Philosophy (PHIL)

Critically examines central figures in American philosophy including Emerson, Thoreau, Pierce, James, Royce, Dewey, Santayana, Mead, Quine, Davidson, and Rorty.

Critically examines central European philosophers including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Levinas, Foucault, and Derrida; course content varies with instructor.

Critical investigation of philosophical problems in ethics, and viability of historical and contemporary ethical positions; course content varies with instructor.

Critical examination of social and political philosophies, their historical context and relation to philosophic method; course content varies with instructor.

This course covers topics in first-order symbolic logic with identity and advanced special topics in metatheory.

Critical examination of problems in philosophy of art including beauty, taste, value, politics, culture, interpretation; course content varies with instructor.

Critically examines feminist approaches to ethics, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, social/political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. PHIL (WMNST) 538 Feminist Philosophy Seminar (3) This course aims to give students an understanding of the philosophical concepts and problems of feminist philosophy. The course will focus on major topics, such as the history of philosophy, ethics, social/political philosophy, epistemology and philosophy of science, and metaphysics, and figures within 20th century feminist philosophy with the concurrent goal of brining them to bear on contemporary issues involving gender's relationship to race, sexuality, class, disability, nationality and age. This course builds upon PHIL 438 Feminist Philosophy and counts towards the requirements of the dual title degree in Philosophy and Women's Studies. Evaluation methods include preparation for and participation in class meetings, two short discussion papers, and a final term paper. The course will be offered at least once every four semesters with an enrollment goal of 20. Specific course content will vary with instructor.

The study of philosophical issues raised by racism and by the concept of race and other related concepts. PHIL 539 Critical Philosophy of Race (3 per semester/maximum of 6) This course provides an intensive examination of a major area of philosophical research: the philosophical examination of racism and of our thinking about race. It will investigate philosophical debates about such topics as mixed-race identity, going beyond the Black-White binary, the distinction between racism and xenophobia, the distinction between race and ethnicity, the debate about the reality of race, as well as questions about the nature and genealogy of racism. The course will have a historical component that will show how thinking in terms of the concept of race first developed and was transformed across time as well as addressing contemporary issues that includes an examination both of the dominant theories and definitions or racial identity and of ethical and political questions raised by the persistence of the notion of race. The course will also examine debates about the complicity of certain canonical figures in the history of philosophy, such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the conceptualization of race and the spread of philosophical racism. In addition to these two philosophers the following authors will be among those studied: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Frederick Douglass, Antenor Firmin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Alain Locke, Paulette Nardal, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Anthony Kwame Appiah, Gloria Anzaldua, Bernard Boxill, and Angela Davis. Race will be examined in its relation to other ways of thinking about human difference, including class, gender, nationality, religion, and sexuality. Attention will be given to diverse experiences in the US context, such as those of African Americans, Latina/os, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Irish Americans, and so on. In addition to examining the role race has played and continues to play in the United States of America, the ways in which race is approached in other parts of the world, for example in China, will also be the subject of investigation. The course content will vary, dependent upon the instructor

Analyzes specific concerns and texts of ancient philosophy including those of Plato and Aristotle; course content varies with instructor.

Critical examination of medieval texts and philosophers, including Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Ockham; course content varies with instructor.

Examines rationalism, empiricism, and other philosophical movements from Bacon and Descartes to Kant and Mill; course content varies with instructor.

Examination of philosophy from Hegel to Nietzsche on history, dialectic, ideology, existence, science, and art; course content varies with instructor.

Central problems in works of twentieth-century philosophers including Russell, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas; course content varies with instructor.

Critically investigates diverse recent figures and problems of continental, pragmatic, and analytic philosophy; course content varies with instructor.

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 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).

Close study of a major figure in modern philosophy through one central or several important texts.

Close study of a major figure in nineteenth-century philosophy through one central text or several important texts. PHIL 563 Major Figures in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (3 per semester/maximum of 12) This course provides an intensive examination of one major figure in nineteenth-century philosophy, such as Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Georg Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, William James, Karl Marx, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Regardless of the figure selected, the course focuses on one major text written by that figure (such as in the case of Hegel the Phenomenology of Spirit or in the case of Schopenhauer The World as Will and Representation) or on two complementary texts by a major figure (for example, Schelling's First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and his The Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature or Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals). Possible topics covered in relation to the figure selected would include as appropriate to the figure: knowledge; reason; language; subjectivity; logic; nature and spirit; dialectics; ideology; philosophy of history; religion; truth; ethics; aesthetics; and genealogy. The students will also be introduced to the major secondary works written about this author and the controversies they have generated. The course content will vary, dependent upon the instructor.

Close study of a major figure in twentieth-century philosophy by means of one central text or several important texts. PHIL 564 Major Figures in Twentieth-Century Philosophy (3 per semester/maximum of 12) The course aims to provide students with a "building block" in their knowledge of the history of philosophy. That is, the students will achieve an expert's understanding of the central ideas of one figure in twentieth-century philosophy. On this basis, students will be able to develop a comprehensive understanding of the figure's entire corpus and complete range of ideas. Moreover, students will be able to develop a comprehensive understanding of the historical period. There are many possible figures for this course: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, John Dewey, Jurgen Habermas, Rudolf Carnap, Wilfred Sellars, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. In relation to Husserl, for example, students will master the problems (relativism and skepticism) to which phenomenology is responding; the phenomenological method (the epoche, the reductions, eidetic variation); and how the transcendental position of phenomenology at once responds to the question of knowledge and to the question of being. This knowledge will allow students to develop an understanding of the phenomenology's crucial role in the development of twentieth-century philosophy, influencing not only existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism, but also analytic philosophy. In relation to Merleau-Ponty, for example, students will learn how embodied perception attempts to respond to the traditional problem of mind-body dualism. This knowledge will allow students to develop an understanding not only of Merleau-Ponty's view of language but also his view of politics. From this developed understanding of Merleau-Ponty, students will be able to understand how Merleau-Ponty differs from Bergson, Merleau-Ponty's predecessor, from Sartre, Merleau-Ponty's contemporary, and from Foucault, Merleau-Ponty's inheritor. The course content will vary, dependent upon the instructor.

This course explores a variety of theories and methods in bioethics and applies them to a selection of current topics.

This course explores systemic and structural issues in bioethics, and the theories and methodologies required to address them.

Provides an understanding of ethical issues arising in the responsible conduct of biomedical research and frameworks for critically analyzing them.

A critical study of one or more thinkers, ideas, or movements in modern phenomenology.

Studies philosophical works in their original (non-English) languages; course content varies with instructor.

Continuing seminars which consist of a series of individual lectures by faculty, students, or outside speakers.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, which are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

Formal courses given on a topical or special interest subject which may be offered infrequently; several different topics may be taught in one year or term.

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Students will teach introductory logic course--i.e., Phil 1--and other introductory level courses as required by staffing.

Foreign study and/or research constituting progress toward the degree at a foreign university.

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This course will examine the social, political, legal, and ethical issues that arise in the context of homeland security.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the use of machines to do tasks that seem to require human intelligence and cognitive skills (thinking, natural language, inference, decision making etc.) The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence is the young branch of applied ethics that seeks to study the far-reaching and diverse ethical issues that arise with the widespread and rapid integration of AI technologies into various aspects of our lives. The challenge is that we are in an uncharted ethical territory with regard to AI: we need to radically adjust our existing ethical paradigms or introduce new ones as we experience and acquire a better grasp of the problems involved in AI-human interaction. A large portion of these issues reflect our concerns about the harm that the use and misuse of AI might cause for humanity. Such issues range from threats to individual privacy and freedom to wider social implications regarding economic justice and race and gender equality. However, as AI systems develop and attain higher levels of intelligence, questions about their moral status become more pressing. If these systems are capable of moral agency, then not only do they have responsibilities towards other moral agents like us, but they also have rights that we should respect in our conduct towards them. This course offers an overview of the nature and extent of the ethical issues arising from AI-human interaction as well as the philosophical background (particularly, in ethics and philosophy of mind) required to develop an informed methodology in approaching these issues, with the help of the flourishing literature on the subject.