Feminist theorizing on the role of women in society has posed serious challenges to traditional forms of analysis in political theory. We begin the course by considering how four prominent feminist political theories address the economic and political needs of women: liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, radical feminism and socialist feminism. In the second half of the course we turn to more general public policy questions of identity and equality. Who counts as a 'woman'? Is it reasonable for women to organize as 'women' or should we emphasize our multiple identities? Closing the course by opening it up, we will ask the meta-theoretical question: how do we go about answering these questions? Is there at root a definition of feminism that could guide us in determining what issues count as ''feminist'' and what do not?

A comparative examination of philosophical defenses and critiques of religion from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Readings from Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Buber, and Tillich.

Freud's writings will be studied both from the point of view of the questions, the challenges, and the opportunities they pose for philosophy, and from the point of view of the kinds of criticisms that philosophy has directed against psychoanalytic theory. Readings will include The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; The Ego and the Id; Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Civilization and Its Discontents, and critical secondary sources. Prerequisite: A previous course in philosophy and permission of the instructor.

Beginning with a close reading of Aristotle's Poetics, we will explore the expansion of the concept of artistic representation derived from Plato, the nature and causes of our emotional response to the arts and the experience of aesthetic catharsis, the power of form as a determinant of the power of art, and the epistemological value of the arts. We will then turn to an investigation of David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste", placing it in its eighteenth century intellectual context and examining the delicate interplay of subjective and objective considerations in aesthetic perception. After analyzing Hume's contribution to the problem of the justification of critical judgement, we then turn to Kant's Critique of Judgement, in which many of the foregoing issues figure; we will add to the Kant's analysis of the sublime in art and nature. We will end with a close look into the contribution Kant's theory of the mind makes to our understanding of art and aesthetic perception.

Prerequisites: Upper college standing and a previous course in either Philosophy and the Arts or in Kant; some reading of Aristotle in your background would also be helpful.