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The Philosophy Department offers a wide range of courses in line with the diverse areas of specialization of our faculty. Students in many departments will find cognate courses for their majors, including ancient philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of the fine arts, and medical ethics. In addition to regularly offered ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú Plan courses, the department's upper-level courses change in content from semester to semester. Upper-level (undergraduate and graduate) course descriptions for the current and upcoming semesters will be updated on a regular basis.

Descriptions

PHL 205/205H: Science and Culture

PHL 205 TR 2:50pm – 4:10pm - Dr. Emily Zakin

PHL 205H TR 10:05am – 11:25am – Dr. Emily Zakin

This course will examine philosophical questions that arise at the intersection of, and in the faultlines between, scientific conceptions of reality and the everyday experience of reality. Looking at the cultural, ethical, political, and social dimensions of scientific practices, and reading across multiple genres, we will explore a variety of arenas where scientific knowledge and technological development have transformed human experience (including experience with the non-human world), and, conversely, arenas where reflection and insight are necessary to confront and navigate conundrums of meaning, value, and action presented by scientific and technological endeavors. Topics will include: the roles of scientific, political, and ethical reasoning in considerations of public health; human/non-human animal relations; climate change and collective agency; and the impact of new media and communication technologies on the boundary between public and private and on the social transmission of (mis-)information.

PHL 241/241H: What is Art?

PHL 241 TR 1:15pm – 2:35pm – Dr. Elaine Miller

PHL 241H TR 11:40am – 1:00pm – Dr. Elaine Miller

Art engages our senses (most of the time) and provokes an emotional response as well as intellectual reflection. What happens when we attempt to translate our aesthetic experiences into words? Does language fail to capture the embodied experience of aesthetics? We will read classical and contemporary philosophical texts about art and sense perception, and use them to reflect on specific artworks and sensuous experiences, asking questions about art and its role in human life. This course will also include art-making, including experimental writing, collaging, and conceptual art.  

PHL 273: Formal Logic

MWF 10:05am – 11:20am – Dr. Michael Hicks

It is tempting to characterize a really good argument this way: if you accept its premise, you must accept its conclusion. This course begins by analyzing this “must”—in what sense can one be logically compelled? What is it for an argument to be valid? A simple trick called “formalization” allows us to focus on certain structural features that are often relevant to the validity of an argument. In this course, we consider two formalizations, sentential logic and a first-order quantification-theory that builds on it, and figure out how to use them to show the validity of arguments. The primary task will be to master these mathematical representations of argument. As such this class is very different from other philosophy classes: homework will often be pseudo-mathematical, and there is very little writing.

PHL 302/302H: Modern Philosophy

TR 10:05am – 11:55am – Dr. Keith Fennen

Philosophic activity in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries is generally referred to as Modern Philosophy. During this time, philosophic activity, both in terms of the critique of traditional concepts and the development of new ideas, was exceptionally high. New conceptions of science, nature, political association, and morality, for example, were put forth. In this course, we will study works by Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, but we will also read brief excerpts from other thinkers. While we will discuss each thinker’s overall philosophical system, some guiding themes throughout the semester will be the self and its constitution, judgment, agency, immanence, and transcendence. 

PHL 310T/310V: Thinking: Minds and Machines

MW 2:50pm – 4:10pm – Dr. Michael Hicks

One of the central features of human life is our "mindedness"---we are conscious, we can think, and we can reason.  These are categories we also often try to apply to non-humans---especially animals and computers.  When we ask whether something or someone has a mind, we seem to be asking something really important: it seems to matter for moral and political reasons, not just to describe the world correctly.  But it isn't always clear what it is we are asking, much less why it is so important.  In this course we take up these questions, with an eye to understanding what is at stake in having a mind.

PHL 321/321H: Being and Knowing

MW 10:05am – 11:25am – Dr. Pascal Massie

This class offers a critical examination of the nature of reality and our knowledge of it. Metaphysics investigates the most basic and general features of reality. Aristotle called this inquiry “first philosophy” by which he meant: philosophy properly speaking. In this course we will approach metaphysics from this general perspective, then shift to some more specific issues: freedom and determinism, time, change and identity, possibility and actuality, universals. 

Epistemology is concerned with the nature and extent of our knowledge of the world. As such it asks what are the necessary conditions of knowledge? What are its sources, its structure, and its limit? What justifies a belief? Sample epistemological topics include knowledge and opinion, truth, skepticism, perception, and justification. 

PHL 331: Political Philosophy

MWF 1:15pm – 2:10pm – Dr. Daniel Cunningham

This course will take an historical approach to political thought, surveying a diverse range of texts including philosophy, history, and primary documents and seeking to understand political ideas as reflecting the strivings and conflicts from which they emerge. It will focus on the modern world, beginning with the political revolutions that occurred from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries, and will move gradually up to the present day. Part 1 will be called “The Birth of Modern Political Culture in the Long 19th Century”; Part 2 “International Ideological Civil War,” focused on the first half of the twentieth century; Part 3 “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Decolonization,” focused on European colonialism and the movements that overthrew it; and Part 4 “Neoliberalism and Whatever Comes Next,” focused on the worldwide neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and its legacies today. Along the way, and especially in this last Part, we will explore many important current issues such as climate change, political extremism and polarization, global inequality, the politics of education, and the relationship between democracy and technology. Major thinkers studied will likely include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Friedrich Hayek, among others. Assignments will be mainly writing-based, culminating in a final paper.

PHL 375: Medical Ethics

TR 2:50pm – 4:40pm – Dr. Clay Alsup

This class will consider a range of issues of ethical significance that arise in the practice of medicine. In the first part of the course, we will examine cases of "medicalization" in history, cases in which arguably non-medical situations are interpreted as being fundamentally medical. These include 18th and 19th century concerns about the health effects of reading novels and later concerns about menstruating women attending universities. We will then look at more recent cases of medicalization and the connection that develops between notions of health and moral character: here we will especially focus on the simultaneous medicalization and moralization of obesity. In the second part of the course, we will consider various ethical debates that emerge in the vicinity of medicine: these will include the extent to which access to health care should be guaranteed by governments, what the appropriate response to the debilitating rise in medical debt should be, and especially various concerns that emerge from the fields of epidemiology and public health, especially in cases of emergency, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

PHL 404: What is Philosophy? (Capstone)

TR 1:15pm – 2:35pm – Dr. Emily Zakin

What is philosophy? Is it a practice (a way of life), an intellectual tradition (embodied in texts), a form of argumentation? Is it universal or rare, intrinsic to human life or a break with it? What should philosophy be? In this capstone class, we will consider various responses to these questions, including our own ideas about what philosophy is and should be. As we read across philosophical genres – dialogue, treatise, meditation, essay, aphorism, rebuttal – we will also reflect on how the boundaries of philosophical inquiry are constructed and what this means for our own reading, writing, and research practices.

PHL 420A: Origins of Analytic Philosophy

MWF 11:40am – 12:55pm –Dr. Michael Hicks

Revolutionary developments in logic and science in the late 19th and early 20th century captured the imagination of philosophers, especially in Cambridge and Vienna, who became convinced that the distinctive task of philosophy had finally been established.  Focusing primarily on the so-called Vienna Circle (Schlick, Neurath, and Carnap especially), we will explore four questions: what influences led to the development of analytic philosophy? What is (was) analytic philosophy?  How did this tradition understand itself in relation to other traditions?  And what is the legacy of this revolutionary movement? 

PHL 450A: Agency and Personal Identity

TR 2:50pm – 4:40pm – Dr. Facundo Alonso

How do our actions contribute to the definition of our identity? What distinguishes an action as self-governing or autonomous? Can autonomous agency be considered an expression of our true selves? What does shape our identity as agents: our values, aspirations, and/or desires? Is autonomous agency a prerequisite for moral responsibility? This course counts toward the Philosophy and Law minor and the Ethics, Society, and Culture minor.

Past Courses

To view courses offered during previous ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú academic terms, visit the Course Bulletin.