PHIL 4003 Plato's Theory of Knowledge (4 Credits)

A systematic investigation of Plato's treatments of knowledge throughout the dialogues with a focus on the theory of recollection, Forms as objects of knowledge, the relationship between the Forms and perceptual experience, and the challenges posed by notions of true and false belief. Prerequisites: At least Junior standing or permission of instructor.

PHIL 4010 Great Thinkers: Aristotle (4 Credits)

A study of Aristotle's central theories and doctrines. Prerequisite: junior standing or instructor's permission.

PHIL 4011 Great Thinkers: Virginia Woolf (4 Credits)

In this course we will read Virginia Woolf as a philosopher. We will discuss her philosophy of nature, knowledge, art, politics, science, sensation, gender, and materialism throughout her fiction and non-fiction writings.

PHIL 4023 Great Thinkers: Maimonides: Politics, Prophecy and Providence (4 Credits)

Using the Guide of the Perplexed as our central text, we explore the complex philosophical ideas of Moses Maimonides (1135-‐1204), a central figure in the history of philosophy and in the history of Jewish thought. In this course, we examine in depth the relationship between Maimonides’ core ideas and his Jewish, Greek, and Islamic contexts, including Torah, Midrash, Aristotle, Plotinus, The Theology of Aristotle, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and al-Farabi. Topics to be explored include: methods and implications of physics and metaphysics; theological modalities of silence and speaking; phenomenologies of religious experience; and the relationship between epistemic, existential, and ethical perfections.

PHIL 4063 Kant on Religion (4 Credits)

The course introduces students to Kant’s philosophy of religion and explores its influence on the subsequent development of German Romanticism. The course shows how Kant redefined the relationship between reason, morality and faith, and how his critical philosophy prepared the way for new romantic reflections on religious experience, subjectivity, and the character of religion in modern life. The course traces how the early German Romantics, most notably Friedrich Schleiermacher, responded to and transformed Kant’s project by emphasizing religious feeling, intuition, and individual experience over Kant’s moral rationalism, seeking a more immediate, intuitive and aesthetically attuned conception of religion that reflects the Romantic critique of Enlightenment rationalism and desire to reinvigorate religion in the modern age.

PHIL 4070 Great Thinkers: Hegel (4 Credits)

Hegel's "Phenomenology," later system and place in the history of modern philosophy. Prerequisite: junior standing or instructor's permission.

PHIL 4075 Marxism (4 Credits)

This course is a survey in the theoretical and political work influenced by the writings of 19th century philosopher and economist, Karl Marx. The course covers both the historical traditions in Marxism in the 19th, 20th, and 21st century as well as the geographical traditions of these time periods in France, Germany, England, Italy, Russia, China, and America. It is not necessary that students have a prior background in Marx's work, but it is highly recommended. Cross listed with ECON 3075.

PHIL 4100 Great Thinkers: Wittgenstein (4 Credits)

The course introduces students to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s two masterworks, the Tractatus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953), both of which provide fresh, often counterintuitive and conflicting, insights into topics ranging from logic and language to ethics, religion, art and culture. The course explores how the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the pressures of an incipient modernity impacted the style, direction and substance of Wittgenstein’s thought, developments that had profound existential and spiritual import for him as he wrestled with the many contradictions of his life and thought. The course concludes with a consideration of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and the existential-phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, both of whom insist upon humanity’s radical finitude and the pre-ontological understanding (forms of life) that always already conditions and guides our questions about reason, truth, beauty and meaning.

PHIL 4146 Great Thinkers: Levinas (4 Credits)

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), famous for his arresting insight of “ethics as first philosophy,” is a key figure in the histories of phenomenology, metaphysics, and theology. Working through many of Levinas’ lesser-known and more well-known writings, we set out to explore Levinas’ insights on ethics, alterity, and infinity through a consideration of his subtle, layered (and what we may call “pausal”) approaches to grounding (and ungrounding) the human subject in conversation with Husserl, Heidegger, Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, Derrida and others. Focusing on temporality, embodiment, and transcendence (and in particular, the implications of temporality and embodiment for transcendence), we explore a range of themes including: Subjectivity, Ethics, Totality, Infinity, Alterity, Immanence, Interruption, Receptivity, Law, Difficult Freedom, Meaning, Language, Responsibility, Judaism, Forgiveness, History, Violence, Politics, Theology, Justice, and Impossibility. We also direct special efforts at aiming to understand the nature of Levinasian method (and its implications for what it means to theorize in general, and towards the work of justice) as compared with various transcendental, existential, and phenomenological methods.

PHIL 4178 Metaethics (4 Credits)

This course systematically and critically examines the metaphysical, semantic, and epistemic issues central to the study of metaethics. Do moral properties exist? If so, how are they related to natural properties? Do moral properties exist independent of human agency, or do we construct morality? If moral properties exist, how can we come to have justified belief about them? Is it possible to know that a moral belief is true? Doesn't the phenomenon of widespread, intractable disagreement about moral matters establish that there are no objective moral truths? Is the process of gaining scientific knowledge really that different from the process of gaining moral knowledge? Prerequisite: junior standing or instructor's permission.

PHIL 4179 Virtue Ethics (4 Credits)

Virtue ethics purportedly provides a distinct approach to moral deliberation, moral reasoning, moral decision-making, and moral justification. This course is a systematic study o the nature of virtue ethics, the nature of a virtue, and the alleged superiority of virtue ethics over its more familiar consequentialist and deontological alternatives. We also study various responses to the following questions: Have moral psychologists generated any valuable studies on the nature of virtue? What virtues ought we to endorse? At least Junior standing required or permission of the instructor.

PHIL 4210 Philosophy of Movement (4 Credits)

Everything is in motion. Yet, most philosophers have considered motion to be a derivative or secondary form of being. Why? What are the political and metaphysical consequences of marginalizing motion in the history of philosophy? The aim of this class is to read the history of philosophy with a unique focus on the status of movement and motion from the ancient to contemporary period.

PHIL 4211 Contemporary Pol Philosophy (4 Credits)

This class focuses primarily on the philosophical problems generated by thinking about political authority and justice. We discuss the nature of political authority, justice, rights, equality and the role of property in a modern state.

PHIL 4212 Philosophy and Mythology (4 Credits)

This class will introduce students to key mythological texts and traditions from around the world including but not limited to Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Norse, Mayan, Uralic, and Polynesian myths.

PHIL 4333 Logic, Language, and Metaphysics (4 Credits)

This course provides a systematic exploration of the foundations of contemporary philosophy—namely, logic and language—and their metaphysical implications. The class can be divided in three broad modules. Our starting point is the collapse of Kant’s system due to staggering discovering in physics and geometry. Next, we shall discuss the subsequent development of mathematical logic and the philosophy of language in the work of Frege, Russell, Tarski, and Goedel. The last portion is devoted to philosophical applications of these logical results in the field of metaphysics. Specifically, we shall explore the work of Carnap, Quine, and Kripke. Junior or senior standing required (or instructor permission).

PHIL 4446 Philosophy in the American Tradition (4 Credits)

The course introduces students to the thought of the three premier American Transcendentalist writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. These three writers—by turns friends, rivals, neighbors, and even housemates in nearby Concord, Massachusetts— created what Emerson called “a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition” and laid the foundations for American philosophy and literature as we know it today. They also led the first countercultural movement in American history, advocating causes as varied as environmentalism, abolitionism, women’s rights, and the “higher law” of the individual conscience in an age of unbridled capitalism and populism. We will consider the Transcendentalists as both writers and reformers, examining their calls for a uniquely American literature and their romantic sacralization of nature as well as their deep commitment to reform and their engagement with the turbulent politics of their time. In the final weeks of the course, we will explore the Transcendentalists’ profound influence on American cultural history, ranging from their contemporaries (Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson) to ours (Terrence Malick, W. S. Merwin and Jane Hirshfield).

PHIL 4448 Theory of the Subject: From Hegel to Zizek (4 Credits)

The great French philosopher Michel Foucault in his Collège de France lectures in the early 1980s characterized the theory of the subject as the very key to the development both of Western philosophy and Western thinking in general. This course will explore Foucault’s thesis with reference to different theoretical models of subjectivity and “subjectification” (as Jacques Lacan calls it). It will do so through close readings of selections from the works of G.W.F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek as well as select portions of Foucault’s 1981-82 lectures entitled The Hermeneutics of the Subject. This course is cross-listed with RLGS 3448.

PHIL 4460 Nietzsche & the Death of God (4 Credits)

This course involves an intensive reading and discussion of Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Thus Spake Zarathustra,' together with relevant associated materials, especially 'The Gay Science.' Prerequisite: junior standing or instructor's permission. Cross listed with RLGS 3460.

PHIL 4465 Derrida and Postmodernism (4 Credits)

The course introduces students to the seminal work of the French-Algerian philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The course centers on the development of Derrida's deconstructive approach to reading texts, which he pioneered and elaborated in his landmark work on Husserl, Voice and Phenomena (1967). The course explores how this reading strategy provided Derrida a way to understand, unpack, and destabilize the core onto-theological assumptions of the Euro-Western tradition. Along the way, Derrida introduced a variety of conceptual and terminological innovations to highlight the process-relational and aporetic dimensions of life and thought, and to encourage a commitment to life without appeal. The course begins with Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness with its commitment to the primacy of sound and voice (Voice and Phenomenon). The course then turns to a consideration of Derrida’s reading of Saussure’s linguistics, Rousseau’s philosophy, and Levy-Strauss's anthropology and their shared commitment to pure meaning (Of Grammatology). The course concludes with Aporias and Specters of Marx, two works that explore the existential and ethical-political import of his thought.

PHIL 4466 Contemporary Continental Philosophy (4 Credits)

A critical study of current trends in European philosophy, focusing on such thinkers as Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Meillassoux, or Laruelle. Prerequisite: junior standing or instructor's permission.

PHIL 4611 The Boundaries of Scientific Knowledge: A Philosophical Exploration (4 Credits)

Despite its staggering successes, public trust in science is disquietingly low. What has gone wrong? Why is a substantive portion of the population unwilling to trust the advice of specialists? A central problem lies in the tendency of scientists, philosophers, and various pundits to hype, bloat, and overemphasize the promises and results of scientific research. This leads to scientism, broadly conceived as the imperialist tendency to reduce all knowledge to scientific knowledge. But what exactly is scientism? Despite the pejorative connotation of the term, is it an intellectual sin or a virtue? The aim of this course is to map the terrain, exploring various dimensions of scientism, and how it affects the public dimensions of scientific research and its relation to the humanities, religion, and other domains of knowledge, culture, and society.

PHIL 4612 AI and Robotics (4 Credits)

In this interdisciplinary seminar we will discuss foundational issues regarding artificially intelligent systems. We will seek to understand how recent advances in AI research bear on our understanding of the nature of the mind, intelligence, agency, rationality, and consciousness. We will also discuss how philosophical advances can advance empirical progress. Additionally, we will discuss some barriers to progress that these technologies might pose. In particular, we will be focused on three groups of questions: 1. What special opportunities and challenges are presented by deep neural net and deep learning technology regarding building and understanding artificially minded intelligent agents? 2. What is the role of the body and environment in producing intelligence? 3. Deep neural net algorithms are already commonly used to predict recidivism rates, diagnose illnesses, and make advertising more effective. In what ways might such algorithms be approaching human or animal intelligence, or shed light on such intelligence? In what ways might human and animal intelligence be importantly different? In what ways might contemporary intelligence research perpetuate injustice and oppression? This seminar is designed to be interdisciplinary, and I welcome students working in philosophy, robotics/AI, and cognitive science who want to work hard and dig deeper. There are no strict prerequisites, but some background knowledge in relevant disciplines will be highly useful.

PHIL 4618 Philosophy of Biology (4 Credits)

A survey of conceptual issues that lie at the intersection of biology and philosophy: the central concepts of evolutionary theory (such as natural selection, fitness, adaptation and function), the relation of biology to other “lower” sciences (can it be reduced to physics and chemistry?), whether there are genuine scientific laws in biology, and the relation between biology and other fields like cognitive science and ethics. At least Junior standing required.

PHIL 4620 Philosophical Perspectives on Economics and Social Sciences (4 Credits)

This course provides an advanced survey of conceptual and methodological issues that lie at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and the social sciences. More specifically, the main goal is to engage in a critical discussion of how sciences such as psychology, sociology, and neuroscience can challenge and modify the foundations and methodology of economic theories. The course is structured around three broad modules. After a brief introduction, we begin by discussing the emergence of rational choice theory which constitutes the foundation of classical and neoclassical economics and present some paradoxical implications of expected utility theory. The second module focuses on the relationship between economics and psychology. More specifically, we examine the emergence of behavioral economics, the study of the social, cognitive, and emotional factors on the economic decisions of individuals and institutions and their consequences for market prices, returns, and resource allocation. Finally, the third module focuses on the implications of neuroscience on decision making. We discuss some recent developments in neuroeconomics, a field of study emerged over the last few decades which seeks to ground economic theory in the study of neural mechanisms which are expressed mathematically and make behavioral predictions.

PHIL 4699 Proseminar in Philosophy (4 Credits)

Philosophy is a diverse discipline with various subfields, most of which are becoming increasingly specialized and methodologically autonomous. Specialization is often (rightly) perceived as an indicator of disciplinary progress and intellectual development. However, it is important that students of philosophy pursue breadth as well as depth. The goal of this course is to provide an overview of a series of seminal texts in philosophy, from a variety of subfields, epochs, and traditions. Each weekly meeting is devoted to the presentation, analysis, and discussion of a text that any student of philosophy should read at some point in her or his career. Requires junior standing or instructor's permission.

PHIL 4800 History of Consciousness (4 Credits)

Everything is in motion. Yet, most philosophers have considered motion to be a derivative or secondary form of being. Why? What are the consequences of marginalizing motion in the history of consciousness? The aim of this class is to explore process theories of consciousness drawing on the work of physicists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and biologists with a unique focus on the status of movement and motion.

PHIL 4991 Independent Study (1-10 Credits)

PHIL 4995 Independent Research (1-10 Credits)