Spring 2027

PHIL 457: Seminar in Twentieth Century Philosophy

Nicolas de Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Continental Philosophy

Am I My Brother’s Keeper? Levinas and the Drama of Otherness. In this seminar, we will read closely and critically Levinas’ seminal work Totality and Infinity. Levinas’ thinking will be contextualized with engaged references to how his thinking draws on contemporary sources (Gabriel Marcel, Simone Weil, Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig) as well as how his thinking provoked other thinkers to take up, at times against Levinas, at times with Levinas, the drama of Otherness for the meaningfulness of ethics (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Enrique Dussel, Judith Butler). 

PHIL 458: Human Extinction

Ted Toadvine

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Metaphysics-Epistemology

This course investigates the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of human extinction in dialogue with historical and contemporary thinkers from the Continental and analytic traditions. We begin by situating contemporary debates within a longer philosophical history, from Enlightenment reflections on humanity’s vocation and the destiny of reason through twentieth-century concerns with technology, finitude, and planetary fragility. On this basis, we critically examine contemporary debates over existential risk, longtermism, and apocalypticism. Guiding questions: What is “humanity,” and what is at stake in imagining its end? Do we have a moral obligation to prevent future human extinction? How does the prospect of human extinction alter our relationship with technology, finitude, and the future? How should risks of human extinction be weighed against obligations to address current suffering? Prospective authors include Anders, Benatar, Bostrom, Colebrook, Derrida, Heidegger, Jonas, Kant, Nancy, Ord, Russell, Torres, Whyte. 

PHIL 461: Plato’s Republic and Laws (Ancient, Ethics) 

Christopher Moore

Possible course requirements fulfilled: None at this time, please check back later for any additional details

This course studies Plato’s two longest works, Republic and Laws. The Republic, supposedly the most assigned philosophy text in the US, has often been thought to contain the breadth of Plato’s philosophical thinking. True enough; but read attentively, the Socratic dialogue seems less to be asserting “doctrine” than to be formulating fundamental questions of ethics and political theory and then trying out various methods of inquiring into them. It considers the problem of old age, the nature of justice, education, the structure of the soul, the relationship between the parts of goodness, domestic arrangements, the equality of women, the meaning of philosophy, the grounding of knowledge, regime change, the trouble with democracy, the value of the arts, eschatology, and other themes. We will read closely the celebrated passages: the elenchus of Thrasymachus, Glaucon’s ring of Gyges, the city of pigs, the city and soul analogy, the three waves, the philosopher kings and queens, the sun analogy, the allegory of the cave, the explanation of tyranny, the myth of Er. 

The Laws, apparently Plato’s final work, features an unnamed Athenian in Crete discussing the constitutional arrangement of a prospective colony there. He and his interlocutors discuss human nature, drinking parties, the origins of civilization, the most effective realistic system of government, the efficacy of laws, the risks of atheism, and much else. (We will likely read about half of the dialogues twelve chapters.) 

The goal of this class is to understand, through freewheeling discussion of these two dialogues, something about Plato’s philosophical contributions and the relationship between ethical, political, and moral psychological theorizing, especially at their mutual beginnings. It is hoped that all graduate students will find in these dialogues material they would like to include in an undergraduate section of Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, or Social/Political Thought. 

PHIL 473: Person, Action, and Freedom in Kant and post-Kantian German Philosophy

Brady Bowman 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 19^th Century, and depending on emphasis, either metaphysics and epistemology or ethics

What is a person? Kant makes an influential distinction. Humanity, on this way of thinking, is rational animality; human being, accordingly, is a being of and within nature, shaped by and subject to the laws of nature. Personality, by contrast, indicates responsiveness to an entirely different order of law — the moral law — by virtue of which the individual person is accountable for her actions. Actions, accordingly, are the point where the series of outward, physical events intersects with that of inward, intelligible volitions and intentions. Because Kant is committed to causal determinism in the realm of nature, his conception of human personality faces tensions: How can persons be morally responsible for actions which, as physical events, are causally determined? Kant’s solution is transcendental idealism: persons belong to two separate worlds, the phenomenal and noumenal, and are in the one what they are not in the other. But this solution comes at a price. Beyond the difficulties associated with Kant’s problematic doctrine of things in themselves, there are problems about motivation, self-knowledge and knowledge of specific moral duties, and also about the limits of actual responsibility: If Ought implies Can, how should we think about the existence of moral luck, tragedy, and situations that test the limits of human agency? What about those exceptional moments when the right thing to do appears underivable from or incompatible with universal “laws” of morality?

The seminar pursues these questions through engagement with the thought of Kant, Jacobi, and Hegel, who recognized Kant and Jacobi as having set the terms for modern German philosophy. — Jacobi is notable as a forerunner of philosophical personalism and for having put the concept of action at the center of his understanding of reality. Of particular interest here: Jacobi’s influential distinction between necessitating “grounds” and agential “causes”, his “maker’s knowledge” approach to epistemology, his views on freedom, creativity, moral value, and religious faith, as well as his associated critique of Kant and the post-Kantian idealists’ pretensions to make philosophy “systematic.” —  Hegel’s writings suggest a rich and nuanced theory of action across the overlapping contexts of morality, religion, law, and social relations that extend beyond individual agency. The seminar will focus on chapters from the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right, and Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Arts, particularly his discussions of tragedy and the limits of agency. Where appropriate and as time permits, we will consider contemporaneous thinkers (Schelling, Hölderlin) as well as relevant 20^th /21^st century views on personality and action.

PHIL 508: The Ethics and Politics of Knowledge 

Désirée Lim

Possible course requirements fulfilled: None at this time, please check back later for any additional details

What is knowledge, and why is it valuable? More than that, what role might political matters like inequalities of power play in our ability to obtain knowledge, and what ethical responsibilities might we have in our capacity as knowers, both to ourselves and others? This course explores the ways in which the conceptual tools of epistemology bear on ethics and political philosophy, and vice versa. It is organized around four broad themes: the nature of truth and knowledge; the limitations of knowledge, especially self-knowledge; the relationship between knowledge, power, and ideology, and the ethics of acquiring, representing or disseminating knowledge.

PHIL 439: Slavery and Its Afterlives 

Jasmine Wallace

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race and Feminist Theory

How should we understand slavery’s presence in the present? This graduate seminar examines how scllholars in Black studies, feminist theory, and philosophy have argued that chattel slavery is not only a past institution but an ongoing framework shaping social life, political institutions, and racial meaning today. Rather than treating slavery as a closed historical chapter, the course explores how its logics persist in contemporary debates about race, gender, kinship, and incarceration.

Reading thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Angela Davis, Sylvia Wynter, and Christina Sharpe, students will engage influential concepts including the flesh, the afterlife of property, social death, racial capitalism, and carcerality. We will trace how these ideas were developed, debated, and reworked, and how Black feminist scholarship has been central to shaping contemporary discourse on slavery’s ongoing significance. The seminar emphasizes close reading, conceptual analysis, and historically grounded critique. 

PHIL 555: Modern Philosophy Seminar – Slavery, Colonialism and the Social Contract 

John Christman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, History (modern)

This course will undertake a critical examination of the major figures in social contract theory, such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, in light of the dynamics of empire, colonialism and chattel slavery operating in the period in which they are writing.  The main components of the theories of these canonical figures will be explicated along with commentary linking their views to the efforts of European domination of non-European peoples.  In addition to unpacking the substances of these theories and critiques arising from these contextual considerations, we will also look at methodological and thematic issues that apply more broadly to the practice of political philosophy, such as ideal vs. non-ideal theory, structural injustice, and the relevance of author intent and social setting to the practice of philosophical interpretation.

Fall 2026

PHIL 418: Seminar in Ethical Theory

Sarah Clark Miller

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics

What makes an action right or wrong? How do we judge if someone is a morally good or bad person? When faced with a moral dilemma, what ought we do? In this course, we will seek answers to these and related questions. We will consider the goal of a moral theory, the role of principles in moral theories, and how to evaluate such theories. We will examine multiple historical approaches, including virtue ethics, divine command theory, deontology, and consequentialism, as well as contemporary criticisms of and responses to these theories. Toward the end of the course, we will study several metaethical theories, including moral particularism and moral pluralism. We will occasionally discuss case studies in an effort to ground newly acquired ethical acumen in practical issues.

This course will welcome graduate students who wish to specialize in ethics as well as those seeking to develop teaching competency. The course will feature special sessions with several Philosophy faculty members open only to graduate students, which will provide an opportunity for in-depth analysis and sustained consideration of select topics beyond the standard course content.

Specific foci of the course will include: Nuts and Bolts: What is the structure of a moral theory? Theory Evaluation: How can we tell if one moral theory is better than another? What criteria should we use to make this judgment? Religion and Ethics: Does morality depend on religion? How does an ethical viewpoint differ from a religious viewpoint? Do human autonomy and divine authority stand at odds with one another? The Nature of Human Nature and Ethics: Are humans inherently altruistic or egoistic? Are they inherently good or evil? What is the relation of ethics to facts about human nature? Measuring Happiness, Measuring the Good: Can happiness and the good be quantified? Principles, Particularism, and Relativism: Is morality relative to the morality of one’s own community? Can ethical judgments be made across communities? Across nations? Across the globe? Reason and Emotion: Should reason rule the roost in moral decision-making? What role should the emotions play?

PHIL 468/JST 468: Jewish Philosophy

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics, Ethics, 20^th Century Philosophy

This course explores the rich history of Jewish philosophy since the Medieval Ages through to the 20th-century. Attention will be paid to debates about the relation between Judaism and Christianity, ethics and religion, what is specific about Jewish identity and religious experience, the challenges of secularism, and the issue of Zionism. Authors studied in the course include Maimonides, Mendelssohn, Heine, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Buber, Levinas, and Derrida.

PHIL 538:  Ecologically-Informed Intersectional Analyses

Nancy Tuana

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy and Ethics Distribution. Counts towards WGSS dual title

As we face unprecedented environmental changes and potential threshold events, understanding how such events not only have differential impacts, but also how those impacts are woven into histories as well as into current practices of oppression is key to understanding how to transform the ways we live together. This course will focus on the linkages between gender, race, sexuality, human development, and an expanded conception of environmental justice in the context of climate change. Feminist, Indigenous, and queer approaches will be used to interrogate binary categories such as nature/culture, natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal, scientific/spiritual as they relate to our understandings of “nature.”  In developing an ecologically-informed intersectional analysis, we will explore how racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression have shaped and continue to shape environmental discourses and practices. 

I have yet to finalize the reading list for the course, but I am currently considering thinkers such as:

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs  Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
• Sharon Patricia Holland an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life
• Latinx Environmentalisms : Place, Justice, and the Decolonial / Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray 
• Mel Y Chen Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire
• Sarah Jane Cervenak Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life
• Hyaesin Yoon Prosthetic Memories: Postcolonial Feminisms in a More-Than-Human World
• Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
• Ghassan Hage  Is Racism an Environmental Threat?
• Melanie L. Harris Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths
• Caterina Albano  Out of Breath: Vulnerability of Air in Contemporary Art
• Robin Wall Kimmerer  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
• Leanne Betasamosake Simpson As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins 
• Kathryn Yusoff A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None…

WGSS 555: Latina/x Feminist Theories

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy and Critical Philosophy of Race 

This course aims at introducing key historical and contemporary Latina/x feminist theories, including Chicana/x, Afro-Latina/x, and diasporic Latin American feminist theories. Given that these theories are informed by a strong tradition of “theory in the flesh,” intellectual production informed by lived experience, this course highlights the relationship between experience and identity formation. Special attention will be given to writings underscoring the construction of identity at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationality. In addition, the course considers how Latina/x aesthetic production is connected to self-formation, transformation, and resistance.

PHIL 556: Nineteenth Century Philosophy 

Robert Bernasconi

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Nineteenth Century Philosophy

During the semester we will examine how nineteenth century moral philosophers within the academy responded to the challenges presented by some of the major radical social reform movements operating from outside the academy. The main such challenge to be investigated will be that presented by advocates demanding the abolition of slavery, but we will also review the debate over Indian Removal and immigration. Other issues that might be included, after consultation with those registered for the class, include women’s rights, imprisonment, and the challenges presented by the growth of industrial capitalism. The main focus of the course will be on the United States and, given the religious affiliation of most of its colleges, we will assess the success of the so-called secularization of ethics as it took place during this time-period. The performance of utilitarianism and rights-based theories will be under special scrutiny, but the place accorded to Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel both within and outside the academy will also be considered. The authors from outside the academy that we will juxtapose with the academic moral philosophers will include Frances Wright, David Walker, James Pennington, Hosea Easton, Frederick Douglass, Leonard Bacon, Maria Stewart, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. At no stage in history has moral philosophy been asked to play as central a role in college education as it was in the United States for the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century and yet its performance during that period remains largely unexamined. By investigating moral philosophy as an institution responsive to the pressures placed on the educational institutions that housed it, we will explore the hypothesis that the radical transformation in the way moral philosophy came to be conceived as the century wore on was at least in part a result of its failure to meet the challenges to which it was exposed.

PHIL 562: Kant: Critique of Pure Reason 

Uygar Abaci

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology, Modern Philosophy

This course offers an intensive study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We will carry out this study on at least four complementary levels: i) the broader historical context of Kant’s critical project as responding to rationalist school metaphysics in 18th century Germany, on the one hand, and reconciling different aspects of empiricism and rationalism, on the other hand; ii) the development of Kant’s thought from his precritical works in the 1750’s and 1760’s through his “critical turn” in early 1770’s and his presentation of the critical system in the 1780’s; iii) the specific major doctrines and arguments presented in the Critique, such as transcendental idealism, theory of knowledge, transcendental illusion, and how they serve his idea of a critical philosophy; iv) the reactions to Kant’s critical project in German Idealism as well as in 20th century German and French traditions.

PHIL 564: Major Figures in 20^th Century Philosophy 

Leonard Lawlor

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental, Metaphysics-Epistemology

Sixty years after its publication, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is now seen as a classic in 20^th continental philosophy. It is one of the primary texts in the 1960s that attack the traditional ideas of identity. In the course, we’ll read the entire Difference and Repetition chapter by chapter. The goal lies in coming to a clear understanding of the book’s original concepts, in particular, difference and repetition. Difference is an ontological concept, while repetition is its meaning, the meaning of being as repetition. Yet, Deleuze’s concept of repetition refers to time. Through this interpretation of the book’s title – Difference and Repetition — we see that it has a deep connection to Heidegger’s Being and Time. The fall course on Difference and Repetition is a kind of sequel to my spring 2026 course on Being and Time. While ontology and temporality will our primary concern, we’ll also follow the few hints Deleuze presents of a possible ethics. This course is based on my current book project called The Disparate: Deleuze’s Ethics of the Univocity of Being.

Spring 2026

PHIL 438: Black Feminist & Queer Theory

Jasmine Wallace

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy

In her 1851 speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Sojourner Truth deftly highlights the racialized character of feminist issues that dominated public discourse of her time: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!” This course is framed in response to Truth’s demand that we attend to the variety of oppressions faced by women and non-binary communities at the intersections of patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity. To this end, we will examine how white supremacist patriarchy characterizes the lived condition of Black and Brown women from American colonialism to chattel slavery, and through to the present. We do so to lay a foundation for an intersectional analysis that will guide our approach to feminist theory. Furthermore, we will emphasize feminist praxis by analyzing concrete models of liberation from social and political institutions that (re)produce heteronormative, patriarchal, and white supremacist norms. Notable authors include Collins, hooks, Lorde, Spillers, Hartman, Davis and others.

PHIL 458: Seminar in Contemporary Philosophy

John Christman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics

This course will focus on issues in contemporary political philosophy. Specifically, we will be looking at the meaning, value, and possibility of freedom for socially constituted subjects. We will be reading recent thinkers in critical theory, analytic political philosophy, and related areas who look at questions surrounding the nature of the political subject, agency, and the nature and possibility of freedom in contexts where such subjects are shaped by overarching relations of power.

PHIL 474: Kant’s Moral Philosophy

Uygar Abaci

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Modern Philosophy

This course aims to offer a comprehensive survey of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant lays the theoretical foundations of a major normative theory: deontology. On the broadest level, we will examine how Kant’s version of deontology compares to the other two major normative theories in the history of ethics, virtue ethics and consequentialism, and how it offers solutions to the structural problems in the latter. Such a comparative outlook requires a careful and intensive analysis of the central ideas and doctrines in Kant’s moral philosophy, in both the chronological and logical order of their development in his practical texts. We will start with the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) with a view to understanding the fundamental framework Kant offers for an ethical system based on the idea of universalizable rationality in the context of a moral community as the source of the normative force of the moral law and practical reason. We will see how Kant develops this framework by way of introducing into it the idea of the highest good, the ultimate object of the moral community, and incorporating it into his system of “critical philosophy” in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). His Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1793) will help us understand his doctrine of evil and refined position on human freedom. Finally, we
will study Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (1795) and the most developed picture Kant’s theory presents with regard to rights and virtues. In discussing these canonical texts, we will focus on Kant’s doctrines of practical reason, human freedom, good and evil, community, the role of God in ethical life, and the ultimate end of morality.

PHIL 485: Heidegger

Leonard Lawlor

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental Philosophy, Metaphysics-Epistemology

This course aims to read Heidegger’s 1927 masterpiece, Being and Time, from cover to cover. The importance of Being and Time cannot be denied since it influences philosophers across the 20th century and now into the 21st century. Because of its immense influence over the last hundred years, Being and Time arguably ranks among the greatest philosophy books in the last 500 years, rivaling Descartes’s Meditations, Spinoza’s Ethics, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. We will read Being and Time as it is intended, as a work in ontology, answering the question of the meaning of being by means of the being that we are (human existence, human Dasein). Because it concerns human existence, we will also read it as the founding book for the philosophical movement called existentialism. It is impossible to ignore that Being and Time concerns how we exist in the world and how our existence might change through the anticipation of one’s own death.

PHIL 539: Abolition Democracy from Douglass to DuBois

Kris Sealey

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race, 19th Century Philosophy

This course examines how key African American thinkers between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century understood concepts of democracy and civic freedom through the experience of slavery, its subsequent abolition and in the unfolding decades of Reconstruction and its failure. In particular, the course will center Frederick Douglass’ antislavery and abolitionist writings to understand the ways in which both enslaved and newly freed Black Americans took on the possibility of membership in the American civil society, and what it meant to concretize their emancipated status at the cusp of a multi-racial democracy. Alongside this, we will center the work of W.E.B. DuBois to trace the evolution of these pressing social questions for Black Americans as they found themselves on the other side of what felt like the failing experiment of a multi-racial American democracy. Ultimately, we will use this historical trace of abolition democracy in Black American thought to make sense of how a twenty-first century Black Radical Tradition has conceptualized the meaning and possibility of Black freedom. Our reading list from Douglass will include The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, selections from Frederick Douglass: Selected Writings and Speeches, and sections from The Frederick Douglass Papers. Our readings list from DuBois will include The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction, as well as select articles and speeches.

PHIL 563: German Idealism — Freedom, Rationality, and the Primacy of the Practical in German Philosophy after Kant: Jacobi, Fichte, Hegel (and the Post-Idealist Aftermath)

Brady Bowman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 19th Century Philosophy, Metaphysics-Epistemology

Hume taught that desires alone and never beliefs, never ideas or reasons just as such, have motivating force; hence: “Reason is the slave of the passions.” If one proposition defines Kant’s philosophy of mind it is the anti-Humean thesis that pure reason has an essential interest and thus motivational force of its own; to recognize some state of things as conformable to the demand of pure reason suffices (in principle) as motivation to act to bring about that state of things in the world. This is what Kant means by the “reality of pure practical reason” and on it hinges all certainty of the reality of free will as a causal force in the universe. Kant further argues for the unity of reason under the primacy of the practical. That is, our certainty of what pure reason demands in the way of moral duty entitles us to be certain about the objective reality of certain ideas of an unconditional and absolute nature, despite the impossibility of theoretical proof.

The primacy of practical reason, thus defined, is the cornerstone of idealism in the sense that term is applied to the post-Kantian thinkers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In their specific ways, each of these thinkers seeks to articulate the interest they conceive as the common source both of reason itself and of the reality in and through and toward which it acts to produce a world that is specifically human in its shape and value. That interest is, in a word, the interest in freedom; and the unity of practical and theoretical reason — that is, the unity of desire or interest, idea, and the objective historical achievement it presupposes defines what Hegel, for one, will come to refer to as spirit (Geist). Most succinctly, the plan is to reveal knowledge itself together with its object (“being,” “the world”) as a function and expression of freedom. Literally every aspect of the post-Kantian idealist program is thus to be understood in terms of its intended contribution to the articulation and vindication of the interest and primacy of practical reason.

Thus, for the first time in Kant and especially in German Idealism, there took hold a conception of belief and cognition as constituted, motivated, and specifically shaped by interest — rational interest. This seminar will largely presuppose the Kantian background and focus on the development of this conception in key post-Kantian thinkers, especially Jacobi, Fichte, and Hegel, with analysis of canonical texts including Jacobi’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza (1781, 21789) and David Hume (1787), Fichte’s Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge (1794), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and selections from his Science of Logic (1816), especially on the so-called “absolute Idea.”

However, once such a conception of a priori rational interest as constituting, motivating, and shaping cognition has taken hold, a further, new option also emerges into view: namely that theoretical cognition might be shaped by a priori non-rational or indeed irrational interest that in place of freedom might have any of a range of different possible objects, e.g. pure productivity, power. Post-Kantianism thus sets the stage for a more radical and far-reaching version of Hume’s conception of reason as the slave of the passions. In this fortified version, reason is not merely the servant of externally given interest; rather, it is itself, through and through, the progeny and expression of such interest, to an extent that calls the very notion of independently rational form, content, and objectivity into question. Schopenhauer was the first to recognize this option and give it systematic elaboration, but clearly Marx and Nietzsche (and beyond them Deleuze and Foucault) are developing the same option in directions of their own. We will devote the last few sessions to considering the further fate of the primacy of practical reason as it takes shapes in the post-Idealist aftermath.

PHIL 580: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception

Ted Toadvine

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology, Continental Philosophy

The core of our course will be a complete reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the work for which he was best known during his lifetime and that established him as the leading phenomenologist of his generation. Here Merleau-Ponty develops his distinctive interpretation of phenomenology’s method in conversation with Gestalt theory and research in psychology and neurology. Framing his inquiry with a parallel critique of empiricism and intellectualism for their unquestioned commitment to a ready-made, objective world, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the essentially embodied, expressive, and historical aspects of perceptual experience across a wide range of existential dimensions, including sexuality, language, space, nature, intersubjectivity, time, and freedom. We will situate Phenomenology of Perception in the wider context of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre, explore his relationship with major interlocutors, and also consider his influence on the burgeoning field of critical phenomenology.

WGSS 555: Latina/x Feminist Theories — Critical Philosophy of Race and Feminist Philosophy

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Philosophy

This course aims at introducing key historical and contemporary Latina/x feminist theories, including Chicana/x, Afro-Latina/x, and diasporic Latin American feminist theories. We will pay special attention to works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Alarcón, Chela Sandoval, María Lugones, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Lorgia García-Peña. Given that these theorists are informed by a strong tradition of “theory in the flesh,” intellectual production informed by lived experience, this course highlights the relationship between experience and identity formation. Special attention will be given to writings underscoring the construction of identity at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationality. In addition, the course considers how Latina/x aesthetic production is connected to self-formation, transformation, and resistance.

Fall 2025

PHIL 439: East Asian Philosophy

Erica Brindley

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Pre-20th Century World Philosophies

This course provides a survey of foundational concepts in East Asian philosophy and intellectual cultures – including those from China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam – over various periods of history. It aims to familiarize students with the most prominent debates and philosophical concerns in East Asian philosophy, from the classical period in China to the rise of Buddhism, and then on to more contemporary times. Readings will include a representative sample of key texts in East Asian philosophy, along with articles that help deepen one’s understanding of the main concepts and their relationships to each other. Topics to be discussed include debates about human nature, social and familial obligations, the nature of reality (esp. relating to impermanence and change), rituals and education, the natural cosmos, human agency and individual desire, virtue ethics, and the political order. Students will also learn to distinguish among various philosophical orientations, especially those from the Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, Legalist, NeoConfucian, Mahayana Buddhist, and Kyoto traditions.

PHIL 455: Seminar in Modern Philosophy

Robert Bernasconi

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Modern Philosophy

During the course we will look at some of the philosophical debates that arose during the early modern period arose from claims about property in land, especially in relation to colonialism, and property in persons (slavery). We will also look at a third issue that has received less attention: the rights of the poor. During the Middle Ages some prominent thinkers promoted the view that, in cases of necessity, poor people had the right to take what
they needed for themselves and their families and that, under appropriate conditions, did not even need to ask permission. All three of these topics – colonialism, slavery, and poverty – will be examined within the institutional and structural contexts in which they took place. Particular attention will be paid to those occasions where philosophical theories were translated into policy. John Locke will be a central reference point for our discussions, but other thinkers whose work will be considered include Aquinas, Vitoria, Las Casas, Sepúlveda, Alonso de la Vera Cruz, Vives, Grotius, Pufendorf, and Winstanley.

PHIL 478: Jewish Philosophy

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Metaphysics-Epistemology

Care ethics has enjoyed a recent resurgence of interest in philosophy and related disciplines. Members of this seminar will have the opportunity to conduct an in-depth exploration of care ethics as a moral theory, with secondary attention paid to how care ethics informs social and political thought. We will consider the historical roots of care ethics in the 1980s and 1990s, its further development during the middle years of 2000–2015, and the cutting-edge contributions of the past ten years. Understanding the current state of the field will be a main goal. We will delineate the main features of care ethics as a moral theory, observing how it differs from other canonical moral theories such as virtue ethics, deontology, sentimentalism, and consequentialism, while also considering the metaethical views care ethics entails. We will examine whether the ethics of care is best understood as a theory of right action or virtuous character—or as something else entirely. Throughout, we will track how care ethics functions as a critical enterprise that not only identifies shortcomings in other normative approaches but also fosters forms of moral, social, and political critique. We will also pay close attention to philosophical issues surrounding the concepts of relationality and dependency found at the core of care ethics by asking both about the moral meanings of specific relationships in which we stand with others and about the constitutive nature of interdependent relationality for normativity itself. Texts for the course will draw primarily from feminist philosophy and contemporary moral philosophy.

PHIL 503: The Ethics of Relationality and Care

Sarah Clark Miller

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Feminist Philosophy

Care ethics has enjoyed a recent resurgence of interest in philosophy and neighboring disciplines. Alongside it, relational ethics has also grown as a connected subfield. Members of this seminar will have the opportunity to study both. We will conduct an in-depth exploration of care ethics as a moral theory and how it informs social and political thought. We will examine the historical roots of care ethics in the 1980s and 1990s, its further development during the middle years of 2000–2015, and the cutting-edge contributions of the past decade. We will delineate the key features of care ethics as a moral theory, observing how it differs from other canonical moral theories such as virtue ethics, deontology, sentimentalism, and consequentialism, while also considering the metaethical views care ethics entails. We will investigate whether the ethics of care is best understood as a theory of right action or virtuous character—or as something else entirely. Throughout, we will track how care ethics functions as a critical enterprise that not only identifies shortcomings in other normative approaches but also fosters forms of moral, social, and political critique. We will also pay close attention to philosophical issues surrounding the concepts of relationality and dependency by asking about the moral meanings of specific relationships in which we stand with others and the constitutive nature of interdependent relationality for normativity itself. Texts for the course will draw primarily from feminist philosophy and contemporary moral philosophy.

PHIL 516: Aesthetics: Countervisuality, The Photograph, and Memory-Making

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race

This course will study aesthetics in an anticolonial register. We will consider the way in which the realm of perception opens the possibility for reframing and contesting dominant imaginaries related to racialization. In particular, we will explore how the photograph and photographic practices may be read against their traditional function of indexing and representation for the purposes of classification, reification of difference, and the recording of hegemonic histories. In the first section of the course, we will analyze key theoretical engagements with the photograph so as to study the nexus of image, history, and identity (Ariella Azoulay, Roland Barthes, Kimberly Juanita Brown, Tina Campt, Susan Sontag, Leigh Raiford, Deborah Willis), while in the second part of the course we will highlight specific photographic projects in terms of the relation between the photograph and memory-making, especially in the context of displacement, racial violence, and coloniality (María Magdalena Campos Pons, Muriel Hasbun, Ken Gonzales-Day, Karen Miranda-Rivanedeira, Zora J. Murff, Carrie Mae Weems).

PHIL 553: Ancient Philosophy Seminar: Aristotle

Christopher Moore

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient Philosophy, Ethics, Metaphysics-Epistemology

A comprehensive study of the work of Aristotle (383–323 bce), with equal attention given to his practical (“ethical”) and his theoretical (“M/E”) philosophy. With Plato, Aristotle has been the most enduringly significant philosopher in the Western philosophical tradition; more than Plato, his views across an enormous range of areas were taken as authoritative for millennia. We will read a lot of Aristotle, with the primary goal of understanding the system and mode of his thought, including its major concepts, arguments, assumptions, and themes. Subsidiary goals include gaining familiarly with Aristotle’s life, influences, and constitution of corpus; intimacy with large sections of his most important works; and a sense for his impact on later thought, not excluding the various “neo-Aristotelian” approaches found in contemporary philosophy.

We will read the entirety of or selected books from the following: the “Organon”; Physics; On the Heavens (De Caelo); Generation and Corruption; On the Soul (De Anima); Motion of Animals (De Motu); Metaphysics; Nicomachean Ethics; Politics; Rhetoric; Poetics. We will not have time for most of the zoological works, but we will still find opportunities to discuss themes found in them, including reproduction, gender, life-force, and species.

PHIL 557: The Anarchist Imaginary

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental Philosophy, Ethics

Anarchism has always been a name haunted by its own imaginary. Although anarchism since the invention of the term by Proudhon in the 19th century has always had a fraught relationship to the term “anarchy,” critical elements in the argument of the anarchic imaginary include: destabilization of absolute sovereignty, relationality of human existence predicated on dependence and vulnerability, the multiplication of diversified communities, the constitutive bond of responsibility underpinning political self-governance, and most importantly, unsparing critique of totalitarian and authoritarian tendencies within modern democratic societies. Delineated along these lines, the anarchic imaginary will be conceived in this seminar as a hermeneutical heterotopia inhabited by different thinkers, as strangers in a distant land who find themselves together by virtue of an elective affinity of our interpretative making. The aim of this seminar is to explore the landscape of the anarchist imaginary through a selection of 20th century thinkers. After an introductory section on 19th-century anarchist thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin), this seminar will focus on the writings of Max Stirner, Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Emmanuel Levinas, Reiner Schürmann, Felix Guattarri, David Graeber, Saul Newman, James Scott, Atticus Bagby-Williams, Nsámbu Za Suékama, and Hakim Bey.

WMNST 507: Feminist Theory

Nancy Tuana

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy, Ethics

What is considered theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts as theory for women of color. Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world. Thus, we need teorías… that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries–new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul.

This course provides a graduate level introduction to some of the key theoretical trends and debates in contemporary feminist theory. One key theme weaving through the class is how to theorize the “afterlives” of oppression—including practices of slavery and colonialism— and how best to understand and address systemic oppression. Throughout the class we will be particularly attentive to the importance of and challenges to coalitional work between different theoretical frames such as Black feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, Latina/x feminisms, Asian American feminisms, and trans theories, as well as engaging issues of class, dis/abilities, and environmental justice.

Spring 2025

PHIL 461: Plato’s Republic

Christopher Moore

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient Philosophy; Ethics

This course studies Plato’s Republic (Politeia), the most assigned philosophy text in the US – its context, its genre, and its discussion and arguments. This long Socratic dialogue has often been thought to contain the breadth of Plato’s philosophical thinking, and so it does; but read attentively, it seems less to be asserting Platonic “doctrine” than to be formulating fundamental questions, articulating hypotheses, and trying out various methods of inquiry. Against the background of classical-period political theory and ethical reflection, it can be seen to consolidate and concentrate the philosophical investigations of the day. So the Republic is at once a portrait of Socrates; documentation of the origins of political philosophy; and an instance of Plato’s approach to hard questions: epistemic humility, topic-spanning creativity, literary vibrancy, irony, and analytic precision.

We will read all ten books of the Republic, which attend to the problem of old age, the nature of justice, education, the structure of the soul, the relationship between the virtues, domestic arrangements, the equality of women, the meaning of philosophy, the grounding of knowledge, regime change, the trouble with democracy, the value of the arts, eschatology, and other themes. We will read closely the celebrated passages: the elenchus of Thrasymachus, Glaucon’s ring of Gyges, the city of pigs, the city and soul analogy, the three waves, the philosopher kings and queens, the sun analogy, the allegory of the cave, the explanation of tyranny, the myth of Er.

We will also spend more than a month reading the surrounding key texts, including Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, the fragments of Antiphon’s On Truth, and Xenophon’s Spartan Constitution.

PHIL 472: Islamic Philosophy

Jonathan Brockopp

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Pre-20th Century World Philosophies

We will survey major texts from the Islamic philosophical tradition, focusing primarily on the classical period (ninth to twelfth centuries) and its influence on modern thinkers. We read translations of those who made an impact on European civilization (Algazel, Avicenna, Averroes, etc.), but also lesser-known scholars, such as Basran saint Rabia al-Adawiyya (d. 801) and African leader Usuman dan Fodio (d. 1817). Our goal is a solid understanding of the depth and breadth of Islamic philosophy.

PHIL 502: Decolonial Marxism

Eduardo Mendieta

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 19th Century; Critical Philosophy of Race

Karl Marx was a decolonial thinker and activist Avant La Lettre. In this seminar we will investigate this claim. Some critics have accused his work of being Eurocentric, Male centric, and technocentric. We will inspect those accusations. It could be argued that this seminar should have been titled “Decolonizing Marxism,” and we will also engage with this claim. In the foreground are the issues of what are decoloniality, decolonizing, and the coloniality of power. Marx argued that colonialism and technology were implicated in the rise of capitalism and its perseverance. If we live in a colonial present, it is because we live in a capitalist present. Marx was also a prolific journalist, and this is how he made some of his living. We will read from Dispatches for the New York Tribute, one of the best compilations of Marx’s journalism. These texts exhibit how Marx was engaged with what was going on with European colonialism across the world during the Nineteen Century. In these texts, Marx engages with an analysis, inter alia, of the U.S. civil war, and the causes for the abolition of slavery. We will also read from some of Marx’s recently published ethnographic notebooks. We will study works by Marcello Musto, Harry Harootunian, Cedric Robinson, Walter Rodney, Enrique Dussel, and likely some Jacques Derrida. Students will be required to lead a class discussion, write a 2K short paper on Marx’s anticolonialism, a second short paper on Marx’s critique of racism, and a 3 to 4 K final paper on Marx’s analysis of the relationship among capitalism, colonialism, and racism.

PHIL 539: Black Ontology and the Matter of Fungible Flesh

Jasmine Wallace

PHIL 562: Rousseau and Contested Conceptions of Freedom

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern Philosophy; Ethics

This course will look closely at the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a springboard to thinking about the nature of social freedom. Rousseau will be taken as a pivotal, albeit controversial, figure in the development of conceptions of liberty at the apex of European enlightenment thought. He has also been taken as an exemplar of the tendency to conceptualize liberty from the perspective only of elite white males in the metropole, hence occluding the dominating effects of patriarchy, racism, and colonial domination. We will examine key texts in Rousseau’s corpus in order to reconstruct his conception of social freedom and its relation to democracy and equality, and in so doing we will thematize these critique of his thought. We will also look at contrasting conceptions of freedom that also arise from this and surrounding periods, such as liberal individualist ideas (associated with Hobbes, Hume, and Bentham), neo-republican conceptions (linked to Machiavelli and others), Marxist-Hegelian approaches, and conceptions of liberty as liberation from oppression. The objectives of the course will be to expose students to (a) a thorough examination of Rousseau’s political thought; (b) radical critiques of that thought that extend to the wider enlightenment; and (c) a survey of dominant conceptions of social freedom in the modern and contemporary philosophical landscape.

WGSS 555: Latina Feminist Theories

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy

This course aims at introducing key historical and contemporary Latina/x feminist theories, including Chicana/x, Afro-Latina/x, and diasporic Latin American feminist theories (Anzaldúa, Alarcón, Sandoval, Alexander, Lugones, García Peña). Given that these theories are informed by a strong tradition of “theory in the flesh,” intellectual production informed by lived experience, this course highlights the relationship between experience and identity formation. Special attention will be given to writings underscoring the construction of identity at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationality. In addition, the course considers how Latina/x aesthetic production is connected to self-formation, transformation, and resistance.

Fall 2024

PHIL 418: Ethics

Sarah Clark Miller

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics

What makes an action right or wrong? How do we judge if someone is a morally good or bad person? When faced with a moral dilemma, what ought we do? In this course on ethics, we will seek answers to these and related questions. We will consider the goal of a moral theory, what role principles play in moral theories, and what makes for a good moral theory. We will also explore and examine numerous historical examples of ethical approaches, including virtue ethics, divine command theory, deontology, and consequentialism, as well as contemporary criticisms of and responses to these theories found in feminist ethics and anti-theory stances. Towards the end of the course, we will consider several metaethical theories, including moral particularism and moral pluralism. We will occasionally examine case studies in an effort to ground newly acquired ethical acumen in practical issues.

This course will welcome graduate students who wish to specialize in ethics as well as those who want to gain teaching competency in ethics. Several faculty members of the Philosophy Department may visit the course as guest lecturers for special sessions with the graduate students enrolled in the course.

Specific foci of the course will include: Nuts and Bolts: What is the structure of a moral theory? Theory Evaluation: How can we tell if one moral theory is better than another? What criteria should we use to make this judgment? Religion and Ethics: Does morality depend on religion? How does an ethical viewpoint differ from a religious viewpoint? Do human autonomy and divine authority stand at odds with one another? The Nature of Human Nature and Ethics: Are humans inherently altruistic or egoistic? Are they inherently good or evil? What is the relation of ethics to facts about human nature? Measuring Happiness, Measuring the Good: Can happiness and the good be quantified? Principles, Particularism, and Relativism: Is morality relative to the morality of one’s own community? Can ethical judgments be made across communities? Across nations? Across the globe? Reason and Emotion: Should reason rule the roost in moral decision- making? What role should the emotions play?

PHIL 457: Derrida: Friendship and Hospitality, Seminar in Contemporary Philosophy

Leonard Lawlor

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental Philosophy

This course will examine Derrida’s 1989-1990 course on friendship (published as Politics of Friendship) and 1995-1996 course on hospitality, as well as the book, The Gift of Death. The goal of the course lies in determining whether friendship, hospitality, and gift-giving share the same structure, a structure rendering each relation to the other impossible or, as Derrida would say, “the impossible.” The course will start with an examination of Derrida’s 1971, “Signature Event Context,” then of the 1997 “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event.” These two texts will allow us to familiarize with Derrida’s thought in general prior to turning to the particular topics of friendship, hospitality, and the gift.

PHIL 474: Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment

Uygar Abaci

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern Philosophy

This course offers a close study of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790). As the final and third piece of Kant’s critical trilogy, the book has the extremely ambitious project of bridging the gap between the respective focal subjects of the first two Critiques, nature and freedom, by arguing that nature is a hospitable place for the realization of free human ends. Kant’s argument is based on an observation of a certain kind of judgment, i.e., “reflecting” (as opposed to “determining”), operative in our aesthetic and teleological evaluation of nature, both of which assign a “purposiveness” to nature in different ways. Thus, a study of the third Critique will help us understand Kant’s most mature theories of aesthetics and teleology. Some of the topics we will focus on will include: Kant’s theory of judgment in general and of reflecting judgment in particular, theory of aesthetic judgment or judgment of taste, analytics of the beautiful and the sublime, universality of the claims of taste, theory of fine art and artistic genius, beauty as symbol of morality, teleological judgment, natural organisms, the rivalry and reconcilability of teleological and mechanical explanations of nature, nature and theology, physico- and ethico- theology, the doctrine of the highest good, and the unity of the critical system. In addition to a rigorous reading of the third Critique, the course will require the students to engage with some of Kant’s other important texts such as the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Anthropology, History, and Education as well as contemporary literature on the specific topics mentioned above.

PHIL 563, Major Figures in 19th Century Philosophy: Karl Marx

Amy Allen

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 19th Century Philosophy; Ethics

This seminar will focus on Capital, volume 1. We will read the text in its entirety, with the aim of getting a grip on Marx’s mature critique of capitalism. Among the questions we will discuss are the following: What is Marx’s conception of critique in this text? How does it relate to the project of immanent critique? Is his critique a normative critique that draws on notions of ethical alienation or unjust exploitation, or is it a non-normative, functionalist critique? Or some combination of these? How does Marx understand history in Capital, volume 1? What role, if any, does his theory of history play in his mature critique of capitalism? More generally, what is the relationship between the theoretical and historical parts of the text? We will use the Fowkes translation, published by Penguin Classics.

PHIL 564: Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon (Major Figures in Twentieth Century Philosophy)

Robert Bernasconi

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race; Continental Philosophy

Systemic racism is a highly contested concept but there has been relatively little discussion within philosophy about its conceptual basis. There is a widespread tendency throughout society to differentiate racism at the institutional or structural level from racism at the individual level, but an understanding of racism as a system, which is more and different from either of these, must integrate these two levels. Statistics can be deployed to provide prima facie evidence of institutional or structural racism, but they fall short if the task is to render the whole intelligible. This course aims to explore the resources found within the dialectical thinking of Sartre and Fanon for meeting this challenge. The course will proceed primarily through a close reading of portions of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, including his Search for a Method, and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. However, we will also read extracts from some of their earlier works (especially Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks) to show how their embrace of a form of dialectical thinking rooted in praxis and history forced them to modify some of their earlier, and still more widely disseminated, approaches to racism.

Spring 2024

PHIL 485: Seminar on Heidegger

Leonard Lawlor

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental Philosophy; Metaphysics and Epistemology

Heidegger’s Being and Time is arguably the most important philosophy book written in the 20^th century. The seminar will be a cover-to-cover, paragraph-by-paragraph reading of this text. In 1927, Being and Time was published in an incomplete form. Heidegger never wrote Part I, Division 3 (“Time and Being”) and Part II of Being and Time. However, scholars think that his 1929 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and his 1027 course called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology provide a clue to what the complete Being and Timewould have looked like (see Translator’s Introduction to The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. xvii). If we have time near the end of the semester, we will investigate parts of these two books.

We will use the Joan Stambaugh English translation (revised by Schmidt) of Being and Time (The SUNY Press).

PHIL 538: Decolonial Feminism: Lugones and her Critics

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race

This seminar focuses on María Lugones’s development of a decolonial feminism both inspired by and resistant to Anibal Quijano’s account of the coloniality of power. In the first part of the class, we will briefly study Quijano’s theorization of the coloniality of power that highlights the category of race as the key element of social classification for the purposes of social exploitation and domination at a global scale.  We will also study Lugones’s development of the notion of the coloniality of gender as a corrective to what she considers major problems in Quijano’s account of coloniality, namely his lack of insight regarding the entwinement between race and gender, and his failure to consider the crucial work that the category of gender performs in processes of subjectification, dehumanization, and exploitation.  In the second of the course, we will carry out a critical assessment of Lugones’s major points in her proposed decolonial feminism, including her view of gender as a colonial imposition, her complex relation to the notion of intersectionality, and her theorization of the dark and light sides of the coloniality of gender.  We will do so by looking at the reception of her work both in the context of the U.S and Latin America, and by juxtaposing her work to recent analyses of decoloniality proposed by thinkers such as  Ochy Curiel, Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, Breny Mendoza, Rita Segato, and Catherine Walsh.

PHIL 539: Creolization and the Black Atlantic

Kris Sealey

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race

This course uses the frame of creolization to make legible and theorize the generative conceptions of identity, belonging and cultural production coming out of the Black Atlantic world. It will foreground the significance of Relation – world-relations broken and world-relations refashioned and imagined anew – as it unfolds in the context of the uneven power terrain of slavery, settler colonial conquest and modern forms of anti-black violence in the Afro-diasporic Atlantic. The course will read works by Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Katherine McKittrick, and Valérie Loichot (among others), with the aim of understanding the Black Atlantic as both site of modernity’s crossroads and its counterculture. In the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, creolization gives us the tools to name the “selective creation and cultural struggle” of Black Atlantic lifeworlds. It renders meaningful the liberatory possibilities of the incoherence, opacity and bricolage that often marks identity-(re)making and homing practices in the aftermath of New World slavery and settler colonial conquest. Hence, using creolization to frame our reading of the works listed above allows us to consider how the Black Atlantic, though always entangled with the violence of racial hierarchies, is always more than the summative reaction to/resistance against that violence. In other words, creolization makes legible the Black Atlantic as a creative site of meaning making and cultural production.

PHIL 553: Ancient Ethics

Christopher Moore

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient Philosophy, Ethics

This course surveys fifth- and fourth-century Greek reflections on ethics in all its variety, from maxims and exhortations, to dialogues and dramatizations, to theories and total world views – from the Sophistic period through Aristotle. Given the fragmentary or indirect nature of much of the pre-Aristotelian evidence, we will have to reconstruct many of the arguments and views to be considered, which will take understanding their socio-intellectual context, the dialectical situation, the assumptions borne and the forms of reasoning deployed by their authors, and the ethically relevant inferences one might make.

Thus this course has two primary goals. First, students should learn the broad range of ethical stances, reasons, and views debated in the classical Greek period. This will contribute to their understanding of ethics and the history of philosophy, and will also prepare them to teach ancient philosophy and the history of ethics at the undergraduate level. Second, students should practice recreating a large-scale philosophical debate whose materials are exiguous and whose situation is relatively foreign to our own.

Key concepts discussed in this course include the virtues; pleasure; flourishing/happiness; the importance of knowledge; the structure of the soul; the nature of law; and the teachability of ethics. Special attention will be given to question of women’s excellences and the place of the domestic sphere in ethical thinking.

We will study the texts attributable to the “Sophists”; the views associated with Socrates; the so-called “economic” or “house-holding” texts; Pythagoreanism; the Platonic project; and the three versions of Aristotle’s “Ethics” course. The assignments are weekly response posts and a major final paper.

PHIL 580, Phenomenology of Life After Death

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics and Metaphysics

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner once observed. Reparations for injustices of the past, the hauntings of moral harms, and question of forgiveness in the name of the dead can be seen as some of the numerous issues animating the problem of “life after death.” How do the dead remain with us in mourning and remembrance? Can the dead ever forget us, let alone forgive us for what we have done to them? In a speculative key, are we entering an age of post-humanism with projects of overcoming biological death, escapism from the planet earth, and other technological dreams of achieving “immortality”?  What ways of thinking are available within phenomenological approaches to the afterlife. Is a phenomenology of being with the dead, of the dead being with us, of non-existing future beings, of ghosts and spectrality, possible? And how would such possibilities need to conceptually take shape and find articulation, indeed, receive a distinct phenomenological voice and vision? The aim of this seminar is to explore this sweep of questions through a combination of phenomenological and literary works. The reading list may include Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Hans Jonas, Jan Patocka, Jacques Derrida, Octavia Butler, Sadiya Hartman, Ernst Bloch, Don Delillo, James Joyce, and P.K. Dick.

Fall 2023

PHIL 405, Philosophy of Law

Eduardo Mendieta

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics and Critical Philosophy of Race

This is an advanced study of the philosophy of law and jurisprudence. This course builds on Phil 105. For this class, to be led like a graduate seminar, we will focus on three key themes: Constitutionalism, Critical Race Theory, and Feminist Legal Theory. We will study the origins of constitutionalism, what it means today, and how it relates to what has been called “Cosmopolitan Constitutionalism.” Constitutions are the crucible of jurisgenesis, and most importantly, of citizenship rights. We will focus particularly on the “President’s Commission on SCOTUS” in order to investigate the relationship between “the constitution” and SCOTUS. Then, we will study Critical Race Theory and Feminist Legal Theory, but as they relate to constitutionalism, and in particular their critique of the U.S. Constitution. If the “state is male” as MacKinnon famously claimed, can we also say it is “white,” as has been argued by many CRT theorists? And how the “maleness” and “whiteness” of our government is related to how SCOTUS has read and/or misread “the” constitution. We will study what has been called “constitutional failure.”

PHIL 418: Seminar in Ethical Theory

Robert Bernasconi

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics and Modern Philosophy

We will study some of the transformations that moral philosophy as an academic discipline underwent in the modern period with particular emphasis on the British moralists (especially Francis Hutcheson, James Beattie, and William Paley). We will begin with the slow emergence of ethics as an autonomous discipline from the twelfth century through the Renaissance. This will give us a vantage point from which to view later efforts to secularize the teaching of moral philosophy. A particular focus of the course will be the challenges that instructors in moral philosophy within British universities faced following the sudden outbreak of a widespread demand, emanating largely from outside the universities, to abolish the slave trade and emancipate the enslaved. Most academic philosophers initially ignored this moral revolution that was dominating public discourse; they continued in their lectures to rehearse the traditional justifications provided by Greek, Roman, and Christian philosophers. But they eventually found themselves forced to address the question of how a time-honored institution could now come to be so widely rejected on principle. It led them to question the understandings of ethics they had inherited, including aspects of the new secularized versions of ethics. In the last part of the course, we will shift our focus to the United States where the challenge of how to address slavery within the context of a moral philosophy course was especially acute: the way it was addressed could impact the economic health of any given college. In most institutions the college president taught the capstone course in moral philosophy. Observing how these philosophers who were also administrators negotiated the various conflicting interests that they faced provides a context for us to explore the role of ethics in the teaching of ethics once ethics becomes institutionalized. In this process ethics lost its centrality in the academic curriculum and the understanding of what it meant to teach ethics within the institutional setting of a university underwent further transformation.

PHIL 460, African American Philosophy 

Kris Sealey

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race

How does the African American experience generate distinctive philosophical engagements with notions such as subjectivity, embodiment, gender, practices of democracy and cultural production. The course looks at key thinkers and cultural practitioners from/integrally related to the African American intellectual tradition, all of whom grapple with the above questions within a context generated by the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its legacies of anti-black violence. We will focus on texts from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century, coming out of geographical regions of both the US mainland and the broader Americas. Readings will include works by Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Alain Locke, W.E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, Paul Robeson, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, and Angela Davis, among others. In so doing, the course develops a deeper understanding of how modern slavery, racial hierarchies and settler colonialism not only shape African American and Afro-diasporic conceptions of being, knowing and doing, but also the critical practice of Philosophy itself.

PHIL 478, Jewish Philosophy 

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics and Metaphysics

PHIL 503, Care and Relational Ethics 

Sarah Clark Miller

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Feminist Philosophy

Care ethics and relational ethics represent two connected forms of moral theory of increasing prominence. The aim of this course will be to guide seminar participants through a thorough exploration of both approaches. The first half of the course will be devoted to the ethics of care. We will consider the main features of this moral theory, observing how it differs from other canonical moral theories (e.g., virtue ethics, sentimentalism, deontology, and consequentialism), as well as where there is overlap. (Seminar participants will gain additional familiarity with those major moral theories through this process.) In studying the historical roots of care ethics, we will pay close attention to Black feminist contributions to the field. We will also examine the less explored metaethical dimensions of care ethics. Next, we will turn to how care ethics functions as a critical enterprise that not only identifies shortcomings in other normative approaches but also fosters forms of moral, social, and political critique. Understanding the current state of the field will be another main goal, with readings on the themes of care and disability justice, trans and queer care, technologies of care, and care beyond human worlds. The second half of the course will engage philosophical issues surrounding the concept of relationality in ethics by asking both about the moral meanings of the specific relationships in which we stand with others and about the constitutive nature of relationality for normativity itself. We will examine why and how relationality might prompt us to reconsider and reformulate certain key ethical concepts such as agency, dignity, and well-being. Texts for the course will draw primarily from conversations in feminist philosophy and contemporary moral philosophy.

PHIL 556, (Figures in 19th Century Philosophy): Dignity, Respect, and the Struggle for Recognition in Classical German Philosophy and Some Contemporary Thought 

Brady Bowman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 19th Century Philosophy, Ethics

As a concept equally central to moral psychology and social-political theory, “recognition” first enters the philosophical vocabulary in Fichte’s work on the Foundations of Natural Right (1797). But it is Hegel who, within the ensuing decade, introduces the dimensions of transgression, provocation, and struggle that make recognition the linchpin for a comprehensive theory of self-consciousness, social interaction, and institutional transformation. Most especially through its role in Hegel’s famous exposition of the master-slave dialectic, this theory was to become his most influential contribution to philosophy. Yet the presentation in the Phenomenology of Spirit is arguably but the torso of an even richer theory of recognition that Hegel developed in the period immediately prior to writing the Phenomenology and then abandoned, leaving it behind in unpublished manuscripts whose philosophical rediscovery over a century later, in the 1930s, became the starting point for a second, differently accentuated wave of reception.

This seminar explores the genesis of the conception in Hegel’s immediate predecessors (Kant, Fichte) and traces its development in Hegel’s thought, in order to assess some of the more influential strands in its contemporary reception (e.g. Darwall, Taylor, Honneth, Butler). The first few sessions will present the background in Kant and Fichte, focusing on elements that Hegel reconfigures in his conflictual theory of recognition: dignity, respect, the categorical imperative, self-conscious freedom, desire, and moral autonomy. The second, main part of the course focuses on Hegel’s development and exposition of the theory in his unpublished Jena writings and in the “Self-Consciousness” and “Spirit” chapters of the Phenomenology, with special attention to the dialectic of lordship and bondage, the unhappy consciousness, Hegel’s interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and his analysis of moral conflict and forgiveness. While texts documenting the theory’s influence on 20^th and 21^st century philosophers will be integrated into the seminar’s first two phases as well, it is during the last four to five weeks of the semester that we will engage most extensively with the contemporary reception of Hegel’s theory of recognition — both with philosophers who (like Taylor, Fraser, and Honneth) have sought to renew and extend the theory to address the pathologies of recognition refused (contempt, disenfranchisement, degradation), and with those who (like Butler) bring attention to the discontent and inner oppression that are the ineluctable shadow of selfhood itself as constrained by recognizability.

Spring 2023

PHIL 402, Seminar in European Philosophy: World, Earth, and Planet  

Ted Toadvine 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology, Continental Philosophy   
The renewal of “world” as a philosophical problem is one of the most significant and influential contributions of phenomenology, and it has opened new ways of understanding how we are in the world and inhabit a “lifeworld.” This renewed attention to world also inspires new ways of understanding the relationship of world to “earth” and the elemental structures and materiality that make the world possible. The relation of world and earth is at the heart of many philosophical issues that continue to confront us: Is there one world or many? Has technology fundamentally altered the relation between world and earth? Is “the” world in danger of ending, or has it perhaps already ended? We begin with classic texts by Husserl, Heidegger, Landgrebe, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Levinas before turning to critical responses from Derrida, Nancy, and Irigaray. We conclude with a consideration of contemporary debates over the relation of world, earth, and planet raised by critical phenomenology, new materialisms, technological innovation, and the advent of the Anthropocene. 

PHIL 453, Ancient Concepts of Nature

Mark Sentesy  

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient Philosophy, Metaphysics-Epistemology 

Of everything human beings face, the question of nature has the deepest roots and widest consequences. How things stand with nature, including what nature is for us and what we can contribute to it, is the fundamental challenge facing our civilization. 

It has always been this way: the first father of our civilization, Gilgamesh, re-negotiated his relationship with nature. In the first unit of this course, we examine Gilgamesh’s first attempts to take his mortal fate into his own hands, the ecological meaning of the story of the flood, and why he ends by devoting his city to nature. We study the Homeric epics, too, which articulate the problem of individual mortality and the meaning of an individual life in the context of a natural world that prevails around it. 

But it has often been said that the Greeks discovered the study of Nature (physis). Nature as a whole is an unusual object of inquiry and names a particular way of experiencing phenomena. Its discovery coincided with the Greek birth of philosophical thinking. How and why did Nature emerge as an all-pervasive concern, and how did the Greeks shape how we think nature? The second unit in this course explores these questions, concentrating on Heraclitus, the Atomists, and Plato’s Timaeus. We address, among other things, the idea that events are governed by non-intentional principles, that there is a single fundamental principle of all phenomena, the concept of dynamic structure, that nothing can be truly created or destroyed, that change disperses being, and the concept of atomic composition. 

PHIL 474, Kant 

Uygar Abaci   

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology, Modern Philosophy 

This course offers an intensive study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We will carry out this study on at least four complementary levels: i) the broader historical context of Kant’s critical project as responding to rationalist school metaphysics in 18th century Germany, on the one hand, and reconciling different aspects of empiricism and rationalism, on the other hand; ii) the development of Kant’s thought from his precritical works in the 1750’s and 1760’s through his “critical turn” in early 1770’s and his presentation of the critical system in the 1780’s; iii) the specific major doctrines and arguments presented in the Critique, such as transcendental idealism, theory of knowledge, transcendental illusion, and how they serve his idea of a critical philosophy; iv) the reactions to Kant’s critical project in German Idealism as well as in 20th century German and French traditions. 

PHIL 502, Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Digital Blackness 

Eduardo Mendieta  

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race, Continental Philosophy  

While this is not a seminar on Foucault, it is focused on one his most important contributions to philosophy in general and to political philosophy in particular, namely his concept of “biopolitics.” We will also go beyond Foucault’s all too evident Eurocentrism and Francophilia. Our aim will be to track the evolution of this philosophical tool “biopolitics,” from some of his earliest writings, through his courses at the Collège de France, in particular his two/three lecture courses that he referred to as The History of Governmentality (from 1976-1979). Furthermore, our hermeneutical prism will be on the relationship between biopolitics and racism. We will see how racism, sexuality, disability are produced, and how through their production certain forms of power are deployed and made productive. We will also deal with the relationship between biopolitics and governmentality, and Foucault’s critique of bourgeois and Marxist political philosophy. Here, we will consider Roberto Esposito’s trilogy on biopolitics, Communitas, Immunitas and his recent Immunità Comune. Then, we will shift to Santiago Castro-Gómez’s critique and appropriation of Foucault in his “decolonial genealogies.” In tandem, we will also cover the work of other writers who have contributed to the semantic and hermeneutic wealth of the concept, one who is in implicit dialogue with Foucault, namely Giorgio Agamben, and another who is not, but whose works deals explicitly with some of the same themes, namely Donna Haraway. Then we will pivot towards Achille Mbembe’s generative re-reading of Foucault with his philosophical tool of “necropolitics.” From there, we will move on to discuss, explore, and think through the shift from analog conceptions of race (Foucault), to digital re-articulations of race (Davis, Harris, Mills, et. al.). We will see how under digital capitalism and neoliberal biopolitics, race is re-articulated as a “digital biopolitics,” (a productive oxymoron), and what I will call “digital blackness.” In this last section of the seminar we will discuss the work of Leonard Harris (necro-being), Angela Davis (prison industrial complex), Cornel West (genealogy of racism), and some very recent work on “race” in the age of social media, algorithmic governmentality, and of course, digital redlining (Ruha Benjamin, Yarden Katz, Dorothy Roberts, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Virginia Uebanks). We will conclude with some very recent work on “immigration/border” politics as a part and parcel of digital/racial/algorithmic governmentality 2.5. We will try to make sense of climate and global precarity migration in terms of new forms of global biopolitical governmentality or what Melissa Wright calls “necropolitical governance” (Maria Mendoza, Laura Pulido, and Melissa Wright in particular). The seminar requirements are: class presentations and participation, one book review, participation in a review essay with two other colleagues, and a term paper that could be a conference submission (circa 3k words). We will aim to put together SPEP panel submissions and/or write a review essay on the most recent literature on “digital blackness.” 

PHIL 508, The Ethics of Migration  

Desiree Lim  

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Critical Philosophy of Race 

How should states treat immigrants and would-be immigrants? On what grounds can immigration be justly restricted, and through what means? This course engages with these complex questions by offering a broad overview of key issues in the ethics of migration and their relation to public policy. Guided by the tools of contemporary political philosophy, you will reflect closely upon a series of pressing issues including the basis of the state’s right to exclude non-citizens, the prospect of open borders and their tensions with egalitarian justice, immigration discrimination, the idea of a human right to free movement, and the rights of refugees and undocumented migrants.  

PHIL 562, Major Figures in Modern Philosophy  

John Christman  

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Modern Philosophy 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an enigmatic, complex but enormously influential figure in the history of philosophy and western culture.  His impact on Kant, the development of the Enlightenment, the emergence of romanticism, and political events such as the French Revolution are well noted.  Yet, Rousseau hovers uneasily between representing the continuation of the Enlightenment ideal in a proto-Kantian mode and presenting an anti-Enlightenment model for the de-centering of reason due to the precarious contingency of our education, socialization, emotional structure, and anthropological history. In addition, while his views of human freedom have served as inspiration in liberation struggles, other aspects of his views suggest his complicity in the racism, colonialism, and patriarchal politics of his age. 

This course will conduct a systematic study of Rousseau’s thought, with special emphasis on his moral, social, and political philosophy.  We will orient our discussion of Rousseau’s philosophy by considering the relation between Enlightenment thought generally and conception of race and the practices of racism, colonialism, and slavery.  Particular aspects of Rousseau’s views will be of special concern in this context, such as his idea of the “noble savage”, his genealogical approach to human nature, the social conception of the self (amour proper), and his thoughts on freedom and slavery.  

Fall 2022

PHIL 425W, Epistemology 

Brady Bowman 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology 

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge and justification, is a broad area of philosophical research, addressing a variety of interrelated topics: the nature and structure of justification, the sources and kinds of knowledge, objectivity and the challenge of skepticism, and the value of truth, knowledge, and understanding. One purported kind of knowledge of special relevance is moral knowledge, that is, knowledge of what is right and wrong, good and bad. In the Western philosophical tradition, the beginning of inquiry into the possibility and nature of such knowledge marks the turning-point from “pre-Socratic” thought to the questions and preoccupations most forcefully represented in Plato and the long tradition he inaugurates.  

While this course will have an historical component, the focus will be primarily systematic and oriented toward contemporary work in moral epistemology. In the early weeks we will acquaint ourselves with some classical representatives of moral realism in epistemology, among them Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Ross, focusing on the intersection between epistemological commitments and their associated commitments in the metaphysics of normativity and value. We then turn to the main varieties of moral skepticism and the arguments in their favor, for instance the view that there are no such thing as moral facts; no such thing as successful moral justifications in the light of persistent and pervasive moral disagreement; no such thing, indeed, as moral beliefs, these really amounting to no more than feelings of approval or disapproval, subjective preferences, and the like. The latter part of the semester will be devoted to the metaphysics and epistemology of moral realism. If there is moral knowledge, it must be knowledge of moral facts; what could be their nature? How do we know such facts — by reasoning or by intuition? How do they figure in moral justifications? And at what level — do we have moral knowledge of universals? Of particulars? Or of both? What are the limits of moral knowledge? And what is such knowledge good for — what, for example, is its relation to or impact on ethical character?   

We will focus on texts that are representative of a cross-section of positions in contemporary epistemology, with special attention to R. Audi’s synthesis of moral intuitionism and pluralism with the Kantian emphasis on formal constraints and a unified principle of moral knowledge (the categorical imperative).  

PHIL 461, Plato’s Republic in Context  

Christopher Moore 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient Philosophy, Ethics 

Plato’s Republic (Politeia) is the most famous work of ancient Greek philosophy. It is also the oddest. Across three hundred pages, it depicts a digressive conversation between the author’s elder brothers and Socrates, whom they ask to defend the personal and civic value of morality. Scattered with provocative though usually underdeveloped arguments about human nature, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy itself are long discussions about nursery-school education, the equality of men and women, the cognitive value of mathematics, and political sociology. Explanations are constrained by the brothers’ idiosyncrasies and the protagonist’s modesty. The central purport of the work, which lacks a thesis statement, is uncertain. Similarly unclear is whether it advocates for oppressive autocracy or an ideal deliberative democracy. For all its weirdness and opacity, then, it is fascinating, philosophically rich, and fun to talk about.  

This class will read the ten books/chapters of the Republic with a specific focus: what does one need to know to understand the dialogue? What is it in conversation with? What does Socrates mean to be doing? Accordingly, we will study works from adjacent genres: constitutional theorizing and dramas of political regime change; educational schemes; statements on justice; collections of poetic wisdom; and conversations featuring Socrates. Among the principal auxiliary authors studied will be Aristophanes, Hesiod, Xenophon, and the Sophists.   

The goal of our class is to reflect on the way the Republic develops a core element of ancient Greek philosophy – conversation aimed somehow at making one’s life go better – in relation to issues of utopia, democracy, virtue, leadership, law, community, power, and vulnerability; and to discern what could contribute to our better understanding now how it does so.  

PHIL 468, Jewish Philosophy  

Nicolas De Warren 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental Philosophy, Metaphysics-Epistemology, Ethics 

The aim of this course is to critically read, understand, and discuss three major themes that animated Jewish philosophy in the 20th-century: redemption and revelation; messianism and history; Judaism, God, and evil after the Shoah. Through the prism of these themes, the course broadly addresses the question “what is Jewish philosophy?” in its relation to philosophical thinking in the 20th-century. Other themes that we shall address in this course: Zionism, Marxism and anarchism, and Jewish mysticism. At the beginning of term in the first week, a broad over-view of the development of Jewish thought (Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Isaac Luria, etc.) will be presented, including Hasidism and the Haskalah movement in the 18th and 19th centuries.  

COURSE READING LIST  

Tikkun  

Martin Buber, I and Thou  

Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking” (in Philosophical and Theological Writings)  

Messianism  

Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”  

“On the Concept of History”  

“Theological-Political Fragment”  

Ernst Bloch, “Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse” (from The Spirit of Utopia)  

Gershom Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism”  

The Shoah    

Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil”  

André Neher, “The Silence of Auschwitz” and “The Variations of ‘Yes’ to Silence”  

Hans Jonas, “God after Auschwitz”  

PHIL 539, Audre Lorde 

Kathryn Belle 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race 

This course will focus on major philosophical figure Audre Lorde, examining her essays, speeches, poetry, and autobiographical writings.  There are many theoretical themes and threads to be examined across Lorde’s corpus. We will consider what it means to take her up on her own terms (including not only her philosophy and theoretical concepts, but also her self-identification first and foremost as a poet), while also considering how she has been frequently used and simultaneously misappropriated and taken out of context.     

This course is part of a larger project that I am thinking through about Black Women Writing Wellness and Wholeness.  I am exploring the myriad ways Black women writers like Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Lorraine Hansberry, June Jordon and others, have taken up writing, wellness, and wholeness.  Toward that end, I am curious about the purpose of writing and for whom one writes, different conceptions of wellness, as well as methods and strategies for living whole, complete, complex (and simple) lives in relationship to oneself and in community with others.  Concepts and themes include marriage and divorce, sex and sexuality, mothers/other mothers and children, community and connection, sisterhood and spirituality, and so much more!  I have been working on an article related to this project, “Audre Lorde’s Concept of Care” inspired by Lorde’s assertion, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence.  It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” I put this claim into a broader Black feminist context as well as into the very specific context in which it was written, while noting various appropriations of this claim and critiquing capitalist (mis)appropriations of this claim.  I am most interested in how Lorde thinks CARE in relationship to language, action, survival, expression, difference, diversity, community, interdependence without patriarchy, the erotic, power, purpose, creativity, poetry, and, of course, caring for self as survival and political warfare.   

Texts:   

• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde   

• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, A Biomythography by Audre Lorde   
• The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, Ed. Roxanne Gay   
• (Recommended) Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux   

PHIL 556, Nineteenth Century Philosophy: Hegel’s Dialectics  

Robert Bernasconi 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Nineteenth Century Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race 

This course is intended to serve as an introduction to Hegel’s conception of dialectical reasoning. In particular, it will explore the role of dialectics in his attempt to render history intelligible. The bulk of the reading will be drawn from two of his most influential texts: first, his Phenomenology of Spirit, especially the last three chapters – Spirit, Religion, and Absolute Knowing; secondly, his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. They will be supplemented by short extracts from his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Today, both in the United States and in Germany, Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history are under renewed scrutiny for their role in the history of racism. But this is a particularly momentous time to be studying Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history for other reasons too. Most especially, previous generations of scholars had to make do with composite editions in which passages from different years were placed alongside each other without any indication of their provenance. We now, since 2020, have separate critical editions of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history as he delivered them in 1822-23, 1824-25, 1826-27, and 1830-31. The publication of these texts has made possible for the first time a systematic study of the successive frameworks Hegel utilized as he sought to demonstrate what he took to be the dialectical movement of world history. By identifying variations across the lectures, we can investigate why in presenting the dialectical movement of history he would sometimes deploy different terms on different occasions to describe the same people and the historical events that shaped them. Doing so gives fresh new insight into Hegel’s practice of dialectics.    

Texts:  

Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by T. Pinkard. (Cambridge University Press, 2019.) ISBN-13: 978-1108730082     

Lectures on the Philosophy of World History 1822-23. edited and translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson. (Oxford University Press, 2011.) ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-0198776642   

Philosophy of History, translated by Ruben Alvarado. (Worldbridge Publishing Company, 2011.)  ISBN-13: ‎ 978-9076660141   

PHIL 564, Major Figures in Twentieth Century Philosophy: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus  

Leonard Lawlor 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental Philosophy, Metaphysics-Epistemology 

This course aims to examine in a relatively thorough way the central book of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical collaboration.  In other words, we will read A Thousand Plateaus chapter by chapter (or plateau by plateau) over the fifteen sessions.  The examination will focus on the many concepts that Deleuze and Guattari invent in this book (and in their entire collaborative corpus: Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, and What is Philosophy): immanence (multiplicity and duality); rhizome; the outside; assemblage (agencement); machine; lines in general and specifically lines of flight; diagram; earth (or body without organs); becoming in general and specifically becoming everyone (devenir tout le monde); continuous variation; cosmos; power, potentiality, and impotence (pouvoir, puissance, and impuissance); conceptual persona; thought; minority (a people); undecidability; and the war machine.  

WMNST 507, Feminist Theory  

Nancy Tuana  

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics, Feminist Philosophy 

What is considered theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts as theory for women of color.  Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world. Thus, we need teorías . . . that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries–new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods.   

Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul  

This course provides a graduate level introduction to some of the key theoretical trends and debates in feminist theory today, including: theoretical approaches to liberatory thought including standpoint theory, intersectionality, performativity, and decolonial theory.  One key theme weaving through the class is how to theorize the “afterlives” of oppression—including practices of slavery and colonialism.  Throughout the class we will be particularly attentive to the question of coalitional work across different theoretical frames such as Black feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, Latina/x feminisms, Asian American feminisms, trans theory, as well as attention to issues of class, dis/abilities, and environmental justice.   

Thinkers will likely include: Vivian Adair, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Talia Mae Bettcher, Eli Clare, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberly Crenshaw, Qwo-Li Driskill, Lynn Fujiwara, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Kahaleole Hall, Tamsin Kimoto, Tiffany Lethabo King, Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Jennifer Nash, Laura E Pérez, Christina Sharpe, Hortense Spillers, Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang.

Maymester 2022

PHIL 558, Contemporary Philosophy: Blackness, Buddhism, and Feminism 

Kathryn Belle 

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Pre-20th Century World Philosophies, Feminist Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race 

We examine how connections between Buddhist Studies, Black Feminism, and Critical Philosophy of Race offer insights for each that are underexplored. This timely study of Buddhism in relationship to caste, race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality in historical and contemporary contexts, demonstrates how Buddhism enables greater understanding of experiences and impacts of intersecting oppressive structures, as well as constructive responses to these structures.    

We begin with Buddhism and the Race Question (1958) by G. P. Malasekera and K.N. Jayatilleke, in which the co-authors which analyzes the overlapping frameworks of racial and caste discrimination and examine early Buddhist efforts to transcend them.  I show the significance of the text for Buddhist Studies and Critical Philosophy of Race, situating it among other UNESCO publications and statements on race and racism in general and with attention to their analyses of racial discrimination and caste discrimination in particular.   

Next, we explore the “Two Buddhisms”/“Three Buddhisms” paradigms in Buddhist Studies and various taxonomies of Buddhism in America (Numrich 2003, Hickey 2010, Cheah and 2011). Taking up critiques of these paradigms, we will consider how recovering past and present interconnections between Buddhism, caste discrimination, and race discrimination provides a more diverse and inclusive analysis.        

Finally, most of the course will focus on contemporary scholars and practitioners, examining the myriad ways Black women have engaged Buddhism – not only for personal inquiry and expressions of their own lived experiences, but also philosophically and practically to cultivate understanding of others and engender positive change in their lives, communities, and the world.   

We will also read:  

1. Jan Willis (Dreaming Me 2001)   

1. Faith Adiele (Meeting Faith 2004)   

1. angel Kyodo Williams Being Black: Zen And The Art Of Living With Fearlessness And Grace (2000)   

1. angel Kyodo Williams Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, And Liberation (2016)   

1. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel The Way Of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, And Gender (2015)   

1. Black and Buddhist: What Buddhist Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom, Eds. Cheryl A Giles and Pamela Ayo Yetunde (2020).   
     

Assignments   

Readings   

Presentations   

Annotated Bibliography   

Short Paper 

Spring 2022 

PHIL 408: The Social and Political Philosophy of Race

Desiree Lim

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; Critical Philosophy of Race

This course examines a survey of distinctive social and political questions that emerge from the philosophical concept of race. What, exactly, is race? What consequences might racial identity and positionality have for our lived experiences? How ought we understand the phenomena of racism and discrimination, as they persist today? Finally, how should societies respond to ongoing legacies of racial oppression? For example, could we be required to support the use of affirmative action, recognize the right to reparations for past injustice, or even dismantle the prison system? Primarily utilizing the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, combined with readings from other perspectives and disciplines (e.g. law, economics, and postcolonial thought), students will engage in rigorous analysis of these puzzles.

PHIL 453: Perception and World

Mark Sentesy

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient Philosophy; Metaphysics; Epistemology

In this course we examine how concepts of perception are intertwined with concepts of reality or world in Ancient Greek philosophy. Key Early Greek views include Xenophanes’ rigorously perspectival concept of knowledge, Heraclitus’ dynamic systems-based critique of the senses, and Protagoras’ objective relativism. We will read the critique of these positions in Plato’s Theaetetus, and Aristotle’s kinetic account of perception in On the Soul and On the Senses.

The course has a discussion-centered format, and written work includes weekly journal entries, and a final portfolio in which students revise, comment, analyze, and flesh out these entries in light of their philosophical stakes.

PHIL 455: Topics in Modern Philosophy: Spinoza’s Ethics

Brady Bowman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern Philosophy; Metaphysics

Baruch de Spinoza’s monism, naturalism, denial of freewill, and his systematic theory of the emotions, together with his critique of religious orthodoxy and his recommendation of the democratic form of government make him the most radical philosopher of the modern period. This course is devoted to a reading of Spinoza’s main work of systematic philosophy, the Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometric Order (published in 1677 posthumously, anonymously, and without naming the printer, so as to avoid political persecution of those involved). It will focus particularly on the metaphysics and philosophy of mind elaborated in parts one and two of the book, the theory of the emotions presented in part three, and part five’s account of the emancipatory power of insight.

Neither Spinoza’s metaphysics nor his methodology can be properly appreciated without reference to Descartes, whose mathematically oriented privileging of clear and distinct ideas Spinoza followed, but whose dualism and voluntarism he rejected as incompatible with metaphysics and a truly demonstrative system of philosophy. We will therefore spend the first couple of weeks of the course familiarizing ourselves with Descartes’s basic ideas and Spinoza’s critical re-working of them in his Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (1663). With this background, we will then turn to the Ethics. Over the course of the semester we will consult relevant passages from Spinoza’s other works and consider some aspects of Spinoza’s later reception and influence (e.g. on Leibniz, the German Idealists, and possibly also Deleuze).

PHIL 478: Ethics after the Holocaust

Possible course requirements fulfilled:

Nicolas De Warren

The aim of this course is to explore various ways in which philosophers have responded to Auschwitz (a signifier, or name, which is in turn not without controversy and complexity). Course readings address the relation between testimony and trauma, rethinking evil and gratuitous suffering in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the reaffirmation of Judaism as a living philosophical and religious worldview, narrativity and historical forgetting, aesthetic representation and the unspeakable, and the question of God. Readings include Primo Levi, Giorgi Agamben, George Didi-Huberman, TW Adorno, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt.

PHIL 555: Contemporary Philosophy: “Buddhism, Feminism, and Blackness”

Kathryn Belle

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, World Philosophy

*Note: this course is not being offered in spring 22, but in Maymester 22

We examine how connections between Buddhist Studies, Black Feminism, and Critical Philosophy of Race offer insights for each that are underexplored. This timely study of Buddhism in relationship to caste, race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality in historical and contemporary contexts, demonstrates how Buddhism enables greater understanding of experiences and impacts of intersecting oppressive structures, as well as constructive responses to these structures. We will read the now iconic Black Buddhist memoires by Jan Willis (Dreaming Me 2001) and Faith Adiele (Meeting Faith 2004) along with angel Kyodo Williams’s Being Black: Zen And The Art Of Living With Fearlessness And Grace (2000) and Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, And Liberation (2016), as well as Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s The Way Of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, And Gender (2015), and finally Black and Buddhist: What Buddhist Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom, Eds. Cheryl A Giles and Pamela Ayo Yetunde (2020).

PHIL 580: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception

Ted Toadvine

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology; Continental Philosophy 

The core of our course will be a complete reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the work for which he was best known during his lifetime and that established him as the leading phenomenologist of his generation. Here Merleau-Ponty develops his distinctive interpretation of phenomenology’s method in conversation with Gestalt theory and research in psychology and neurology. Framing his inquiry with a parallel critique of empiricism and intellectualism for their unquestioned commitment to a ready-made, objective world, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the essentially embodied, expressive, and historical aspects of perceptual experience across a wide range of existential dimensions, including sexuality, language, space, nature, intersubjectivity, time, and freedom. We will situate Phenomenology of Perception in the wider context of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre, explore his relationship with major interlocutors, and also consider his influence on the burgeoning field of critical phenomenology.

PHIL 597: Lugones on Active Subjectivity and Decoloniality

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy, Metaphysics and Epistemology

This seminar will study the work of Latina decolonial philosopher María Lugones with an emphasis on metaphysical, epistemological, and political questions regarding her theorization of subjectivity in the early work as well as in the more explicitly decolonial later writings. In the first part of the seminar, we will study her early thinking about impurity which becomes

key in the development of a notion of “active subjectivity” that is tied to a spatial politics that already carries a decolonial aim. We will see how this account of spatiality can be traced back to her early thinking on motion and stasis. In the second part of the seminar, we will study her explicit elaboration of a decolonial feminist philosophy that introduces the notion of the “coloniality of gender” and calls for a transformation of feminist practices. Whenever possible we will also study the sources that inspired and informed her philosophy (Anzaldúa, Alarcón, Sandoval, de Certeau, Oyewumi, Quijano).

Fall 2021

PHIL 408W: Social and Political Philosophy

Robert Bernasconi

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Nineteenth Century; Ethics

The nineteenth century presented numerous challenges to the inherited ways of thinking about political philosophy as represented, for example, by social contract theory. One major focus of the course will be on the difficulties political philosophers in the United States faced at that time as they sought to address such issues as Indian Removal, slavery, women’s rights, citizenship, and the formulation of rules for the conduct of war. We shall see how in the context of debates around these issues the political philosophies of, for example, Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Paley, all of which had been prominent in the United States around 1800, were repeatedly challenged both from inside and outside the academy as scholars and activists looked to see if Aristotle, Comte, Kant, Hegel, and Mill offered better resources. Within the institutions of higher learning it was not only a question of which of these philosophers was presented to the students as canonical figures; it was also a war of survival in which some of the long-established Universities in the North East compromised their principles as they tried to fight off tough competition for students from the new colleges in the South. Our examination of the teaching of political philosophy will be offset by voices from outside the academy, including Jeremiah Evarts, Frederick Douglass, and Frances Wright. More generally, the course investigates the way political philosophies are generated and come to prominence in response to particular local needs but are subsequently modified or even abandoned when they are transported into new contexts where the demands are significantly different. It is, in other words, a course about the interface between philosophy and policy, as well as being about the power of institutions to silence perspectives that threaten their own existence and that of the status quo.

PHIL 410: Philosophy of Science

Emily Grosholz

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology

The aim of this course is first to understand the important changes that occur in philosophy of science, later in the 20th- century, when it begins to focus on the science of biology. This shift occurs after the impact of Thomas Kuhn’s’ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and so the history of biology, especially from Darwin on, is central to these philosophers’ reflections. The shift is also accompanied by a growing sense that the state of the environment is becoming problematic: deforestation, the disappearance of species, climate change, invasive species, the pollution of water – rivers, seas and oceans. The philosophy of biology cannot avoid ethics and politics. We will begin with a philosophical discussion that is epistemological, and then

observe how it gradually acquires a political, practical and ethical dimension. How can philosophy of science help us assess what is happening to the world we live in, and what actions should or can be taken? We will read books of philosophy (see list below), but students will also be expected to read some scientific articles (which the professor will provide, from research she has been following) in order to think about ‘case studies’ pertinent to class discussion and the final paper. We may also go on one or two field trips in the nearby forests.

Alex Rosenberg and Daniel McShea, Philosophy of Biology (Routledge, 2008)

Jonathan Howard, Darwin: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2001)

Richard Lewontin’s The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment

John Leary, One Shot: Trees as Our Last Shot at Survival (Trees for the Future, 2017).

Philip Kitcher, Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011)

Wangari Maathai, Unbowed (Anchor Books, 2007)

Philip Kitcher and Evelyn Fox Keller, The Seasons Alter (Liveright / Norton, 2017)

PHIL 438 (001): Feminist Philosophy: “Women’s autobiographies and Philosophy”

Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse (legally Manzini)

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race and World Philosophy

In this seminar, we will consider how Feminist Philosophies and Critical Philosophy of Race give us the tools to explore the relation between autobiographical and philosophical writing. The examination of the autobiography in relation to race, gender, class, colonialism, and Apartheid in historical and contemporary contexts demonstrates how particular autobiographies written by women enables a greater understanding of experiences and impacts of multiple and intersecting oppressive structures and constructive responses to these structures. 

Some of the questions that foreground our critical reading of the chosen texts include: When does the autobiography become philosophical? What does the autobiography offer to Philosophy that impersonal and argumentative forms of philosophical discussion cannot offer? We will read autobiographies written by various women across race, class and nationality (France, the United States, and South Africa), concurrently paging between Simone de Beauvoir (The Prime of Life, 1962); Angela Davis (Angela Davis: an autobiography, 1988) and Mamphela Ramphele (A Passion for Freedom: My Life, 1995).

PHIL 479: Ethics After Auschwitz

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Twentieth Century; Ethics

The aim of this course is to explore various ways in which philosophers have responded to Auschwitz (a signifier, or name, which is in turn not without controversy and complexity).

Course Readings

P. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

G. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz

G. Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All

T. W. Adorno, “Athens and Auschwitz” (from Metaphysics: Concept and Problems)

H. Jonas, “The Concept of God After Auschwitz”

E. Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil”

H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem; “Some Questions of Moral Philosophy” (in: Responsibility and Judgment) 

PHIL 503: The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerability

Sarah Clark Miller

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy; Ethics

At perhaps no other time in recent history has humanity’s collective vulnerability been laid so bare as during the pandemic. In one sense our vulnerability is universal and shared. Yet, structural injustice has created unbearable precarity for some, while others have weathered the pandemic in relative safety and comfort.

The current crisis calls for broader philosophical investigation of the ethics and politics of vulnerability. This course will offer such an exploration of moral and political questions regarding the origins and implications of vulnerability and related concepts, including dependency, interdependency, precariousness, precarity, finitude, and need. These concepts have been of recent interest to analytic and continental feminist thinkers alike. As such, we will remain attuned throughout the semester to the points of connection, overlap, and divergence such approaches evidence.

Students in the course will consider the moral significance of vulnerability and related concepts as universal features of what it is to be human, with special attention paid to embodiment. We will also investigate the political significance of these experiences as they play out situationally in power-laden social and institutional contexts of late capitalism. Further, we will seek to address questions of how to respond to vulnerability by exploring modes and models of moral and political responsibility, including care, mutual aid, and solidarity.

Texts for the course will draw on both analytic (e.g., Engster, Goodin, Kittay, Mackenzie, MacIntyre) and continental (e.g., Butler and Fraser) philosophers, with an emphasis on feminist philosophy, and will feature recent contributions from trans and disability justice scholars.

PHIL 553: Ancient Ethics

Christopher Moore

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient Philosophy; Ethics

This course surveys fifth- and fourth-century Greek reflections on ethics in all its variety, from maxims and exhortations, to dialogues and dramatizations, to theories and total world views – from the Sophistic period through Aristotle. Given the fragmentary or indirect nature of much of the pre-Aristotelian evidence, we will have to reconstruct many of the arguments and views to be considered, which will take understanding their socio-intellectual context, the dialectical situation, the assumptions borne and the forms of reasoning deployed by their authors, and the ethically relevant inferences one might make.

Thus this course has two primary goals. First, students should learn the broad range of ethical stances, reasons, and views debated in the classical Greek period. This will contribute to their

understanding of ethics and the history of philosophy, and will also prepare them to teach ancient philosophy and the history of ethics at the undergraduate level. Second, students should practice recreating a large-scale philosophical debate whose materials are exiguous and whose situation is relatively foreign to our own.

Key concepts discussed in this course include the virtues; pleasure; flourishing/happiness; the importance of knowledge; the structure of the soul; the nature of law; and the teachability of ethics. Special attention will be given to question of women’s excellences and the place of the domestic sphere in ethical thinking.

We will study the texts attributable to the “Sophists”; the views associated with Socrates; the so-called “economic” or “house-holding” texts; Pythagoreanism; the Platonic project; and the three versions of Aristotle’s “Ethics” course. The assignments are weekly response posts and a major final paper.

PHIL 555: Theories of Freedom in Modern Philosophy

Uygar Abaci

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern Philosophy; Metaphysics-Epistemology; Ethics

This course offers a survey of some of the influential conceptions of freedom in Early Modern Philosophy, with a focus on major figures of the 17th and 18th centuries such as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. The overarching theme will be the tension between two rival views of freedom. One view, various versions of which can be found in Hume and Kant, construes freedom as a matter of the agent’s (or their will’s) being the proper causal source of the action. This view of freedom turns around the notion of “spontaneity”, i.e., not being causally compelled or constrained by external factors (though externality is interpreted very differently by different “source” theorists), and does not by itself require that the agent have a choice between alternative possibilities. According to the other view, most prominently defended by Leibniz but also found in Descartes, “source” is not a sufficient condition of genuine freedom; but freedom additionally requires that the agent have “leeway” between alternatives or have the possibility of willing or doing otherwise. The key here is how to interpret this additional modal condition of freedom. Would a mere logical possibility satisfy this condition, as, for instance, Leibniz seems to think or would a thicker, metaphysical kind of possibility be required to constitute a genuine leeway or contingency for the agent’s volition and action? While the central emphasis of the course will be on these alternative ways freedom is construed and formulated by Early Modern thinkers, we will try to answer a host of questions regarding the roles these distinct ideas of freedom played in relation to their other philosophical commitments in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and empirical psychology. One prominent question concerns how to situate freedom in a modern conception of nature that is governed by causally deterministic laws. Are freedom and determinism compatible, as Leibniz and Hume defend in various ways, or incompatible, as Kant maintains, and if the latter is the case, should free will be denied or relocated outside of the causal-temporal order

of nature? What is the nature of the connection between freedom and knowledge or understanding? Does the latter increase the former, as, for instance, Spinoza suggests? How is human will structured? Are normative constrains on the will necessary for the exercise of freedom, as Leibniz and Kant think? If so, how are, if any, free evil acts possible? We will discuss these questions in light of excerpts from the canonical texts of the aforementioned mentioned figures as well as contemporary commentaries on them.

PHIL 580: Phenomenology of Stupidity

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Twentieth Century; Epistemology

The aim of this seminar is to critically explore what is arguably the most widespread phenomenon of human existence, but which just as arguably has received the least amount, indeed: almost none, of philosophical scrutiny: stupidity. Is a phenomenology of stupidity (in contrast to ignorance, error, or lack of knowledge) possible? Is it still possible to be stupid in a world that has become entirely false? And if the gods themselves struggle in vain against human stupidity, as remarked by Schiller, what hope might there be for philosophers?

Given that a phenomenology of stupidity has never been undertaken, this course will attempt to develop such an enterprise across readings from Sartre, Nietzsche, Barthes, Debord, Adorno, Arendt, Musil, Kundera, and Deleuze.

WMNST 507: Feminist Theory

Nancy Tuana

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist philosophy; Ethics

What is considered theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts as theory for women of color. Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world. Thus, we need teorías . . . that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries–new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul

Feminist theory both aims to reveal the complex nature of systemic oppression and to new theoretical approaches, new concepts, and new attunements that will be more inclusive of and more accurately reflect the complex relations between gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, ability, and class, as well as transform unjust institutions, practices, and beliefs. The wide-ranging approaches that constitute the domain of feminist theory have placed justice and ethical considerations at the heart of research arguing for research that is a) epistemically responsible, b) attentive to the complexity of diversity or intersectionality, and c) has as its goal social transformation and empowerment.

This course provides a graduate level introduction to some of the key theoretical trends and debates in feminist theory today, including (1) feminist methodological tools such as: standpoint theory; intersectionality; epistemologies of ignorance; and performativity. Such approaches will be put to work by examining (2) how to theorize with attention to differences (including gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, and other others), (3) by studying feminist theory in its many differences—Black feminist thought, Latinx feminist thought, Indigenous feminist thought, Asian American feminist thought, and (4) considering the intersections between feminist theories and other liberatory theories such as decolonial theories, disability theories, and queer theories.

Spring 2021

PHIL 418W, Ethics

Sarah Clark Miller

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics

What makes an action right or wrong? How do we judge if someone is a morally good or bad person? What ought we do? In this course on ethics, we will seek answers to these and related questions. We will consider what the goal of an ethical theory is, what role principles play in ethical theories, and what makes for a good ethical theory. We will also explore and examine numerous historical ethical approaches, including virtue ethics, divine command theory, deontology, and consequentialism, as well as contemporary criticisms of and responses to these theories found in feminist ethics and anti-theory stances. Towards the end of the course, we will consider several metaethical theories, including moral particularism and moral pluralism. We will occasionally examine case studies in an effort to ground newly acquired ethical acumen in practical issues.

This course will welcome graduate students who wish to specialize in ethics as well as those who wish to gain teaching competency in ethics. Several faculty members of the Philosophy Department will visit the course as guest lecturers for special sessions with the graduate students enrolled in the course.

Specific foci of the course will include: Nuts and Bolts: What is the structure of an ethical theory? Theory Evaluation: How can we tell if one ethical theory is better than another? What criteria should we use to make this judgment? Religion and Ethics: Does ethics depend on religion? How does an ethical viewpoint differ from a religious viewpoint? Do human autonomy and divine authority stand at odds with one another? The Nature of Human Nature and Ethics: Are humans inherently altruistic or egoistic? Are they inherently good or evil? What is the relation of ethics to facts about human nature? Measuring Happiness, Measuring the Good: Can happiness and the good be quantified?  Principles, Particularism, and Relativism: Is morality relative to the morality of one’s own community? Can ethical judgments be made across communities? Across nations? Across the globe? Reason and Emotion: Should reason rule the roost in ethical decision-making? What role should the emotions play?

PHIL 508, The Ethics of Migration

Desiree Lim

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; Critical philosophy of race

How should states treat immigrants and would-be immigrants? On what grounds can immigration be justly restricted, and through what means? This course engages with these complex questions by offering a broad overview of key issues in the ethics of migration and their relation to public policy. Guided by the tools of contemporary political philosophy, you will reflect closely upon a series of pressing issues including the basis of the state’s right to exclude non-citizens, the prospect of open borders and their tensions with principles of egalitarian justice, the idea of a human right to free movement, and the rights of refugees and undocumented migrants.

PHIL 553: Aristotle On the Soul

Mark Sentesy

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient; Metaphysics-Epistemology

Aristotle’s book On the Soul has received a significant amount of attention over the last few decades, and it has influenced important positions in phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Aristotle’s psychology is not, however, primarily an investigation of mind or consciousness, but of soul, a source of motion and organized experience.

On the Soul is a hotly contested book: belonging to the Physics and the Biological works, but engaging deeply in First Philosophy and even Theology, it inquires into the full range of life, from plants, to animals’ experience of touch and perception, to imagination and up to the highest possibilities for thought.

In this course we will survey the history of the concept of soul in Greek thought before Aristotle, and then conduct a close reading of Aristotle’s text, drawing on related passages from Aristotle, notably the Ethics, and a selection from the secondary literature.

PHIL 556, Figures in 19th Century Philosophy: The Philosophy of Schelling

Brady Bowman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 19th Century; Metaphysics-Epistemology

F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854) began his philosophical career at nineteen years of age, with a series of book-length publications on subjectivity, knowledge, and freedom. Their self-consciously post-Kantian tenor established him at the forefront of German philosophy, where he soon numbered among the intellectually ambitious and socially disruptive members of the Early Romantic circle. An elegant and prolific writer, Schelling won fame during this early period through his embrace of Spinozism and his elaboration of a philosophy of nature (or unconscious mind) as the neglected counterpart to transcendental idealism (the philosophy of conscious mind). His collaboration with Hegel in the years 1801–1804, which effectively launched the latter’s career, was decisive in shaping the system of thought that would come to be known as German Idealism.

This course centers on a turning-point in Schelling’s philosophical development, the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom [1809], which mark a substantial shift in his thinking on the relation between nature and freedom, the origin of moral good and evil, the scope and limits of rational insight, and the possibility of a philosophical system. To establish the context, we will devote the early weeks of the semester to selection from Schelling’s earlier writings (e. g. the Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism [1795], Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature [1799] and the System of Transcendental Idealism [1800]), as well as from the authors to whom he is responding (e. g. Spinoza, Kant, Jacobi). We will then turn to a close and extended reading of the short but challenging Freedom Essay itself, accompanied by Heidegger’s illuminating and highly accessible commentary on the work.

PHIL 558, On Indigeneity 

Eduardo Mendieta, co-facilitated with Wayne Wapeemukwa

Possible course requirements fulfilled: World philosophies

The Pennsylvania State University is a land-grant settler-colonial institution that occupies the ancestral and contemporary hallowed lands of the Erie, Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca), Lenape, Shawnee, and Susquehannock Peoples, names that echo across the ages but whose original intonation has been subsumed into colloquial English without memory of their origin. While this seminar recognizes this sovereignty, Pennsylvania remains one of only a few states with neither reservations nor any federally, or state recognized Indigenous nations. In the spirit of Sandy Grande’s celebrated ‘Red Pedagogy,’ this seminar situates philosophy within this ongoing legacy of settler-colonialism. We will ground philosophy in the land around us with an eye to the myriad ways in which Indigenous Peoples have been encountered, ‘discovered,’ and invaded, along with having been ‘invented,’ erased, and romanticized. We will philosophize how the Indigenous Peoples of (so-called) ‘Pennsylvania’ persevere as stewards of this land, notwithstanding existential and cultural genocide. In lieu of organizing our readings by topics or periods––as is usual in (white) philosophy, and for very specific reasons [who controls chronology, controls history]––we will instead follow the example set by the Standing Rock Syllabus by looking to the land as its learners; reading a diversity of materials across genres, such as the various treaties (and lacks thereof), canons of ‘Indian law,’ and Indigenous-authored materials, which have all coalesced into our surrounding settler-colonial legacy. This is a rich and unsuspecting ‘archive’ that may make us better philosophers and critics of our settler-colonial inheritances. We will confront the ‘Carlisle Industrial Indian School.’ Attention will be dedicated to the imbrication of settler-colonialism with slavery: What points of contention and/or allegiance, for example, reside at the intersection of black liberation and native sovereignty? How have Indigenous Peoples been complicit with––yet also anathema to––slavery? How has native sovereignty enabled and disabled disenfranchisement under the U.S. constitution? Thus, one of the questions we will study is the relationship between native sovereignty and “birthright citizenship,” Each week we will constellate these ‘grounded’ materials with thematically related readings including, but not limited to: Leon-Portilla, Luis Villoro, Vine Deloria Jr., Robert Warrior, Eve Tuck, José Carlos Mariátegui, Lorraine Mayer, Lee Maracle, Jodi Byrd, Mark Rifkin, Taiaike Alfred, Glen Coulthard, Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson, Louis Riel, Howard Adams, and Maria Campbell. Just as importantly, the seminar will also have an Indigenous pedagogical component wherein students will collectively produce transmittable/sharable knowledge, perhaps in the form of a draft ‘Territory Acknowledgement’ to deliver to Penn State. In this spirit, students will be evaluated not necessarily in terms of their ‘achievement’ or ‘progress’ (with respect to a term paper), but, the degree to which their learning may be reciprocated and shared to the benefit of Indigenous Peoples. Students will be given the opportunity to provide gifts, time, or activities to others in order to enrich our relations. Among those gifts may be: to learn to locate ourselves as philosophers on lands that are ancestral to Indigenous Peoples; to begin the learn/unlearn the long process of philosophy’s complicity and entanglements with settler-colonialism; to think through race, ethnicity, class, and indigeneity as sites of generativity; and to think of philosophy as a pedagogy of liberation that is always localized on ground that is hallowed to others who may not be us.

PHIL 564: Major Figures in 20th Century

David Marriott

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical philosophy of race; Continental

This course aims to study the thought and influence of Frantz Fanon. We will trace that influence in Fanon’s reading of Hegel, Sartre, Marx, and Merleau-Ponty, before turning to Fanon’s own emerging thought in the fields of philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. That is, we will look at the settings and implications, historical frameworks and contemporary significance of what has become known as ‘critical Fanonism’.

PHIL 597: Philosophy of Biology

Emily Grosholz

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; Metaphysics-Epistemology

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philosophy of Biology. Princeton UP, 2016.

Samir Okasha, Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, Second Ed. 2016.

Evelyn Fox Keller and Philip Kitcher, The Seasons Alter: How to Save our Planet in Six Acts. Liveright Press, 2017.

Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democrary. Harvard UP, 2004.

Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Wangari Maathai, The Green Belt Movement. Lantern Books, 2006.

John Leary, One Shot: Trees as Our Last Shot at Survival. Trees for the Future, 2017.

Vandana Shiva, The Vandana Shiva Reader. University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

The aim of this course is first to understand the important changes that occur in philosophy of science, later in the 20th- century, when it begins to focus on the science of biology. This shift accompanies a growing sense that the state of the environment is becoming problematic: deforestation, the disappearance of species, climate change, invasive species, the pollution of water – rivers, seas and oceans. We will begin with a philosophical discussion that is epistemological, and then observe how it gradually acquires a political, ethical and practical dimension. How can philosophy of science help us assess what is happening to the world we live in, and what actions should or can be taken? We will read books of philosophy, but students will also be expected to think about ‘case studies’ pertinent to class discussion and the final paper. We may, I hope, also go on one or two field trips in the nearby forests.

WMNST 536, Gender and Science: Ecologically-Informed Intersectional Analyses

Nancy Tuana

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist philosophy; Ethics; Metaphysics-Epistemology

As we face unprecedented environmental changes and potential threshold events, understanding how such events not only have differential impacts, but also how those impacts are woven into histories as well as into current practices of oppression is key to understanding how to transform the ways we live together. This course will focus on the linkages between gender, race, sexuality, human development, and an expanded conception of environmental justice in the context of climate change. Feminist, Indigenous, and queer approaches will be used to interrogate binary categories such as nature/culture, natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal, scientific/spiritual as they relate to our understandings of “nature.”  In developing an ecologically-informed intersectional analysis, we will explore how racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism, imperialism, and other forms of oppression have shaped and continue to shape environmental discourses. Our explorations will include nonwestern approaches to knowledge production.

I have yet to finalize the reading list for the course, but I am currently considering thinkers such as:

•          Marisol de la Cadena Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds

•          Amitav Gosh The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

•          Donna Haraway Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

•          Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

•          Leanne Betasamosake Simpson As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance

•          Kathryn Yusoff A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None…

Fall 2020

PHIL 456, Topics in Nineteenth Century Philosophy, Nietzsche

Charles Scott

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Nineteenth Century; Continental

Nietzsche’s writings are among the most influential to come out of the 19th Century.  One of the reasons for that influence is found in his questions and critiques concerning the values and practices that dominate Western cultures in combination with his development of a genealogical approach in which he traces the complex development of those values and practices.  In this course we will engage in close readings parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals.  In TSZ we will focus on Zarathustra’s self-overcoming in connection with his struggle with the thought of time as eternal return and on the implications of his acceptance of time as eternal return.  In BGE we will consider carefully the elusive meaning of ‘beyond’ and the ways Nietzsche rethinks the meaning of transcendence throughout the book.  In GM we will consider his development of genealogical knowledge, the import of ‘beyond’ in his conceptions of genealogical history and time, and the impact his genealogies can have on ethical and religious ways of life.  We will also read Michel Foucault’s essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” and engage his account of descents that begin with dissension and without clear origins.

The course will be taught as an interactive seminar in which all students participate.  In each class after I make introductory and background remarks we will work on selected paragraphs from the assigned reading.  I will ask individuals to read a paragraph aloud and to articulate what it means in its context.  Further discussion will often develop from the first interpretation as we explore the questions and issues we have regarding what Nietzsche is saying and the implications of what he says.  We will all have many questions and uncertainties about what we read, and our goals for the classes are to develop an exploratory, collaborative effort to understand Nietzsche’s thought and to enjoy ourselves along the way.

PHIL 460, African-American Philosophy

David Marriott

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race

This course considers the various responses by African American philosophers to the racial crisis of the 1960s, and the revolutionary political history of the twentieth century more generally. It considers the relation between dissidence and rebellion, Marxism and Maoism, racial optimism and Afropessimism, reformism and messianism, and the attempt, by several philosophers, to ‘denature’ humanity and make the world anew.

PHIL/JST 468, Jewish Philosophy

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental; Metaphysics-Epistemology

The aim of this course is to critically explore major figures in 20th-century Jewish philosophy: Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Through an engaged reading of key writings, this course will examine how this lineage of Jewish thinkers stands astride — in challenging and undermining — established Western conceptions of the relation between philosophy and religion as well as the history and practice of philosophy. Emphasis in this course is placed on the relational between I and Thou, the “meontic” (non-being) and the transcendence of the Good, the interplay of creation, revelation, and redemption, the hiddenness and nearness of God, the relation between language, the Law, and the Holy, and messianism. Forays into Jewish Kabbalist thought, Moses Mendelssohn, Moses Maimonides, and Philo of Alexandria will also be included in the scope of this course.

PHIL 474, Kant’s Practical Philosophy

Uygar Abaci

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern Philosophy; Ethics

This course aims to offer a comprehensive survey of Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy. Kant lays the theoretical foundations of a major normative theory: deontology. On the broadest level, we will examine how Kant’s version of deontology compares to the other two major normative theories in the history of ethics, virtue ethics and consequentialism, and how it offers solutions to the structural problems in the latter. Such a comparative outlook requires a careful and intensive analysis of the central ideas and doctrines in Kant’s moral philosophy, in both the chronological and logical order of their development in his practical canon. We will start with the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) with a view to understanding the fundamental framework Kant offers for an ethical system based on the idea of universalizable rationality in the context of a moral community as the source of the normative force of the moral law and practical reason. We will see how Kant develops this framework by way of introducing into it the idea of the highest good, the ultimate object of the moral community, and incorporating it into his system of “critical philosophy” in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). His Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1793) will help us understand his doctrine of evil and refined position on human freedom. Finally, we will study Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals (1795) and the most developed picture Kant’s theory presents with regard to rights and virtues. In discussing these canonical texts, we will focus on Kant’s doctrines of practical reason, human freedom, good and evil, community, the role of God in ethical life, and the ultimate end of morality.

PHIL 503: ETHICS

Robert Bernasconi

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; Modern Philosophy; Critical philosophy of race

Throughout the modern period slavery was a standard topic in European books on ethics, but with very few exceptions the discussion was about what forms of slavery were legitimate and about who could be legitimately enslaved: the legitimacy of slavery as such was almost never questioned and, to the extent it was, this happened only in passing. The theoretical framework in which these discussions took place was so well established, especially in the Universities, that even when, in the final third of the eighteenth century, there was a widespread challenge directed against slavery practices, that it seems that these new developments, inspired in large part by African voices, could not readily be reflected within the discussions taking place within the dominant philosophical circles. The aim of the course is, in part, to investigate these philosophical discussions to see to what extent the bold claims that are often made against the Western philosophical tradition can be supported by an examination of this case. For this reason we will be asking why almost none of the various ways in which moral philosophy was practiced during this period were ready to embrace abolitionism. We will approach this question through a study of the dominant forms of moral philosophy of the modern period and the arguments that they deployed:  the Aristotelianism of the heirs of scholasticism, the various forms of the natural law tradition, the Scottish moralists, early forms of utilitarianism, and the innovations found within the Wolffian-Kantian school. We will read extracts from, among others, Sepulveda, Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, Carmichael, Montesquieu, Wolff, Hutcheson, Beattie, Paley, and Kant. But we will also be looking at the other voices that indicated other philosophical approaches that were largely ignored or dismissed as non-philosophical: Las Casas, Bodin, Moirans, Wallace, Cugoano, and Gouges, We will also look at the role philosophers played in the various stages by which these justifications of slavery came to be linked with the racialization of the slaves, not least because this tendency came to play such an important role in nineteenth century defenses of slavery.

PHIL 555, Seminar on J.J. Rousseau’s Social and Political Philosophy

John Christman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern Philosophy; Ethics

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an enigmatic, complex but enormously influential figure in the history of philosophy and western culture.  His impact on Kant, the development of the Enlightenment, the emergence of romanticism, and political events such as the French Revolution are well noted.  His own life and personality, as well, have been the subject of fascination for generations. Yet, it is extremely difficult to specify precisely what his settled views were on various fundamental issues.  Rousseau hovers uneasily between representing the continuation of the Enlightenment ideal in a proto-Kantian mode and presenting an anti-Enlightenment model for the de-centering of reason due to the precarious contingency of our education, socialization, emotional structure, and anthropological history.

This course will conduct a systematic study of Rousseau’s thought, with special emphasis on his moral, social, and political philosophy.  Of particular importance will be the relation between his conception of the self and freedom, on the one hand, and the practices of slavery and the causes of abolition (which he largely ignored) on the other.  Also of interest will be his views on such issues as the self and its relation to reason, the notion of perfectebilité, the social contract and the general will, and the construction of the self in the context of social and historical dynamics. 

PHIL 564: Major Figures in 20th century Philosophy: Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

Leonard Lawlor

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental; Metaphysics-Epistemology

As the course title indicates, the course will consist in a careful reading of Difference and Repetition. At this point in the history of philosophy, it is possible and indeed probable that Difference and Repetition rivals Heidegger’s Being and Time as the classic text in 20th century philosophy. (Also, A W. Moore completes his Evolution of Modern Metaphysics with a chapter on Deleuze.) Like Being and Time, Difference and Repetition is at once an investigation into the history of philosophy and the creation of a new philosophy. At once, Difference and Repetition continues Deleuze’s earlier investigations of figures in the history of philosophy and, more importantly, it creates a new philosophy of difference and of repetition. Difference and Repetition, as Deleuze says, was the first time “I tried to do philosophy.” Deleuze creates a concept of difference in which difference is not determined by a prior sameness, and a concept of repetition, in which repetitions are not determined by a prior model. Like Heidegger, Deleuze places the experience of time at the root of these two new concepts. We shall examine Difference and Repetition in order to gain clarity about how the experience of time generates these two new (and intertwined) concepts. However, our focus will be eventually on Chapters 4 and 5. Through the examination of these two difficult chapters (Chapter 4 concerning ideas, and Chapter Five concerning intensity), I will try to develop a novel interpretation of Difference and Repetition: Difference and Repetition is of course a book in theoretical philosophy; however it actually aims to be a book in ethics. Or, I think that Deleuze’s own philosophy is at once speculative and practical, as it is in Spinoza. A quotation from Deleuze’s 1968 Spinoza book (p. 272/251) illuminates this unification: “The sense of joy is revealed as the truly ethical sense; it is to the practical sphere what affirmation itself is to the speculative sphere. Spinoza’s naturalism is defined by speculative affirmation in his theory of substance, and by practical joy in his conception of modes. A philosophy of pure affirmation, the Ethics is also a philosophy of joy corresponding to such affirmation.”

WMNST 507, Feminist Theory

Nancy Tuana

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist philosophy

What is considered theory in the dominant academic community is not necessarily what counts as theory for women of color.  Theory produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world. Thus, we need teorías . . . that will rewrite history using race, class, gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis, theories that cross borders, that blur boundaries–new kinds of theories with new theorizing methods. -Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul                                                                                                                       

Feminist theory has two aims; the first is to critique existing knowledge practices, theoretical paradigms, and conceptual systems in a wide range of disciplines for embedded biases and exclusions of gender-related issues and experiences, and the second is to propose new theoretical approaches, new concepts, and new attunements that will be more inclusive of and more accurately reflect the varieties of experiences related to gender/sex, as well as transforming unjust institutions, practices, and beliefs. The wide-ranging approaches that constitute the domain of feminist theory have placed justice and ethical considerations at the heart of research arguing for research that is a) epistemically responsible, b) attentive to the complexity of diversity or intersectionality, and c) has as its goal social transformation and empowerment. 

This course provides a graduate level introduction to some of the key theoretical trends and debates in feminist theory today, including (1) feminist methodological tools such as: standpoint theory; intersectionality; epistemologies of ignorance; and performativity.  Such approaches will be put to work by examining (2) how to theorize with attention to differences (including gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, and other others), (3) by studying feminist theory in its many differences—black feminist thought, Latinx feminist thought, Indigenous feminist thought,  Asian American feminist thought, and (4) considering the intersections between feminist theories and other liberatory theories such as decolonial theories, disability theories, and queer theories.

Spring 2020

PHIL 407, Technology and Human Values: Technology and Nature

Mark Sentesy

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; metaphysics-epistemology

This course investigates an issue in the field of environmental ethics, namely how technology transforms our ethical relationship with nature. The most significant single characteristic of the human relationship with the natural world is that it is technological. The planetary consequences of our mastery of nature, visible in every environmental problem, are not the only characteristic of our relationship with technology, they are expressions of it. Technology totally reconfigures every part of our relationship with nature, from the introduction of new kinds of action, to the way civilization is structured, to our belief in progress, to what we do in our practical lives day by day, to our scientific picture of the physical world, to our sense of our own mortality and the destiny of humankind. It reconfigures us while operating according to its own independent functional coherence and principles of development.

This course, then, investigates how technology affects our ethical situation. In so doing, we seek out a way to overcome a foundational problem in the field of environmental ethics, namely anthropocentrism, the belief that the value of the natural world depends on human beings. We will explore the thesis that the very idea of anthropocentrism originates in our experience of technology. We will also explore how technology itself is an example of how to challenge anthropocentrism: since technology is an axis around which our ethical experience orbits, our principles are not simply determined by human beings. This opens the door to a renewed approach to nature as something that organizes and directs our ethical lives.

PHIL 408W, Social and Political Philosophy

Desiree Lim

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; critical philosophy of race

This course examines a survey of distinctive social and political questions that emerge from the philosophical concept of race. What, exactly, is race? What consequences might racial identity and positionality have for our lived experiences? How ought we understand the phenomena of racism and discrimination, as they persist today? Finally, how should societies respond to ongoing legacies of racial oppression? For example, could we be required to support the use of affirmative action, recognize the right to reparations for past injustice, or even dismantle the prison system? Primarily utilizing the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, combined with readings from other perspectives and disciplines (e.g. law, sociology, and postcolonial thought), students will engage in rigorous analysis of these puzzles.

PHIL 457, 20th Century Philosophy

Leonard Lawlor

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental; metaphysics-epistemology

The topic of this course will be 20^th century answers to the question of what is philosophy. These answers will be drawn from 20^th century European philosophers: Bergson (1903); Heidegger (1929 and 1956); Merleau-Ponty (1951); Lyotard (1964); Deleuze (and Guattari) (1991); and Agamben (2016). If we look at a different tradition, we can see what will unify this trajectory from Bergson to Agamben. Simon Blackburn’s 1999 Thinking (which is a book written for a general audience) lacks a chapter on language and its sole discussion is located within a larger discussion of reasoning (and logic). In contrast, all the answers we shall see in the European tradition will concern the question of language, philosophy’s strange relation with standard systems of language (such as English). This relation is not irrational or a-logical but it is not logical in the traditional sense. If philosophy is concerned with what transcends subjects and objects, what is not directly given in perception, if it deals primarily with being or what is beyond being, then philosophy’s expressions can only be defined by a kind of creativity. It seeks to express what cannot be expressed and yet what must be expressed. Creativity within language or of language will be the most general definition of philosophy we shall see in this course. Of course, to define philosophy by linguistic creativity is nothing more than providing a new definition of Socratic irony.

PHIL 460, African American Philosophy

David Marriott

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical philosophy of race

The primary purpose of the seminar will be to offer a critical introduction and overview of African American Philosophy. Beginning with the question of race and ontology, the course will go on to consider questions of sovereignty and domination, freedom and liberation, identity and difference, and concluding with a study of race and the posthuman.

To engage these questions we will pay special attention to the themes of violence and determination; structure and geneaology; as well as history and repetition. We will also study African American Philosophy across a variety of fields and genres, including: Marxism, Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Aesthetics, Ethics, Africana and Continental Philosophy. Major thinkers to be studied will include: W.E. B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Cedric Robinson, Charles Mills, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, as well as contemporary figures such as Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers.  

The seminar will be taught interactively with emphasis on focused attention to assigned material and discussion that arises out of our engagement with that material.  Students will be encouraged to bring to bear their specific disciplinary interests in both the discussions and their term papers.

PHIL 461, Plato

Christopher Moore

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient history

We will study dialogues from across Plato’s career that develop approaches to political thinking – and thus may constitute the earliest instances of “political philosophy,” as we recognize it, in the Western philosophical tradition. All these dialogues engage explicitly or implicitly with the writings of Critias of Athens, Plato’s uncle and probably the first “constitutional theorist.” All but two take up the problem of political education: how it could be possible, through institutional arrangements, to help people become virtuous. All but one present Socrates, in a variety of forms, as impresario of a conversation aimed somehow at making one’s life go better. All reflect the manifold interests of this most influential of early Greek philosophers, judged by many to be the language’s best prose author and our most sensitive historian of those fifth-century discussions and investigations that came to constitute the origins of Western philosophy.

Given the political angle of this course, we will focus on issues of utopia, democracy, virtue, leadership, law, the individual and communal good life, and the power and weaknesses of discussion to make progress on these issues. We will read the Apology, Protagoras, Charmides, Republic, Timaeus, Critias, and chapters from Laws.

PHIL 503, Ethics Seminar: Feminist Ethics

Sarah Clark Miller

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; feminist philosophy

This course offers an opportunity for in-depth analysis of current, major themes in feminist ethics. Initially, we will focus on an overview of feminist moral philosophy’s methodologies, with particular attention paid to its unique approaches and emphases. These include intersectionality and related theories of oppression and privilege (featuring analysis of how intersectionality relates to decoloniality, disability, and trans and non-binary lives); attention to everyday moral life and moral phenomena; robust accounts of contexts, moral agents, and moral patients; critical engagement with ideal theory and universalism; an awareness of institutionalized oppression and the interplay of social hierarchies and power; and a questioning of any fixed divide between ethics and politics.

Thereafter, the course will explore multiple thematic strands in contemporary feminist ethics. Seminar members will select a subset of possible areas and topics that will comprise a substantial portion of the course. Options include: (1) where feminist ethics meets feminist epistemology, including the overarching concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression, as well as the related concepts of epistemic gaslighting, silencing, and resistance; (2) the intertwining themes of dependence, vulnerability, and care, including investigations regarding the relational foundations of responsibility; (3) feminist ethical treatments of the body, such as exploration of the nature of the relationship between normativity and embodiment, as well as implications of embodiment for moral judgment, agency, and selfhood; (4) sexual violence and sexual empowerment, with a focus on the possibilities that a feminist pluralist account of sexual violence offers; (5) what it means for feminist ethics to think transnationally, examining the problems and promises of solidarity and coalition; (6) feminist liberalism and challenges thereto; and (7) reproductive justice. The course will likely include four or five of the seven topics named.

PHIL 557, Twentieth Century Philosophy Seminar, Ecophenomenology

Ted Toadvine

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental philosophy

Ecophenomenology emerged in the 1980s as an alternative to naturalistic and instrumentalist approaches to environmental problems. Drawing on classic works in the phenomenological tradition, especially Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, it vindicated the role of embodied experience in reexamining our epistemological and ontological assumptions about the natural and built environments. In dialogue with feminist, Indigenous, deconstructive, and decolonial philosophies, critical ecophenomenology reorients this experience-based approach toward issues of interspecies ethics, environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, globalization, and apocalypticism. This course explores the prospects for a critical ecophenomenology along three axes: Embodied experience; Lifeworld, place, and land; End times and unworlding. Likely authors include S. de Beauvoir, J. Butler, E. Casey, E. Clare, J. Corburn, J. Derrida, R. Garland-Thomson, L. Gross, E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, S. Holmes, S. James, R. Kimmerer, S. Lindberg, E. Levinas, M. Merleau-Ponty, J.-L. Nancy, K. Oliver, J. Sallis, M.S.C. Schuback, S. Skrimshire, C. Willett, K. Whyte, D. Wood.

PHIL 562, Major Figures in Modern Philosophy, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement

Uygar Abaci

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern; metaphysics-epistemology

This course offers a close study of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment(1790). As the final piece of Kant’s critical trilogy, the third Critique book has the extremely ambitious project of bridging the gap between the respective focal subjects of the first two Critiques, nature and freedom, by arguing that nature is a hospitable place for the realization of free human ends. Kant’s argument is based on an observation of a certain kind of judgment, i.e., “reflecting” (as opposed to “determining”), operative in our aesthetic and teleological evaluation of nature, both of which assign a “purposiveness” to nature in different ways. Thus, a study of the third Critique will give us a chance to understand Kant’s most mature theories of aesthetic and teleology. 

Some of the topics we will focus on will include: Kant’s theory of judgment in general and of reflecting judgment in particular; theory of aesthetic judgment or judgment of taste; analytics of the beautiful and the sublime; universality of claims of taste; theory of fine art and artistic genius; teleological judgment; natural organisms; the rivalry and reconcilability of teleological and mechanical explanations of nature; nature and theology; physico- and ethico-theology; the doctrine of the highest good; and the unity of the critical system.

PHIL 564, Major Figures in Twentieth-Century Philosophy: Simone de Beauvoir

Kathryn Belle

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist philosophy; continental

In this graduate seminar we will read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex alongside critical engagements with that classic text, especially (but not exclusively) by women of color.   Some of the secondary literature we will take up includes scholarship by: Loraine Hansberry, Angela Davis, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Deborah King, OyèrónkéOyěwùmí, Mariana Ortega, Kathryn T. Gines (now Kathryn Sophia Belle), bell hooks, Kyoo Lee, Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Patricia Hill Collins, Alia Al-saji.  We will also explore Beauvoirs’ philosophical positions in conversation with some of her contemporaries (e.g., Claudia Jones, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Richard Wright).  Major philosophical questions/themes of this seminar will include: Analogical, intersectional, and multiplicitous approaches to the question of who/what is “woman”?;  comparative and competing frameworks of oppression in The Second Sex; and the ongoing exclusions of women of color in white feminist secondary literature on this figure and text.

Of related interest:

BIOET 502, Macro-Perspectives and Methods in Bioethics: Public Health Ethics

Jonathan Marks

The course encompasses theories of justice and health; the relationship between public health ethics, health policy, and health law; the framing of public health problems and their solutions (from “personal responsibility” to “social and environmental determinants”); the ethical obligations of institutional actors—including the WHO; comparative health care systems; the global burden of disease—including NCDs—and the distribution of health care resources; access to essential medicines; the ethics of vaccination policy; the ethics of stigma, “nudging,” and other forms of health promotion; the ethics of pandemics, public health emergencies, and disaster response; the ethics of humanitarian intervention; health disparities and inequalities; systemic issues in empirical public health research; food systems and health; the relationship between human rights, human security, and public health; the built environment, occupational environments, and health; environmental toxins, “fracking,” and health; climate change and health.  The content of the course may change from year to year, and will be tailored to the expertise of the instructor, and the disciplines and interests of the students in the seminar.

PLSC 5583, Modern Political and Social Theory

John Christman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; critical philosophy of race

The idea of freedom dominates both contemporary and historical discourse in the western tradition of political thought.  Debates about the meaning and value of freedom reflect deep and trenchant questions in political philosophy generally in this tradition.

However, attention to this key concept and its conceptual cousins generally takes place from the perspective of the (already) free.  That is, freedom is conceptualized as something to be protected rather than something that is denied.  Yet, it is claimed by various historians, sociologists and others that freedom arose as a value, when and where it did, in relation to the practices of slavery.  Therefore, an adequate examination of the concept of social freedom (or liberty) must take place against the backdrop of the study of enslavement and resistance to enslavement.

With this in mind, this course will undertake an examination of dominant conceptions of freedom in the western tradition of political theory but do so in interaction with an examination of the conditions of slavery, abolition and slave rebellion.  We will read and discuss both historical writing on freedom, including work by Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill, and contemporary theorists.  This will be combined with readings concerning slavery and resistance, focusing specifically on the case of the slave revolt in Haiti.

The goal of the course is both to give a standard overview of traditional theories of freedom in the western tradition but also trouble that tradition in both substantive and methodological ways. 

Fall 2019

PHIL 402, European Philosophy

Nicolas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental

The aim of this course is to explore different philosophical understandings of dialogue as well as different understandings of philosophy as dialogue in the writings of Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hermann Cohen, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricouer, Simone Weil, and Knud Ejler Løgstrup. We shall also explore whether violence represents the end of dialogue or is itself a form dialogue as well as whether monologue is nothing other than regarding oneself as other, and hence, a form of dialogue itself.

PHIL 416, Philosophy of Social Science

John Christman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology

The purpose of this class will be to investigate various philosophical issues concerning the methodologies, claims to objectivity, value commitments, and conceptions of human nature and motivation that function in the social sciences.  Reading will focus both on contemporary writers and on critiques of social science arising in philosophy and social theory of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (for example, in work by Marx, Weber, Durkheim, DuBois and others).  Specific topics will include: the relation between social scientific analyses of social practices and social critique; the question of the possibility of detachment and objectivity in social science; the practice of “critical hermeneutics”, i.e., the problem of interpretation of social practices; and assumptions about human identity, rationality, motivation, and interests in these scientific traditions.  

PHIL 432, Medical and Health Care Ethics

Desiree Lim

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics

This course provides a survey of distinctive ethical and political questions raised by the fields of medicine and healthcare. We will examine persistent and pressing real-world issues, including present inequalities in access to healthcare, the global right to healthcare, and the existence of markets in human organs and surrogacy. We will also evaluate the use of technology, both present and potential. For example, is it ever permissible to genetically engineer a “designer child”? May physicians provide end-of-life services for patients? At the same time, we will consider deeper questions about concepts that are often taken for granted: what is the best model of disability? What is informed consent and why is it so valuable? Utilizing the tools of contemporary analytic philosophy, students will engage in rigorous analysis of these puzzles and gain familiarity with current bioethical debates.

PHIL 438, Feminist Philosophy

Kathryn Belle

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist-Philosophy

This course examines the central currents of feminist philosophy, selected problems and concepts regarding difference, gender and sex, identity, and political culture.  The specific objective of this course is to examine feminist philosophies, especially women of color feminisms, through the lenses of intersectionality and multiplicity.  We will explore seminal readings in intersectionality and multiplicity in the U.S. context and engage these themes in transnational and decolonial feminisms.

Readings (Selections from):

• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa
• All of the Women Are White, All of the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982) edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)
• Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (1991) edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres
• Guy-Sheftall’s Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (1995) a collection of Black women’s scholarship spanning over one hundred and fifty years.  
• Alma García, Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (1997)
• Mariana Ortega, In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (2016)
• Maria Lugones (select articles)
• Kimberlé Crenshaw (select articles)
• Recommended: Recent scholarship on intersectionality (e.g., Vivan May, Jennifer Nash, Anna Caratathis)

PHIL 455, Topics in Modern Philosophy: Spinoza & Hume on the Nature of Mind and Conscious Unity

Brady Bowman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern; Metaphysics-Epistemology

On many obvious points of comparison, Spinoza and Hume represent polar opposites. To name a few, Spinoza’s rationalism, deism, substance-monism, and necessitarianism are a world away from Hume’s empiricism, atheism, pluralism, and his skeptical denial of an objectively real causal nexus. At second glance, some equally undeniable affinities come into focus, for instance their commitment to philosophical naturalism and their openly critical attitudes toward religion and religious conceptions of moral authority. The same substantive affinities are evident in their conception of philosophy’s method and its goal: In seeking out the “secret springs and principles by which the human mind is actuated” (Enquiry, sect. I), Hume aspires to a moral philosophy whose rigor and evidence would rival that of Newtonian physics, just as Spinoza resolves to “consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of [geometrical] lines, planes, and solids” (Ethics III). In this seminar we will explore how far these affinities reach, to discover what we can learn from their otherwise starkly divergent perspectives on the human mind.

More specifically, the seminar will focus on questions of unity and individuality. If (or rather to the extent that) minds are individuated, what is it that does the individuating? To what extent is “consciousness” coextensive with “mind”? Are there unconsciousness minds? And what about conscious experience: to what extent is it or must it be unified? Further, to the extent that minds are self-conscious, what makes that possible and how is selfconsciousness related to consciousness more generally? How does the mind come to distinguish between what is “in the mind” and “outside the mind,” and whence springs the mind’s conception of itself as enjoying a distinctively “inner,” psychologically “private” experience?  What are the limits of (self-) conscious unity and what do they imply about the nature and limits of intentional action or about mental life and death more generally? — We will examine some of the possible answers suggested by Hume’s and Spinoza’s respective theories of mind, including the physical integrity of the body, self-affection as a higher-order impression, stable associations of ideas, logical interconnections among thoughts, conatus or the striving for self-preservation, affective coherence and sensations of power.

Discussion will focus mainly on the relevant portions of Spinoza’s Ethics, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. However, we will also draw on relevant background texts by Descartes (e.g. Meditations and Principles of Philosophy) and Locke (Essay Concerning Human Understanding). We may occasionally glance forward to Kant’s theory (in the Critique of Pure Reason) of apperceptive unity as linked to intellectual and volitional spontaneity.

PHIL 456, Topics in Nineteeth Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

Charles Scott

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Nineteenth Century; Continental

Nietzsche’s writings are among the most influential in the 19^th Century.  One of the reasons for that influence is found in his questions and critiques concerning the values and practices that dominate Western cultures in combination with his development of a genealogical approach in which he traces the complex development of those values and practices.  In this course we will engage in close readings of Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals.  In Beyond Good and Evil we will thematize the elusive meaning of ‘beyond’ and the ways Nietzsche rethinks the meaning of transcendence throughout the book.  In On the Genealogy of Morals, in addition to careful analysis of his specific claims and the values imbedded in those claims, we will consider his conception of genealogy and the impact of ‘beyond’ in his conception of genealogical history and time.

Over the course of this class we will have occasions to consider selected passages from other of Nietzsche’s works such as The Birth of Tragedy, Joyful Wisdom, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and a short essay, “The Dionysian Worldview,” that he wrote early in his career (1873).

The course will be taught as an interactive seminar in which all students participate.  In each class, after I make introductory and background remarks we will work on selected paragraphs from the assigned reading.  I will ask individuals to read a paragraph aloud and to articulate what it means in its context.  We will all have many questions and uncertainties about what we read, and our goals for the classes are to develop an exploratory, collaborative effort to understand Nietzsche’s thought and to enjoy ourselves along the way.

PHIL 539, Critical Philosophy of Race

David Marriott

Possible course requirments fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race

This course will offer a critical introduction and overview of the philosophical concept of race. We will trace that concept in the fields of continental philosophy before turning to the emerging thought of the ‘postcolonial’. That is, we will look at the settings and implications, historical frameworks and contemporary significance of ‘race’ as discourse, language, doxa, and lexis, Beginning with the question of language and ontology, the course will go on to consider questions of sovereignty and domination, freedom and liberation, identity and difference; concluding with a study of race and the posthuman. Major thinkers to be studied will include: GWF Hegel, J.-P. Sartre, M Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, W.E. B. DuBois, as well as contemporary figures such as Frank Wilderson, Charles Mills, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers.

PHIL 553, Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Mark Sentesy

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient; Metaphysics-Epistemology

To study metaphysics is to articulate what being is. This involves discovering the principles by which beings differ and identify with each other, and the patterns in which they organize together. In this respect metaphysics can re-shape, expand or restrict what we think is real, possible, and necessary, and how we take beings to relate to one another.

The influence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is visible in almost every intellectual discipline. It was so pervasive that not long ago many of its core concepts were considered to be bedrock, common-sense ideas, such as the relationships between subjects and their attributes, matter and form, actuality, potency, and teleology. Even under criticism, these concepts were still often taken to be self-evident.

But in the resurgence of scholarship on Aristotle’s work our understanding of these concepts has been changing. Moreover, Aristotle’s texts have been increasingly regarded as pedagogical, aporetic, and dialectical, rather than dogmatic or even systematic, and the Metaphysics, more clearly than any of his other works, advances by seeking out paradoxes. 

In this course we will read from the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics through its core books, in light of two backgrounds: the ancient Greek context, and recent work on Aristotle (from Brentano and Heidegger, to Adorno and Agamben, to Burnyeat, Broadie, and Witt). We will examine, among other things, the relationship between speech and being, Aristotle’s claim that being is irreducibly diverse, the paradoxical relationship between particular and universal, the limits of the concepts of matter and form, Aristotle’s critique of atomism, his concepts of potency and actuality, and the thinness or thickness of his metaphysics of teleology and organic emergence.

PHIL 580, Ancient Phenomenology

Nicholas De Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental; Metaphyics-Epistemology

It does not require any special knowledge or instruction to recognize how essential time proves to be for human existence. What proves more challenging, however, is understanding what time is, how we experience time, and who is that being for whom time is at all a question. The aim of this seminar is to critically explore different approaches the question of time in Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. In addition to addressing classical themes in the phenomenology of temporality, we shall examine so-called “limit phenomena” of death, birth, and sleep, as well as phenomenological conceptions of the eternal / eternity, mourning, anxiety, and forgiveness. 

PHIL 597, Theorizing Differential Consciousness: Anzaldua, Alarcon, and Sandoval

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy; Critical Philosophy of Race

The aim of this seminar is to understand the notion of “differential consciousness” as deployed by women of color feminists in order to survive, resist, and thrive within contexts of multiple oppression.  Attention will be given to the manner in which an “oppositional” theory of differential consciousness is, according to Sandoval, connected to a “mobile and transformable subjectivity” and to the practice of love as a “hermeneutic of social change.”  Such a mobile subjectivity will be shown to be connected to Alarcón’s understanding of the meaning of Chicana identity.    Lastly, this seminar aims to examine how differential consciousness informs Chicana/x, Latina/x aesthetic practice in the process of self-transformation and resistance, in particular in Anzaldúa’s work.

WMNST 507, Feminist Theory

Nancy Tuana

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Feminist Philosophy; Critical Philosophy of Race

Feminist theory has two aims; the first is to critique existing knowledge practices and theoretical paradigms in a wide range of disciplines for impeded biases and exclusions of gender-related issues and experiences, and the second is to propose new theoretical paradigms that will be more inclusive of and accurately reflect the variety of human experience, as well as transforming unjust institutions, practices, and beliefs. The wide-ranging approaches that constitute the domain of feminist theory have placed justice and ethical considerations at the heart of research arguing for research that is a) epistemically responsible, b) attentive to the complexity of diversity or intersectionality, and c) has as its goal social transformation and empowerment. 

This course provides a graduate level introduction to some of the key theoretical trends and debates in feminist theory today, including: (1) feminist epistemologies, including the debate over accounts of epistemic privilege, epistemic injustice, and liberatory epistemologies such as standpoint theories and epistemologies of resistance;  (2) the debate over gender identity itself or the viability of the category “woman” and correlated concerns regarding essentialism and heterosexist economies;  (3) debates about intersectionality or how to theorize with attention to difference (including gender, race, sexuality, class, nationality, and other others), (4) postcolonial critiques of western feminism and the attempt to create a transnational and anti-racist feminism; (5) material feminist attention to the role of the body including issues of embodiment and labor; (6) accounts of agency in feminist and other liberatory narratives.  

Spring 2019

PHIL 410, Philosophy of Science

Emily Grosholz

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Metaphysics-Epistemology; Ethics

The aim of this course is to introduce students to some of the central themes and problems in twentieth century and current philosophy of biology, which encompasses both epistemology (theory of knowledge) and ethics. Mid-twentieth century Anglophone philosophy of science made use of predicate logic as its instrument of analysis, and drew its case studies mostly from physics. Newton’s axiomatization of classical mechanics was for them the paradigm of scientific rationality, along with his mathematical models of the solar system. But when we consider the life sciences as case studies, different kinds of issues emerge for the philosophy of biology (and chemistry). How must we enlarge our understanding of scientific rationality, and of the methods and modes of representation used by science as it studies living things: macromolecules, cells, organisms, and ecological systems? In what sense is Darwin’s theory of evolution a theory? In what sense is genetics a science? Does biology have laws in the same way that physics has laws? What are the roles of metaphor and models in biological reasoning? What is the role of experiment?  How do biologists set up taxonomies? How do they offer explanations? How shall we understand the relation between biology, and physics and chemistry? When science deals with complex phenomena, what becomes of the relation between prediction and description? What ethical obligations do scientists (and in particular) biologists have? Should we assume that scientific knowledge must supplant the wisdom of traditional societies about how to live on the earth, or should we look for ways of combining traditional knowledge and scientific theories? To address the last issue, we will focus on the environmental importance of trees, using Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement as a case study.

PHIL 453, Nature in Aristotle and His Predecessors

Mark Sentesy

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient; Metaphysics-Epistemology

It has often been said that the Greeks discovered the study of Nature. Nature is an unusual object of inquiry and names a particular way of experiencing phenomena. Its discovery coincided with the Greek birth of philosophical thinking. How and why did Nature emerge as an all-pervasive concern, and how did the Greeks shape how we think nature? The course explores these questions through Greece’s paradigmatic philosopher of nature, Aristotle, against the background of the pre-Socratic physicists he engages.

The course opens with background, inquiring into several key moments in pre-Aristotelian philosophy of nature – the idea that events are governed by non-intentional principles, that there is a single fundamental principle of all phenomena, the concept of dynamic structure, that nothing can be truly created or destroyed, that change disperses being.  The course then turns to a close reading of Aristotle’s Physics, where we examine, for example, the argument for the plurivocity of being, the relationships between nature, singular being, and ‘essence,’ the defense of the existence of change, the sort of reality that belongs to chance and automaticity, his watershed arguments that materiality and place exist, and that events occur because of structure and orientation (i.e., telos).

Depending on student interest, we may turn to Aristotle’s concept of life and his account of the gradual emergence of living structure (epigenesis). This would take us into his biological works, parts of which remained unsurpassed until the 19^th century. The course requires close reading of the ancients, but we shall occasionally also read secondary literature, for example, Heidegger’s argument that Aristotle determines the path for thinking nature for the West while simultaneously revealing ways of experiencing natural phenomena that were left behind and set aside.

PHIL 474, Kant’s Moral Philosophy

Uygar Abaci

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Modern; Ethics

This course aims to offer a comprehensive survey of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Kant lays the theoretical foundations of a major normative theory: deontology. On the broadest level, we will examine how Kant’s version of deontology compares to the other two major normative theories in the history of ethics, virtue ethics and consequentialism, and how it offers solutions to the structural problems in the latter. Such a comparative outlook requires a careful and intensive analysis of the central ideas and doctrines in Kant’s moral philosophy, in both the chronological and logical order of their development in his practical texts. We will start with the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) with a view to understanding the fundamental framework Kant offers for an ethical system based on the idea of universalizable rationality in the context of a moral community as the source of the normative force of the moral law and practical reason. We will see how Kant develops this framework by way of introducing into it the idea of the highest good, the ultimate object of the moral community, and incorporating it into his system of “critical philosophy” in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788). His Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason (1793) will help us understand his doctrine of evil and refined position on human freedom. Finally, we will study Kant’s “Doctrine of Virtue” in the Metaphysics of Morals (1795) and the most developed picture Kant’s theory presents with regard to specific virtues and duties. In discussing these canonical texts, we will focus on Kant’s doctrines of practical reason, human freedom, good and evil, community, the role of God in ethical life, and the ultimate end of morality.

PHIL 520, Logic

David Agler

Passing this course with a B or better grade fulfills 1/2 of the language-logic requirement

Logic is of interest to philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, and others. This course focuses on the areas of logic that have been traditionally of interest to philosophers. It will begin with an overview of propositional and first-order predicate logic before turning to predicate logic with identity and functions, the treatment of definite descriptions, and modal propositional and modal predicate logic. Additional topics may include the logic of counterfactuals, second-order predicate logic, metatheory, free logic, relevance logic, temporal and deontic logics, many-valued logics, criticisms of logic, and the logics of vagueness (e.g. supervaluationism). At the end of the semester, participants will be fluent in logic to a degree that will allow them to read philosophical texts that engage with, or are informed by, advancements in logic. This course will also examine pedagogical issues in teaching/tutoring symbolic logic at the undergraduate level, including (but not limited to) textbook selection, course instruction, accomodating students with math-related or visual disabilities, teaching online, etc. Prior training in symbolic logic is helpful but not required.

PHIL 555, Modern Philosophy Seminar: German Idealism

Brady Bowman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 19th Century; Metaphysics-Epistemology

German Idealism is a unified movement that emerged in the 1790s and quickly became consolidated around a handful of common commitments: the reality of freedom and the “primacy of the practical,” the foundational status of subjectivity, the unity and intelligibility of being, the systematic nature of philosophical knowledge, and a methodology wedding morphogenetic construction to dialectical criticism. Hegelian philosophy represents an innovative variation on patterns of thought already well-established by Fichte and Schelling prior to Hegel’s relatively late emergence onto the philosophical stage. Accordingly, the early weeks of the semester will be devoted to discussion of texts by Jacobi, Fichte, and Schelling that define the post-Kantian agenda. Major points of agreement as well as divergence (e.g. the debate concerning the compatibility of freedom with systematicity or the applicability of “transcendental” methodology in the philosophy of nature) will be identified; and the genesis of a recognizably “dialectical” method will also be traced from the early Fichte through Schelling’s “history of self-consciousness.” On this basis, we will turn to Hegel in the latter half of the semester to consider the critical function, methodology, and systematic organization of his first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, before examining key selections from the works of his philosophical maturity, especially the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia.

The course will thus acquaint students with the background and the basic texts in the development of German Idealism. Having a good grasp on the early phase of the movement is key to understanding Hegel’s thought and to appreciating what is (and is not) truly specific to his approach.

PHIL 558, Contemporary Philosophy Seminar: The Critique of the Critique

Eduardo Mendieta

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 20th Century; Metaphysics-Epistemology

Postcolonial and decolonial thinking can and should be understood as forms of immanent critique, logos working upon logos, which uses a variety of philosophical methods and approaches, in order to illuminate the very limits of critique and thus clear the way for ‘transcendence from within.’ Thus, they are exemplars of the ceaseless work of [dialectical] reason and part of what they do, at the very minimum, is to catalogue the different forms in which extant forms of critique, from within and about the so-called “West” and its “Others,” have been insufficient, at best, or blinded by a variety of assumptions that blunt the incisiveness of critique, at worst. We will study closely five critiques: Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black [Nègre] Reason, Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Critique of Latin American Reason, Kristie Dotson’s Varieties of Epistemic Oppression (forthcoming), and Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity. The aim is to discern to what extent these critiques are not simply “critical critiques” but part of the “critique of critical critique,” to paraphrase Marx and Engels’s subtitle to the Holy Family. We will begin with a consideration of the role and meaning of “critique” in Kant, Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Sartre, Foucault and Jaeggi [we will read condensed and selected passages], in order to venture a typology of modes of critique, so as to approach the work of the critique of the critique.

PHIL 564, Major Figures in Twentieth Century Philosophy, Derrida: Deconstruction in Theory and Practice

Leonard Lawlor

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental; 20th Century

The general aim of this course lies in achieving a comprehensive understanding of Derrida’s extensive philosophical work. The core of this aim will be to examine what Derrida has called deconstruction. To this end, we shall examine a handful of Derrida’s early writings such “The Ends of Man,” “Violence and Metaphysics,” Voice and Phenomenon, and “Signature, Event Context.” Then in the second half of the course, we shall examine “Force of Law,” Given Time, and his writings on hospitality and forgiveness. The more specific aim of the course will be the attempt to discover whatever sort of ethics deconstruction implies. In other words, we shall try to understand what Derrida means when he says, “I am ultra-Kantian. I am Kantian, but I am more than Kantian” (in “On Forgiveness: A Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida,” in Questioning God, eds., John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 52-72, in particular. P. 66).

PHIL 597, Critiques of Captialism: Marx and Beyond

Amy Allen

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Continental Philosophy; Ethics

An understanding of capitalism is crucial for developing a critique of our present, which is so powerfully shaped by the forces of a globalized, neoliberal form of finance capitalism. The aim of this class is to give students an analytically precise understanding of capitalism and to study a variety of classical and contemporary critical theories of it. We will start, of course, with several weeks on Marx, considering his critiques of alienation, exploitation, and capitalism’s crisis tendencies, and the complex relationship between these three modes of critique in Marx’s work. We will then study classical critiques of capitalism by Max Weber and Karl Polanyi; consider the relationship between capitalism and (post)colonialism; and discuss contemporary critiques of neoliberalism and the politics of debt. In addition to readings by Marx, Weber, and Polanyi, the course will cover work by authors such as Emmanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Luc Boltanski, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and Rocío Zambrana. The course is designed to give students the theoretical and methodological tools they will need to incorporate a critical analysis of capitalism into their own research.  (Continental Philosophy; Ethics)

Of related interest:

AFAM 502 – Blacks and African Diaspora

Seminar in the theory and history of Blacks in the African Diaspora.

AFAM 503 – Sexual and Gender Politics in the African Diaspora

A seminar in the theory and history of sexual and gender politics in the Black Diaspora from the Colonial Era forward.

BIOET 502, Macro-Perspectives and Methods in Bioethics: Public Health Ethics

Jonathan Marks

The course encompasses theories of justice and health; the relationship between public health ethics, health policy, and health law; the framing of public health problems and their solutions (from “personal responsibility” to “social and environmental determinants”); the ethical obligations of institutional actors—including the WHO; comparative health care systems; the global burden of disease—including NCDs—and the distribution of health care resources; access to essential medicines; the ethics of vaccination policy; the ethics of stigma, “nudging,” and other forms of health promotion; the ethics of pandemics, public health emergencies, and disaster response; the ethics of humanitarian intervention; health disparities and inequalities; systemic issues in empirical public health research; food systems and health; the relationship between human rights, human security, and public health; the built environment, occupational environments, and health; environmental toxins, “fracking,” and health; climate change and health.  The content of the course may change from year to year, and will be tailored to the expertise of the instructor, and the disciplines and interests of the students in the seminar.

WMNST 507, Feminist Theory

Development of feminist theory and its relationship to history in terms of critique of family, sexuality, and gender stratification.

WMNST 508, Feminist Methodolgy

The objective of this course is to examine feminist approaches to traditional research methodologies. The course will examine the animated and contentious debates among feminist scholars about what constitutes a feminist method. Although there is no single feminist method, this diverse academic community is searching for techniques consistent with their convictions as feminists. For this reason, the course will distinguish between methods, as tools for research, and methodology, as theory about the research process. The course reviews methods such as ethnography, interviewing, oral history, discourse analysis, visual analysis, and mixed method approaches.

WMNST 597/AFAM 597, Special Topics “Black Womanist/Feminist”

No description available.

Fall 2018

PHIL 409, Aesthetics: The Aesthetic, Photography, and Practices of Othering

Mariana Ortega

Possible course requirements fulfilled: 20th Century

Aesthetics has traditionally been associated with disinterestedness or a neutral, apolitical approach to questions pertaining the nature of taste, beauty and sublimity. Nevertheless, it is deeply intertwined with technologies of power and practices of othering. This course studies the relation between the aesthetic, technologies of power, practices of othering, and the reign of the visual in the construction and representation of the racialized and gendered subject. In particular, we will investigate the way in which photography marks as well as produces the othered, abject subject and is thus complicit with the violence—epistemic, aesthetic, cultural—that arises from such representation. Lastly, we will consider practices of countervisuality or ways in which the photographic may be enlisted in resistant representations of racialized and gendered subjects. In this last section of the course, particular attention will be given to countervisuality as related to representations of Latinidad.

PHIL 478, Ethics After the Holocaust

Nicolas de Warren

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; Continental Philosophy; Critical Philosophy of Race; 20th Century 

Can humanity experience an historical rupture of such an ethical magnitude that we no longer understand what it is to be human, whether there still is a God, and how we might still co-exist politically and ethically in peace? This course explores various philosophical responses to this basic question in the aftermath of the Holocaust. This exploration begins with the question of naming itself: can we even name this unspeakable catastrophe – Auschwitz, the Shoah, the Holocaust? Can we even think, let alone speak the philosophical significance and consequence of the Holocaust? In light of this question, this course explores the meaning of ethical testimony, mourning, representation, theological redemption, gratuitous suffering (torture), moral atrocity, and absolute evil in the writings of Arendt, Agamben, Levinas, Jonas, Lyotard, Levi, Blanchot, and others.  

PHIL 503, Ethics Seminar

John Christman

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics

This course is designed to support students’ efforts to become competent in “mainstream” ethical theories and controversies.  The class will focus on both standard normative ethical frameworks (utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue, and care) as well as meta-ethical issues, with specific attention to foundational philosophical texts by thinkers such as Aristotle, Hume, and Kant.  In addition, discussion of critical responses to these traditions will be threaded throughout the course, responses motivated for example by considerations of gender, race, and identity.

PHIL 508, Social and Political Philosophy Seminar: The Ethics of Migration

Desiree Lim

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; 20th Century

How should states treat immigrants and would-be immigrants?  On what grounds can immigration be justly restricted, and through what means?  This course engages with these complex questions by offering a broad overview of key issues in the ethics of migration and their relation to public policy.  Guided by the tools of contemporary political philosophy, you will reflect closely upon a series of pressing issues including the basis of the state’s right to exclude non-citizens, the prospect of open borders and their tensions with egalitarian justice, the idea of human right to free movement, and the rights of refugees and undocumented migrants.

PHIL 539, Critical Philosophy of Race

Robert Bernasconi

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Critical Philosophy of Race; 19th Century

When and how were the dominant understandings of racism(s) formed and to what extent were these accounts of racism deployed to conceal the genesis of structural racism as a global phenomenon? More simply, whose interests did these accounts of racism serve? By examining the ways in which  travel reports, legal documents, court cases, and statistics were used as instruments intended to shape the process of racialization of modernity, the course will demonstrate how a genealogical approach to the concepts of race and of racism can perform a critical function in the understanding of racism(s) today. We will first examine how, among Europeans, legally enshrined racial and religious designations were connected until, especially in the context of North American slavery, the possibility of religious conversion separated religion from race with implications that are still felt today in debates about whether antisemitism and Islamophobia should be thought of as racisms. We will next investigate how concerns about racial/religious purity in the early modern period in Spain and in Mexico were transformed as people appealed to biology to justify more stringent restrictions on marriage until the introduction in the United States of the one drop rule and the adoption, most notably in Nazi Germany, of eugenic sterilizations. In this part of the course we will also look both at how slavery has impacted accounts of gender (Spillers, Hartman) and at how the very different attitudes to race mixing at different times and in different parts of the world shaped discussions of race leading to the strange anomaly whereby there are some people who can travel by plane from East to West one can be white, métisse, and Black all on the same day (Jared Sexton). Thirdly, by highlighting the shifting census categories used in the United States, India, Mexico, and South Africa we will look to identify why at different times certain specific racial labels were promoted above others and how those labels impacted shifting citizenship qualifications, whether defined by descent, territory, or language. In this context we will look at how beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing to the present day attempts have been made to frame immigration policies in an effort to racialize specific populations. Throughout the course we will include the study of brief selections from more theoretical texts with the aim of showing how various thinkers by their conceptual innovations have helped to transform how the material conditions came to be seen. The authors to be investigated include: John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Saul Ascher, Ottobah Cugoano, Arthur de Gobineau, Antenor Firmin, Antonio Garcia Cubas, Eugen Dühring, W. E. B. Du Bois, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, C. L. R. James, Steve Biko, and Angela Davis. Students will be encouraged to bring their own areas of expertise to bear in broadening the discussion and in relating these various genealogies to current racisms.

PHIL 553, Early Greek Philosophy: On Disciplinary Origins

Christopher Moore

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ancient

We will study the fragments of the sixth- and fifth-century bce thinkers called phusiologoi/phusikoi/philosophountes by Aristotle (e.g., Pherecydes, Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus) and sophistai by Plato (e.g., Protagoras, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Gorgias, Hippias), with an eye to their methods, concerns, and other distinguishing features of their practices. Since the fourth-century bce, some of these thinkers have been grouped as “early Greek philosophers” because later philosophoi considered them their direct disciplinary forebears, others because they shared materially in the interests, practices, and conversations of such people. Our study requires attending to related Greek intellectual practices, including medicine, constitutional reform, and myth-rectification. It also requires knowing something of the intellectual practices of neighboring societies, including the astronomy, cosmogony, mathematics, and record-keeping of Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt, which influenced the Greeks, as well as appreciating the rise of cognate traditions in India and China. These contexts will help us to ask, of the Greek situation, about the position of ethical reflection and political critique in the holistic practice of theoria; our thinkers’ consciousness of argumentative structures and dialectical engagement; their practice of “ways of life”; their investigation into selfhood and its relation to knowledge and other normative notions; and the use of fragments of ancient Greeks by later authors. They will also help us to ask, more generally, about the significance, if any, of our studying early Greek philosophy; the notion of culturally-bound disciplinary “origins”; and the meaning of the practice of the history of philosophy. Thus, this class has three goals – (i) Instrumental: it will help students gain firsthand understanding of a group of thinkers who have been discussed “philosophically” or otherwise by “philosophical” writers for the past 2400 years; (ii) Exemplary: the Greek case is a useful one for thinking through the global phenomenon of disciplinary formation; and (iii) Intrinsic: the authors studied here reward and even refine the skills of close investigation and cross-domain thinking familiar to students of philosophy.

BIOET 540, Bioethics/Biopower

Charles Scott

Possible course requirements fulfilled: Ethics; 20th Century

The word, bioethics, is often thought to address ethical issues found primarily in medical science and practice.  The work done within this orientation is certainly important both theoretically and practically.  In our seminar, however, we will expand the range of investigation into meanings of bios (life) and ethos (ways people live together) with the conviction that “bioethics” rightfully applies to social, environmental, and institutional lives.  Values and social structures are fraught with implications for how people live together, i.e. how their ethos functions in connections with the well-being of those who live in it.  Quality of life, the defining values of an ethos, and specialized knowledge are intertwined and always involve issues of power.

The primary purposes of the seminar will be: 1. to develop an understanding of bioethics and the workings of biopower by considering the ways people’s lives interconnect and the relations of power that infuse, influence or control those interconnections, and 2. to engage the questions: how might we speak of the unspeakable and cultivate awareness of the ways lineages ineffably permeate and function in our individual and collective lives?  How far can specialized knowledge go as we think of the ways we live together and those dimensions of living that go beyond the reach of rationality and norms?  How might we put in question the boundaries established by our individual identities?  In this context we will consider works by Michel Foucault and Gloria Anzaldúa.

We will pay special attention to Foucault’s account of “unreason” in Madness and Civilization and to the historical formations of such institutions as asylums, systems of justice, and prisons.  And we will pay special attention to Anzaldúa’s Light in the Dark/ Luz en lo Ascuro and her experience of “nepantla” in the context of unsayables and transformation of identities.

The seminar will be taught interactively with emphasis on focused attention to assigned material and discussion that arises out of our engagement with that material.  Students will be encouraged to bring to bear their specific disciplinary interests in both the discussions and their term papers.

Of related interest:

AFAM 501 – Seminar in African American Studies

Abraham Khan

A survey of the academic field of African American Studies.

AFAM 597 – Special Topics “Race and the Health Sciences”

David McBride

No description is available for this course yet.

BIOET 501, Perspectives and Methods in Bioethics

Jonathan Marks

This course explores the broad range of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches employed in bioethics, and their application to a variety of contemporary issues. The course also examines the intellectual, cultural, and disciplinary history of bioethics, as well as current debates about the politics and ethics of bioethics and health humanities. We will also examine the intersections of bioethics, law, and policy, as well as the bioethical implications of recent work in behavioral science, neuroscience, and disability studies. This course will give graduate students in the humanities an opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary conversation with students in the life, health, and social sciences. Since the course is taught in small seminar format, the content will be tailored to the interests of participants.  Students are also encouraged to enroll in the complementary course, BIOET 502 Spring 2019 Perspectives in Macro-Bioethics, which explores systemic and institutional perspectives, and focuses on public health ethics.

WMNST 502 – Global Perspectives on Feminism

Melissa Wright

Exploration of feminist issues in a global perspective, including debates in history, ethics, and political feminism.

WMNST 507 – Feminist Theory

Courtney Morris

Development of feminist theory and its relationship to history in terms of critique of family, sexuality, and gender stratification.

WMNST 516/HIST 516 – US Women’s and Gender History

Lori Ginzberg

A critical analysis of gender and theories of gender in selected American historical contexts.

WMNST 522 – Gender and Sexuality

Hilary Malatino

This course offers students an interdisciplinary overview of the complex topics of gender and sexuality. Employing various theoretical and disciplinary perspectives including feminist and queer theory, historical and sociological perspectives, visual culture, and post-colonial discourse, this course gives students a broad understanding of key historical and contemporary issues in the arena of gender and sexuality. This course engages the following themes: gender and sexual identities; the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and class; discourses of heteronormitivity & homonormativity; the body, body politics, and bodily violence; contemporary movements for gender and sexual justice; racial, gender and sexual politics; performances and representations of gender and sexuality; health and medicalization; global LGBTA human rights issues; the (re)production of gender and sexual difference; labors of gender and sexuality; and the relationship between gender, sexuality and the State. Students in this course will develop a keen understanding of how these themes operate in the discourse of gender and sexuality. Throughout this course, students will examine a variety of diverse texts—theoretical, historical ethnographic, literary, visual, and sonic—to gain a comprehensive introduction to the topic of gender and sexuality. This graduate seminar emphasizes discussion, writing, and research.

WMNST 542/C I 542 Girls’ Cultures and Popular Cultures

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh

The study of girls and their relationship with popular culture lies within the interdisciplinary field of Girlhood Studies which draws on established areas of Women’s Studies, Children’s / Childhood studies, Cultural Studies and Educational Studies. This seminar explores girls’ cultures in different textual and material forms including books, toys, magazines, and new media.

Students will employ feminist cultural theories to compare historical and contemporary girls cultures in relation to educational research and practice. This will provide a framework to locate girls at the center of research and action in order for graduate students to engage in methodologies that are not simply about girls but “for”, “with” and “by” girls. Key topics include the misperception of girls (popular) culture as only a contemporary phenomenon, the role of girls as consumers plus producers of culture, and recurrent issues in girls cultures such as sexualization and hyperfeminity.

WMNST 550/AFR 550 African Feminisms

Alicia Decker

African feminisms are deeply rooted in the continent’s rich historical traditions and diverse cultural contexts. In this interdisciplinary graduate seminar, students will become familiar with the theoretical frameworks that guide African feminist scholarship, as well as the activist histories from which they emerged. This course will consider the epistemological foundations of African feminist thought and how they differ from feminisms in other parts of the world. This course will also examine key areas of conjuncture – how African feminisms map on to larger transnational movements. Particular emphasis will be placed on the fluidity of African gender systems, the ways in which African women have negotiated politics, religion, militarism, sexuality, and violence, and the role of creativity, art, and beauty in nurturing and sustaining activist momentum. Students in the course can expect to engage with a number of different types of texts: documentaries, feature films, memoirs, novels, newspapers, scholarly books, and articles.

WMNST 597 – Special Topics “Feminist Pedagogies”

Jill Wood

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar introduces students to the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological foundations of feminist pedagogy. We will examine theoretical frameworks of teaching and learning that promote justice and social change (i.e. praxis), as well as feminist pedagogical strategies that can be utilized within and beyond the classroom (i.e. practice). Students can expect to engage with various critical and liberatory pedagogies, pedagogies of identity and difference, and signature pedagogies. They will learn how feminist epistemologies shape (and are shaped by) ethical classroom practice, focusing on specific ways in which to cultivate and nurture feminist teaching and learning. In addition, students will also learn how to develop a syllabus and teaching philosophy.

Spring 2018

PHIL 457, Topics in the 20th Century Philosophy: Bergson’s Ethics

Leonard Lawlor

The final sentence of Chapter One of Bergson’s 1932 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion states: “Let us give to the word biology the very wide meaning it should have, and will perhaps have one day, and let us say in conclusion that all morality… is in essence biological.” This course aims to understand this sentence. Because Bergson conceived The Two Sources as a continuation of Creative Evolution, we shall start with Bergson’s 1907 Creative Evolution. Here we shall see not only Bergson criticisms of evolution conceived through finalism or mechanism, but we shall also and more importantly see his conception of life: “life in general is mobility.” It is this definition of life that orients Bergson in The Two Sources. The definition leads to his distinction between the open and the closed, the opening being free mobility, and the closed being inhibited mobility. Therefore we shall read Creative Evolution with an eye ahead to The Two Sources. The Two Sources will be our real focus. The basic question we are asking is: what is Bergson’s ethics?

PHIL 479, Critical Theory

Amy Allen

This course will focus on the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School through its first three ‘generations’, with an emphasis on the work of first generation thinkers Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse.  We will consider a range of themes and topics, including methodological reflections on what critical theory is and how it differs from “traditional” theory, how critical theorists engaged with the traditions of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Nietzschean genealogy to develop a distinctive critique of contemporary society, how this critical project has been transformed in the last fifty years by contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, and how the prospects look for the future of critical theory, almost 100 years after its inception. 

PHIL 555, Modern Philosophy

Emily Grosholz

The Seventeenth Century in Europe witnessed a revival of Neo-Platonism and Atomism that interacted in complex ways with Scholasticism. The interaction affects not only epistemology, but also cosmology as well as the study of living things. We will examine the ways in which a novel account of method affects the account of knowledge, the cosmos and the life sciences in the works of Descartes, Gassendi, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley and Leibniz.

PHIL 560, African Philosophy

Kathryn T. Gines

This course explores and analyzes existing and emerging dominant themes in Africana philosophical discourse. It examines the construction of the Africana Philosophy canon and dominant themes that emerge within that canon while also identifying new directions for this important area of philosophy. With this in mind graduate students will explore central foundational articles and books that signaled the rise of Africana Philosophy, edited collections and anthologies in Africana Philosophy, existing course syllabi, and more recent trajectories in Africana Philosophy in the 21st Century. Furthermore, the course will make central not only the contributions of early and contemporary male philosophers and activist-intellectuals to this tradition, but also critical women philosophical figures (who have often been marginalized by their male counterparts).

PHIL 564, Major Figures in 20th Century Philosophy: Gigantomachia peri tês ousias, Husserl and Heidegger

Nicolas de Warren

One could define “great” philosophers as philosophers who rarely talk directly to each other even as they never cease to speak against and with each other. In the history of Western philosophy, the philosophical confrontation between Husserl and Heidegger ranks unquestionably as one the most enduring along with other momentous conflicts of philosophical thought: Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel. The aim of this seminar is to orchestrate a philosophical confrontation between Husserl and Heidegger – a confrontation that shaped and continues to shape philosophy in the 20th and 21st-centuries. The basis for this seminar is a reading and critical discussion of Husserl’s Ideen I and Heidegger’s Being and Time. The seminar will begin with the unfinished article on phenomenology by Husserl and Heidegger for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Of related interest:

BIOET 502, Macro-Perspectives in Bioethics: Systemic Issues in Public Health Ethics

Jonathan H. Marks

What are public health ethics, population health ethics, and macro-bioethics?  In this course, we explore a variety of topics, with an emphasis on systemic ethical issues.  We will address theories of justice and health; the relationship between public health ethics, health policy, and health law; the framing of public health problems and their solutions (from “personal responsibility” to “social and environmental determinants”); the ethical obligations of institutional actors—including the WHO; comparative health care systems; the global burden of disease—including NCDs—and the distribution of health care resources; access to essential medicines; the ethics of vaccination policy; the ethics of stigma, “nudging,” and other forms of health promotion; the ethics of pandemics, public health emergencies, and disaster response; the ethics of humanitarian intervention; health disparities and inequalities; systemic issues in empirical public health research; food systems, food security, food sovereignty, and health; the relationship between human rights, human security, and public health; the built environment, occupational environments, and health; environmental toxins, “fracking,” and health; climate change and health.  This course is an interdisciplinary course required for the dual-title Ph.D. in bioethics.  However, we welcome interested students from other programs—including graduate students in public health, biobehavioral health, health policy, clinical and translational science, food and nutrition, health humanities, life sciences, communication science, environmental science; and students in law, international affairs, medicine, and nursing.

PLSC 581, History of Political Theory: The Political Philosophy of Jeans-Jacques Rousseau

John Christman

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is an enigmatic, complex but enormously influential figure in the history of philosophy and western culture.  His impact on Kant, the development of the Enlightenment, the emergence of romanticism, and political events such as the French Revolution are well noted.  His own life and personality, as well, have been the subject of fascination for generations. Yet, it is extremely difficult to specify precisely what his settled views were on various fundamental issues.  Rousseau hovers uneasily between representing the continuation of the Enlightenment ideal in a proto-Kantian mode and presenting an anti-Enlightenment model for the de-centering of reason due to the precarious contingency of our education, socialization, emotional structure, and anthropological history.

This course will conduct a systematic study of Rousseau’s thought, with special emphasis on his moral, social, and political philosophy.  Of particular importance will be his views on such issues as the self and its relation to reason, the notion of perfectebilité, the social contract and the general will, and the construction of the self in the context of social and historical dynamics.  Attention will also be paid to Rousseau’s unique rhetorical style and philosophical method.  In particular we will be concerned with the relation between (auto-) biography and the development and presentation of theoretical and political commitments.

Fall 2017

PHIL 456, Topics in Nineteenth Century Philosophy: Nietzsche

Charles Scott

Nineteenth Century Philosophy, Continental Philosophy:  Nietzsche’s writings are among the most influential in the 19^th Century.  One of the reasons for that influence is found in his questions and critiques concerning the values and practices that dominate Western cultures in combination with his development of a genealogical approach in which he traces the complex development of those values and practices.  In this course we will engage in close readings of Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals.  In Beyond Good and Evil we will thematize the elusive meaning of ‘beyond’ and the ways Nietzsche rethinks the meaning of transcendence throughout the book.  In On the Genealogy of Morals, in addition to careful analysis of his specific claims and the values imbedded in those claims, we will consider his conception of genealogy and the impact of ‘beyond’ in his conception of genealogical history and time.

Over the course of this class we will have occasions to consider selected passages from other of Nietzsche’s works such as The Birth of Tragedy, Joyful Wisdom, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and a short essay, “The Dionysian Worldview,” that he wrote early in his career (1873).

The course will be taught as an interactive seminar in which all students participate.  In each class, after I make introductory and background remarks we will work on selected paragraphs from the assigned reading.  I will ask individuals to read a paragraph aloud and articulate what it means in its context.  Further discussion will often develop from the first interpretation as we explore the questions and issues we have regarding what Nietzsche is saying and the implications of what he says.  We will all have many questions and uncertainties about what we read, and our goals for the classes are to develop an exploratory, collaborative effort to understand Nietzsche’s thought and to enjoy ourselves along the way.

PHIL 503, Ethics: Relationality and Ethics

Sarah Clark Miller

What is the significance of relationality for moral life? This course will engage philosophical issues surrounding the concept of relationality in ethics by asking both about the moral meanings of the specific relationships in which we stand with others and about the constitutive nature of relationality for normativity itself. We will examine why and how relationality might ask us to reconsider and require us to reformulate certain key ethical concepts such as agency, dignity, and well-being. Texts for the course will draw primarily from conversations in contemporary moral philosophy and feminist philosophy.

Specific course topics will include friendship, love, partiality vs. impartiality, care and dependency relations, special obligations, agent-relative vs. agent-neutral reasons for action, how to resolve conflicts between personal and impersonal moral considerations, the role of moral emotions (e.g., respect and sympathy) in our relationships, the justice vs. care debate, and patterns of moral reasoning that incorporate partiality and particularity. We will also consider philosophical approaches to several specific relationships, such as the parent-child relationship, marriage, and ethical relationships between human and non-human animals. Some key authors we will study in the course will be Brake on marriage, Kittay and Noddings on care ethics, Haslanger on the parent-child relationship, Haraway and Anderson on ethical relationships between human and non-human animals, Helm and Velleman on love, Scheffler and Wolf on partiality and impartiality, and Hursthouse on friendship.

Students who wish to develop ethics as an area of competence may be interested in this course, as relationality will function as a focal point through which students will learn about major historical approaches in ethical theory (e.g., virtue ethics, consequentialism, and deontology), as well as multiple themes of significance within and between these approaches.

PHIL 553, Ancient Philosophy Seminar, “Aristotle on Time”

Mark Sentesy

“[The Physics] determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking.” – M. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason 62-3.

This course begins by reading Aristotle’s four chapters on time, enriches and challenges his account by reading pivotal responses by thinkers from Plotinus to Heidegger and Bergson, as well as key texts in recent Aristotle scholarship, and then returns to a closer reading of Aristotle’s text at the end of the course. The goal is to develop an original interpretation of Aristotle’s account of time by drawing on its philosophical history.

Aristotle gave us the earliest direct examination of the nature and being of time that has come down to us. It details an original and radical view, that time is motion insofar as motion has an arithmos, a number or amount.

But the text is hermeneutically unstable. Since Aristotle’s procedure is Socratic, developing a positive account only through formulating and working with impasses, these chapters have been a deep and complex resource for later thinkers. It starts with the problem of whether or not time exists at all, and ends with the problem of how time depends on the soul. Contemporary debates about time still take their point of departure from the perplexities Aristotle identified.

PHIL 562, Major Figures in Modern Philosophy: Kant

Uygar Abacci

This course offers an intensive study of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We will carry out this study on at least four complementary levels: i) the broader historical context of Kant’s critical project as responding to rationalist school metaphysics in 18^th century Germany, on the one hand, and reconciling different aspects of empiricism and rationalism, on the other hand; ii) the development of Kant’s thought from his precritical works in the 1750’s and 1760’s through his “critical turn” in early 1770’s and his presentation of the critical system in the 1780’s; iii) the specific major doctrines and arguments presented in the Critique, such as transcendental idealism, theory of knowledge, transcendental illusion, and how they serve his idea of a critical philosophy; and iv) the reactions to Kant’s critical project in German Idealism as well as in 20^th century German and French traditions.

PHIL 564, Major Figures in 20th Century Philosophy

Ted Toadvine

Course Title: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.  The core of our course will be a complete reading of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the work for which he was best known during his lifetime and that established him as the leading phenomenologist of his generation. Here Merleau-Ponty develops his distinctive interpretation of phenomenology’s method in conversation with Gestalt theory and research in psychology and neurology. Framing his inquiry with a parallel critique of empiricism and intellectualism for their unquestioned commitment to a ready-made, objective world, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the essentially embodied, expressive, and historical aspects of perceptual experience across a wide range of existential dimensions, including sexuality, language, space, nature, intersubjectivity, time, and freedom. We will situate Phenomenology of Perception in the wider context of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre, his relationship with major interlocutors (e.g., Husserl, Bergson, Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre), and the critical reception of his thought by Foucault, Levinas, and Derrida, among others. Phenomenology of Perception is often read today either as a rejection of transcendental philosophy in favor of a “naturalized” phenomenology, on the one hand, or as still too wedded to subjectivist and correlationist tendencies of phenomenological idealism, on the other. Against these interpretations, our reading will follow a network of sub-themes running through this text: radical reflection’s debt to the prereflective, experience as a transcendental field, the anonymous and prepersonal time of the body, and the immemorial past of nature. These offer rich resources for thinking the human place in nature that resist reduction  either to naturalism or to correlationist subjectivity.

WMNST 597, Feminism, Intersectionality, Decolonialism: The Work of María Lugones

Nancy Tuana

Esta es escritura hablada cara a cara.  This is writing spoken face to face.  Escritura solitaria por falta de compañía que busca solaz en el dialogo.  Writing that is solitary for lack of company and looks for solace in dialogue.  Monólogo extendido hacía afuera ye hablado en muchas lenguas.  Monologue spoken outwardly and in tongues.

                                    María Lugones  “Hablando Cara a Cara/Speaking Face to Face”

 This course provides an opportunity to study the lineages of the work of Latina feminist theorist, María Lugones.  Her thought has been central to the formation of Latina feminist philosophy and theory and has been highly influential in liberatory work in both feminist and decolonial theory.  Her writings span a wide range of topics including importance of the affective, “Hard-to-Handle Anger,” the interrelations between oppressing ßà resisting relations, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” the role of world-travelling “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” street-walker theorizing as a way to bridge theory and activism, “Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker/ Estrategias Tácticas de la Callejera,” and the modern colonial gender system, “The Coloniality of Gender.”

The seminar will enable participants to develop a foundational understanding of Lugones’ thought in anticipation of a conference that will be held at Penn State in May 2018.  Seminar participants will be encouraged to develop and submit an abstract to the conference.  The conference provides a unique opportunity to continue the work of the seminar as it will likely attract top Latina/o thinkers, both feminist and decolonial.

Of related interest:

BIOET 501, Perspectives and Methods in Bioethics

Jonathan Marks

This course explores the broad range of disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological approaches employed in bioethics today through their application to a variety of contemporary issues. The course also examines the intellectual, cultural, and disciplinary history of bioethics, as well as current debates about the politics and ethics of bioethics.  Theories and methods in bioethics will be applied to a variety of topics in bioethics drawn from the primary disciplines of the graduate students. We will also examine the intersections of bioethics, law, and policy, as well as the bioethical implications of recent work in behavioral science, neuroscience, and disability studies.  This course will give graduate students in the humanities an opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary conversation with students in the life, health, and social sciences.  Since the course is taught in small seminar format, the content will be tailored to the interests of the students.  Students are also encouraged to enroll in the complementary course in Spring 2017, BIOET 502 Perspectives in Macro-Bioethics (which focuses on systemic and institutional perspectives in bioethics, on public health ethics, and on questions of distributive justice in a variety of health care systems.)