Ethics & Society, lower-division section (Spring 26): This course is an introduction to ethical theory and normative theory. In addition to the discussion of major ethical theories, students will select around six applied topics to discuss throughout the semester. Possible topics might include: theories of punishment, insanity defense, choosing embryos, abortion, the moral status of AIs, AI and robot rights, neuroenhancement and other enhancement, lethal autonomous weapons, deathbots, the land ethics, livestock and factory farming, animal rights, animal sentience, moral status of plants, climate change and responsibility, friendship, romantic relations, and marriage, deepfakes, privacy and surveillance, world poverty/consumption, work and wages.
Philosophy of Fiction, upper-division/graduate combined section (Spring 26): This course is a special topics course in the philosophy of fiction with nine modules: (1) What fictions are; (2) What constitutes the value of fiction and literature; (3) What authors are; (4) Creating fictions; (5) The ontology of fiction; (6) Participating in fictions; (7) The paradox of fiction; (8) Im/moralism about fiction; (9) The puzzle of imaginative resistance.
Proseminar (Fall 2024): ‘Critical Moments in Analytic Philosophy’: This course is designed to initiate first-semester graduate students into the program and into philosophy as it is practiced at higher levels of professional academic competence. The initiation into advanced philosophy will be achieved by equipping students with the skills in analysis, composition, and research that are appropriate for meeting the expectations of our MA program. The description for the Fall 2024 offering is ‘Critical Moments in Analytic Philosophy’. We will rotate topics weekly by analyzing influential articles from the last century.
Philosophy of Law, upper-division section (Sum 26, Winter 26, Sum 25, Winter 25, Summer 24, Winter 24, Summer 23, Winter 23, Summer 22, Winter 22, Summer 21, Winter 21, Fall 2010): upper-division section. Study of the historical development of the philosophy of law and examination of the problems in the field ranging from general theories to analysis of fundamental legal concepts and normative issues.
Engineering Ethics, upper-division section (Fall 2023): This course introduces major ethical theories in philosophy and a discussion of case studies from engineering fields. Topics covered included cost-benefit analysis, the problem of group responsibility, environmental ethics and sustainability, privacy, artificial intelligence, skeptical accounts of. technology, and risk and uncertainty. The course uses examples and case studies from different areas of engineering, in both historical and contemporary contexts. The focus in all cases will be tying our evaluation of case studies to ethical principles that are grounded in developed philosophical theories, and which may be reflected in professional codes of ethics.
Proseminar (Fall 2021): This course is designed to initiate first-semester graduate students into the program and into philosophy as it is practiced at higher levels of professional academic competence. The initiation into advanced philosophy will be achieved by equipping students with the skills in analysis, composition, and research that are appropriate for meeting the expectations of our MA program. The topic for Fall 2021 seminar was Philosophy of Fiction.
Philosophy & Literature, upper-division section (Fall 2020): This course is about (A) philosophical questions about literature, and (B) philosophical views within literary works. The units that will be covered in the first half of the course are: (1) What is literature? (2) What is the value of literature? (3) What is an author? (4) Creating fictions. (5) Participating in fictions. (6) The ontology of fiction. (7) The Paradox of Fiction and the Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance. Our primary text for investigating these questions is Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe. We will supplement with excerpts and readings from Martha Nussbaum, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Lewis, Amie Thomasson, Derek Matravers, Nelson Goodman & Catherine Elgin, Tamar Gendler, and Jorge Luis Borges. Students also read a series of short fictions and one longer novel-length text.
Philosophy & Film, lower-division section (Winter 2020, Winter 2019, Fall 2018, Winter 2018): Students in this course deepen their understanding of the 'big questions' of philosophy by examining them both in primary texts and in cinematic representations. Traditional reading of philosophical texts and essays are paired with excerpts from films. The course looks at cinematic 'texts' in order to understand concepts such as knowledge, reality, personal identity, memory, freedom, moral luck, friendship, love, forgiveness, and the meaning of life. We also investigate whether cinematic works of art have fixed meanings and interpretations, and whether they can be a source of knowledge in themselves.
Proseminar (Fall 2019): This course is designed to initiate first-semester graduate students into the program and into philosophy as it is practiced at higher levels of professional academic competence. The initiation into advanced philosophy will be achieved by equipping students with the skills in analysis, composition, and research that are appropriate for meeting the expectations of our MA program. The topic for Fall 2019 is Animal cognition and related issues. We will read historical and contemporary papers related to themes of animal minds, sentience, social awareness, cognition, consciousness, communication, and ethics.
Political Philosophy, upper-division section (Fall 2017): Students in this course will read historical and contemporary texts in political philosophy around the themes of respect, liberty, and authority. The readings include: WEB DuBois ("Of The Ruling Of Men," "The Servant in the House," "The Damnation of Women"), Hobbes (Leviathan, excerpts), Kant (Groundwork, excerpts and Lectures on Ethics, excerpts), Hamilton and Madison (Federalist Papers, excerpts), Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the US, De Tocqueville (Democracy in America, excerpts), The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, excerpts; The Subjection of Women, excerpts), Isaiah Berlin ("Two Concepts of Liberty"), John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, excerpts), Michael Sandel ("The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self"), Martha Nussbaum ("The Feminist Critique of Liberalism"), Joseph Dejacque ("On Being Human"), Rosello di Leo ("On the Origins of Male Domination"), Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, excerpts), Grotius ("The General Rights of Things"), Pufendorf ("On the Origin of Dominion"), Locke ("Of Slavery and Property"), William Godwin (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, excerpts; "Of Law"), Bertrand Russell ("The World As it Could Be Made"), Noam Chomsky ("Notes on Anarchism"), Charlotte Wilson ("Anarchism"), Mikhael Bakunin ("What is the State?", "The Illusion of Universal Suffrage"), Peter Kropotkin ("Law and Authority"), He Zhen (“Women’s Liberation”), Carmen Lareva (“Free Love”), Emma Goldman (Marriage, excerpts and “Marriage and Love”), Carol Pateman (The Sexual Contract, excerpts), Charles Mills (The Racial Contract, excerpts), Martin Luther King, Jr. ("Letter From Birmingham Jail").
Philosophy of Literature, upper-division section (Fall 2016): This course is about (A) philosophical questions about literature, and (B) philosophical views within literary works. The units that will be covered in the first half of the course are: (1) What is literature? Here we use philosophical tools to demarcate a work of literature itself. (2) What is a work of fiction? (3) What is the ontology of fiction and fictional entities? (4) What is the logic of assertion, truth, and meaning in fictional worlds? (5) How do we psychologically participate in fictions? Our primary text for investigating these questions is Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe. We will supplement with excerpts and readings from Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Lewis, Amie Thomasson, and Jorge Luis Borges. The second half of the course is on this semester's theme: self-knowledge. We will read a couple philosophical works on this theme (including an essay by Charles Taylor), and then we will look at this theme in a variety of literary works. There will be some student choice in this list (meaning: students pursue their own reading interests from a fairly long list), which may include work by: St. Augustine, George Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Marcel Proust, Milan Kundera, Henry James, Lydia Davis, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, David Markson, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Philosophy of Language, upper-division/graduate combined section (Fall 2015, Spring 2013, Spring 2011, Spring 2009): This is a greatest hits course in twentieth century philosophy of language. Units: meaning & language, definite descriptions, names, indeterminacies. Readings include Frege ("The Thought" and "On Sense and Reference"), Wittgenstein (from Philosophical Investigations), Quine (from Word and Object), Grice ("Logic and Conversation"), Chomsky ("Language and Problems of Knowledge"), Russell ("Descriptions"), Strawson ("On Referring"), Donnellan ("Reference and Definite Descriptions"), Kripke ("Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference" and material from Naming and Necessity and material from On Rules and Private Language), Searle ("Proper Names"), Evans ("The Causal Theory of Names" and "Understanding Demonstratives"), Kaplan ("Demonstratives..." and "Dthat"), and Perry ("The Problem of the Essential Indexical").
Philosophy & Literature, upper-division section (Fall 2014): This course is about (A) philosophical questions about literature, and (B) philosophical views within literary works. The units covered this semester were: (1) What is literature? Here we use philosophical tools to demarcate literature itself. What goes into the creation of literary works? Do they need to contain fictional elements? Does the author need to intend for them to be literary? How can literature be defined such that it allows for the production of new work? (2) What is the purpose of literature? Is literature ever bad for societies? Is it necessary for understanding the harshness of reality? Can it make philosophical claims in ways that are unavailable to philosophers? Should it aim toward something good? Can literature written with immoral intentions still be good literature? (3) What is an author? (4) The ontology of fiction: how can we talk about fictional events, objects, and persons, fictional events in non-fictional settings, non-fictional events that are partially fictionalized, the language games of fiction and reality. (5) Personal identity. (6) Memory and immortality. Readings included work by Robert Stecker, Monroe Beardsley, E.D. Hirsch, Peter Lamarque & Stein Haugom Olson, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Carver, Catherine Wilson, Edith Wharton, Martha Nussbaum, Oscar Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, David Foster Wallace, Nelson Goodman & Catherine Elgin, John Searle, David Lewis, and Amie Thomasson. Students selected novels to work on from Oscar Wilde, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Ellison, Virginia Woolf, Milan Kundera, or their own choice.
Kant, upper-division/graduate combined section (Spring 2014, Spring 2012, Spring 2010): upper-division/graduate combined section. In this course we study Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason carefully, critically, and thoroughly. This will take us through a number of topics central to philosophy including reason, knowledge and its limits, experience, space and time, self-knowledge, and appearances and reality. Students will leave this course better prepared to discuss this extremely important episode in the history of philosophy, and will be better prepared to take the richness of Kant’s philosophy and apply it to many contemporary philosophical debates. First Critique material covered included: B preface, B introduction, B33-B202, Axvi-Axvii, B218-B256, B294-B315, B349-B396, A338-A405, B432-B453, B472-B479, B560-B586, B595-B503, B823-B858 (some of the material near the end was optional for students depending on paper topic). Graduate students were required to attend additional discussion seminars where we read and discussed Karl Ameriks' "From Kant to Frank: The Ineliminable Subject" and "Identity," Manfred Frank, "Is Subjectivity a Non-Thing, an Absurdity [Unding]? On Some Difficulties in Naturalistic Reductions Self-Consciousness," Dieter Heinrich, "Self-Consciousness: A Critical Introduction to a Theory," Thomas Nagel, from The View from Nowhere, and portions of Henry Allison's Transcendental Idealism.
Introduction to Ethics, lower-division section (Spring 2015, Spring 2014, Spring 2013, Spring 2012, Spring 2011, Spring 2010, Spring 2009): Introduction to major historical ethical theories and select topics in normative ethics.
Critical Thinking, lower-division section (Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2012, Fall 2011, Fall 2010, Fall 2009, Fall 2008, Spring 2008, Fall 2007): Introduction to philosophical principles and methods of clear reasoning. Includes discussion of the psychological literature on heuristics and biases.
Proseminar (Fall 2013): This course is designed to initiate first-semester graduate students into the program and into philosophy as it is practiced at higher levels of professional academic competence. The initiation into advanced philosophy will be achieved by equipping students with the skills in analysis, composition, and research that are appropriate for meeting the expectations of our MA program. The theme for the proseminar for Fall 2013 was ‘Speech Acts and Pragmatics’. We read and discussed classic and contemporary papers related to these topics including work by Grice, Austin, Searle, Szabo, Salmon, Strawson, Carston, Bach & Harnish, Saul, Lewis, Stalnaker, and others.
Liberty and Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in American Law, upper-division section (Fall 2012): This course covers philosophical questions concerning race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity in the history of American law. Readings include work by J.S. Mill, Naomi Zack, Michelle Alexander, Martha Minow, Ronald Dworkin, Susan Okin, Angela Harris, Dean Spade, Richard Delgado, Catherine MacKinnon, and J. Angelo Corlett. We also read many court opinions in this course, including U.S. v. The Amistad, State v. Post (1845), Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954 and 1955), Strauder v. West Virginia (1879), Korematsu v. United States (1944), Washington v. Davis (1976), McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), Loving v. Virginia (1967), University of California v. Bakke (1978), Craig v. Boren (1976), Michael M. v. Sonoma County Superior Court (1981), Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), Watkins v. U.S. Army (1990), Steffan v. Perry (1994), Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000), Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health (2003), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942), Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966), City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez (1973), Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), Roe v. Wade (1973), Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), Miller v. California (1973), American Booksellers Assoc. v. Hudnut (1985), Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America (1977), Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992).
Proseminar (Fall 2011):This course is designed to initiate first-semester graduate students into the program and into philosophy as it is practiced at higher levels of professional academic competence. The initiation into advanced philosophy will be achieved by equipping students with the skills in analysis, composition, and research that are appropriate for meeting the expectations of our MA program. The theme for the proseminar for Fall 2011 was ‘Autonomy and Objectification’. We read and discussed classic and contemporary papers related to these topics including work by Kant (Groundwork, Lectures on Ethics, Metaphysics of Morals), Henry Allison, Christine Korsgaard, Jane Kneller, Barbara Herman, Sally Haslanger, Martha Nussbaum, Jennifer Saul, Rae Langton, Charles Taylor, Susan Wolf, Linda Barclay, Paul Benson, and Natalie Stoljar.
Seminar (Spring 2008): ‘The Nature of Language’: In this course we studied philosophical theories on the nature of language. We were not primarily concerned with the narrow problems that have occupied most contemporary philosophy of language (e.g., reference, meaning, quantification domains, indexicality, contextualism, etc.). Rather, we tried to answer the most general philosophical about language, namely What is language? Readings included Plato (Cratylus), Locke ("Of Words"), Leibniz ("Of Words"), Humboldt (from On Language), Austin ("Performative Utterances" and from How to Do Things with Words), Searle ("What is a Speech Act?" and "Literal Meaning"), Grice ("Logic and Conversation" and "Meaning"), Quine (from Word and Object), Davidson ("Belief and the Basis of Meaning"), Saussure ("On the Dual Essence of Language"), Sapir (from Language, An Introduction to the Study of Speech), Lewis ("Language and Languages"), Chomsky (from Language and the Problems of Knowledge and from Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use), Langacker (from Cognitive Grammar), Clark ("Languages and Representations"), Sperber & Wilson (from Relevance), and Cappelen & Lepore (from Semantic Minimalism).
Feminism, undergraduate/graduate combined section (Fall 2007): Classic readings in the history of feminist theory.