s project, in the Phenomenology of Perception. The courses has two overarching aims. The first is familiarizing students with key terminology and concepts of phenomenology, as well as cultivating careful reading and analytical practices. The second aim is thematic, focusing on the importance, to phenomenology, of our bodily situation within the world, as the beginning point of philosophical reflection, such that philosophy must take that into account as the condition of reflection. In the Phenomenology, though, we will see that this beginning is in fact intercorporeal and crucially opens to history, a key theme across Merleau-Ponty’s works. Accordingly, in the last weeks of the course we will take up the most challenging chapters in the Phenomenology, on the cogito, temporality, and freedom.

PHIL 658 – Selected Topics in Continental Philosophy: Khôra and Gaia (C)

Instructor: Matthias Fritsch
In the face of far-reaching ecological destabilization, reconsiderations of the relation between earth and human world will here be condensed into the relation between Plato’s khôra and Margulis’s and Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. We will primarily consider philosophical interpretations and uses of these concepts by Derrida and Latour, with possible glances at Stengers, Heidegger, Sallis, and Nishida.

PHIL 678 – Topics in Current Research: French Feminism and Subjectivity

Instructor: Emilia Angelova
This course is an advanced study of problems in feminist philosophy. The overall focus is prepared by post-1968 French feminist theory, specifically Irigaray and Kristeva. These readings deploy Lacanian and Foucauldian discourse analysis, and feminist tools to trace an essential difference of “woman” understood in its reflection as feminine inscription or “writing.” Part of this theme will be devoted to Achille Mbembe’s foundational thinking through constructs of blackness and Africa: life on the “postcolony.” Three weeks of study of the mid-1970s texts by Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, and texts from Anzaldua’s The New Mestiza.

PHIL 607 – Kant: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (A)

Instructor: Nabeel Hamid
This course will be devoted to a close reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and associated texts. 

PHIL 615 – 19th-Century Philosophy: Hegel on the State (A)

Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt
This seminar discusses Hegel’s political philosophy. Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Right (1821) are often regarded as the origin of social-constructivist concepts, such as that of an institution; they have shaped modern political thought from conservative to Marxist. We shall read §§ 142–360 and contextualizing literature. 

PHIL 623 – Issues in Ethical Theory: Philosophy of Well-Being (B)

Instructor: Pablo Gilabert
This course will be an in-depth discussion of contemporary theories of well-being (hedonistic, desire-satisfaction, objective list, perfectionist, etc.). The seminar will also include critical discussion of the application of these theories to contemporary cultural, political, economic, and environmental issues, such as those emerging from the relations between work and well-being in contemporary capitalist societies. 

PHIL 634 – Selected Topics in Epistemology: Naturalized and Experimental Epistemology (C)

Instructor: Murray Clarke
The goal of this course is to study naturalized and experimental epistemology. A critique of standard analytic epistemology is combined with an examination of the more recent scientific study of knowledge. 

PHIL 634 – Selected Topics in Epistemology: Ethics of Belief (C)

Instructor: Anna Brinkerhoff
This seminar surveys classic and cutting-edge research in the quickly evolving literature on the ethics of belief in contemporary analytic epistemology. Very broadly, this literature focuses on whether—and how—various practical and moral considerations bear on what we ought to believe, and on the rationality of belief. We will explore the following topics: pragmatism vs. anti-pragmatism, moral and pragmatic encroachment on epistemic rationality, doxastic wrongs, doxastic partiality in friendship, promising against the evidence, the epistemology of prejudice, epistemic injustice, and the epistemic demands of #BelieveWomen.

PHIL 615 – 19th-Century Philosophy: Hegel on the State (A)

Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt
This seminar discusses Hegel’s political philosophy. Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Right (1821) are often regarded as the origin of social-constructivist concepts, such as that of an institution, thereby shaping modern political thought, from conservative to Marxist. We shall read §§ 142–360 and contextualizing literature.

PHIL 633 – Selected Topics in Value Theory: Ethics of Death (B)

Instructor: Anna Brinkerhoff
This seminar will survey a variety of issues related to the moral dimension of death and dying including: the badness of death, euthanasia, killing vs. letting die, the value of immortality, the allocation of scarce medical resources, death vs.pre-natal non-existence, posthumous harms, and grief. 

PHIL 641 – Philosophical Foundations of Biology (C)

Instructor: Matthew Barker
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. 

PHIL 658 – Selected Topics in Continental Philosophy: Radical Democracy (C)

Instructor: Matthias Fritsch
This course will study conceptions of radical democracy, mostly in post-war European thought. We will read texts by authors such as Claude Lefort, Jean-Luc Nancy, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida. 

PHIL 678 – Topics in Current Research: Moral Psychology and Asian Philosophy

Instructor: Jing Hu
This course offers an in-depth exploration of selected topics in world philosophy that hold significant relevance to our modern society. It addresses issues such as moral agency across various philosophical traditions, perspectives on artificial intelligence, and cultural views on aging and caregiving.

PHIL 607 – Kant: Kant's Practical Philosophy (A)

Instructor: Pablo Gilabert
This seminar is devoted to a close critical reading of Immanuel Kant’s main ethical and political writings, and to an assessment of their contemporary relevance. This class has three objectives. First, we will seek to understand Kant’s moral and political thought by engaging in a careful reading of his texts. Second, we will consider the significance of Kant’s views for contemporary moral and political philosophy (e.g. regarding the contrast between deontology and consequentialism in normative ethics, moral constructivism, and the illumination of ethical and political issues about gender, race, and class). To do this we will read recent interpretations and discussions of Kant's work. Finally, we will engage in a critical assessment of the central claims and arguments advanced in those texts by asking whether they should be retained, reformulated or abandoned. The format of the class, encouraging both careful reconstruction of the texts and active critical discussion of the themes, theses and arguments raised in them, is geared toward satisfying these objectives. 

PHIL 612 – Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle's Physics (A)

Instructor: Emily Perry
In this course we will read Aristotle’s Physics with a view to understanding the argument of the work as a whole. Topics may include Aristotle’s responses to the paradoxes of Parmenides and Zeno; Aristotle’s conception of nature, motion, and body; Aristotle’s argument for the existence of a single, continuous motion and a first, unmoved mover. 

PHIL 625 – Aesthetics (B)

Instructor: Ulf Hlobil
This is a course on the philosophy of art. We will focus on Arthur Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. 

PHIL 643 – Selected Topics in Metaphysics: Modularity and Concepts (C)

Instructor: Murray Clarke
In this course we will investigate the contemporary literature in cognitive science on the nature of concepts. Beginning with the classical theory of concepts, Definitionism, we then move on to consider prototype theory and the theory-theory. Finally, we evaluate Fodor's conceptual atomism and Prinz's empiricist account of concepts. 

PHIL 658 – Selected Topics in Continental Philosophy: Deleuze and Kristeva (C)

Instructor: Emilia Angelova
This course is an advanced study of problems in the philosophy of values and norms, in the framework of ethics as transformed by post-structuralism and psychoanalysis in late 20th century Continental philosophy. We begin with Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. We move on by studying Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of difference, the processes of subjectivation and the emergence of the new category of “actuality,” which brings this category close to Nietzsche’s notion of the instant of monumental time. We will pay special attention to themes of the event, experience and experimentation as part of the critique of representation and new forms of constructing subjectivity. In the last third of this course, we turn to exploring sublimation, love’s labour and the constitution of subjectivity in psychoanalysis as part of developments in French post-structuralism. In this part we read Julia Kristeva’s work in psychoanalysis, specifically on narrative, trauma and the abject.