Advanced and Special Topics Courses

PHIL 430 – Advanced Studies in Ethics: Death
Instructor:  Anna Brinkerhoff
This seminar will survey a variety of issues related to the moral dimension of death and dying including: the badness of death, euthanasia, killing vs. letting die, the value of immortality, the allocation of scarce medical resources, death vs.pre-natal non-existence, posthumous harms, and grief. 

PHIL 440 – Advanced Political Philosophy: Hegel on the State
Instructor:  Katharina Nieswandt
This seminar discusses Hegel’s political philosophy. Hegel’s lectures on the Philosophy of Right (1821) are often regarded as the origin of social-constructivist concepts, such as that of an institution, thereby shaping modern political thought, from conservative to Marxist. We shall read §§ 142–360 and contextualizing literature.

PHIL 441 – Philosophical Foundations of Biology
Instructor:  Matthew Barker
This course helps students critically engage biology’s philosophical foundations. Topics typically include the nature of scientific reasoning, testing, and evidence in biology; how best to discover, define, and apply biological concepts; and how to structure the aims of biology to fit our diverse and changing societies. 

PHIL 473 – Advanced Topics in Continental Philosophy: Radical Democracy
Instructor:  Matthias Fritsch
This course will study conceptions of radical democracy, mostly in post-war European thought. We will read texts by authors such as Claude Lefort, Jean-Luc Nancy, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida. 

PHIL 484 – Advanced Topics in World Philosophy
Instructor:  Jing Hu
This course offers an in-depth exploration of selected topics in world philosophy that hold significant relevance to our modern society. It addresses issues such as moral agency across various philosophical traditions, perspectives on artificial intelligence, and cultural views on aging and caregiving.

PHIL 429 – Values and Biotechnology
Instructor:  Katharina Nieswandt
This course examines normative issues around genetic engineering or other biotechnologies, including moral, metaphysical, epistemic or political questions. This year's seminar addresses questions such as: “What is a disability, and should we genetically engineer human beings not to have any?” and “Are genetically modified plants a good remedy for global hunger?” Readings range from applied ethics to philosophy of science.

PHIL 465 – Current Research in Metaphysics: Modularity and Concepts
Instructor:  Murray Clarke
In this course we will investigate the contemporary literature in cognitive science on the nature of concepts. Beginning with the classical theory of concepts, Definitionism, we then move on to consider prototype theory and the theory-theory. Finally, we evaluate Fodor's conceptual atomism and Prinz's empiricist account of concepts. 

PHIL 474 – Current Research Topics in Continental Philosophy: Deleuze and Kristeva (C)
Instructor:  Emilia Angelova
This course is an advanced study of problems in the philosophy of values and norms, in the framework of ethics as transformed by post-structuralism and psychoanalysis in late 20th century Continental philosophy. We begin with Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. We move on by studying Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of difference, the processes of subjectivation and the emergence of the new category of “actuality,” which brings this category close to Nietzsche’s notion of the instant of monumental time. We will pay special attention to themes of the event, experience and experimentation as part of the critique of representation and new forms of constructing subjectivity. In the last third of this course, we turn to exploring sublimation, love’s labour and the constitution of subjectivity in psychoanalysis as part of developments in French post-structuralism. In this part we read Julia Kristeva’s work in psychoanalysis, specifically on narrative, trauma and the abject.

PHIL 481 – Aristotle: Aristotle's Physics
Instructor:  Emily Perry
In this course we will read Aristotle’s Physics with a view to understanding the argument of the work as a whole. Topics may include Aristotle’s responses to the paradoxes of Parmenides and Zeno; Aristotle’s conception of nature, motion, and body; Aristotle’s argument for the existence of a single, continuous motion and a first, unmoved mover.

PHIL 485 – Kant: Kant's Practical Philosophy
Instructor: Pablo Gilabert
This seminar is devoted to a close critical reading of Immanuel Kant’s main ethical and political writings, and to an assessment of their contemporary relevance. This class has three objectives. First, we will seek to understand Kant’s moral and political thought by engaging in a careful reading of his texts. Second, we will consider the significance of Kant’s views for contemporary moral and political philosophy (e.g. regarding the contrast between deontology and consequentialism in normative ethics, moral constructivism, and the illumination of ethical and political issues about gender, race, and class). To do this we will read recent interpretations and discussions of Kant's work. Finally, we will engage in a critical assessment of the central claims and arguments advanced in those texts by asking whether they should be retained, reformulated or abandoned. The format of the class, encouraging both careful reconstruction of the texts and active critical discussion of the themes, theses and arguments raised in them, is geared toward satisfying these objectives.

PHIL 498 – Advanced Topics in Philosophy: Aesthetics
Instructor:  Ulf Hlobil
This is a course on the philosophy of art. We will focus on Arthur Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.