Course:

PHIL 104  Multicultural Philosophy

Professor:

Daniel Berthold  

CRN:

90029

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap:

22

Credits:

4

This course is an introduction to such major themes in the history of philosophy as the nature of reality and our capacity to know it; issues of ethics and justice; and conceptions of how one should live.  Readings will include selections from a diverse range of traditions, including Western, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, African, native American and feminist texts.  A main emphasis of the course is to look at ways that cultural contexts inflect the meanings of what philosophy is and how it is expressed.

 

Course:

PHIL 108  Introduction to Philosophy

Professor:

David Shein  

CRN:

90030

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     8:30 AM - 9:50 AM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

20

Credits:

4

If our lives have meaning, what gives them meaning?  If our lives do not have meaning, how ought we to live them?  Guided by this pair of very big questions, we will spend the semester exploring classical and contemporary attempts to figure out whether the universe is purposeful and how the answer to that question might impact how we live our lives.  Topics to be discussed include the existence of God, the nature of reality, the possibility of knowledge, the problem of induction, conceptions of the good, and the relationship between the individual and the state.

 

Course:

PHIL 212  Early Greek Thinking

Professor:

Jay Elliott  

CRN:

90031

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

20

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  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. 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.

 

Course:

PHIL 217  Philosophy in the USA

Professor:

Kathryn Tabb  

CRN:

90032

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Olin 205

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

This course will offer a survey of different philosophical movements historically associated with the United States. We will focus on the twentieth century, but also look at traditions that have their roots earlier and apart from the nation-state, such as Indigenous American philosophies and logical positivism,  brought to the country by European emigres in the 1930s. This class's guiding question will be whether there is such a thing as a "tradition of American philosophy," and if so whether it can be identified simply by genealogy, or rather through a particular set of philosophical commitments. Contenders will include the pragmatism found in thinkers from C.S. Peirce to Richard Rorty; the pluralism championed by philosophers from Ida B. Wells to Alain Locke; the socialized ethics of the likes of Jane Addams, John Dewey, and the intellectual leaders of the Civil Rights Movement; and the radicalism of political thinkers from Emma Goldman to Cornell West. 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.

 

Course:

PHIL 234  Philosophy, Art, and the Culture of Democracy

Professor:

Zachary Weinstein

CRN:

90035

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 303

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Art History; Human Rights

How have philosophical conceptions of liberty, equality, freedom of expression, and representation defined our conception of American political democracy? How have they continued to challenge and shape our social and cultural conceptions of individuality, education, political responsibility, and social engagement? How are art works and critical writing not just exemplary of, but fundamental to, our democratic culture and essential to its continuation? We will explore these questions through discussions of philosophical works by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stanley Cavell, Marilyn Frye, and others; Bard’s Stockbridge-Munsee Land Acknowledgment; essays by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Claudia Rankine; and art works by Bruce Nauman, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Glenn Ligon, Theaster Gates, and other artists.

 

Course:

PHIL 237  Symbolic Logic

Professor:

James Brudvig  

CRN:

90036

Schedule:

  Wed  Fri   10:20 AM - 11:40 AM Reem Kayden Center 103

Distributional Area:

MC Mathematics and Computing

Class cap:

25

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Mind, Brain, Behavior

An introduction to logic, requiring no prior knowledge of philosophy or mathematics.  This course aims at imparting the ability to construct correct formal deductions and refutations. Our text (available on-line free of charge) covers the first order predicate calculus with identity; we will cover as much of that as feasible in one semester.  There is software for the course, called Logic 2010, developed by Robert Martin and David Kaplan at UCLA in the 1990s and subsequently rewritten for the internet, that will assist students by providing feedback on exercises.

 

Course:

PHIL 245  Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

Professor:

Ruth Zisman  

CRN:

90033

Schedule:

 Tue  Thurs    12:10 PM - 1:30 PM Olin 204

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  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 work, tradition, history, god, religion, morality, power, sexuality, and subjectivity. 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.

 

Course:

PHIL 306  The Philosophy Lab

Professor:

Kathryn Tabb  

CRN:

90037

Schedule:

 Fri   2:00 PM - 3:20 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

12

Credits:

2

This two-credit course will focus on philosophy as a discipline, with special attention to questions of inclusion and access. Students will meet biweekly to discuss readings on the current state of the profession and its history, to learn about what life as a philosopher looks like at the post-graduate and professional levels, and to contribute to the community of the program. This last component might include choosing speakers for the annual Speaker Series, organizing events for the Philosophy Salon, managing the Philosophy Study Room, and participating in a mentoring program. Written work will include biweekly response papers as well as other short assignments. This class is open to all moderated students in Philosophy.

 

Course:

PHIL 317  Spinoza

Professor:

Robert Tully  

CRN:

90038

Schedule:

   Thurs    2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 304

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Jewish Studies; Study of Religions

Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, a product of the early Enlightenment, is a paradigm of rationalist metaphysics.  The book is comprehensive, systematic, rigorously argued, and unflinching in its radical conclusions about our place in the universe.  It is also a neglected masterpiece.  To the empirically committed, the Ethics sinks under the weight of obsolete philosophical concepts.  In Spinoza's metaphysics, God is identical with Nature, a single substance possessing infinite attributes which causes its own existence and on which everything in space and time depends.  But hasn't modern science gone well beyond such a framework?  To the religiously inclined, the Ethics is heretical secular theology which views God as an impersonal power, and which condemns traditional beliefs and practices, whether in Judaism or Christianity, as no better than primitive idolatry.  Isn't this atheism?  However, just as it is counterproductive for theology to ignore the knowledge which science reveals to us, it is also self-serving for science to ignore the deeply contemplative and spiritual side of Spinoza's thought about the mind's capacity to recognize its limited function within nature.  Spinoza intended the Ethics to guide the serious reader towards a perspective that enables a well-ordered life.  For that reason alone, his book is of timeless importance and rewards careful study, which is the aim of this course.

 

Course:

PHIL 393  Philosophy and the Arts Seminar

Professor:

Garry Hagberg  

CRN:

90039

Schedule:

 Tue      5:40 PM - 8:00 PM Olin 203

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

15

Credits:

4

This advanced seminar on aesthetics will work through three of the great masterpieces in the field. Beginning with Aristotle's Poetics, we will look closely into questions of representation in the arts, the role and experience of the spectator, the connections between ethics and aesthetics, and the relation between art and knowledge. From there we will move to Hume's essay on taste, looking into the distinction between subjective and objective judgement and the nature of aesthetic perception. We will then progress to a close reading of Kant's Critique of Judgement, in which we will explore questions of aesthetic perception, judgement, ethics and aesthetics, the beautiful, and the sublime. We will end with an examination of the transition to the aesthetics of romanticism and nineteenth-century aesthetic thought.  This course satisfies the Junior Seminar requirement.

 

Course:

PHIL 399  Kierkegaard

Professor:

Daniel Berthold  

CRN:

90040

Schedule:

 Tue      2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 306

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Study of Religions

An examination of a variety of Soren Kierkegaard's aesthetic, psychological, and theological texts. We will investigate the portrait of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions of existence; the critique of systematic philosophical discourse; the existentialist psychology of inwardness; the religious categories of absurdity, paradox, and offense; and the nature of language and authorship.  Readings will be drawn from such pseudonymous works as Either / Or  (Victor Eremita), Repetition (Constantine Constantius), Fear and Trembling (Johannes de Silentio), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Johann Climacus), Training in Christianity and The Sickness Unto Death (Anti-Climacus), as well as some of the sermons or 'Edifying Discourses' written under Kierkegaard's own name. We will also read a variety of writers who have engaged Kierkegaard's authorship in ways central to the several projects of modernity and postmodernity, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Sylviane Agacinski (and other feminist commentators).

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

Course:

HR/PS 243  Constitutional Law

Professor:

Peter Rosenblum and Roger Berkowitz

CRN:

90139

Schedule:

Mon  Wed     3:50 PM - 5:10 PM Reem Kayden Center 103

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis

Class cap:

40

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  American Studies; Philosophy

 

Course:

HR 3206  Evidence

Professor:

Thomas Keenan  

CRN:

90140

Schedule:

Mon       2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Center for Curatorial Studies Seminar Room

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

D+J Difference and Justice

Class cap

18

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Literature; Philosophy

 

Course:

PS 392  The Political Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois

Professor:

Mie Inouye  

CRN:

90572

Schedule:

 Thurs      10:20 AM - 12:40 PM

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value

Class cap:

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Africana Studies; American Studies; Human Rights; Philosophy

 

Course:

SOC 306  Law, Jurisprudence & Social Theory

Professor:

Laura Ford  

CRN:

90016

Schedule:

Mon       2:00 PM - 4:20 PM Olin 301

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis

Class cap

12

Credits:

4

Cross-listed:  Human Rights; Philosophy