Advanced and Special Topics Courses

PHIL 430 - Advanced Studies in Ethics: Nietzsche’s Critique of Kant and Plato
Instructor:  Paul Catanu

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 232 or 330, or permission of the Department. This course offers a study of one or more of the following ethical theories: deontology, utilitarianism, virtue theory, feminist ethics, care ethics, narrative ethics, contractualism, and discourse ethics, with a focus on ethical reasoning and motivation. This specific offering will propose to consider the now-classical critique that Nietzsche made of Platonic and Kantian ethics that are based on universal rational claims and values.

PHIL 440 - Advanced Political Philosophy: Political Perfectionism
Instructor:  Katharina Nieswandt

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 241 or 342, or permission of the Department. This course uses selected historical or contemporary writings in political philosophy to treat topics such as those of power, freedom, equality, distributive justice, law, and the boundaries of the political. This year's seminar will be devoted to the perfectionist perspective on major topics in political theory, such as the justification of the state. We will read historical classics, such as Aristotle’s Politics, as well as recent literature.

PHIL 463 - Current Research in Epistemology: Knowledge of Other Minds
Instructor:  Olivia Sultanescu

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 263 or 265 or 364 or 365, or permission of the Department. This course presents an intensive study of major contemporary issues in the theory of knowledge. Nothing is more ordinary than our taking ourselves to know that there are other people and that they have thoughts. But it is difficult to make philosophical sense of this knowledge. For instance, we seem to know our own thoughts immediately, without observing our behaviour. But in order to know the thoughts of others, it seems that we must rely on evidence. How, then, could the very features that we ascribe to ourselves without any evidence be ascribed to others on the basis of evidence without seriously distorting those features? This is one of the puzzles that we will consider in this course. Our topic will be the possibility of knowing others, as well as the nature of the knowledge that we might have of them. Special attention will be paid to the intimate connection between knowing what someone thinks and understanding her utterances.

PHIL 465 - Current Research in Metaphysics: Truth
Instructor:  Ulf Hlobil

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 263 or 265 or 364 or 365, or permission of the Department. This course presents an intensive study of major contemporary issues in metaphysics. This particular offering is on the philosophy of truth. We will read seminal texts on the nature and logic of truth from different historical periods, including recent research.

PHIL 482 - Advanced Topics in Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle’s Generation of Animals: Heredity, Teleology, and Sexual Difference  
Instructor:  Emily Perry

Prerequisite: PHIL 260 and PHIL 261. An in-depth study of principal figures or important topics in ancient Greek or Roman philosophy. This course is dedicated to Aristotle’s Generation of Animals. We’ll discuss how Aristotle’s account of animal reproduction illuminates broader issues in his natural philosophy and metaphysics, including his hylomorphism, his natural teleology, and his scientific methodology. We’ll also take up numerous questions peculiar to this treatise, including: What, for Aristotle, is the mechanism by which an animal’s form is transmitted to its offspring? How does he explain why children resemble their parents more than they do the average adult? Why does Aristotle think sexual reproduction is in some sense better than asexual reproduction? How does he conceive of the difference between the sexes? of their characteristic contributions to the reproductive process?  At what point in its development does he think an embryo has its own nature? How should we understand the role of this nature in the embryo’s self-fashioning? What are natural deformities, and how are they explained? Readings from the Generation of Animals will be supplemented by selections from throughout Aristotle, as well as relevant secondary materials.

PHIL 488 - Topics in 20^th-Century Analytic Philosophy: Frege and Wittgenstein
Instructor:  Gregory A. Lavers

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy, or permission of the Department. This course focuses on figures in 20th‑century analytic philosophy and/or the topics that attracted their attention. Frege is known as the originator of modern logic and the grandfather of analytic philosophy. His project of logicism (an attempt to show that all of arithmetic follows from logic together with definitions) occupied him for most of his life. The way he tried to demonstrate the thesis of logicism was seen as a radically new approach to philosophical problems. This project at the intersection of mathematics and philosophy allowed for an essentially philosophical problem to be stated and addressed with unprecedented clarity. Although Wittgenstein explicitly rejected many of Frege's philosophical doctrines, he always acknowledged a philosophical debt to Frege. In this course, we will look at some of the central texts of both Frege and Wittgenstein (early and late) and we will explore certain Fregean themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy.

PHIL 489 - Phenomenology: Bodies of Language
Instructor:  David Morris

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy, or permission of the Department. This course examines classic themes, texts and methodological issues in phenomenology, typically focusing on the work of figures such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. This particular offering begins with a close study of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, focusing on the theme of language and expression, as crucial to his account of the body, expression, our inter-corporeal being, and to his method of radical reflection. This is followed by a study of his abandoned book and project, The Prose of the World, and selections from his course notes on The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Nature and possibly also his lectures on the problem of speech and the literary use of language. (To be determined.) The deeper philosophical effort is twofold: to understand perceiving, sense-making bodies as gestural, expressive, communicative, linguistic bodies, in a broad sense; to understand language and idea as not being abstract informational systems, but bodily. To support this, the philosophical readings will be complemented with recent work on, for example, Protactile (a growing tactile language of the DeafBlind), new scientific work on other creatures as manifesting linguistic behaviours, and other empirical work that pushes us to suspend typical presumptions about boundaries between language and non-language, linguistic bodies and non-linguistic bodies, and what language consists in.

PHIL 420 - Advanced Philosophy of Science: Categories and Classification
Instructor:  Matthew Barker

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy, or permission of the Department. This course explores advanced topics in the philosophy of science, such as theory change and justification, realism and anti-realism, or reductionism; or specific issues in philosophy of physics or biology, such as evolution and development. This particular offering will consider how categories and classification of them are some of the most controversial and long-studied topics at the intersection of philosophy and the sciences. Racial categories, and sex and gender categories, are obvious examples today. But there are many others too. Do categories such as living thing, chemical element, and race have reality independent of our views about them? What should we recognize their boundaries to be? Do they have essential natures, and if not, what are their natures? What kind of evidence is relevant to views about them? What are the limits to empirical knowledge about categories, and what roles can and should non-empirical methods have in gaining knowledge about categories? Which ways of classifying or ordering categories are best, and why? We’ll address these sorts of questions and others.

PHIL 429 - Values and Biotechnology
Instructor: Katharina Nieswandt

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy, including PHIL 232 or PHIL 233 or PHIL 235 or PHIL 318 or PHIL 330 or PHIL 441 prior to enrolling. If prerequisites are not satisfied, permission of the Department is required. This course examines normative issues around genetic engineering or other biotechnologies, including moral, metaphysical, epistemic or political questions.

PHIL 440 - Advanced Political Philosophy: Critical Theory
Instructor:  Pablo Gilabert

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 241 or 342, or permission of the Department. This course uses selected historical or contemporary writings in political philosophy to treat topics such as those of power, freedom, equality, distributive justice, law, and the boundaries of the political. This seminar will be devoted to a sustained examination of recent contributions in Critical Theory regarding social justice, freedom, and well-being. Authors discussed will likely include Amy Allen, Robin Celikates, Simone Chambers, Rainer Forst, Nancy Fraser, Raymond Geuss, Sally Haslanger, Axel Honneth, Timo Jütten, Rahel Jaeggi, Cristina Lafont, Hartmut Rosa, and Martin Saar, among others.

PHIL 464 - Advanced Studies in Epistemology: Ethics of Belief
Instructor:  Anna Brinkerhoff

Prerequisite: Students must have completed 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 263 or PHIL 265 or PHIL 364 or PHIL 365 prior to enrolling. If prerequisites are not satisfied, permission of the Department is required. This course examines a cross-section of important epistemological issues, such as those about justification, evidence, reason, rationality, or knowledge. This particular offering will focus on central questions in the ethics of belief: Is it always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence? What is the relationship between epistemic and moral evaluation of beliefs? If ‘ought implies can’, and if we lack voluntary control over our beliefs, is it the case that we ought to believe in certain ways? Are we responsible for what we believe? What is the aim of belief: truth or something else? What makes a belief rational? Does morality get a say in the rationality of belief? Does friendship place demands on belief that conflict with epistemic demands? Does promising require us to flout epistemic norms? Does moral ignorance exculpate moral blame? What contribution do moral beliefs make to the moral worth of an action?

PHIL 471 - Advanced Topics in Feminist Theory: French Feminism & Subjectivity
Instructor:  Emilia Angelova

Prerequisite: PHIL 371, or permission of the Department. This course is an advanced study of problems in feminist philosophy. The overall focus of this particular offering is post-1968 French feminist theory, specifically Irigaray and Kristeva, their readings of central texts in the Western philosophical tradition. Their readings deploy Lacanian and Foucauldian discourse analysis (which we will take up via Butler and Foucault) and feminist tools to trace an essential difference of “woman” understood in its reflection as feminine inscription or “writing.” These writings scrutinize a disturbing history of violence and study the feminine “as” subjective sexual identity and its representations in constructs of modern subjectivity. Where modern subjectivity is defined by its telos as an internalizing effort, the writing of the feminine, as essential difference that shakes up the ideological subject, tears open the closures of discourse, and returns reflection to experience in the actual world. In this manner, the differential contribution of the writing of the feminine is that it opens up the excluded other or material underside of discourse, and forces discourse to constant revisability. The question of the difference of “woman” (classically identified as the maternal feminine, the psycho-bisexual feminine, and variously the lesbian) is open-ended and not reducible to a denotational referent in natural language, nor is it a common property identified neatly with categories of biology and culture. The experience of transsubjectivity and transgender identity in contemporary culture is not excluded from, but constitutes just another differential possible subjectivity, precisely. In the 1960s the French feminists share in generally post-structuralist ideas about the new revolutionary forces, and seek to subvert traditional forms of patriarchy, colonialization and exploitation.

Texts under examination will include Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and recent work, Michel Foucault’s Sexuality (2022), Irigaray’s Beyond East and West (2022), Kristeva’s Dostoyevsky (2022).

PHIL 473 - Advanced Topics in Continental Philosophy: Democracy and Climate Change
Instructor:  Matthias Fritsch

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy including PHIL 374 or 377, or permission of the Department. This course focuses on a selected theme or topic within or via the texts of the tradition of continental philosophy. Example topics include language, the world, animality, social or environmental justice, the political, violence, and memory.

In our times of environmental destabilization, the democratic form of government has been criticized as inherently short-termist, incapable of addressing long-term challenges as severe and urgent as climate change. In this particular offering, we will study this critique as well as (largely “Continental-European”) accounts of democracy that may offer a response, including possible justifications of civil disobedience and climate activism.

PHIL 485 - Kant
Instructor:  Nabeel Hamid

Prerequisite: 12 credits in Philosophy, or permission of the Department. This course will be devoted to a close reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment.