Spring 2024 Class Schedule
Courses are subject to change. Check Caesar for the most up-to-date list of the current quarter.
spring 2024 course descriptions
PHIL 101-8-20: First-Year Writing Seminar: Work
From the time you enroll in this course, you can likely expect to spend about 90,000 hours of the rest of your life at work. But what is work? What makes work meaningful? Is there a right to meaningful work? What is free time? How much should we be working? Is there anything wrong with having to work for someone else for a living? Should all work be abolished? Should workplaces be democratic? How might technology change the nature of work and its place in our lives? If there is some work that has to be done but that no one wants to do, who should do it? What determines the division of labor in our society, and what, if anything, is wrong with this division? To help you explore these questions, you will read and critically discuss works of philosophy and social theory by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, David Graeber, and others. The emphasis, however, will be on developing your own views and defending them in writing.
PHIL 210-3: History of Philosophy: 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, Malebranche, Leibniz, Bayle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Du Châtelet—on the nature of God, causation, substance, mind, knowledge, and the material world. Additional readings will be drawn from Elizabeth, Galileo, Masham, Boyle, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Shepherd, and Cordova.
PHIL 221: Gender, Politics and Philosophy
This course is an introduction to philosophical problems concerning gender and politics. What is gender and what is its relation to sex and sexuality? What is gender injustice and why is it wrong? What are the causes of gender injustice and how could we overcome it? And what is the relation of feminist theory to lived experience and to political action? We will read and critically discuss both historical and contemporary texts addressing these questions.
PHIL 253: Introduction to the Philosophy of Lanuage
This is an introduction to the philosophy of language taught through academic texts from philosophy and the cognitive sciences as well as selections of short fiction. Some questions we will ask include: What is meaning? Can we ever really communicate with one another and, if so, how?
How do we acquire a language? How do the languages that we learn shape our minds and the ways that we live? Do non-human animals use language? And how does figurative language work?
PHIL 269: Bioethics
This course is a study of moral and political problems related to biomedicine and biotechnology. In the first part of the course, we will study the physician-patient relationship. We will consider what values ought to govern that relationship, how those values may conflict, and how such conflicts are best resolved. In the second part of the course, we will turn to some specific ethical challenges related to biotechnology, including abortion, genetic manipulation, and physician-assisted suicide. We will close the course by surveying the field of public health ethics, with particular attention to ethical issues related to global pandemic preparedness and response.
PHIL 270: Climate Change and Sustainability: Ethical Dimensions
This course is an introduction to some central concepts and problems in philosophical environmental ethics, with an emphasis on issues related to anthropogenic climate change. In the first part of the course, we will explore the problem of “moral standing:” the problem of who or what is deserving of ultimate moral consideration. For example, do sentient non-human animals like pigs or polar bears have moral standing? What about non-sentient life, such as plants or fungus? Might whole ecosystems or even nature as such have standing? We will examine recent arguments on these questions and their implications for moral theory.
In the second part of the course, we will turn directly to the issue of global climate change. We will explore the standard economic analysis of climate change as a collective action problem and the philosophical presuppositions of that analysis. We will consider the question of the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of climate mitigation globally, and we will discuss the ethics of geoengineering. We will close by considering the issue of “anthropocentrism” in ethics, asking whether and why anthropocentrism might be a problem for moral theory.
PHIL 273-3: The Brady Scholars Program: The Good Society
This course aims to introduce students to political philosophy by examining the philosophical questions raised by debates about social justice, and our responses to it. The course will be divided into three parts. First, we will consider some key social issues which frequently spark debates about justice, and discuss the philosophical questions they raise. Second, we will examine the ethics of how to respond to social injustice. Finally, we will consider what a just society might look like - what sort of society should our effort at reform aim to realize?
PHIL 317: Studies in 19th and 20th Century Philosophy: Later Wittgenstein
This course will study Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein's early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was influenced by Frege and Russell, and in turn influenced the logical positivists (though he disavowed much of their appropriation of his work). One of the goals of the Investigations is to oppose the picture of logic in the Tractatus, as a subject of "crystalline purity". Logic, in the new view, arises from rule-governed practices appearing as a part of human life, and requires "agreement in judgments". "This seems to abolish logic;" he declares, "but does not." In the course of this argument and the resulting investigation of meaning, understanding, and mind, Wittgenstein introduces the notions of language games, forms of life, and the "rule-following considerations" that have played an important role in late 20th-century philosophy. This course will focus on a close reading of the Investigations in light of both his early work and its impact on later philosophy.
PHIL 360: Topics in Moral Philosophy: Love and Sex
In this class we will read a wide range of texts from the history of philosophy through to the present day, using these as a starting point to explore central questions concerning the nature of love and eroticism: Is the object of love the particular individual, or something more general? What is the relationship between eros and embodiment? Are love and sex (always?) political? And what role do our love relationships play in constituting us as the particular selves we are?
PHIL 361: Modern Moral Philosophy: Integrity and Corruption
If all seasoned politicians in a fragile democracy are implicated in wide-scale corruption, but if the country is facing an acute economic crisis requiring experience at the helm, what ought to be done about the corrupt, and who ought to decide? What compromises, if any, are appropriate when considering kleptocrats who are effectively holding their people hostage - for instance, rulers who systematically abuse loans from foreign creditors, but who rely on the fact that their vulnerable population will suffer if loans are cut off entirely? What compromises, if any, are morally appropriate when dealing with dictators who threaten to unleash violence unless they are guaranteed an amnesty by the democratic forces trying to replace them? This upper-level course delves into such fraught political problems, revolving around different kinds of corruption and abuse of political power. In order to grapple with these problems, we examine in detail two moral ideas related to "the people." The first is the idea of the sovereign people as the owner of public property, often stolen by corrupt politicians. The second is the idea of the people as an agent with its own moral integrity - an integrity that might bear on intricate policy dilemmas surrounding the proper response to corruption. In the process of examining both of these ideas, students will acquire familiarity with prominent philosophical treatments of integrity, property, and - more generally - public policy.
PHIL 364: Business and 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. Juniors and Seniors only.
PHIL 410: History of Skepticism
From its origin in ancient Greece, the skeptical tradition has represented a radically different way of engaging in philosophy. In this course, we will trace its development—both as a type of argument and as a way of life—from ancient Greece through the Early Modern period, when it was transformed in light of scientific and religious controversies.
PHIL 459: The Metaphysics of Social Collectivity
In this course, we will be drawing on work in social metaphysics to build out a taxonomy of different ways in which people can be said to constitute a collective. When we consider terms like "women", "brown-eyed people", "the Republican Party", "the working class", and "the Civil Rights Movement," we see that each purports to refer to a single unit composed of multiple people---but in each case, what it is that binds the relevant people together such that they appear to us as a unified entity is different in kind. Some forms of collectivity require that all constituent individuals have some antecedent trait in common, while some unite erstwhile dissimilar individuals. Some depend on people conceiving of themselves as unified, while some do not depend on individuals' mental states at all. And determining which flavor of collectivity a given entity instantiates is important for answering further practically and philosophically important questions: is the collective the kind of thing that can bear duties, or to which it makes sense to have reactive attitudes? Is it the kind of entity that we should strive to create, or which will figure in the explanation of social change? Readings will include work on grouphood, collective intentionality, and the grounding of social facts, as well as discussions of both ontological and explanatory varieties of the individualism/holism debate.
PHIL 488: Professional Skills
This workshop aims to prepare students for the academic job market, as well as guiding them towards resources for various alt-ac careers. It is aimed primarily at students planning to go on the job market in Fall 2024.