Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Humor

Professor: Seth Halvorson  

Course Number: PHIL 114

CRN Number: 10206

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 202

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

“Socrates walks into class and says…” This is a course on philosophical issues related to laughter, comedy, and humor. Historical and contemporary philosophical theories of humor as well as the psychological, political, and moral dimensions of humor will sit at the core of our inquiry. The course will explore jokes, the absurd, the forms and types of humor, as well as the possibilities of humor as a tool of personal and political transformation.  Examples from the visual, performing, and printed arts will run alongside our philosophical texts. This class is open to students new to philosophy, and will be of interest to students in the performing and written arts and students interested in the possibilities of humor as a site of activism and critique.

Introduction to Philosophy: Evil in Ethics

Professor: Archie Magno  

Course Number: PHIL 124

CRN Number: 10207

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

Crosslists: Human Rights; Study of Religions

This course will take up some of the central questions of ethics: How should we organize our lives? Is there such thing as a consistent criterion of right or wrong? Can we control our emotions, and if so, how should we do it? Is virtue possible, and how is it different from vice? But there is a special angle under which the course will address these questions, namely: what should we not do and why? Is there such thing as "evil"? How do we deal with an offense or an enemy? What is temptation, and does one have always to resist it? Is one responsible for one’s own trauma? The paradox of our culture is that, focused as it is on enjoyment and personal success, its political and social imaginary is filled with demonic “axes of evil” and the cultivated emotions are those of depression or anxiety. Why is this happening? Are the current cultural rituals efficient in dealing with unpleasant expectations and memories? What are the conditions for tolerance or intolerance with regard to evil? We will try to approach if not answer these difficult questions during the course. An interdisciplinary set of readings combines philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies. It includes such authors as St Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud, Arendt, Levinas, Žižek, Simona Forti, and others. Requirements include participation, an interpretive essay (2000-2500 words), and a research paper (4000-5000 words).

Introduction to Philosophy: Slavery

Professor: Jay Elliott  

Course Number: PHIL 129

CRN Number: 10208

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Africana Studies; Classical Studies; Human Rights

How can one human being own another? Today many of us regard slavery as the ultimate example of an unthinkable evil. Yet we also live in a society powerfully shaped by the institution and aftereffects of slavery, and recent events have shed renewed light on the enduring legacy of slavery in the United States. Our focus will be on two major slave societies: Greco-Roman antiquity and the modern Atlantic. We will seek to understand slavery and its enduring effects through these two slave societies and the interrelations between them. A special focus of our course will be the historically deep connection between philosophy and slavery. Many of the founding figures of Western political thought – including Aristotle, Locke, and Hegel – produced justifications of slavery that are often ignored today but that raise profound questions about the intellectual legacies of these canonical thinkers. Alongside these philosophers, we will also approach the inner life of slave societies through a variety of other sources, including letters, plays, autobiographies, and legal codes. Throughout the course we will consider a range of questions, including: how has slavery been intellectually justified and maintained in slave societies? How does the practice of slavery intersect with ideas about nature, work, property, sex, race, nationality and belonging? How do thinkers within slave societies come to develop critiques of slavery? What does it mean for slavery to end? This course fulfills the Difference and Justice requirement. Courses meeting this requirement are intended to further students’ understanding of diverse forms of thought and experience, especially those that are marginalized in conventional academic discourse. In this course, we will juxtapose a long tradition of theorizing and legitimizing slavery in Western political thought with texts that critique slavery and give voice to the lived experiences of enslaved people. The aim of the course is to understand how the terrible injustice of slavery is possible and to cultivate modes of thinking that can help us to comprehend and resist it. 

Body and World: Selves and Social Sense-Making

Professor: James Keller  

Course Number: PHIL 219

CRN Number: 10285

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Hegeman 204

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

Our everyday accounts of perception, action, social norms, language, and intelligence take detached conceptual rationality as the essential feature of human life. A good deal of recent philosophy, though, explores the possibility that we might not be “rational all the way out” and that we use concepts to supplement more primary, embodied ways of knowing, being, and being with others. The first part of this course examines embodiment as basic to conceptual and nonconceptual ways that we make sense of reality. We then look at the extent to which bodies conform or not to social ideals of normalcy or reconfigure these norms. The readings that we encounter argue for a more inclusive form of realism in our accounts of perception, action, language and intelligence, and we consider a plurality of diverse embodiments and a range of understandings of the ways that bodied selves and social life are woven together. Readings include HL Dreyfus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Judith/Jack Halberstam, and others.

Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

Professor: Ruth Zisman  

Course Number: PHIL 245

CRN Number: 10286

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

Crosslists: German Studies

Writing from the mid-19th century through the 1930s, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud revolutionized modern philosophy in radical and yet radically different ways. Together they dismantled previously held beliefs and demanded a rethinking of ideas of human nature, history, and economy; god, religion, and morality; power, sexuality, and violence; language, literature, and art. These three “masters of suspicion,” according to Paul Ricoeur, “clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a destructive critique but by the invention of an art of interpreting.” And the legacy of their thinking lives on today not only in the academy but in everyday discussions and debates about topics such as economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, social values, and mental health. In this course, we will read closely and get to know Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud - both individually and in conversation with one another - and we will consider the ways in which their thinking forms the basis of contemporary critical thought.

History and Philosophy of Science

Professor: Michelle Hoffman  

Course Number: PHIL 274

CRN Number: 10287

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM - 2:50 PM Henderson Comp. Center 106

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

Crosslists: Historical Studies; Science, Technology, Society

What, if anything, separates science from pursuits such as religion, philosophy, or literature? Are scientific facts the result of objective evidence and reasoning, or do they reflect the ideologies and biases of their creators? Is science progressing toward the truth? How do we tell good science from bad science? In this introduction to the history and philosophy of science, we will consider historical questions about the origins of science and how it developed into its modern form alongside philosophical questions about the nature of science, its theories, and its methods. In order to examine these questions, our readings will range from antiquity to the present day, drawing on thinkers such as Aristotle, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, David Hume, Karl Popper, and Thomas Kuhn, while also considering more recent developments in the philosophy of science such as feminist philosophy of science and theories of scientific objectivity. This course satisfies the Philosophy program’s Histories of Philosophy requirement. All majors are required to take two courses fulfilling this requirement, starting with the class of 2025.

French Philosophy around 1968: A Structuralist Existentialism

Professor: Archie Magno  

Course Number: PHIL 279

CRN Number: 10350

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 310

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists: French Studies

The vibrant political context of the 1960s in France centers on the preparation and the aftermath of the failed revolution of 1968. French thought during this period is in a way a long interpretation of this crucial event of French history post-WWII. We are going to understand the main contours of this period, by discussing some of the most influential French philosophers of the time: Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou, and by discovering the concepts that they formulate. The French philosophy of the 1960-70s is often presented as predominantly “structuralist.” But this course will show that this scientific emphasis on systemic thinking is almost always serving a deeply existential concern for the unique difference and the truly free subjectivity. Their focus is the singular subject who is opposed to the traditional liberal models of personality and responsibility, being a spontaneous poet and rebel. Some of the thinkers are critical of the very philosophical category of the “subject,” some, on the contrary, claim to reinvent it in a positive way, but they are all interested in the weak ephemeral being that the subject, or another unique agent, helps to reinforce in a specific, eventful situation. Structural method allows the French authors to delineate the points of rupture and overlap that leave the space for an event and/or unique action. The course will be built as a survey of the intellectual tradition against the historical background of 1968, with a special emphasis on the work of Alain Badiou. We will discuss such challenging but useful concepts as: situation, event, subject, difference, interpellation, generic procedure, part of those who have no part, and some others. Students will provide summaries of the reading; there will be a quiz on the main concepts, and an interpretive essay as a final paper.

Feminist Philosophy

Professor: Robert Weston  

Course Number: PHIL 333

CRN Number: 10289

Class cap: 16

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon       3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists: Gender and Sexuality Studies; Human Rights

This seminar provides a foundation for students seeking footing in feminist philosophy. Building upon cornerstones laid in gender theory and feminist epistemology, the course guides students into critical engagements with key feminist contestations of the male-dominated philosophical tradition. We will explore the concept, history, ethics, and politics of sexual difference, engage with productive disruptions from black, brown, and trans feminism, and grapple with poststructuralist metacritiques of the phallic logocentrism undergirding canonical philosophy. We will examine how the regulation of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’ is entangled in relations of power, desire, violence, and race, and we will track how racism, sexism, and misogyny intersect in the global stranglehold of male supremacy. These investigations will enable us to consider broadly how the categories ‘sex,’ ‘gender,’ and ‘race’ operate within classificatory regimes of knowledge to engender and perpetuate asymmetrical relations of power between people sexed as women and people sexed as men. We will consider whether rationality itself is gendered, and how relations of sex and gender condition the construction of knowledge and the representation of objective reality. If, with the ascendance of reason in ancient philosophy, rationality is constructed by men as male, explicitly exclusive of women—whose purported deficiency in reason serves, foundationally, as legitimation for women’s subjugation to men—what critical stance do feminist philosophers take toward the rationalism governing androcentric thought? More generally, if the basic concepts for describing ‘reality’ that women inherit to express, finally, their historically omitted experience of the world are concepts constructed by men for men—what different relationship to language might philosophy written from the perspective of women require? Such questions will involve us in feminist experiments with new modes of writing, rhetoric, logic, and reasoning. Is anatomy destiny? Are the differences between women and men essential differences rooted in ‘nature’? Or is sexual difference, with its categories ‘sex’ and ‘gender,’ the contingent product of historically specific cultural forces? If sex and gender are social constructs, who is doing the constructing? Who or what determines who counts as “woman” and who does not? How does one explain the transcultural devaluation of women and conflicting veneration and denigration of the feminine? What is misogyny and why is it so pervasive? Can there be difference without domination? Or does othering through marks of difference inherently introduce power asymmetry, hierarchy, devaluation, and subordination? Guided by these and related questions, students will become familiar with diverse perspectives of feminist philosophers who expose, analyze, and unravel the system of relations by which women have been defined and devalued, desired yet despised, silenced, subjugated, and exploited by men. Seminar readings will ultimately reflect the preparation and interests of participants, but may include works by Aristotle, Ahmed, Alcoff, Anzaldúa, Beauvoir, Bey, Butler, Cixous, Crenshaw, Dotson, Freud, Friedan, Haraway, Haslanger, hooks, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, Laqueur, Lorde, Lugones, Manne, Mercer, Mies, Mohanty, Plato, Rubin, Scott, Spivak, Stoler, Wittig, and Wollstonecraft.

Ethics with Aristotle

Professor: Jay Elliott  

Course Number: PHIL 363

CRN Number: 10351

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 306

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

During the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, philosophers have been increasingly drawn to the work of a revolutionary thinker whose ideas have come to dominate much of contemporary Anglophone ethics. Who is this thinker? Aristotle. Yes, that Aristotle, a guy who died over two thousand years ago and whose ideas are available to us only in the form of notoriously obscure jottings in ancient manuscripts. In this course, we will study in depth Aristotle’s most influential ethical work, Nicomachean Ethics, while also encountering a range of thinkers who represent his contemporary influence. Some questions we will consider are: What is distinctive about Aristotle’s approach to ethics? What contribution might its central concepts, such as virtue, happiness, pleasure, friendship, and luck, make to our thinking? How can we adapt Aristotle’s ideas to our very different social and political context? Can we engage productively with Aristotle despite the infamously problematic aspects of his work, such as his endorsement of aristocracy, slavery and patriarchy? Might Aristotle even be valuable for contemporary feminist or socialist critique? How might an encounter with this strange and difficult philosopher help us to overcome the categories and assumptions that constrain our thinking? We will also experiment with doing ethics for ourselves using Aristotelian concepts and methods.

Philosophy of Wittgenstein

Professor: Robert Tully  

Course Number: PHIL 385

CRN Number: 10290

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian by birth who resided in England for much of his professional career, was one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers in the analytic tradition, and perhaps its most disruptive.  His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – a terse, demanding, enigmatic, almost mesmerizing book – crystalized the doctrine known as Logical Atomism and imposed necessary limits for any meaningful language.  His later Philosophical Investigations, written in an informal and instructive manner, but no less confidently assertive, systematically exposed his younger position which he condemned for being formalistic and self-deceivingly detached from the natural functioning of language.  In its place, Wittgenstein offered an expansive account of the social nature of meaning which has influenced generations of philosophers.  Commentaries and controversies concerning Wittgenstein’s ideas presuppose a deep grounding in these two seminal texts.  The priority of this seminar will be a careful reading and discussion of them.

Senior Project Colloquium

Professor: Yarran Hominh  

Course Number: PHIL 403

CRN Number: 10291

Class cap: 15

Credits: 1

Schedule/Location:

Mon       12:30 PM - 2:50 PM Olin 107

Distributional Area:

None   

Great philosophers don’t think alone. This course supports the work of the senior project by providing a communal setting in which students will give and receive feedback on their senior project in progress. Over the course of the semester, we will work collaboratively to cultivate the habits and skills essential to a successful senior project, such as setting goals, planning and organizing your work, and revising your writing in response to comments. Students will also practice oral presentation and discussion skills. The course is open to students in either the first or second semester of the senior project. Note: This course is required for all students enrolled in PHIL 401 (first semester of senior project) during spring 2024. It is optional for students in PHIL 402. Students must also register for PHIL 401 or 402. The course is required for all senior Philosophy majors, but adds no additional credits.

The Courage to Be: Courage in the Universities

Course Number: CC 108 B

CRN Number: 10331

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Maxim Botstein

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

HA MBV  Historical Analysis Meaning, Being, Value   

Crosslists:

German Studies; Philosophy

(Un)Defining the Human

Course Number: HR 234

CRN Number: 10299

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Robert Weston

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Olin 101

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists:

Philosophy

Constitutional Law

Course Number: HR 243

CRN Number: 10300

Class cap: 30

Credits: 4

Professor:

Roger Berkowitz Peter Rosenblum

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM - 4:50 PM Henderson Comp. Center 106

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists:

American & Indigenous Studies; Philosophy; Politics

Hannah Arendt: Reading The Human Condition and the Plurality of Languages

Course Number: LIT 318

CRN Number: 10391

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

Professor:

Thomas Wild

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

LA  Literary Analysis in English   

Crosslists:

German Studies; Human Rights; Philosophy

Authority, Equality, Freedom: Introduction to Political Theory

Course Number: PS 103

CRN Number: 10210

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Lucas Guimaraes Pinheiro

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM - 1:10 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists:

Human Rights; Philosophy

American Anthropocenes and the Politics of Nature

Course Number: PS 286

CRN Number: 10275

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

Professor:

Bill Dixon

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

Crosslists:

Environmental Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Philosophy; Science, Technology, Society

Islamic Political Thought

Course Number: PS 3020

CRN Number: 10282

Class cap: 14

Credits: 4

Professor:

Pinar Kemerli

Schedule/Location:

  Th     3:10 PM - 5:30 PM Olin 308

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists:

Middle Eastern Studies; Philosophy; Study of Religions

Tibetan Buddhism

Course Number: REL 105

CRN Number: 10212

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

Professor:

Dominique Townsend

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM - 11:30 AM Olin 305

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value  D+J Difference and Justice

Crosslists:

Asian Studies; Philosophy