Fall 2023 Class Schedule
Courses are subject to change. Check Caesar for the most up-to-date list of the current quarter.
Fall 2023 course descriptions
PHIL 101-7-20: College Seminar: Philosophy of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
To borrow a phrase from Aristotle, sex is said in many ways. The word "sex" can refer to the domain of the erotic, that is, to sexual desire and sexual activity. It can also refer to certain biological categories related to an animal's reproductive role, such as female, male, or intersex. Among humans, "sex," along with the nearby term "gender," can also refer to cultural or social categories like woman, man, or nonbinary. And we can also talk about "sex" in the sense of sexual orientation, a set of categories relating an individual's own sex or gender with the sex(es) or gender(s) that the individual is typically attracted to, such as gay, lesbian, straight, or bisexual. Needless to say, things gets complicated pretty quickly.
In this seminar, we will read and discuss recent philosophical attempts to make sense of all this. The course will cover a wide range of topics, including: What is sexual desire? What (if anything) is sexual perversion? What is the best account of concepts like gender identity or sexual orientation? How (if at all) do those concepts relate to biological sex? What about the ethics and politics of sex? Is there anything wrong, morally speaking, with casual sex, or with the buying and selling of sex? What should we think about the ways that gender roles and expectations affect people's economic and social prospects? Readings for this course will be drawn mostly from contemporary philosophical sources.
PHIL 101-7-21: College Seminar: What is Democracy?
In this seminar we will examine some of the fundamental ideas and questions behind democracy and provide a reading of their "inventors". Some of the questions are: What is democracy? Is it a form of government, a value, an ideal, a political system, a form of life, a bit of all this? Is democracy always the best political solution (in wartime? general starvation?)? Why should the whole of the people decide and not the specialists in the respective questions? Are all democratically taken decisions automatically legitimate (what about minorities\' rights?)? How should all citizens in a democracy participate in politics? By direct self-government of the people or by voting representatives? Is everything democratically decidable or does the individual have unalterable rights? Is tolerance and/or free speech necessary for democracy and how far can it go?
PHIL 101-7-22: College Seminar: The digital self: freedom, truth, and well-being
It is estimated that GenZers spend over 4 hours a day on social media with millennials like myself not far behind at 3.5 hours per day. That's almost a quarter of our waking hours. But should we be? A lot of that time is devoted to maintaining a digital identity: a curated collection of photos, or tweets and shares that signal and display our commitments. Does the cultivation of such a digital self make us better or worse off? In this course, we will explore such topics. Special attention will be given to the connection between social media and well-being, social media and freedom, and social media and polarization. Students should expect various written and practical assignments to guide their exploration of this topic.
PHIL 110: Introduction to Philosophy
In this course we will be exploring several traditional topics within philosophy, including free will, the nature of morality and justice, and existential issues pertaining to the meaning of life and the significance of death. Students will be expected (i) to comprehend the various philosophers’ arguments on these topics, (ii) to develop their own views on the topics, and (iii) to present their own views, as well as the views of the philosophers we read, in clear, succinct, and forcefully argued thesis papers. Special attention will be paid to questions concerning disagreements over values.
PHIL 150: Introduction to Logic
In a slogan, logic is about what follows from what. It concerns when information is guaranteed to be true because of how it is related to other true information. To learn a logic is to learn a formal language with its own rules (like a math or programming language), and to develop skill using this formal language. A logic is then used to figure out whether arguments are good or bad in roughly two steps. First, the argument is represented in a logic. Second, the argument is assessed by seeing whether it is constructed in a way where the argument's conclusion follows. Good arguments are structured so that their conclusions are guaranteed to be true when the premises are true; bad arguments are not. In this course, you will learn two logics: truth-functional logic and first-order logic. Truth-functional logic concerns arguments involving "and," "or," "if," and "not." First-order logic builds on truth-functional logic to concern complex arguments involving "every", "none," and "some." Since this course satisfies the FD-EDR degree requirement, students should expect a rigorous class with weekly assignments and quizzes.
PHIL 210: History of Philosophy: Ancient
What makes a person’s life go well? Why should we act justly, when being unjust can be so profitable? What makes someone a friend, how many kinds of friendships are there, and how many friends should we aim to have? These kinds of questions preoccupied ancient Greek philosophers, and their contributions to these topics continue to influence contemporary thought. We will investigate different proposed answers to these and other questions with a view to better understanding ancient Greek ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. This course strongly emphasizes the development of close reading and writing skills. No prior exposure to ancient philosophy is required.
PHIL 224: Philosophy, Race, and Racism
This course provides a broad overview of philosophical discussions of race and racism in American culture. In this overview, we will focus on phenomenological issues concerning the experience of race, epistemological issues concerning racial distortions and racial ignorance, and ethical and political issues concerning racial oppression. Some of the central questions that we will address are: How should we understand the concept of race and the processes of racialization through which people come to see themselves as having a racial identity? What are the different kinds of racial injustice that we can identify, and the different kinds of exclusion, subordination, marginalization and stigmatization that can be part of racial oppression? How should racial oppression be resisted? How should racial violence be stopped? How should we build racial solidarity and fight for racial justice? We will also explore the connections between race and other identity categories such as gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, religion, nationality, etc. In the last part of the course we will read recent philosophical essays on Black Lives Matter.
PHIL 254: Introduction to the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences
The course will introduce students to deep philosophical issues raised by modern natural science of metaphysical and epistemological nature. From a reflection on methodological questions, it will approach the question of realism. We will be guided by nested "what does it take"-questions. For example: What does it take for a system of sentences to count as a good scientific theory? What does it take for a scientific theory to be testable by observational and experimental data (and, by the way: what does it take for certain series of experiences to count as data or observations?)? What does it take for a given theory to be better supported by the available evidence than its competitors? What does it take for a given theory to explain the known phenomena in an area of knowledge? What does it take for an explanatory scientific theory to be credited with reference to underlying structures of reality? We will begin with a brief overview of the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th century, and then turn to the treatment of certain problems in the contemporary literature, like the problem of induction, the problem of the underdetermination of theory choice by the available data, the problem of rationality and conceptual change, the problem of realism.
PHIL 260: Introduction to Moral Philosophy
Moral philosophy is the study of how we should live. What kind of life is best for human beings? What is happiness? What is it to have a good character? What is it for an action to be morally right or wrong? We will investigate these and related questions by reading foundational texts in the history of ancient Greek and modern European philosophy, including Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
PHIL 273-2: The Brady Scholars Program: The Moral Life
What does morality require of us? Does acting morally amount to consistently bringing about the best consequences that we can? Or are there other important considerations that we should take into account when thinking about how to act well? When we are trying to figure out how to act, what questions should we be asking ourselves? Drawing on both classic and contemporary readings in philosophy, as well as our own experiences, we will ask what it means to live a moral life in different spheres and situations. Do we have, or can we justify, special obligations to our friends and family? Do our professional and other roles shape what we have reason to do? How do we understand our obligations towards strangers? Is there some unified way to understand the reasons that should guide us in all of these spheres, or do they operate independently?
PHIL 361: Topics in Social & Political Philosophy: Freedom and Autonomy
In this course, we will explore the concepts of freedom and autonomy. In the Western liberal tradition, these are foundational values of political life. But there are also numerous instances in which it seems important to restrict people’s freedom. The overarching question of the course will be whether, and how, we can reconcile these two convictions. In doing so, we will consider questions such as: Should there be legal restrictions on hate speech? Is it morally justifiable for the government to restrict people’s freedom for their own good? Should we tolerate moral/political views which we find repellent? Does egalitarian redistribution conflict with the value of freedom? Readings may include works by John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G. A. Cohen, Seana Shiffrin, Japa Pallikkathayil, Susan Brison, T. M. Scanlon, Bernard Williams, Natalie Stoljar.
PHIL 373-1: The Civically Engaged Life: The Good Work
Brady Scholars in their senior year will meet frequently throughout the quarter to move ahead with the collaborative project they have chosen as their service to the Evanston community.
PHIL 380: Philosophy of Art: Beauty, Imitation, and Sympathy: The Moral Significance of Art in 18th c. British Philosophy
Eighteenth-century Britain saw an explosion of interest in aesthetics: many thinkers leapt to investigate beauty and sublimity, imitation and emotion in art, artistic creativity, and so forth. A major reason for this interest was the cynical account of human nature, morals and politics promoted by Thomas Hobbes and Bernard de Mandeville: that human beings are solely motivated by self-interest, and that morals and politics are merely tools of social control, aimed to limit and redirect self-promoting human impulses. Many thinkers argued in response that human attractions to beauty and art were powerful counterexamples to that portrayal of human nature, showing that human beings can love objects and others for their own sakes, and in a way that calls them to social harmony, perhaps through eliciting sympathetic responsiveness. In this course, we will read and talk about central texts and issues in this discussion, moving from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees to several major responses to his cynical challenge in the British aesthetics tradition: Shaftesbury’s high-minded view of beauty as rational order eliciting disinterested pleasure; Hutcheson’s theory of humor as cognitive and morally corrective (not mockery or ridicule); Kames’ view of art, including tragedy, as arousing sympathetic emotional responses; and Adam Smith’s and Sophie de Grouchy’s views of art, morality, and politics as grounded in sympathetic imagination. In addition to discussing their claims concerning the importance of art for understanding human nature and morality, we will discuss questions such as: does appreciation of art and beauty require education, or contribute to moral and political education, or both? How does representational art (“imitation”) arouse sympathetic emotion or understanding of diverse others? How is taste (for beauty or art) influenced by wealth, social class, or national identity?
PHIL 390: Special Topics in Philosophy: Philosophy of Education
What is the just way to distribute educational resources? Should parents have the right to send their children to private school, if doing so harms other children? How should we resolve the tension between liberal values and multicultural education? What is the difference between education and indoctrination? What should the role of educational institutions be in a divided democracy? These are questions in the philosophy of education that intersect strongly with classic topics in political philosophy: distributive justice, liberalism, and democracy. In this class we will investigate this intersection and learn about issues in philosophy of education through the lens of political philosophy.
PHIL 414: Seminar in German Philosophy
This course is a reading-intensive seminar on the social and philosophical thought of Karl Marx. We will study Marx’s earlier and later writings, as well as relevant background material from Marx’s Hegelian predecessors (including Hegel himself) and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economists.
PHIL 420: Studies in Ancient Philosophy
This seminar focuses on the accounts of political expertise in Plato's Republic and Statesman. In these dialogues, Plato examines the nature of political expertise, explains what abilities make for the best political leaders, and considers the backlash that would be invoked by his political theory. We will conduct a close reading of selections from these two dialogues and engage with other relevant primary texts and secondary literature. Knowledge of Greek is not required.
PHIL 460: Seminar in Ethical Theory
We value many things and what we value plays an indispensable role in how we organize our lives. But what is valuing? Is it a belief, a perception, an action, an emotion, or some combination of these? How is valuing related to reasons and how is it related to the value of a thing? Does it make sense to think of value as intrinsic or absolute, or is all value relational, value-for something?
We will consider realist, constructivist, and fitting attitudes accounts of value and valuing. And we will pay special attention to the case of the value of a person and the relationship between this and the reasons that we have to interact, and refrain from interacting, with others in various ways.
PHIL 401-1: First-year Proseminar
In this seminar, we will read some of the central, inaugurating texts of the philosophy of history in the European modern tradition, by Rousseau, Kant, and Herder, and discuss their various questions, including: does history have an aim or purposes, and how could we know of it/them? Is there historical progress, and if so, of what sort? Is there a central defining subject matter or “spine” for human history (such as political events, technology, cultures)? Relatedly, we will also discuss questions – of philosophical anthropology, one might say -- that occupy these early thinkers concerning the relationship between history and nature, freedom, and rationality. For example: is human history to be understood as part of or continuous with natural history (of all organisms, or of human organisms in particular)? Is historical investigation therefore strongly akin to biological explanation, or based upon biological premises? Or does human freedom or rationality disrupt the claims of biology and nature – so that history (proper) is departure from nature, a break with (merely) biological processes? What, most broadly, makes human beings historical? Finally, we will also consider why these philosophers present their claims concerning human nature (philosophical anthropology) in speculative-historical, narrative form: what sorts of philosophical claims or projects might be promoted by this form of philosophizing? We will consider how these projects in philosophy of history may be connected to the philosophers’ criticisms of the European colonial project and (related) European racist theorizing (historically contemporary to their work). We will conclude the course with excerpts from later discussions of the relation between philosophy and history, as a contrast case: Friedrich Nietzsche’s debunking genealogy of morality, and Amia Srinavasan’s reflections on the cogency of such genealogical arguments.
PHIL 402-1: Second-year Proseminar: Introduction to Speech Act Theory
In this proseminar we will read and discuss the foundational texts in speech act theory, with readings from Austin, Grice, Bach and Harnish, Stalnaker, Lewis, and Roberts (among others). Our focus will be on the nature of speech acts as well as the applications of speech act theory in various philosophical domains (including but not limited to ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology).