Prior course offerings

PHIL 612 – Ancient Philosophy: The Origin of the Will in Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophy (A)

Instructor: Emily Perry
This course traces the development of the concept of the will in Greco-Roman antiquity, drawing on texts ranging from Plato to the Patristics.

PHIL 615 – 19^th Century Philosophy: Hegel (A)

Instructor: Emilia Angelova
Conceived and written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, G. W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is a ferment of a philosophical revolution in its own right. This is one of philosophy’s most important works and on it was founded the movement of German Idealism. Grasped from the vantage point of complete self-consciousness, this dialectic renders philosophy into a system that is both subjective and absolute. The Phenomenology is to appear to us, its readers, as the complete science of the recollected life of Desire, more decisively, the desire for self-actualization and the self’s objective recognition by the other, all of which are notions that underlie also current social, political and economic life. The achievements of self-conscious life and desire are many: art, religion, science and reason; enlightenment, culture and faith; morality, social life and forgiveness; ethics, law, absolute knowledge and instrumental reason.

This seminar is a close reading of Hegel’s text. We will make the very task of learning how to read this phenomenological text one of our goals. But we will conduct our study also as a critical reading: we will ask about implications and ideas that have inspired subsequent philosophical developments and as well have posed controversies involving Hegel’s contribution.

PHIL 617 – Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Frege (A)

Instructor: Olivia Sultanescu
This course provides an analysis of some of the central philosophical works in the analytic tradition from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The tradition of analytic philosophy has Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) as one of its main founders. Frege’s chief ambition is to set arithmetic upon secure foundations by showing that its truths can be derived from logical truths alone. In pursuing this project, Frege reconceives the discipline of logic and revolutionizes our understanding of both language and thought. What is more, he contributes to a profound transformation of philosophy itself. This transformation, often taken to be distinctive of the analytic tradition, is captured in the realization that we can attain philosophical understanding of a phenomenon through the investigation of the logical structure of the discourse about that phenomenon. This insight leads to new conceptions of philosophical analysis.

In this seminar, we will try to understand Frege’s seminal contributions through a careful reading of some of his most influential texts, as well as through a careful consideration of the ways in which Frege’s work influenced the later work of another key figure of the analytic tradition, namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). We will also examine the views of Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), who shared many of Frege’s commitments.

PHIL 626 – Political Philosophy: The Concept of the Political (B)

Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt
This seminar critically examines Carl Schmitt’s anti-liberal conception of sovereignty and democracy. Schmitt was an early supporter of fascism, but his legal theory continues to have profound influence across the political spectrum—shaping post-war constitutions and today inspiring the anti-colonial left. We shall read Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (2nd, exp. ed.) and contextualizing literature, from Hegel to Chantal Mouffe.

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 658 – Selected Topics in Continental Philosophy: Heidegger, Deconstruction, and Marxism (C)

Instructor: Matthias Fritsch
In this course we will trace a number of themes through the works of Marx, Heidegger, and Derrida: the critique of the maximization of value; the relationship between finitude and value; between theory and practice; and conceptions of time in modernity. We will read texts, among others, by Marx, Marcuse, Heidegger, Derrida, and Hägglund.

Note: This offering of PHIL 658 may be considered as category (B) upon consultation with the GPD.

PHIL 678 – Topics in Current Research: Mind, Time and Nature (C)

Instructor: David Morris
This course focuses on time as central to the problem of the relation between mind and nature, through a study of Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, and Whitehead’s The Concept of Nature. Bergson and Whitehead are philosophers who take up the sciences of their time to advance philosophy—but also challenge the ways that scientists tend to think about being, mind, and perception. They especially do this by emphasizing the central importance of time in philosophy and in nature. One occasion for this course is the publication of a new translation of Creative Evolution; another is renewed and ongoing interest in both Bergson and Whitehead.

PHIL 613 – Medieval Philosophy (A)

Instructor: Ulf Hlobil
Course on medieval ethical theories. We will read Abelard, Aquinas, and other authors.

PHIL 614 – Modern Philosophy: Leibniz (A)

Instructor: Nabeel Hamid
This course will be an intensive study of the philosophy of the 17th/18th-Century German polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. We will focus on his influential positions on topics in metaphysics and epistemology, such as substance, force, and modality, as well as his distinctive version of idealism.

PHIL 623 – Issues in Ethical Theory: Philosophy of Work (B)

Instructor: Pablo Gilabert
This seminar will be devoted to a sustained examination of recent debates in ethics and political philosophy about well-being and social justice at work. Questions addressed include the following: What is work? What makes work desirable and what makes it undesirable? How can we organize working activities so that they are more conducive to well-being and aligned with social justice? These questions are not only of theoretical interest. They are also practically important. Many people spend half of their waking hours working, and our society pressures us into work on pain of severe poverty or social shame. We will likely discuss works by Kwame Appiah, Chris Bousquet, Michael Cholbi, John Danaher, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Jon Elster, Raymond Geuss, Anca Gheaus, Pablo Gilabert, Alex Gourevitch, Lisa Herzog, Axel Honneth, Rahel Jaeggi, Jan Kandiyali, David Leopold, Tom O’Shea, Tom Parr, Jahel Queralt, Julie Rose, Willemn Van der Deijl, Nicholas Vrousalis, and Erik Wright.

PHIL 629 – Values and Biotechnology (B)

Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt
This course examines normative issues around genetic engineering or other biotechnologies, including moral, metaphysical, epistemic or political questions. This year's seminar addresses questions such as: “What is a disability, and should we genetically engineer human beings not to have any?” and “Are genetically modified plants a good remedy for global hunger?” Readings range from applied ethics to philosophy of science.

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

Instructor: Murray Clarke
The focus of this course will be to examine recent results from naturalized and experimental epistemology. Defenders of these movements include Quine, Stich, Kornblith and Machery. Critics include Jennifer Nagel, Ernest Sosa and others. Arguments and evidence on all sides of these debates will be closely evaluated.

PHIL 644 – Philosophy of Science: Science and Values (C)

Instructor: Matthew Barker
What roles do values play in science? Are there roles they must play? Which roles should values play in science, and which shouldn’t they play? These questions are centuries old, but work on them in philosophy of science has intensified in recent years. We’ll read, write, and have group discussions about some of the resulting papers and books, as we address the above questions ourselves. Example topics include how social values should influence choice of research questions in science, which epistemic values should influence evidential reasoning, how moral and political values should bear upon applications of scientific findings, and how values should influence where the boundaries of scientific categories are drawn.

PHIL 612 – Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: Heredity, Teleology, and Sexual Difference (A)

Instructor: Emily Perry
This course is dedicated to Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. We’ll discuss how Aristotle’s account of animal reproduction illuminates broader issues in his natural philosophy and metaphysics, including his hylomorphism, his natural teleology, and his scientific methodology. We’ll also take up numerous questions peculiar to this treatise, including: What, for Aristotle, is the mechanism by which an animal’s form is transmitted to its offspring? How does he explain why children resemble their parents more than they do the average adult? Why does Aristotle think sexual reproduction is in some sense better than asexual reproduction? How does he conceive of the difference between the sexes? of their characteristic contributions to the reproductive process?  At what point in its development does he think an embryo has its own nature? How should we understand the role of this nature in the embryo’s self-fashioning? What are natural deformities, and how are they explained? Readings from the Generation of Animals will be supplemented by selections from throughout Aristotle, as well as relevant secondary materials.

PHIL 621 –  Value Theory: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant and Plato (B)

Instructor: Paul Catanu
This course will propose to consider the now-classical critique that Nietzsche made of Platonic and Kantian ethics that are based on universal rational claims and values.

PHIL 626 – Political Philosophy: Political Perfectionism (B)

Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt
This course introduces you to the perfectionist perspective on major topics in political theory, such as the justification of the state. We will read historical classics, such as Aristotle’s Politics, as well as recent literature.

PHIL 634 – Selected Topics in Epistemology: Knowledge of Other Minds (C)

Instructor: Olivia Sultanescu
Nothing is more ordinary than our taking ourselves to know that there are other people and that they have thoughts.  But it is difficult to make philosophical sense of this knowledge.  For instance, we seem to know our own thoughts immediately, without observing our behaviour.  But in order to know the thoughts of others, it seems that we must rely on evidence.  How, then, could the very features that we ascribe to ourselves without any evidence be ascribed to others on the basis of evidence without seriously distorting those features?  This is one of the puzzles that we will consider in this course.  Our topic will be the possibility of knowing others, as well as the nature of the knowledge that we might have of them.  Special attention will be paid to the intimate connection between knowing what someone thinks and understanding her utterances.

PHIL 643 – Selected Topics in Metaphysics: Truth (C)

Instructor: Ulf Hlobil
This is a course on the philosophy of truth. We will read seminal texts on the nature and logic of truth from different historical periods, including recent research.

PHIL 649 – Phenomenology: Bodies of Language (C)

Instructor: David Morris
This course begins with a close study of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, focusing on the theme of language and expression, as crucial to his account of the body, expression, and our intercorporeal being—and to his method of radical reflection. This is followed by a study of his abandoned book and project, The Prose of the World, and selections from his course notes on The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Nature and possibly also his lectures on the problem of speech and the literary use of language. (To be determined.) The deeper philosophical effort is twofold: to understand perceiving, sense-making bodies as gestural, expressive, communicative, linguistic bodies, in a broad sense; to understand language and idea as not being abstract informational systems, but bodily. To support this, the philosophical readings will be complemented with recent work on, e.g., Protactile (a growing tactile language of the DeafBlind), new scientific work on other creatures as manifesting linguistic behaviours, and other empirical work that pushes us to suspend typical presumptions about boundaries between language and non-language, linguistic bodies and non-linguistic bodies, what language consists in, and so on. 

PHIL 656 – Selected Topics in Analytic Philosophy: Frege and Wittgenstein (C)

Instructor: Gregory Lavers
Frege is known as the originator of modern logic and the grandfather of analytic philosophy. His project of logicism (an attempt to show that all of arithmetic follows from logic together with definitions) occupied him for most of his life. The way he tried to demonstrate the thesis of logicism was seen as a radically new approach to philosophical problems. This project at the intersection of mathematics and philosophy allowed for an essentially philosophical problem to be stated and addressed with unprecedented clarity. Although Wittgenstein explicitly rejected many of Frege's philosophical doctrines, he always acknowledged a philosophical debt to Frege. In this course, we will look at some of the central texts of both Frege and Wittgenstein (early and late) and we will explore certain Fregean themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy.

PHIL 607 – Kant: Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (A)

Instructor: Nabeel Hamid
This course will be devoted to a close reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment.

PHIL 629 – Values and Biotechnology (B)

Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt
This course examines nomative issues around genetic engineering or other biotechnologies, including moral, metaphysical, epistemic or political questions.

PHIL 631 – Theories of Justice: Critical Theory (B)

Instructor: Pablo Gilabert
This seminar will be devoted to a sustained examination of recent contributions in Critical Theory regarding social justice, freedom, and well-being. Authors discussed will likely include Amy Allen, Robin Celikates, Simone Chambers, Rainer Forst, Nancy Fraser, Raymond Geuss, Sally Haslanger, Axel Honneth, Timo Jütten, Rahel Jaeggi, Cristina Lafont, Hartmut Rosa, and Martin Saar, among others.

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

Instructor: Anna Brinkerhoff
This course will focus on central questions in the ethics of belief: Is it always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence? What is the relationship between epistemic and moral evaluation of beliefs? If ‘ought implies can’, and if we lack voluntary control over our beliefs, is it the case that we ought to believe in certain ways? Are we responsible for what we believe? What is the aim of belief: truth or something else? What makes a belief rational? Does morality get a say in the rationality of belief? Does friendship place demands on belief that conflict with epistemic demands? Does promising require us to flout epistemic norms? Does moral ignorance exculpate moral blame? What contribution do moral beliefs make to the moral worth of an action?

PHIL 644 – Philosophy of Science: Categories and Classification (C)

Instructor: Matthew Barker
Categories and classification of them are some of the most controversial and long-studied topics at the intersection of philosophy and the sciences. Racial categories, and sex and gender categories, are obvious examples today. But there are many others too. Do categories such as living thing, chemical element, and race have reality independent of our views about them? What should we recognize their boundaries to be? Do they have essential natures, and if not, what are their natures? What kind of evidence is relevant to views about them? What are the limits to empirical knowledge about categories, and what roles can and should non-empirical methods have in gaining knowledge about categories? Which ways of classifying or ordering categories are best, and why? We’ll address these sorts of questions and others.

PHIL 658 – Selected Topics in Continental Philosophy: Democracy and Climate Change (C)

Instructor: Matthias Fritsch
In our times of environmental destabilization, the democratic form of government has been criticized as inherently short-termist, incapable of addressing long-term challenges as severe and urgent as climate change. In this course, we will study this critique as well as (largely “Continental-European”) accounts of democracy that may offer a response, including possible justifications of civil disobedience and climate activism.

PHIL 678 – Topics in Current Research: French Feminism & Subjectivity (C)

Instructor: Emilia Angelova
This course is an advanced study of problems in feminist philosophy. The overall focus is post-1968 French feminist theory, specifically Irigaray and Kristeva, their readings of central texts in the Western philosophical tradition. Their readings deploy Lacanian and Foucauldian discourse analysis (which we will take up via Butler and Foucault) and feminist tools to trace an essential difference of “woman” understood in its reflection as feminine inscription or “writing.” These writings scrutinize a disturbing history of violence and study the feminine “as” subjective sexual identity and its representations in constructs of modern subjectivity. Where modern subjectivity is defined by its telos as an internalizing effort, the writing of the feminine, as essential difference that shakes up the ideological subject, tears open the closures of discourse, and returns reflection to experience in the actual world. In this manner, the differential contribution of the writing of the feminine is that it opens up the excluded other or material underside of discourse, and forces discourse to constant revisability. The question of the difference of “woman” (classically identified as the maternal feminine, the psycho-bisexual feminine, and variously the lesbian) is open-ended and not reducible to a denotational referent in natural language, nor is it a common property identified neatly with categories of biology and culture. The experience of transsubjectivity and transgender identity in contemporary culture is not excluded from, but constitutes just another differential possible subjectivity, precisely. In the 1960s the French feminists share in generally post-structuralist ideas about the new revolutionary forces, and seek to subvert traditional forms of patriarchy, colonialization and exploitation.

Texts under examination will include Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and recent work, Michel Foucault’s Sexuality (2022), Irigaray’s Beyond East and West (2022), Kristeva’s Dostoyevsky (2022).

PHIL 607 – Kant: Wolffianism and the Early Kant (A)

Instructor: Nabeel Hamid
This course will focus on a selection of Kant’s early works (that is, works before his so-called “critical turn”). In addition to Kant, we will also read selections from Kant’s immediate German predecessors, including Christian Wolff, Martin Knutzen, and Christian August Crusius. We will aim to understand the development of Kant’s thought prior to his landmark Critique of Pure Reason by situating it in the context of major currents in early eighteenth-century German philosophy.

PHIL 617 –  Origins of Analytic Philosophy: The development of logic in the 19th Century (A)

Instructor: Gregory Lavers
Logic is a science that dates back as far as Aristotle, but while there was a great deal of work on logic in the intervening centuries, the 19th Century involved some clear breakthroughs. In his Begriffsschrift of 1879, Frege put forward the first system of modern logic. In this course we will look at the work by Mill, Boole, and Frege that analyzes reasoning in natural language and attempts to represent it in formal languages. Frege’s work will be examined in detail: in particular we will read Frege’s Begriffsschrift and Foundations of Arithmetic.

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, resentment, and guilt. We will be introduced to literature in moral psychology, virtue ethics, 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 643 – Selected Topics in Metaphysics: Culture, Concepts, and Cognition (C)

Instructor: Murray Clarke
In this course we investigate the nature of concepts and various cognitive architectures, and we consider how culture and evolution might play a role in various cognitive architectures.

PHIL 658 – Selected Topics in Continental Philosophy (C)

Instructor: Natalie Helberg
Topic and Description TBA. 

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

Instructor: Emilia Angelova
Conceived and written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, G. W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is a ferment of a philosophical revolution in its own right. This is one of philosophy’s most important works and on it was founded the movement of German Idealism. Grasped from the vantage point of complete self-consciousness, this dialectic renders philosophy into a system that is both subjective and absolute. The Phenomenology is to appear to us, its readers, as the complete science of the recollected life of Desire, more decisively, the desire for self-actualization and the self’s objective recognition by the other, all of which are notions that underlie also current social, political and economic life. The achievements of self-conscious life and desire are many: art, religion, science and reason; enlightenment, culture and faith; morality, social life and forgiveness; ethics, law, absolute knowledge and instrumental reason.

This seminar is a close reading of Hegel’s text. We will make the very task of learning how to read this phenomenological text one of our goals. But we will conduct our study also as a critical reading: we will ask about implications and ideas that have inspired subsequent philosophical developments and as well have posed controversies involving Hegel’s contribution.

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

Instructor: Pablo Gilabert
This seminar 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 relation between work and well-being in contemporary capitalist societies. Authors discussed will include Gwen Bradford, David Brink, Roger Crisp, Dale Dorsey, Jon Elster, Guy Fletcher, Rainer Forst, Daniel Heybron, Thomas Hill, Tom Hurka, Rahel Jaeggi, Herbert Marcuse, Robert Nozick, Martha Nussbaum, Derek Parfit, Joseph Raz, Connie Rosati, Tim Scanlon, Christine Tappolet, Valerie Tiberius, and Susan Wolff.

PHIL 633 – Selected Topics in Value Theory: Values & Biotechnology (B)

Instructor: Anna Brinkerhoff
“Biotechnology” is an umbrella term for genetic engineering techniques. We shall discuss moral and metaphysical questions that arise for these techniques, such as: (1) What is a disability, and should we genetically engineer human beings not to have any? (2) Are genetically modified plants a good solution to malnutrition in poor countries? (3) What's good about biodiversity? (4) Can genes be patented; i.e., are they fit to be private property? (5) Is lobbyism a social problem? (6) Should scientific journals routinely publish non-significant results, too?
Readings in this course include: classics in philosophy of science; contemporary empirical studies from biology, medicine and political science; and contemporary articles in applied ethics.

PHIL 644 – Philosophy of Science: Science and Values (C)

Instructor: Matthew Barker
What roles do values play in science? Are there roles they must play? Which roles should values play in science, and which shouldn’t they play? These questions are centuries old, but work on them in philosophy of science has intensified in recent years. We’ll read, write, and have group discussions about some of the resulting papers and books, as we address the above questions ourselves. Example topics include how social values should influence choice of research questions in science, which epistemic values should influence evidential reasoning, how moral and political values should bear upon applications of scientific findings, and how values should influence where the boundaries of scientific categories are drawn.

PHIL 678 –Topics in Current Research: Individuals (C)

Instructor: David Morris
This course approaches metaphysical questions about individuality and the role of individuality in metaphysics through close studies of P.F. Strawson’s classic Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics and Gilbert Simondon’s Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Simply put, Strawson advances an argument that individuality is a basic starting point of metaphysics. Simondon argues that the presumption of individuality is a basic error of classic metaphysics: individuality results from most basic metaphysical terms, rather than being a basic term. This study in contrasts will be framed with select readings, TBA, from philosophers such as Aristotle, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, on individuality, and perhaps also readings from philosophy or sciences on the role of individuality in mathematics (e.g. around the axiom of choice), physics (e.g., the no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics), or biology (problems about the individuality of various organisms, especially bacteria). 

PHIL 607 – Kant (A)

Instructor: Nabeel Hamid
This course will focus on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, with an emphasis on understanding the implications of Kant’s theory of knowledge and his critique of metaphysics for religion.

PHIL 623 – Advanced Ethics: Private Property Rights (B)

Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt
In this course we shall discuss how anyone comes to own anything in the first place and how far these rights extend. Questions include: Is property a natural right or a social construction? How does our current, global system of property allocation work? Should every human being be guaranteed a minimum of private property, and would this be economically feasible to do? In trying to answer these questions, we will touch on many larger philosophical questions, such as: What is a right? What makes a good human life? What economic conditions obtain in a just society? The readings are a mix of philosophical classics (such as Locke and Marx), recent publications (e.g. by Thomas Picketty and by David Graeber) and empirical case studies.

PHIL 631 – Theories of Justice: Egalitarian Social Justice (B)

Instructor: Pablo Gilabert
This seminar will be devoted to a sustained examination of recent contributions to an egalitarian understanding of social justice. We will address debates on the content, justification, and feasible implementation of egalitarian principles. We will discuss important recent works by Elizabeth Anderson, Thomas Christiano, G. A. Cohen, Nancy Fraser, Andrea Sangiovanni, T. M. Scanlon, and Stuart White, among other authors. 

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

Instructor: Murray Clarke
In this course, we examine recent approaches to naturalized epistemology and experimental epistemology. We consider some of the literature on the status of epistemic intuitions and its implications for standard analytic epistemology. We also consider what methodological mutations might result from, and have resulted from, these approaches to doing epistemology. Authors studied will include Kornblith, Machery, Stich, and more.

PHIL 658 – Selected Topics in Continental Philosophy: The Politics of Truth and Tragedy (C)

Instructor: Matthias Fritsch
Current political times have been diagnosed as “post-truth,” even when the relation between truth and politics, between science and policy, is critically at stake for many vulnerable populations in the present and the future. In the context of health crises and global heating, a common justification for civil disobedience and political resistance has been found in the name of a truth that politics does not sufficiently acknowledge. In such times, questioning the univocity or perspectival nature of truth, or suggesting the inseparability of truth and rhetoric, may seem to be irresponsible. This course will examine these matters by discussing Foucault on ‘free-spokenness’ or parrhesia (‘speaking truth to power’) and Heideggerian and Derridian accounts of truth and world-making. As Foucault retrieves parrhesia from ancient Greek political philosophy and tragedy, we will in part be drawn to examine the relationship between political action and tragic conflict. We will discuss whether resistance can be legitimized by accusations of hubris, even in the face of tragic conflicts around truth. Apart from Foucault, we will read work by authors including Arendt, Derrida, Schürmann, Bennington, Hägglund, and others.