Philosophy

Questions of justice are as old as civilization and involve historically and culturally contingent processes. How do we understand justice in light of widening disparities between groups of people across contemporary societies? Students examine how definitions of justice are interpreted, mediated and put into practice, particularly as part of public policy and the social institutions that structure our lives.

Credits: 4

Designed for first-year students, this course takes up questions about the nature and significance of property, or owning stuff (including oneself and one’s “properties”). Authors include Aristotle, Justinian, Locke, Marx, Hegel, Fourier, Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, Cheryl Harris, the U.S. Supreme Court, and St. Francis of Assisi. Students read, write, and discuss primary texts using interpretative methods distinctive of the humanities.

Credits: 4

Examines the complex and evolving relationship between modern science and religion from the 16th century to the present. Topics include the influence of the Reformation on emerging secular culture; the modern philosophical debate over the existence of God; “disenchantment” as a defining feature of modern experience; and Darwinian evolutionary theory, humanism, and conflicts between secularism and fundamentalism in the 21st century.

Credits: 4

A critical look at power in its many forms, with special focus on analyzing oppression and domination as they operate through race, class, gender/sexuality, (dis)ability, and other social categories, interpersonally, institutionally, and politically. Historical and contemporary readings by philosophers and other theorists; specific readings will vary from semester to semester.

Credits: 4

The emergence of Western philosophy in ancient Greece during the age of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle.

Credits: 4

A survey of our most important ethical notions and of the philosophers who were most important in shaping them.

Credits: 4

An introduction to philosophy through an examination of influential views of what it is to be human. Topics include the relations among people, machines, and animals; the role of culture in shaping people; and the question of whether there is a distinctively human good.

Credits: 4

An introduction to Western culture through the study of tragic drama, Plato’s dramatic dialogues, and philosophical reflections on tragedy. The focus is on the possibilities and limitations of human action. Topics include the relations of individual to city, mortal to divine, and male to female; and the roles of knowledge and desire in human conduct. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Toni Morrison are included.

Credits: 4

An examination of major 19th- and 20th-century European philosophical and literary texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Fanon. Topics include “the death of God,” alienation, freedom and commitment, ethics and politics when “everything is permitted,” and the interaction of self and other(s) in the definition of individual and social identities.

Credits: 4

Close readings of four or five major philosophers from the modern period (e.g., Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant). Issues and supplementary readings may vary each semester.

Credits: 4

Systematic analyses of ordinary arguments, followed by a study of formal languages that are used to represent arguments symbolically.

Credits: 4

An overview of the development of philosophy in the Islamic world, with a focus on the medieval period (9th–13th centuries). Key figures and concepts of the Islamic philosophical movement are discussed, together with its influence on Jewish and Christian thinkers, Islamic theology and mysticism, and its impact on modern Islamic projects of reform.

Credits: 4

A critical introduction to major Asian philosophical systems, including Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Particular attention is given to core themes in traditional texts and later commentaries pertaining to metaphysical questions about the nature of reality, epistemological questions about the sources of knowledge, ethical questions about virtuous conduct and the good life, and aesthetic questions about art and beauty.

Credits: 4

Topics include philosophic conceptions of experience, nature, self, and truth in classical Buddhist schools of India, Tibet, China, and Japan.

Credits: 4

What is gender? What is power? What tools do we have for understanding and addressing gender injustice? This course employs philosophical, feminist, and queer theory to address these and related questions.

Credits: 4

Examines how philosophical ideas about beauty, ancient and modern, continue to inspire fresh debates about artistic, moral, and political life. Key questions include: Is there a single universal standard of beauty, or are all such standards “relative”? Must good art always be beautiful? Why do disagreements about standards of beauty so often become fiercely political? Examples are drawn from the arts and from students’ personal experiences.

Credits: 4

A critical examination of the category and idea of race. The course addresses historical, philosophical, ideological, institutional, ethical, and psychological components of race, focusing on the ways race mobilizes systems of domination, including racism and white supremacy. Relationships between race and ethnicity, race and gender, race and class, and other intersections are explored.

Credits: 4

Investigates today’s dramatically escalating codependence between humans and technology. How do “smart” technologies affect our moral, spiritual, and political experiences? What roles do such technologies play in the evolving ecology of a planet that is a hybrid of human and nonhuman things? Can machines become conscious? Might machines achieve personhood? Readings from earlier modern and more recent philosophical and science fiction writers.

Credits: 4

An introduction to major traditional and contemporary issues in the philosophy of art. Topics include the problem of defining “art”; the nature of representation; the problem of whether taste has an objective basis; and the relation of art to moral, cognitive, and social values.

Credits: 4

An examination of the forms of and challenges to religious experience. Key questions include: Can any religious beliefs be proved or disproved? Is there a basic conflict between reason and faith? Must one be traditionally religious to lead a spiritual life? Does the existence of evil refute the idea of a Supreme Being? Is fundamentalism a distortion of the essence of religion? Readings are drawn from modern, medieval, Western, and non-Western sources.

Credits: 4

An examination of the deep relationships—metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual—between human beings and all other nonhuman species and ecosystems in the natural world. Key questions include: What does it mean, metaphysically, to say that humans are (or are not) “part of nature”? Do humans have duties towards nonhuman species? Do any nonhuman species have rights? When do ecological philosophies become politically controversial? Readings from selected contemporary and traditional philosophers and environmental thinkers.

Credits: 4

A historical examination of philosophical thought on the structure and meaning of time. Readings emphasize the centrality of time to continental thought, but other approaches are also discussed. Key questions include: What is the relation between subjective and objective temporality, and how are we to conceive of each? Is there anything more to time than our experience of it?

Credits: 4

Is there such a thing as objectivity, journalistic or otherwise? How do accounts of reality in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities differ, and is any account more objective than the others? How do narratives tell the truth, and how do they lie? What might people mean by the term “truth,” anyway? Course readings are interdisciplinary; the course style is philosophical.

Credits: 4

An examination of theories of capitalism from the Industrial Revolution to the age of neoliberalism. Students engage major thinkers and develop critical perspectives on the socioeconomic forces that shape people’s lives. John Locke, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Robert Nozick, C.B. McPherson, E.P. Thompson, David Harvey, and Wendy Brown are among the thinkers.

Credits: 4

An examination of the rich philosophies of Tibetan Buddhism, drawing on Nagarjuna and the Indian background, developing the tantric tradition through its philosophic assumptions and arguments. (offered Summer, in India)

Credits: 4

Explores what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might have meant when he wrote that “all of philosophy may be found in the plays of Shakespeare.” The focus is on a close study of selected works, together with commentary by such thinkers as Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Cavell, and Critchley. Plays include Hamlet, Richard II, Coriolanus, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and King Lear.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: THP2205 Or PHI1515 Or PHI2110

A critical study of the Enlightenment approach to ethics and politics in the natural rights and social contract theories. Topics include tensions between the individual and the state, liberty and equality, and reason and passion in the theory and practice of the great democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. Readings include Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Burke, and the Federalists.

Credits: 4

A study of thinkers who challenged accepted notions of reason and selfhood and, in doing so, helped shape the intellectual life of our present century. Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are some of the thinkers studied.

Credits: 4

Examines philosophers’ efforts to rethink fundamental ethical, legal, and political issues in the wake of total war and totalitarian domination in Europe between 1914 and 1945. Focusing on Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, questions about resistance, complicity, guilt, and punishment become central. Additional texts are selected from Jaspers, Beauvoir, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Adorno, and Butler.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

Approaches music (represented in various world music traditions) as a form of experience that raises deeper questions about the metaphysics and evolution of human cognition, emotion, rhythm, sociality, and imagination. Readings draw on the literatures of philosophy of music and philosophy of mind, but also on recent discussions of embodied cognition and meaning in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Credits: 4

What is education? What is its nature? Its value? How can it help, and how can it harm? Students read and debate the answers to these questions offered by Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Maria Montessori, Paulo Freire, and others, and critically analyze the positions and policies of contemporary educational policymakers and activists.

Credits: 4

Explores the development of phenomenology through selections from the major works of phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The focus is on how strict adherence to phenomenological description leads one beyond the secluded Cartesian ego to accounts of consciousness that take ego and world to be coeval.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2060 Or PHI2110

An exploration of central issues in 20th-century European philosophy. The focus is on the challenges to traditional humanism posed by the successes of modern science and technology; the fragmentation of social and political life; and the decentering of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literary modernism. Texts include works by Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas, and Derrida.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

A study of how philosophical themes have been developed in recent fiction and an examination of the relationship between philosophy and literary criticism.

Credits: 4

A critical examination of influential attempts to understand the nature of the cinematic medium. Questions raised include: Is film a fine art? Must a movie “represent reality” if it is to succeed as a movie? Are there certain insights into human experience that are better expressed through film than through other media? Readings include Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin, and Stanley Cavell.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: (CIN1500 And CIN1510 ) Or PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

An investigation of classical, modern, and contemporary theories of desire and sexuality, with an emphasis on the relationship between familial and other social institutions and on the formation of individual identities. Readings include works by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theorists.

Credits: 4

An investigation of philosophical accounts of the nature of mind, including issues like: What does it mean to have a mind? How are mind and body related? Could animals or machines have minds? How are accounts of the mind important for our understanding of freedom, immortality, human nature, and religion?

Credits: 4

An investigation of what current evolutionary psychology and cognitive science suggest about a philosophical idea that has long been sacred for modern humanistic culture: that human beings can act freely, without constraint by social or biological forces. Are “free will” and “determinism” fundamentally contradictory ideas, or is a compromise position possible? Includes readings from selected philosophers, cognitive psychologists, and others.

Credits: 4

What, if any, moral and political obligations does art have? Should public policy promote some kinds of art and discourage others? This course addresses these and related questions via works from across the arts and philosophical texts.

Credits: 4

A forum for second-semester juniors with two distinct aims: (1) to facilitate the formulation of (a) a senior thesis prospectus, (b) an outline, (c) a bibliography, and (d) a schedule for the composition, during the senior year, of a satisfying 40-page senior thesis; and (2) to introduce the mainstreams of contemporary thought and interpretation in philosophy. Senior thesis topics need not deal with the topic of the junior seminar.

Credits: 4

An intensive study of the major texts, emphasizing their role in defining the work of Western philosophy, with special attention to the interaction of drama with argumentation in the dialogue form.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515

A close study of Aristotle’s most influential texts with discussion of how these texts helped shape the philosophical tradition. Topics may include Aristotle’s ideas about being, soul, cause, nature, ethics, and politics.

Credits: 4

This seminar stages an encounter between the two thinkers: Martin Heidegger, one of the most powerful and controversial philosophers of the 20th century, and Hannah Arendt, arguably its greatest political thinker. Among the central questions studied: individual authenticity vs. being in the world with others; resoluteness and political death vs. the promise of birth; and the relation between philosophic reflection and political action.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

An intensive study of the main ideas and texts of William James and John Dewey, two seminal figures of American pragmatist philosophy. Readings and discussions focus on such topics as the centrality of the idea of experience to philosophical analysis; the relations between thought and action; the epistemological status of metaphysical and religious belief; and the reconstructive role of intelligence in art, science, and social life.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

Writing in the latter half of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche has exercised extraordinary influence on subsequent philosophy. He is a powerful thinker and an intriguing writer. This seminar involves an intensive examination of the full range of his work.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

Intensive study of primary texts by major late 20th century thinkers, focusing on relation of subjectivity to language, history and politics.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

An examination of what it means to be aware of oneself and one’s world. Questions discussed will include the following: Is a unified self necessary for experience? What constitutes our sense of self? How does our social existence influence the character of consciousness? What is it like to be conscious? When we are conscious of something, what exactly is it we are conscious of?

Credits: 4

Kant is the thinker who has, more than any other, shaped the discussion of intellectual issues over the past two centuries. The semester is devoted to a close study of Kant’s critical philosophy of scientific knowledge, human morality, and judgment in art and the life sciences.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI2110

This 'single figure' seminar will focus on two figures: Kant and Hegel. Readings will touch on all of Kant's and Hegel's major concerns, but the emphasis will be on their respective conceptions of nature and reason. The seminar will attend to similarities between the two thinkers but also work through Hegel's reasons for rejecting much of Kant's view.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

A seminar devoted to close readings from several of Hegel’s texts (e.g., Phenomenology of Spirit, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Science of Logic, Philosophy of History).

Credits: 4

PREREQ: PHI2110

Continues the writing workshop format of PHI 4890 (required in the fall semester), and focuses on the development of oral presentation skills. Students present aspects of their ongoing work to each other, culminating in a public presentation to philosophy majors and faculty at the annual Assessment Day in the late spring. Required of philosophy majors in the second semester of their senior projects.

Credits: 2

PREREQ: PHI4890

For first-semester seniors who are developing their senior theses. Designed to give students the invaluable experience of presenting ongoing work to a critical and supportive public of peers.

Credits: 2