[*All course marked with an asterisk are either not yet approved or need to change from a 300 to a 400 level course.]

PHIL 500 / GRADUATE SEMINAR

In this seminar students in their first year will cover a variety of topics designed to introduce the practical and theoretical skills necessary for graduate-level philosophy.

PHIL 590 / THESIS SEMINAR

In this seminar students in the second year present work relevant to their thesis research.

PHIL XXX  VIRTUE, JUSTICE, AND THE GOOD IN THE ANCIENT WORLD*

This course offers an in-depth examination of a topic in ancient Greek and Roman ethical or political philosophy, broadly construed. Topics might focus on a figure or school (e.g. Aristotle’s political theory or Stoic moral psychology); a question or area (e.g. ancient views of akrasia or Greek “virtue ethics”); or a relevant text (e.g. Plato’s Philebus or Aristotle’s Politics). The course aims to enable students to engage with contemporary scholarly debates on the chosen topic with expertise.

PHIL XXX MIND AND REALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD*

An advanced study of a topic in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, emphasizing issues related to metaphysics, epistemology, and theoretical approaches to phenomena we would call “mental”. Topics might focus on a particular figure or school (e.g. Plato’s theory of Forms, Stoic epistemology), a general question or theme (e.g. ancient skepticism), or a relevant text (e.g. Aristotle’s Metaphysics); but in every case students will engage with contemporary scholarship on the chosen topic as well as recent work on related philosophical problems.

PHIL 450 / FALLIBILISM, CERTAINTY, AND DOGMATISM

Discussion of epistemic and ethical questions concerning fallibilism; whether certainty is a condition for knowledge, whether claims to knowledge is always a dogmatic attitude, how to be open-minded without being a skeptic.

PHIL 350 / PHILOSOPHY OF CURIOSITY*

Discussion of historical, epistemic, semantic, and ethical questions related to the notion of curiosity; defining curiosity; its historical background; how curiosity relates to awareness of ignorance, Meno’s Paradox, asking questions, knowledge, belief, acquaintance, understanding, truth and epistemic virtues.

PHIL 315 / ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY*

Analytic philosophy has been the dominant philosophical tradition in the English-speaking world from at least the middle of the last century. Over the last two decades its influence has also been steadily growing in the non-English-speaking world. As a first approximation, in its most inclusive sense, analytic philosophy can be characterized as the tradition that originated in the work of Gottlob Frege (1848- 1925), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), G. E. Moore (1873- 1958), and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 1951) and developed and ramified into the complex tradition that we know today. This course is an introduction to the methodological and historical basis of the approaches, arguments, concepts, doctrines, moves, positions, texts, themes, and theories that gradually accumulated in their interconnectedness to form this tradition. As it will be shown in the introductory lecture, although there are some obvious candidates—such as, the emphasis on the role of analysis, the focus on the question of language, the hostility to metaphysics, anti-psychologism, ahistoricism, naturalism, the demand for argumentation, clarity, and, rigor— there is no common theme, set of values, or methods which provide a more definitive characterization of this tradition.  Therefore, our approach will be reading seminal texts from the first half of the last century and focus on the activity of the analytic philosophizing in these texts through which the tradition was born.

PHIL 438 / PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION

This course is an introduction to twentieth century, analytic philosophy of action. We will consider three interrelated sets of questions: (i) questions about how, if at all, to analyze bodily action and its explanation into psychological and non-psychological components; (ii) questions about how to understand the special sort of knowledge ‘from within’ an agent has of what she does intentionally; (iii) questions about the shape of practical reasoning, reasoning about what to do, focusing on whether it concludes in an inner psychological state or an action. Various philosophers will be considered but we will devote considerable attention to the work of G. E. M. Anscombe and Donald Davidson.

PHIL 451 / PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION

An investigation into the nature of perception; an assessment of different philosophical accounts about the structure of perception; a detailed examination of the debate between direct realism and indirect realism; an investigation into the nature of the connection between believing and perceiving; an examination of the role of perceiving in the acquisition of knowledge about the external world; an assessment of different philosophical accounts about the contents of perception.

PHIL 423 / PHILOSOPHY OF VALUE

The concept of value. The nature of value judgment. The evaluation of values.

PHIL 436 / PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

The analysis of the philosophical problems that issue from the nature

and structure of language. These include meaning, reference, speech

acts and contemporary descriptive linguistics.

PHIL 4XX / EXISTENTIALISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY*

This is a survey course on the early 20th century philosophical currents of phenomenology and existentialism in contemporary European philosophy. It begins with the concept of intentionality in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, takes up the question of Being and the related notion of being-in-the-world in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, explores the ontology of freedom in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, and analyzes the problem of perception in Maurice-Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and The Invisible   as culminating in a new ontology. The course aims at discussing some of the most important problems of contemporary philosophy in the European tradition by exploring and navigating the philosophical relations between aforementioned philosophers.

PHIL 4XX / THE OTHER IN PHILOSOPHY

The philosophical problem of the other minds goes back to Descartes. In the phenomenological tradition, in Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, it is considered as inseparable from the notion of the living body.  Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty claim that the relation to the others is inseparable from the question of the constitution of the sense of the world. The central problem is the following: At the fundamental ontological level, are we separated or related to the others? In Emmanuel Levinas the relation to the other is considered as an ethical relation beyond normative ethics. In an intriguing way, he argues that ethics precedes ontology. In Paul Ricoeur the alterity emerges at the heart of the problem of personal identity and of the narrative constitution of selfhood.  This course explores the ontological and ethical dimensions of the philosophical debates over alterity in Contemporary Philosophy and shows why this problem is still very important for us today.

PHIL 450 / SELECTED TOPICS IN PHILOSOPHY

Detailed examination of current topics in philosophy.

PHIL 490 / INDEPENDENT STUDY

The goal of this course is to give students the opportunity to do in-depth research on a topic in which they are interested under the guidance and direction of a faculty member. This course is mostly available to senior students and is subject to the consent of the instructor.