Class Schedules

The Philosopher Aristotle said "without friends no one would choose to live, though they had all other goods". (Nicomachean Ethics, 1055a 5-7). It is not clear exactly what Aristotle means by this, but the high value he gives to friendship and love is shared by many other ancient Greek and Chinese Philosophers, such as Plato, Epicurus, and Confucius. This class will begin with an overview of central themes in ancient and contemporary philosophy -- epistemology, metaphysics and ethics -- and then undertake a detailed investigation of friendship and love: Why are friendship and love valuable? How do we become friends, and when should we break off friendships? With whom can we be friends: family members? pets? on-line friends? AI? Is ’romantic’ love real or merely a social construction? Should we love only one other, or many, or everyone? Could it be good for us to have no friends, or should we have as many friends as possible? How should we think philosophically about polyamory and asexuality? What role, if any, does gender play in four conceptions of friendship and love? What, if anything, do we owe to our friends and lovers? We will consider texts by Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Sappho, Confucius, Montaigne, Kant, Emerson, de Beauvoir, Sartre, bell hooks, as well as several contemporary philosophical perspectives on friendship and love. We will also read works of literature, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and love poems of Emily Dickinson, and view together several films, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Your grade will be based on three short papers, two ’take-home’ examinations, reading responses (’convos’), and attendance/participation.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an intro-level undergraduate course aimed at providing an introduction to several main topics and issues in philosophy. To guide this survey, the course will ask and investigate four main questions about human life and its limits (set out by Kant): what can I know?; what must I do?; what may I hope?; and what is a human?. To answer these questions, we will cover important figures in the western philosophical tradition from across history – from Plato and Aristotle in the 3rd-4th century BCE, to Sartre and Beauvoir in the early 20th century, to contemporary figures of our day. In addition to investigating these core questions, the course will ensure that students are able to see their relevance to current issues and investigations and facilitate students’ ability to draw from this material in their future endeavors (be they philosophical or not).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The Philosopher Aristotle said "without friends no one would choose to live, though they had all other goods". (Nicomachean Ethics, 1055a 5-7). It is not clear exactly what Aristotle means by this, but the high value he gives to friendship and love is shared by many other ancient Greek and Chinese Philosophers, such as Plato, Epicurus, and Confucius. This class will begin with an overview of central themes in ancient and contemporary philosophy -- epistemology, metaphysics and ethics -- and then undertake a detailed investigation of friendship and love: Why are friendship and love valuable? How do we become friends, and when should we break off friendships? With whom can we be friends: family members? pets? on-line friends? AI? Is ’romantic’ love real or merely a social construction? Should we love only one other, or many, or everyone? Could it be good for us to have no friends, or should we have as many friends as possible? How should we think philosophically about polyamory and asexuality? What role, if any, does gender play in four conceptions of friendship and love? What, if anything, do we owe to our friends and lovers? We will consider texts by Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Sappho, Confucius, Montaigne, Kant, Emerson, de Beauvoir, Sartre, bell hooks, as well as several contemporary philosophical perspectives on friendship and love. We will also read works of literature, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and love poems of Emily Dickinson, and view together several films, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Your grade will be based on three short papers, two ’take-home’ examinations, reading responses (’convos’), and attendance/participation.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

An introduction to formal methods for evaluating deductive arguments. Topics include formal fallacies, decision procedures, translation of arguments to argument forms, and natural deduction proofs in propositional and predicate logic.

General Education Requirements:
Quantitative Thinking Q1

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An introduction to formal methods for evaluating deductive arguments. Topics include formal fallacies, decision procedures, translation of arguments to argument forms, and natural deduction proofs in propositional and predicate logic.

General Education Requirements:
Quantitative Thinking Q1

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

What matters in life?  Is pleasure the only thing that matters?  If so, whose pleasure should I pursue-just my own, my family's, or everyone's? Does suffering matter, too? What about the suffering of non-human animals? Is it okay for me to make animals suffer in order for me to enjoy the pleasure of eating their flesh? Or how about the suffering of people who are really far away from me-say, on another continent? Is it okay for me to spend money on cool stuff for myself when instead I could donate it to help people who are suffering very badly far away?  If things in life other than pleasure matter too, what are they? People who oppose torture think that it's wrong to hurt one person really badly even in order to prevent a large number of people from being hurt.  Are they right?  Is it always wrong to treat someone as merely a means to an end? Is it in general wrong to do things to people without their consent?  Why?  When do people deserve to be praised or blamed for their actions? What kind of person should I be?  Should I try to be happy? Or should I try to be virtuous? Is virtue its own reward? Or are we all inevitably faced with a choice between being virtuous and being happy?  If we are faced with that choice, which one should we pick?  In Ethics, we will talk about these questions, and others.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What matters in life?  Is pleasure the only thing that matters?  If so, whose pleasure should I pursue-just my own, my family's, or everyone's? Does suffering matter, too? What about the suffering of non-human animals? Is it okay for me to make animals suffer in order for me to enjoy the pleasure of eating their flesh? Or how about the suffering of people who are really far away from me-say, on another continent? Is it okay for me to spend money on cool stuff for myself when instead I could donate it to help people who are suffering very badly far away?  If things in life other than pleasure matter too, what are they? People who oppose torture think that it's wrong to hurt one person really badly even in order to prevent a large number of people from being hurt.  Are they right?  Is it always wrong to treat someone as merely a means to an end? Is it in general wrong to do things to people without their consent?  Why?  When do people deserve to be praised or blamed for their actions? What kind of person should I be?  Should I try to be happy? Or should I try to be virtuous? Is virtue its own reward? Or are we all inevitably faced with a choice between being virtuous and being happy?  If we are faced with that choice, which one should we pick?  In Ethics, we will talk about these questions, and others.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an intro-course aimed at providing an overview of the pre-classical and classical periods of Ancient Greek philosophy. Throughout the course, students will become familiar with the major works and views of three of the most influential philosophers of all time: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In many ways, these three figures set the tone for all western philosophy that comes afterwards, identifying key topics with which it is concerned as well as methods and means by which philosophy is done to this day. These core throughlines in western philosophy still offer valuable insight into the means of critical investigation while also showing how much (or little) has changed since their creation. This course will a) familiarize students with the central topics and means developed by our core figures, b) ensure that students are able to see their relevance to current issues and investigations and c) ensure that students are able to draw from this material in their future endeavors (be they philosophical or not).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Bioethics deals with a variety of ethical issues arising in the context of medical care and biomedical research. These issues include informed consent, euthanasia, reproductive rights, confidentiality, and the distribution of health care resources. The course uses ethical theory to shed light on issues in medicine, and issues in medicine to illuminate ethical theory.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course considers the question: what philosophical questions arise with respect to the law, and how should we answer them? In the first part of the course, we'll consider philosophical questions related to making laws. For instance, is it permissible to create laws that are primarily aimed at preventing people from harming themselves, or should laws only be aimed at preventing people from harming others? In the second part of the course, we'll consider philosophical questions related to breaking laws. For example, to what extent are civil disobedience - and uncivil disobedience - justified? Along the way, we'll discuss myriad issues of serious contemporary relevance: the abolition of criminal punishment; the complexities of legal responses to sexual misconduct; and the complex relationship between morality and the law.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Are humans violent by nature? Are wars, terrorism, and conflict inevitable or avoidable? Is violence ever justified? Is peace an important value or ideal and if so what moral obligations does it imply? This course explores theories of peace and violence from western and world philosophical traditions. We will consider philosophical perspectives on peace and violence as applied to topics such as just war theory, political violence and terrorism, threats of nuclear war, gun violence, protests and civil disobedience, moral vegetarianism, and environmental activism. We will also explore theories of pacifism and conflict resolution, and possibilities for philosophy (and philosophers) to contribute to promoting peace and preventing violence in local and global communities.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Taught in English.“Free choice is the only miracle the moderns recognize” (Karol Berger). Freedom has for some time now occupied an ambiguous place in our collective state of mind: while the Right takes to the streets in the name of freedom, MLK’s “free at last” continues to resonate in the Left’s calls for social justice. Both see freedom in a distinctly modern light, as a naturally given or innate property of humans as individual agents of choice. In this course, we will work to gain a measure of distance on this common view of freedom by counterposing it with premodern concepts as well as modern strains of thought that go against the grain of classical liberalism. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, not until the Enlightenment of the 16th and 17th centuries did anyone see freedom as inherent in or even attainable by an individual human; and from Hegel and Marx to Adorno, Badiou, and Agamben, freedom means something quite different from what we think of as individual free will: not something I have by default and that others might limit, but something I need others for in order to realize. Readings from Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Du Bois, Sartre, Lorde, Mbembe, Badiou, Ahmad Yousif, Toni Morrison, and others. Several reading responses; one short and two mid-length papers, with revisions. No prerequisites, but be prepared to work your way through some densely argued texts.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Have you ever thought to yourself - What should I be doing with my life? And what should all of us be doing with our lives, in our local communities and our world at large? Generations of South Asian philosophers have addressed these fundamental moral and political questions. In this class, we'll be tackling these big life questions, seeing what lessons we can learn from the rich philosophical thought of South Asia. Topics might include: Buddhist arguments that the non-existence of a self should lead us to care about other people's well-being just as much as our own well-being; arguments for and against abolishing the caste system as a system of social organization; South Asian feminist ideas and practices; and more.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an intro-level undergraduate course aimed at providing an introduction to several main topics and issues in philosophy. To guide this survey, the course will ask and investigate four main questions about human life and its limits (set out by Kant): what can I know?; what must I do?; what may I hope?; and what is a human?. To answer these questions, we will cover important figures in the western philosophical tradition from across history: from Plato and Aristotle in the 3rd-4th century BCE, to Sartre and Beauvoir in the early 20th century, to contemporary figures of our day. In addition to investigating these core questions, the course will ensure that students are able to see their relevance to current issues and investigations and facilitate students’ ability to draw from this material in their future endeavors (be they philosophical or not).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an intro-level undergraduate course aimed at providing an introduction to several main topics and issues in philosophy. To guide this survey, the course will ask and investigate four main questions about human life and its limits (set out by Kant): what can I know?; what must I do?; what may I hope?; and what is a human?. To answer these questions, we will cover important figures in the western philosophical tradition from across history: from Plato and Aristotle in the 3rd-4th century BCE, to Sartre and Beauvoir in the early 20th century, to contemporary figures of our day. In addition to investigating these core questions, the course will ensure that students are able to see their relevance to current issues and investigations and facilitate students’ ability to draw from this material in their future endeavors (be they philosophical or not).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How should you live your life? This course is dedicated to exploring that BIG question. One dimension of that question is: what is good for you? Or in other words, what makes a life go well? Is it all dependent on the amount of pleasure and pain that you experience? All about how many desires of yours are satisfied? Or something else? However we answer such questions, we might also wonder - is morality just about self-interest? If not, what else is it about? And so another dimension of the question of how to live is: what makes an action morally right or wrong? Is it all about the consequences - for you or other people? Is it about treating people as more than just a means to get what you want? Is it about virtue? About caring for others? Is morality a messy combination of all of these things, and more? No matter what we think morality is, we can all admit: sometimes we morally mess up. And so we must wonder: what do we do in the wake of wrongdoing? Should we express blame? If so, when, and how? If I myself am the wrongdoer, can I ever forgive myself? This course is about questions like these. Along the way, we'll consider myriad real-world ethical issues - how to treat animals; how to live a life with meaning; whether we have obligations to donate to charity; what it means to give consent to sex; how to feel about and respond to our complicity in various structural injustices; and more. Readings will include not just philosophical papers, but also films, short stories, comedy, and popular essays. If you want a chance to reflect deeply on how to live - a chance to work together to explore the big questions in life - this course is for you.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How should you live your life? This course is dedicated to exploring that BIG question. One dimension of that question is: what is good for you? Or in other words, what makes a life go well? Is it all dependent on the amount of pleasure and pain that you experience? All about how many desires of yours are satisfied? Or something else? However we answer such questions, we might also wonder - is morality just about self-interest? If not, what else is it about? And so another dimension of the question of how to live is: what makes an action morally right or wrong? Is it all about the consequences - for you or other people? Is it about treating people as more than just a means to get what you want? Is it about virtue? About caring for others? Is morality a messy combination of all of these things, and more? No matter what we think morality is, we can all admit: sometimes we morally mess up. And so we must wonder: what do we do in the wake of wrongdoing? Should we express blame? If so, when, and how? If I myself am the wrongdoer, can I ever forgive myself? This course is about questions like these. Along the way, we'll consider myriad real-world ethical issues - how to treat animals; how to live a life with meaning; whether we have obligations to donate to charity; what it means to give consent to sex; how to feel about and respond to our complicity in various structural injustices; and more. Readings will include not just philosophical papers, but also films, short stories, comedy, and popular essays. If you want a chance to reflect deeply on how to live - a chance to work together to explore the big questions in life - this course is for you.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Did Confucius really say all those things? What does it mean to call something "zen"? The popularity of mindfulness and meditation made "Eastern Philosophy" fashionable, but what exactly does that entail? This class will be an introduction to classical Chinese philosophy, focusing on Confucianism and its rivals (Daoism, Mohism, Buddhism). Many schools of thought in East Asia offered competing views on how to live a good life; we will explore these views and chart how they responded to each other. We'll also see how Chinese thoughts were received and developed by Korean and Japanese philosophers and assess ongoing influences of these philosophies in East Asia and beyond. Texts with English translations.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Emerging in the 1970s, the field of environmental ethics began by sparking a rich line of philosophical inquiry largely focused on the moral status of the natural world and the non-human entities within it. What reasons do we have to give moral consideration to the environment? And what do we mean when we say we have a moral duty toward the environment? Do we have moral duties to individuals within a species, or to species themselves, or to ecosystems, or to...? This course will invite you to reflect on key philosophical works that engage these and related questions. You will also have the opportunity to think about significant emerging topics in environmental ethics. Depending on the semester, these may include the debate over the ethics of wilderness preservation; the challenges of expanding environmental ethics to address issues of global climate change and resource sustainability; environmental rights; and environmental justice.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course examines how philosophy can be applied to address an important real-world problem, specifically ensuring the ethical use of human subjects in scientific research. While the use of human research subjects has led to an overall improvement in human health globally, such progress continues to be marked by important ethical questions, such as: How do we weigh the potential benefits of an experiment against its possible harms? How do we ensure that the benefits and risks of research are distributed equally among all members of a community? What do we do when the interests of the scientific community conflict with an individual or community’s cultural values? And finally, who gets to decide these questions—and how? To answer these questions, we will examine a handful of key episodes in the history of biomedical research in the US from the 1940s to the present, with an emphasis on ones involving Black and Indigenous people.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is an upper-level course aimed at providing an introduction to phenomenology and existentialism, two interrelated philosophical movements originating in Europe at the beginning of twentieth century. In particular, we will examine some of the most prominent thinkers in these movements (namely, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir) as well as their respective views concerning several core themes (namely, being-in-the-world, authenticity, the body, the other, and freedom). We will examine each figure and their views on these topics respectively, all the while gradually comparing them to each other and noting the differences and evolution of views between them.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What is the world ultimately, fundamentally like, and how does science, especially physics, address this question? In what sense do quarks or quantum fields exist? Are they real? What about DNA molecules or distant galaxies? How are these scientific objects related to one another? What makes something a scientific law or a law of nature? While science (and the technologies that it has provided) are at the heart of modern society, and the “scientific method” is often held up as the gold standard in knowing about the world, what actually is science? What is its “method”, and just how seriously should we take its discoveries? Can the scientific method be understood as a genuinely objective way to gain knowledge? How does feminist philosophy of science challenge the idea that science is objective and value-free? How has the practice of science been influenced by its social and historical contexts? In this course, we will explore these topics in contemporary philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, and scientific metaphysics. No prerequisites in physics or other sciences. Prerequisites: PHIL 100 or PHIL 111, or permission of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A capstone experience in philosophy for senior majors. Each participant in the seminar will be expected to write an essay reflective of scholarly standards within the discipline on a question of their own choosing, within a collaborative and supportive environment. Participants in the seminar will help one another develop their capstone papers and prepare to present them publicly at the end of the semester. Readings may be assigned as appropriate with regard to student-identified topics. Prerequisite(s): Philosophy major and senior status, or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials