Spring 2021 Class Schedule
Spring 2021 class Schedule
Spring 2021 course descriptions
PHIL109: First-Year Seminar: The Self
In this course, we will discuss philosophical questions about the nature of the self, raised and answered in readings from the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophical writings, as well as some artistic representations. Thus we may discuss questions such as: Is self-awareness necessary or sufficient for selfhood? What guarantees the continuity of personal identity over time? To what degree is the self-constituted by its social context? Are there good or bad (authentic/inauthentic, alienated, unified, etc.) ways to be a self? As with any first-year seminar, the course will also involve frequent writing assignments, including both informal exercises and formal argumentative papers.
PHIL 210-3: History: Early Modern
The transition from the Medieval to the Modern era in philosophy began, roughly, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and ended, again roughly, in the late 18th century. New methods of acquiring knowledge, along with a radically different conception of the world, permanently transformed the philosophical enterprise and the broader culture. In this course we will examine the views of some of the most important modern philosophers—especially Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Bayle, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—on the nature of God, causation, substance, mind, knowledge, and the material world. Additional readings will be drawn from Elizabeth, Galileo, Masham, Boyle, Shepherd, and Du Châtelet.
PHIL 221: Gender, Politics, and Philosophy
This class introduces students to a variety of philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. Together, we'll read classic and contemporary texts that examine questions such as: what is gender -- and how, if it all, does it relate to or differ from sex? What does it really mean to be a woman or a man -- and are these categories we're born into or categories that we become or inhabit through living in a particular way under specific conditions? Human history all the way up to the present seems to be rife with asymmetrical relations of power that relegate those marked out as women to a subordinate position -- what explains this? What would it mean to overturn this state of affairs -- and which strategies are most likely to accomplish this task? And to what extent is it possible to grapple with all of the above questions -- questions of gender, sex, and sexuality -- without also, at the very same time, thinking about how they relate to questions of class and race? Readings will include selections from Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Judith Butler, Talia Bettcher, and others.
PHIL 224: Philosophy, Race & Racism
Race powerfully shapes our identities and how we are treated by others. But does race really exist? Is it racist to think that it does? Can we fight racism without the concept of race? In this course we will explore philosophical questions about the nature of race and racial oppression. We begin with what race is - the ontology of race - and whether it is biological or socially constructed. If race is socially constructed, how does it acquire its power? Can, or should, we eliminate this concept or hold onto it? We then examine the lived experience of racial oppression. Is racism primarily psychological or structural? How does racism intersect with other forms of oppression? How can we create a more just society? Readings will include Appiah, Du Bois, Zack, Fanon, Alcoff, Crenshaw, and Mills.
PHIL 262: Ethical Problems, Social Issues
A study of ethical problems arising in public policy, as well as philosophical approaches to addressing these problems. Topics to be discussed include criminal punishment, immigration, climate change, and pandemic ethics.
PHIL 273-3: Brady: The Good Society
In this course we will focus on the tradition of social contract theory that informs much of our modern political life. Our central questions will be the following. What is the purpose of politics? Does political community contain our selfish motives, or express our sociability? What is the relationship between the individual and society? Can we be good in a bad society? Free in an unjust society? What makes a government legitimate, and do we ever have a duty to resist the government? We will also explore challenges to the social contract tradition from Marxist, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives. Can a capitalist society be a good society? Does the model of a social contract conceal structures of domination? Readings will include Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Pateman, and Mills.
PHIL 325: Philosophy of Mind
In this course we will explore some of the main themes in the philosophy of mind, with special attention to (i) the relationship between mind and body, (ii) perception and the senses, and (iii) the nature of the emotions.
PHIL 350: Advanced Logic
This course concerns the limitations of certain logical theories, and how those interact with questions of knowledge, truth, and certainty. Arithmetic seems like knowledge as certain as any. And yet, as we will establish, an arithmetic theory that is robust, correct, and tractable cannot validate some intuitions about a priori knowledge, etc. In this course we will use the tools of logic to describe arithmetic theories, and make precise what might be meant by "robust", "correct", and "tractable". We'll develop the theory of recursive functions in arithmetic so as to prove Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, as well as the other limitative theorems of Tarski and Church on truth and decidability (respectively). As time allows we will explore further related questions, with attention to their philosophical significance.
PHIL 361: Topics in Social & Political Philosophy
The United States is currently home to 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners. With more than 2.3 million people under the control of the American criminal legal system, the United States has more total incarcerated people than any other country in the world. Moreover, the United States has one of the most punitive approaches to criminal justice, imposing lengthy prison sentences, forcing people who are incarcerated to spend years—sometimes even decades—in solitary confinement, and providing very few educational, vocational, and recreational programs in prisons. Punishment and incarceration also disproportionately impact people of color. African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. While African Americans and Hispanics make up about 32% of the US population, they constitute 56% of the incarcerated population. This course will use a philosophical lens to examine the causes and consequences of this crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, along with possible solutions to it, with a particular emphasis on the theories of punishment grounding our criminal legal system and, thus, our prisons. The course will be small and will have a seminar-style format. Enrollment will be limited to 10–12 Northwestern students from our Evanston campus and 10–12 incarcerated students who have been admitted into the Northwestern Prison Education Program (NPEP students). Because of the restrictions imposed by COVID-19, the NPEP students will participate via written correspondence.
PHIL 364: Business & Professional Ethics
Do corporations have moral obligations that extend beyond mere compliance with law? Or is business ethics a contradiction in terms, as some have argued? In this course, we will attempt to answer these questions. We will survey the major contemporary theories of business ethics, and we will apply these frameworks to issues such as climate change and worker's rights. Readings will be drawn from economics and organizational theory as well as philosophy.
PHIL 422: Studies in Modern Philosophy
This course will cover some central figures, texts, and questions in eighteenth-century British aesthetics, focusing on the "subjective" character of taste or beauty and an aesthetics-based theory of art.
PHIL 423 Seminar in Contemporary Philosophy
In this course we will discuss new work on higher-order evidence and higher-order defeat.
PHIL 488: Professional Skills
We will prepare for success in the job market by putting together all of the major elements of the dossier and by practicing the skills needed for interviewing and presenting one’s work.