Winter 2024 Class Schedule
Courses are subject to change. Check Caesar for the most up-to-date list of the current quarter.
Winter 2024 course descriptions
PHIL 101-8-20: First-Year Writing Seminar: That's funny: on the use (and abuse) of humor
This course aims to explore the nature of humor and its relationship with laughter, and to determine whether (and if so when) humor is properly subject to ethical or political criticism. Students will be encouraged to develop their own views, and they will be expected to defend their views in written work.
PHIL 101-8-21: First-Year Writing Seminar: Time, Then and Now
Augustine of Hippo famously wrote: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” One of the difficult parts of thinking about time is that one can’t jump back and observe it from afar, though we feel like we know what it is because we live "in" it . But it is hard to say what any of this means. And that might lead us to ask whether time is “real”. What about the parts of time: past, present, and future. Is one more real than the other? What does “real” even mean when we are talking about something like time? Does modern physics answer these questions, or not? This course will examine questions that arise from the contemplation of time from logical, physical, and metaphysical perspectives. With readings from Aristotle, Augustine, Nagarjuna, Leibniz, Clarke, Du Chatelet, Einstein, and others.
PHIL 101-8-22: First-Year Writing Seminar: Plato on Love and Death
In this class, we will read four classic dialogues by Plato: the Apology, Phaedrus, Symposium, and Phaedo. We will explore Plato's treatment of two fundamental aspects of the human experience—love, and death—and the way he sees both of these topics as connected to the practice of philosophy. For Plato, love is the impetus that drives us towards philosophy (indeed, the word 'philosophy' literally means 'love of wisdom'); philosophy, in turn, is a kind of preparation for dying. Our engagement with these texts will be the jumping-off point for a series of structured writing assignments, aimed at developing and refining your academic writing skills.
PHIL 220: Introduction to Critical Theory
In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber, paying particular attention to the methods they deploy in the treatment of moral and religious phenomena. We will conclude with a section on Charles Mills and contemporary Critical Race Theory. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings.
PHIL 250: Elementary Logic II
This second course in logic explores ways to extend and vary the systems developed in Phil 150. In 150, truth-functional logic assumed every sentence is either true or false but not both. What if, however, there were a third truth value? Or what if sentences could be both true and false at the same time, or neither? These might be helpful in dealing with cases involving vague properties, like “tall”. We then go further to explore how to address sentences like “Lincoln could have been Canadian” and “Had Lincoln been Canadian, there wouldn’t be computers.
PHIL 261: Introduction to Political Philosophy
Philosopher A. John Simmons tells us that: “What is distinctive about political philosophy...is its prescriptive or evaluative concern with justifications, values, virtues, ideals, rights, obligations—in short, its concern with how political societies should be, how political policies and institutions can be justified, how we and our political officeholders ought to behave in our public lives.” In this course, we will engage these themes by looking specifically at social contract theory (contractarianism). Contractarianism is a political theory that employs the idea of agreement among rational and equal persons to account for the content and the normative force of the requirements applicable to those rational and equal persons. We will explore many themes in political philosophy by looking at six philosophers who endorsed contractarianism—namely, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Rawls, Carole Pateman, and Charles Mills.
PHIL 262: Ethical Problems/Public Issues
This course is a study of ethical problems arising in public policy, as well as philosophical approaches to addressing these problems. In this course we will think within, and critically examine, contemporary philosophical theories of morality such as utilitarianism, contractualism, virtue ethics, and care ethics. We will examine these moral theories through the lens of disputed moral issues such as punishment, immigration, racial integration, climate change, and freedom of speech, paying special attention to these issues as they figure in the contemporary social and political landscape of the United States. We will explore historical and contemporary structures of inequality in the US, particularly related to race, gender, and class, and we will critically reflect on our own positions within these structures.
PHIL 273-1: The Brady Scholars Program: The Good Life
In this course we will study such questions as these: What is it for a human life to go well? What is happiness? What is the place of pleasure in a good life? What makes lives meaningful, rich, flourishing? Are the lives of human beings in some way more valuable than other forms of life, and if so, what is it about us that grounds such superiority? What is human dignity? Can the well-being of different individuals be added up, and if so, should we promote the well-being of as many people as we can? Is death the final end to human life, and if so, is that a bad thing? Are there objective answers to such questions as these, and how can we know that we have the right answers? We will also focus on becoming clearer and more persuasive writers.
PHIL 280: Introduction to the Philosophy of Art
In this class we will consider some foundational questions in the philosophy of art and aesthetics: Is aesthetic value objective or subjective? Can one give a 'theory of art'? What is the relationship between art and morality? Might art be dangerous? What is art, anyway? We will explore these questions through careful engagement with a range of historical and contemporary texts, beginning with Plato's famous attacks on the arts, and ending with present-day authors discussing the role of art within our contemporary world.
PHIL 326: Philosophy of Medicine
This course will be a study of philosophical issues related to health inequalities. Many theorists hold that inequalities in health (or in access to health care) are more troubling than other inequalities, such as inequalities in wealth. Is that so? What makes inequality bad in the first place? What (if anything) is special about health inequalities? Should we be concerned with inequalities between individuals or inequalities between groups? Are health inequalities less troubling when they result from individuals' health behaviors?
PHIL 362: Modern Moral Philosophy
At the beginning of the modern era, in 1625, Hugo Grotius asked how we could possibly have any obligations if there were no God. In 1958, Elizabeth Anscombe argued that there was no such possibility. But in the intervening centuries many philosophers thought otherwise. We will trace the development of modern moral philosophers' attempts to make sense of the idea of obligation. We will focus on the British Rationalist and Sentimentalist traditions and end with Immanuel Kant's theory of autonomy--that we impose obligations on ourselves.
PHIL 373-2: The Civically Engaged Life
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 390: Philosophy of Disability
Disability is a protected class alongside race and gender. But what characterizes disability? Is disability grounded in people and their limitations, in how social institutions make it easier for some but not others to exercise their abilities, both, or something else entirely? Institutions like schools or businesses are regulated to support the lives of disabled persons. For example, the American with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits associated discrimination. But, at present, is social life arranged such that persons with disabilities are treated justly? What does justice require for disabled persons? This class will explore these and related questions to better understand what disability is, and what justice requires in connection to disability. In addition to written assignments, students can expect practical assignments to help them explore topics like accessibility at
PHIL 414: Introduction to Hegelian Metaphysics
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 426: Social Cognition in Conversation
Pragmatics is the study of how we use language. But our use of language depends on the operation of various psychological processes. As such, the study of pragmatics is incomplete without the study of these processes. In this class, we will explore the extent to which influential theories in pragmatics fit with findings from cognitive science concerning the psychological processes that underwrite language use. Theories covered will include, among others, those associated with Paul Grice, Robert Stalnaker, Sperber and Wilson, and Craige Roberts. Special attention will be given to what these theories require of mindreading, which is alternatively known as mentalizing, perspective-taking, or Theory-of-Mind. For philosophy students unfamiliar with cognitive science, this class will serve as an introduction to doing philosophy of language and mind in an interdisciplinary way.
PHIL 467: The Metaphysics of Race
This graduate seminar provides a survey of philosophical explorations into the nature and normativity of race. In it students engage the main theoretical questions: What, if anything, do we mean when we say “race”?; Is there a concept of race that undergirds different conceptions of race?; Do races exist, and what are races if they do exist? Students also engage the main practical questions: What ought we to do with race? Is it moral to believe that humans are divided into races? Should we engage in the metaphysics of race, and if so, then should our engagements serve the elimination of racism?
PHIL 401-2: 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 402-2: 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).