Introduction to Philosophy: Classics of Western Philosophy

 

Course Number: PHIL 103

CRN Number: 92084

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Garry Hagberg

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 205

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

A critical examination of the work of some major figures in the history of philosophy, emphasizing historical continuities and developments in the subject. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Nietzsche, and Russell.

 

Introduction to Philosophy: From Global Perspectives

 

Course Number: PHIL 104

CRN Number: 92085

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Yarran Hominh

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Henderson Comp. Center 101A

 

Distributional Area:

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

What does it mean to be human? What should we do in life? Does anything matter, really? Philosophy asks questions about these deep and important matters of human concern. It is also, as bell hooks said, a liberatory practice. It helps you come to understand yourself, your community, your world in a clearer way. It helps you shed light on who you are and what matters to you. And it gives you the tools to think through the questions and issues that confront you. Philosophy is not limited to any one place or time. It is an expression of the universal human desire to make sense of things. But human beings may make sense of things differently in different places and times. And so though you may not have the answers when this class ends, you will hopefully have a better grasp of your questions and of ways of thinking that might help you find some answers.

 

Introduction to Philosophy: Life, Death, Meaning

 

Course Number: PHIL 110

CRN Number: 92083

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Ruth Zisman

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 202

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

The 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger described the human being as “the being for whom Being is a question.” Indeed, many of the biggest questions in the history of philosophy concern the nature of human existence. Is there a meaning to existence? Does life have a purpose? How does one live a good life? Is death a bad thing? What happens after we die? In this course, we will read foundational philosophical texts and consider how philosophers from antiquity to the present have thought about life, death, and the possibilities for meaning therein.

 

Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy and/of Education

 

Course Number: PHIL 154

CRN Number: 92086

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Seth Halvorson

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 102

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

This course is an introduction to Philosophy and Education and perennial questions regarding the purposes, methods, and problems of philosophy, education, and life.  Is education central to a good life?   How and why?  What is education? The course will study the dynamics between selves in formation, institutions, and society and explore the ways that education can be a catalyst for change and also reproduce social hierarchies and inequalities. What is Liberal Education and what is college about?  How can educational policy issues be understood philosophically? We will explore theories of teaching and learning, alternative and radical philosophies of education, the moral and political status of youth, and the connections between culture, technology, and education.  The course will focus on the ways in which core values and virtues like knowledge, wisdom, justice, belonging, freedom, individuality, and citizenship define political, academic, legal, and moral norms of education.  What does it mean to be educated and how does education shape our identities? Who should define knowledge, and how it is taught?  Who should control education? The course will draw from a wide range of classical and contemporary works in philosophy, as well as film, art, music, and literature, to try to answer the most fundamental of questions:  How should we understand the formation of the self?

 

Early Greek Thinking

 

Course Number: PHIL 212

CRN Number: 92091

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Jay Elliott

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     8:30 AM – 9:50 AM Olin 202

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

 

Crosslists:

Classical Studies

Our word “philosophy” derives from the Greek word philosophia, meaning “love of wisdom.” What did it mean to “love wisdom” in ancient Greek societies, and what might it mean to us today? This course invites students into the discipline of philosophy through a critical consideration of its origins in ancient Greece. Philosophy emerged in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE in a context of rapid urbanization, expanding literacy, colonial warfare, and democratic experimentation. Without any established academic disciplines or traditions, the early Greek thinkers we now call the “first philosophers” experimented with an astonishing variety of forms and practices, including scientific observation, cryptic aphorisms, poetic narratives, and dramatic dialogue. As we follow the emergence of distinctively “philosophical” ways of thinking and living, we will also trace the shifting relations of philosophy to other modes of thought in ancient Greek culture, such as poetry, religion, theater, and politics. The course centers on the enigmatic figure of Socrates, in whose intellectual circle the term “philosophy” first came into common use. We will consider the conflicting accounts of Socrates and his circle that we find in the historian Xenophon, the comedian Aristophanes, and the tragedian Plato. Alongside this paradigmatic philosopher, we will also consider other thinkers who have a more contested relationship to the philosophical canon, including the so-called “Presocratics” and the Sophists. In taking up the question of who counts as a philosopher and what counts as philosophy in Greek antiquity, we will attend to the role of class, gender and sexuality in the formation of philosophical communities.

 

Symbolic Logic

 

Course Number: PHIL 237

CRN Number: 92736

Class cap: 20

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Robert Tully

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs   3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 203

 

Distributional Area:

MC  Mathematics and Computing 

Logic is not imposed on natural language but embedded in it. Symbolic Logic maps its logical structure. The course starts with whole statements (the units of language with which truth and falsity are associated) and the different ways they combine into compound statements. It then proceeds to examine arguments, which connect statements by means of a fundamental relation called implication. (The course concentrates on deductive implication, the strongest form of this relation.) The analysis of arguments extends to the internal components of whole statements: names, properties and relations. Different strategies are introduced throughout for testing symbolized arguments as well as for constructing them. Nevertheless, the course does not bury itself in abstraction. Whenever appropriate, it will emphasize the presence of logic within the domain of natural language use. For any student, the concepts and methods encountered in this course enable a precise understanding of words such as proof, inference, validity, equivalence, truth, entailment, and necessity, thus providing objective standards for appraising the diverse meanings frequently given to such words in everyday language.

 

Environmental Ethics

 

Course Number: PHIL 256

CRN Number: 92087

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Nicholas Dunn

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 204

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

 

Crosslists:

Environmental & Urban Studies; Environmental Studies; Human Rights; Global and International Studies; and Political Studies

This course considers the ethical issues surrounding our relationship the environment—that is, the kinds of moral relations we might stand in with it and the potential duties we have to it. We begin by considering the moral status of non-human animals, along with theories about the value of nature (i.e., species and ecosystems). We then turn to the ethics of climate change, with an emphasis on the issue of responsibility. From here, we examine some issues of global justice (e.g., climate refugees and our duties to future generations) as a way of seeing how our duties to the human and non-human might be related. In all of this, we will pay special attention to the ways in which these are matters of both feminist and indigenous concern.

 

Philosophy of Care

 

Course Number: PHIL 276

CRN Number: 92092

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Seth Halvorson

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 306

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

Care is central to our lives, our practices, our projects, and institutions. What does it mean to care? How do we give and receive good care?  This 200-level course approaches questions of care from the perspective of moral and political philosophy.  Contemporary philosophies of care, as well as core texts in the philosophy of care will sit at the center of our inquiry. The class will study the ethics, politics, and economics of care across the lifespan and the connection between care and social institutions. Where do our views of care connect to concerns and issues regarding gender, race, class, technology, age, the specific needs at various stages of the human lifespan, and (dis)ability?  How can we understand care as a normative and regulative ideal? This course will be of interest to students in philosophy, the humanities and social sciences generally, but also students in STEAM fields, pre-health, and sustainability studies. One feature of the course will study how an ethics of care might connect to the care and maintenance of our human, technical, and non-human environments.

 

The Frankfurt School: Social Sciences and Humanities Revisited from the Hotel Abyss

 

Course Number: PHIL 277

CRN Number: 92088

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Archie Magno

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Olin 304

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

 

Crosslists:

German Studies; Human Rights; Jewish Studies

The German Left of the 20th century elaborated a unique philosophical tradition which combined Marxism with many trends of post-idealist thought, such as Hegelianism, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. The group of Jewish intellectuals who built upon these positions and formed the Frankfurt institute in the 1920s underwent a vertiginous biographical and intellectual trajectory, from the radical outcasts and emigrants, to the academic establishment of the post-war Germany, from revolutionary Marxism to the Cultural Left and further to a synthesis with the Anglo-American liberalism in today’s Critical Theory. The richness and breadth of their contribution to contemporary philosophy and political theory is hard to overestimate. In the course, we will read and discuss the main authors of the school: Benjamin, Reich, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Habermas, Honneth, Negt, and others, against the turbulent historical context of the German 20th century.

 

From Structuralism to Deconstruction

 

Course Number: PHIL 323

CRN Number: 92095

Class cap: 16

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Robert Weston

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon       3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Olin 304

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

 

Crosslists:

French Studies; Human Rights

As denoted by the term, “Poststructuralism” names a movement of thought developing from and responding to but also moving beyond structuralism. Drawing neat historical divisions in thought can be tricky, yet this course offers students the opportunity to examine these movements with sufficient context to identify Poststructuralism’s debts to Structuralism, as well as its critical departures. The course is divided into four parts. 1) We begin by examining core ideas of structuralism that develop in the field of linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson, Benvéniste) and tackle the basic structuralist proposition that beneath the variable surface phenomena of human culture there exist governing relations of abstract structure. 2) Pursuing the idea that human culture can be grasped by means of deep structures modeled on language, we turn to examine authors who adapt structural analysis for disciplines beyond linguistics, including anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), Marxism (Althusser), literature (Barthes), and psychoanalysis (Lacan). 3) We then turn to social constructionism and consider how Foucault views power and knowledge to operate in historical constructions of the subject. 4) Beginning with an overview of structuralism’s perceived limitations, for the remainder of the course we grapple with some core concerns in poststructuralist thought, such as the instability of meaning in language (Derrida), capitalism and desire (Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard), reality and simulation, (Baudrillard), identity and difference, including questions of sexual difference and gender construction (Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, Butler). The course aims to familiarize students with a range of poststructuralist methodologies, including conceptual analysis, historicism, social constructionism, discourse analysis, schizoanalysis, écriture féminine, and deconstruction. Students can expect to acquire a nuanced grasp of key concepts such as metalanguage, the symbolic and the real, discourse, biopower, logocentrism, différance, alterity, desiring-production, and the precession of simulacra.

 

Virtual and Physical Reality: Ways of Immediate Knowing

 

Course Number: PHIL 324

CRN Number: 92094

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Roger Berkowitz

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM – 5:30 PM Olin 303

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

 

Crosslists:

Human Rights; Politics

Much of modern day experience remains rooted in the understanding of ourselves as fundamentally distinct and separate from what surrounds us. We lose ourselves in books, escape into t.v. and the internet, and socialize online. Increasingly, we live in virtual worlds. While the rise of the scientific and virtual worlds has led to a great range of advances, most notably in the empirical sciences, the world wide web, and globalization, it has closed off other more physical, local, and embodied ways of feeling and experiencing the things and the people with whom we share this world. In this course, we want to explore various approaches that go beyond the metaphysics of separation. We want to take seriously expressions such as “to know something in your heart,” or “to have a gut feeling,” and “I’m just not feeling into it.” Through readings but also through meditative walks and reflective exercises, we aim to explore the potential truth inherent in embodied and physical ways of knowing. We will cover a wide range of sources – from romanticism to phenomenology to Buddhism and other wisdom traditions – to illuminate the theme. We aim to incorporate poetry, visual arts and music and explore the range of perceptions that different practices can reveal. This class will also require some outdoor activities, weather permitting.

 

W. E. B. Du Bois

 

Course Number: PHIL 338

CRN Number: 92093

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Yarran Hominh

 

Schedule/Location:

  Tues       12:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin 306

 

Distributional Area:

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

 

Crosslists:

Africana Studies; Historical Studies; Human Rights

This seminar examines several philosophical themes from the life and work of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963). We will read three of his most important book-length collections of essays: The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Darkwater (1920); and Dusk of Dawn (1940), as well as other assorted essays from across his oeuvre. The four themes on which we will focus are Du Bois’s philosophy of race, his moral psychology, his political philosophy, and his aesthetics. But we will also read his works with an eye to their literary, historical, sociological, and rhetorical aspects, which, as we will see, are inextricable from his philosophy.

 

Senior Project Colloquium

 

Course Number: PHIL 403

CRN Number: 92097

Class cap: 15

Credits: 0

 

Professor:

Jay Elliott

 

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 fall 2023. It is optional for students in PHIL 402. It adds no additional credits.  Students must also register for PHIL 401 or 402. The course is required for all senior Philosophy majors, but adds no additional credits.

 

Cross-listed Courses:

 

Poetry and Philosophy

 

Course Number: GER 331

CRN Number: 92462

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Thomas Wild

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin 303

 

Distributional Area:

FL  Foreign Languages and Lit   

 

Crosslists:

Philosophy

 

Confucianism: Humanity, Rites, and Rights

 

Course Number: HIST 229

CRN Number: 92046

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Robert Culp

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM – 1:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 101

 

Distributional Area:

HA  Historical Analysis  D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists:

Asian Studies; Human Rights; Philosophy; Study of Religions

 

Evidence

 

Course Number: HR 3206

CRN Number: 92069

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Thomas Keenan

 

Schedule/Location:

   Wed  10:10 AM – 12:30 PM Center for Curatorial Studies

 

Distributional Area:

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

 

Crosslists:

Literature; Philosophy

 

Authority, Equality, Freedom: Introduction to Political Theory

 

Course Number: PS 103

CRN Number: 92100

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Mie Inouye

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM – 2:50 PM Olin Languages Center 206

 

Distributional Area:

SA  Social Analysis   

 

Crosslists:

Human Rights; Philosophy

 

Foundations of Law

 

Course Number: PS 237

CRN Number: 92105

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Roger Berkowitz

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     3:30 PM – 4:50 PM Olin 307

 

Distributional Area:

MBV  Meaning, Being, Value   

 

Crosslists:

Human Rights; Philosophy

 

Derrida

 

Course Number: REL 329

CRN Number: 92081

Class cap: 16

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Bevin Blaber

 

Schedule/Location:

  Wed     3:30 PM – 5:50 PM Olin 304

 

Distributional Area:

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

 

Crosslists:

Human Rights; Jewish Studies; Philosophy