Spring 2025 Class Schedule
Courses are subject to change. Check Caesar for the most up-to-date list of the current quarter.
spring 2025 course descriptions
PHIL 101-8-20: First-Year Writing Seminar: Gender, Politics, and Reproduction
This writing seminar provides an overview to the role of reproductive politics in historical and contemporary feminist philosophy and theory, with a focus both on rights claims, and activist experiments with paradigms beyond the language of rights. Taking as our starting point the end of the (federal) constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. in 2022, we consider arguments concerning its significance within North American law and politics. We also engage trans-border and further perspectives contributed by an international outlook. The course offers an introduction to a cross-disciplinary area of study: we will encounter arguments from a range of fields such as legal studies, political and media theory, Black studies and decolonial thought, history, philosophical theories of biopower, and activist dimensions. We will consider the development in both national and trans-national contexts of different paradigms including intersectionality, reproductive justice, the politics of collective care, and the plural activisms of Latin America’s “green wave” movements.
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 219: Introduction to Existentialism
This class is an introduction to existentialism through a study of several of its principal philosophic sources: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean Paul Sartre. We will focus on existentialist theories of value. With respect to this problem, we will explore existentialist conceptions of absurdity, alienation, anxiety, authenticity, and affliction.
PHIL 240: Freedom & Responsibility
Many people think that we are responsible for our actions only if we are free agents in acting that way. But there are reasons—from science and from philosophy—for doubting whether we really are free (and therefore whether we really are responsible). In this course, we will examine several different ways of thinking about freedom and responsibility and consider whether they are compatible with scientific ways of thinking about the world. Along the way, we will also look at how freedom and responsibility are connected to other issues, such as responsibility in the legal system, addiction, mitigated responsibility, and the meaning of what it is to be a person.
PHIL 250: Logic II
Logic is about entailment. In a slogan, it is about what follows from what. This course explores advanced extensions of more basic, introductory logics. As such, it presumes students are familiar with both propositional logic, and predicate logic with quantifiers (i.e. the logics taught in PHIL150). We will get off to a gentle start by exploring predicate logic with identity. Then we will turn to understanding modal logic, which can be built on top of both propositional logic and predicate logic. Towards the end of the quarter, we will explore predicate logic with types.
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 from the history of ancient Greek and modern European philosophy, as well as contemporary texts critiquing and developing these traditions.
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 273-3: 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 313-1: Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' I
In this course, we will discuss Kant's central doctrine concerning knowledge: transcendental idealism, or the claim that human beings can know objects as they appear to us, but not as they are in themselves. We will examine Kant's consequent claims that on this view he can respond to skeptical challenges to the possibility of human knowledge.
PHIL 353: Philosophy of Language
This course will provide an advanced introduction to the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. We will focus on how to properly analyze context-sensitive expressions (e.g. pronouns, descriptions, demonstratives), how a discourse is structured, the varieties of content that a sentence can convey (e.g. at-issue content, presuppositions, expressive content, conventional implicatures), and end the quarter by reading recent work on a topic to be decided upon by the students (e.g. slurs, dogwhistles, metaphor, tense). Our approach will be both interdisciplinary at times by reading important work in linguistics, and historical at times by reading influential philosophical work from early in the 20th century.
PHIL 360: Contemporary Virtue Ethics
This course explores the modern-day revival of the ancient virtue ethical tradition. We will read a variety of authors from the late 20th and early 21st centuries whose work aims to reimagine the role of character, moral psychology, and human flourishing within ethical life. We will study writings from philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, John McDowell, and Iris Murdoch, investigating their critiques of utilitarian and deontological theories and their attempts to develop alternative frameworks for thinking about morality. Through these readings, we will explore the ways in which this recent tradition can offer us new insights into the nature and complexity of ethical life.
PHIL 361: Rawls and His Critics
John Rawls was without a doubt the most important figure in late twentieth century American political philosophy, and his work continues to set the terms of many important debates in political philosophy even today. In this course, we will survey Rawls's own work, alongside that of some of his most influential and incisive critics, such as Robert Nozick, Susan Moller Okin, G.A. Cohen, Jurgen Habermas, and Charles Mills. Topics to be studied include the contractualist method in political philosophy and the challenges of ideal theory, Rawls's theory of distributive justice and the value of equality, the problem of political stability, the idea of public reason, and more.
PHIL 372-2: Civic Reflections II
PHIL 375: Issues in Environmental Philosophy
This course offers a deeper examination of a rapidly growing topic in environmental ethics and politics: environmental (in)justice. Together, we will critically reflect upon the questions that have shaped the contemporary discourse on environmental (in)justice. Some of the key questions that will be considered include: Is environmental injustice best understood through the lens of distributive justice alone, or must we take into account procedural justice as well? How does environmental justice relate to the values and ideals of other, more traditional forms of environmentalism? What, in turn, is its relationship—if any—to racism and other social justice issues, such as sexism and ableism? Moreover, what constitutes an environmental burden or benefit, and what is the appropriate standard for assessing ‘environmental risks’ or forms of ‘exposure’? In the final section of the course, we will also reflect on how disagreement between stakeholders’ moral and cultural standpoints complicates both the recognition and reparation of environmental injustices.
PHIL 390: Shared Agency, Complicity, and Solidarity
Many of today's most pressing social problems are not the result of what any one person has done, but are rather the product of many people acting together. But what does it take to perform an action together with others? When am I complicit in a collective wrong? Are groups of people capable of moral agency? How should we theorize the concept of solidarity, and does it have a role to play in combating social injustice? In this course, we will explore how to answer questions like these.
PHIL 414: Nietzsche's 'On The Genealogy of Morality'
This class is centered on a close reading of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality in translation. Alongside this text, we will study excerpts from other parts of Nietzsche’s writings, and a selection of secondary literature, drawn primarily from the Anglo-American analytic tradition.
PHIL 415: Foucault and After: From Biopolitics to Necroresistance
This course in Foucauldian and contemporary post-Foucauldian biopolitics offers an introduction to the field organized by the themes of biopower, resistance, necropolitics, and thanatopolitics. In this context, to think with the interrelations of race, gender, sexuality, class, poverty, health, citizenship, immigration status, abilities, and nationalist exceptionalism, is also to consider the intersections of heterogeneous techniques of power. We’ll consider engagements with and challenges to the Foucauldian lexicon of power (including the terms: sovereign, discipline, pastoral, governmental, biopolitical, security, neoliberal governmentality) that have been contributed by post-Foucauldian analyses whose lexicon also includes: domination, exploitation, occupation, expropriation, coloniality, and decoloniality, and which has asked how contemporary forms of resistance to power have centered around such as problems as: the formation of a sovereign right to maim; of freedom as burdened individuality; of neoliberalism as am omnipresent form of governmentality; the making of endebted life, and the deadly aspects of biopower.
PHIL 461: Theories of Exploitation
We will study the work of mostly contemporary moral, social, and political philosophers to address the following questions: What is exploitation? When and why is it wrong? What is it for exploitation to be structural? And how is exploitation related to oppression?
PHIL 414: 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 2025.