Philosophy Courses

A launch-course into the wide world of philosophical inquiry that approaches the field through consideration of such perennial problems as ultimate reality, free will, knowledge, morality, political obligation and the existence of God. Depending on instructor, this course may also explore some aspects of social identity, such as race and gender, from a philosophical perspective.

• Counts as: HU
• Elective
• Pre-requisites: None

Are there any moral restrictions on what we can sell? Should we be allowed to sell endangered animals as pets, our bodies into slavery, our bodies for sex, or our votes for public officials? This course will introduce you to some basic philosophical methods and problems, particularly those connected to these questions. We begin by learning about logic - we will learn about the difference between good and bad arguments. Then, we will turn to explore the basics of ethical theory - we will ask what makes our actions good or bad. Finally, we will turn to our main topic: the moral limits of markets. We will explore controversies about which things we should be allowed to sell, and the moral value (or disvalue) of markets.

• Counts as: HU
• Elective
• Pre-requisites: None

Most of our lives are now mediated by the cyber domain, which is constituted by networked computers, smartphones, and connected devices transmitting and receiving data packets across the globe nearly at the speed of light. The goal of this course is to cultivate ethical reasoning skills crucial to securing human flourishing in the cyber age. Students will be exposed to ethical concepts, such as utilitarianism, virtue ethics, duty-based ethics, and care ethics that can serve as useful frameworks and moral standards to help us navigate, either as citizens, future software engineers, or cybersecurity professionals, appropriate restraints of internet uses and ethically informed design principles that safeguard human privacy and liberty. After introducing the discipline of ethical reasoning, the course will consider a variety of contemporary ethical and legal puzzles including ethical hacktivism, intellectual property, ethical issues related to AI and machine learning, surveillance, net neutrality, equity and access to new technologies, and cyberwarfare.

• Counts as: HU
• Elective
• Pre-requisites: None

A historical study of Western philosophy from its beginnings in ancient Greece through the end of the classical period, with primary emphasis on Plato and Aristotle. Representative original works are read dealing with such problems as reality, the self, knowledge and value.

• Counts as: HU
• Texts and Contexts
• Pre-requisites: None

Critical reasoning is the ability and tendency to be moved by good reasons and not by poor ones. This course examines arguments-how to identify them, how to evaluate them, and how to produce them-so that students will be better prepared to reason critically about issues of importance to themselves and to society. Topics may include both the formal and informal evaluation of arguments, scientific reasoning, and fallacious reasoning.

• Counts as: QLR
• Logic and Argumentation
• Pre-requisites: None

An introduction to ethics, drawing on texts from the Greeks to the present. What is the nature of moral obligation? What character traits are human virtues and vices? How do we discern goodness and evil? How do we justify ethical judgments of any kind? This is an appropriate selection for students with an interest in questions of how to live well in a shared world and provides an important background for further study in philosophy or other disciplines.

• Counts as: HU
• Ethics and Values
• Pre-requisites: None

This course introduces students to the debate over distributive justice in political philosophy. Distributive justice concerns the principles according to which we should distribute goods in society. Should society be guided by strict equality when we distribute goods? Should society redistribute goods from the wealthiest to give back to the poor? Or should we avoid redistributing goods to promote individual liberty? To answer these questions, we'll explore classic views: socialism, liberalism, and libertarianism. We will also explore newer views philosophers have put forward like Luck Egalitarianism, Relational Egalitarianism, Prioritarianism, and Left-Libertarianism. As they learn about this debate, students will have opportunities to think about their commitments to economic justice and to learn where their values are best expressed in this complex and important debate.

• Counts as: HU
• Ethics and Values
• Pre-requisites: None

A study of the answers that philosophers from Plato to Marx have given to the question, "How should political life be organized?" This question leads us to consider the related problems of justice, power, equality, freedom, and human nature. The course includes discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy.

• Counts as: SS
• Elective
• Also offered as: POLS-206
• Pre-requisites: None

In the 16th-18th centuries, a scientific revolution shattered medieval certainties and philosophers worked to rebuild human knowledge from the ground up. While Descartes tried to find firm foundations for knowledge, scientists and mathematicians like Galileo and Newton revolutionized scientific methods. Meanwhile, thinkers like Locke, Hume, and Kant wrestled with mind-bending questions: How do we know anything at all? What is the relationship between our minds and the external world? Can reason alone deliver truth, or must we rely on experience? This course will examine the ideas and thinkers that laid the foundations for our world, with a special focus on learning how to understand the worldviews of others through deep engagement with their texts and ideas.

• Counts as: HU
• Texts and Contexts
• Pre-requisites: None

The study of ethics and moral reasoning is introduced through the lens of sport. Topics such as moral skepticism, ethical relativism, utilitarianism vs. Kantianism, competing concepts of impartiality, the care vs. justice perspective, positive vs. negative duties and the doctrine of double effect are explored. Students will be asked to evaluate their own opinions, beliefs and attitudes that govern their judgment and/or actions within the realm of sport.

• Counts as: HU
• Elective
• Pre-requisites: None

More than simply philosophical work from Latin America or from Latin American thinkers, Latin American philosophy is a distinctive philosophical tradition, emergent, in the words of Enrique Dussel, from "the underside of history". Although the characteristics of Latin American philosophy are hotly debated, suggested themes and commonalities include: 1) attention to lived experience and the role of social, political, and historical location in shaping the pursuit of truth and justice; 2) contemporary reverberations of indigenous thought; 3) inquiry into what it means to be 'Latin American' and/or 'Latinx'; and 4) an urgent concern for liberation from colonialism and oppression. In this class, we read works from thinkers who are aligned with this contested tradition while also grappling with the philosophical question of what makes Latin American philosophy what it is. Mirroring the fields own tendencies towards situated and engaged philosophy, the course strives to attend to the distinctive historical, social, and political contexts out of which these texts emerge while also highlighting their relevance to struggles for liberation today. Indeed, no tradition of critical inquiry and philosophical reflection may be more relevant to the contemporary moment; whether it be the issue of immigration, colonialism and decolonialization, or the search for identity, Latin American philosophy cuts to the quick of the social and political issues of our times, deploying philosophy itself as a tool of change.

• Counts as: HU, DIV-13
• Power and Privilege
• Pre-requisites: None

Students will be introduced to techniques and skills drawn from humanities disciplines such as literature, philosophy, and history to expand and complicate the fundamental distinction between illness and health. Humanistic disciplines emphasize the importance of stories/narratives, reading carefully, empathetic listening, tolerating ambiguity, understanding the context and history of concepts, analyzing metaphors, putting together arguments, and evaluating one's own beliefs and values in light of discussion and debate with people whose own life experiences have shaped them in ways that force us to reexamine the most fundamental views we hold. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to studying health and illness that integrates medical/scientific models with the personal, the ethical, the artistic, and the socially shaped character of institutions and knowledge. We will specifically look at narrative medicine, cross-cultural competence, patient experience, bioethical dilemmas, social and political sources of suffering and resilience, the history of medicine, and global health disparities.

• Counts as: HU
• Elective
• Pre-requisites: None

This course engages a set of questions that emerge out of three interrelated bodies of philosophic literature-African philosophy, Caribbean philosophy, and African American philosophy-which comprise an inclusive category of African diasporic thought (or Africana philosophy). We read texts on the metaphilosophical question, "What is Africana philosophy?" We also engage several philosophers on the political philosophical concerns and legacies of colonization and American slavery, and on the epistemological and ethical questions of Race and racism.

• Counts as: HU, DIV-13
• Power and Privilege
• Pre-requisites: Any 100-level philosophy course or permission of the instructor.

In the United States today, 2.2 million people are incarcerated in prisons and jails at a rate that far outpaces the rest of the world. This trend of mass incarceration is characterized by significant racial and socioeconomic disparity, growing incarceration rates among women, the recent dedication of resources to detain undocumented citizens (detention rates have doubled in last 10 years), and laws and practices that run counter to the reality of crime rates and common decency. How did we get here? We'll spend our semester exploring various aspects of American history, philosophical arguments concerning the role of the criminal justice system, ethical analysis of contemporary practices of predictive policing (including Flock Cameras, Biometric Searches, and other forms of automated algorithmic policing) to better understand the modern phenomenon of mass incarceration, namely what drives it, what are the costs, and what civil rights are in jeopardy with modern policing tactics.

• Counts as: HU, DIV-13
• Power and Privilege
• Pre-requisites: None

What is the world ultimately like? Are we humans anything more than the cells and tissues that we're made of? Should we really believe that the sciences tell us what the world is like? And how do the smallest bits of the world, like atoms, relate to the biggest bits, like societies? Philosophers have thought long and hard about questions like these and have produced many provocative, but ultimately incompatible, answers. This course introduces students to the debate around these questions and more. Along the way, students will work to refine their critical thinking, argumentative writing, and presentation skills. This course is appropriate for all students, regardless of their background in philosophy, and satisfies the HU requirement.

• Counts as: HU
• Knowledge and Reality
• Pre-requisites: None

Symbolic logic is the study of how we ought to reason, or in other words, it is the study of the conditions under which we are allowed to draw conclusions from a set of claims. In this course, we will learn a logical language that allows us to break down ordinary English arguments into their core logical components so that we can show using proofs and other methods when conclusions follow from evidence and when they don’t. Mastering these skills is not only fun and philosophically interesting but has significant practical value. Proficiency with the logical reasoning skills we will learn in this course can help students develop the skills needed to become better logical reasoners in general but also provides students with the capacity to do well on tasks that gauge skill with logic and argumentation (e.g., on standardized exams like the LSAT). 

 This course requires no mathematical background. Students from all backgrounds, and especially students interested in developing their logical reasoning abilities, are welcome. This course fulfills the QLR requirement.  

• Counts as: QLR
• Logic and Argumentation
• Pre-requisites: None

200 Level - This course focuses on the American Philosophical Tradition, including the works of Emerson, Cady Stanton, Thoreau, Whitman, Addams, James, Dewey, Baldwin and Rorty. Key themes include individualism, self-trust, civil disobedience, non-conformity, practical problem solving, and democracy. Students will explore topics such as education, human experience, the value of pluralism, and the role of democratic institutions and civil society in affecting social progress. Contemporary applications include: racism, gender identity, wealth inequality, worker's rights, educational reform, environmental activism, and countering fascism.

• Counts as: HU
• Texts and Contexts
• Pre-requisites: None

Austrian artist, architect, and environmental activist, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose name literally translates to 'Peace Realm Hundred Waters', once provocatively proposed that our reality is made up of a series of five skins: Our literal skin, our clothing, our homes, our identity, and, finally, the earth itself. Inspired by Hundertwasser's concept of these 'five skins' and the interrelationships between them, but also by the place-based thinking of many indigenous peoples and the philosophical method of phenomenology, this course asks and explores fundamental questions about dwelling: How do the places we inhabit influence where our minds' journeys and the paths by which they travel there? What is a home? How do our abodes influence our experiences of the world and to whom and what we feel connected? What ethical and ecological responsibilities surround our dwelling places, and how do they shape and inform our lives? Throughout the semester, such philosophical inquiries into the nature of dwelling are interspersed with explorations of concrete possibilities for more sustainable ways of living on this beautiful and fragile earth, such as Hundertwasser's architectural designs for human and tree tenants alike, Arakawa and Gin's de-habituating designs proclaimed to 'reverse destiny', and SunRay Kelley's hand-hewn houses. Fulfills EL and HU learning requirements.

• Counts as: HU, EL
• Ethics and Values
• Pre-requisites: Any PHIL or ENVS course

This course, multi-listed with the Education and Philosophy departments, is an interdisciplinary examination of three complementary theoretical approaches: feminist philosophy, feminist epistemology, and feminist pedagogy. Together we will ask how minority perspectives on the world such as those defined by critical theory, gender, (dis)ability, intersectionality, indigenous ways of knowing, and postmodernist theory demand new methods of learning and teaching in the 21st century. Course readings will come from book and article selections by Deloria, hooks, Freire, and Wilshire among others.Pre-requisites, one of the following: Intro to Philosophy, education course, or gender studies course.

• Counts as: HU
• Power and Privilege
• Pre-requisites: Any PHIL, EDUC, or ENVS course

What obligations, if any, do we have towards the environment? What changes should we make in our own lives in light of those obligations? How does material consumption relate to our happiness? If we can be happy consuming less, why do so many of us continue to consume so much? How do our attitudes towards the environment reflect our social position? What is the difference between the natural and the artificial? This course examines such questions in order to come to grips with our relationship with the environment, and what these ideas mean for the way we lead our lives. Students will explore these questions in relation to the global community, to our local community, and in relation to their own lives and choices. Prerequisite: any 100-level philosophy course, or ENVS-101, or permission of the instructor.

• Counts as: HU, EL
• Ethics and Values
• Pre-requisites: Any PHIL course or ENVS-101

Are there races? If races exist, then are they biological or social constructs? If races do not exist, then what sense can we make of our racial discourse - what do racial terms refer to, if anything at all? This course introduces students to the contemporary philosophical debate around these questions. Along the way, we will visit the discourse about race in anthropology, economics, and sociology and learn about the distinctive philosophical issues these disciplines raise about nature and existence of race. Finally, we will entertain how the different positions about the reality of race connect to social and economic justice.

• Counts as: HU, DIV-R
• Knowledge and Reality
• Pre-requisites: Any PHIL course OR ANTH-101 OR ANTH-102 OR ANTH-103 OR ANTH-104

This course introduces students to philosophical issues in the human sciences (e.g., economics, epidemiology, political science, sociology), especially philosophical work focusing on economics, epidemiology, and sociology. Philosophers of science have studied the foundational assumptions of the various human sciences and have unearthed philosophical issues that set these sciences apart from natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. Philosophers have examined the ways in which the human sciences are connected to our moral and political values, the philosophical implications of how successful the human sciences are compared to the natural sciences, and whether human societies and populations can be studied scientifically at all. Along the way, philosophers have examined traditional questions asked in the philosophy of science about the extent to which successful science provides true descriptions of reality, and whether and to what extent science can ever achieve objectivity. Our aim is to explore these issues by looking at some of the most prominent research strategies used in the human sciences, especially modeling. This course assumes no familiarity with philosophy or the health or social sciences - students from different disciplinary backgrounds are welcome (and encouraged) to register!

• Counts as: HU
• Knowledge and Reality
• Pre-requisites: Any ECON, GOVT, PHIL, or SOC course, OR BIO-101 OR BIO-102 OR PH-216

In this upper this division inquiry based seminar we explore the relationship between ways of knowing and ways of being-in-the-world through textual analysis of feminist philosophical texts on epistemology and ethics. After an introduction to feminist ways of knowing, and readings addressing specific topics of concern for feminist philosophers in the first part of the course, we then engage in readings around a particular theme in feminist philosophy. Themes have included, but are not limited to: the body, the self, intersections of race, class, sexuality, gender and ethnicity, Asian feminist philosophy, contemporary issues.

• Counts as: HU
• Power and Privilege
• Pre-requisites: Any of PHIL-100,PHIL-103, ENVS-101, ASIA-123, PHIL-120,PHIL-206, PHIL-206W, GOVT-206, GOVT-206W, OR GNDR-290, or PEAC-100

This course examines the nature of the mind. Is your mind the same thing as your brain? What is consciousness? Could a computer think and feel like we do? How is that we are able to think about the world outside of our own heads at all? Drawing on work in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, this class investigates questions about the conceptual foundations of the various ways in which we try to understand the mind and brain. Students will not only develop a better understanding of these central questions, but also explore the interplay between philosophical and empirical approaches to a shared problem.

• Counts as: HU
• Knowledge and Reality
• Pre-requisites: Any of PHIL course or or NRSCI-288 or BIOL-288

This course will examine how American thinkers and writers describe the struggle to become an educated person. The authors that we will read together this semester all come to a point where they ask: Why does the world seem to conspire against individuals who aim to become educated? Each of our authors see the struggle for education in different ways, describing it as a struggle: against the old (world); against our self and our self-conceptions; against injustice; against our language; against our forms of thinking and ways of knowing; against racism and other forms of prejudice; against our limitations (real and perceived). Together we will witness the struggles for education that our authors manage to (beautifully) express, and we will work together to discover what lessons these expressions hold for our understanding of education and our own struggles to become educated.

• Counts as: HU
• Power and Privilege
• Pre-requisites: None

This course grapples with many of the difficult, ethical questions that arise in contemporary medicine and the field of public health: How should doctors balance respect for patient autonomy with commitments to benevolence, or doing good? What are the ethical implications of emerging biomedical technologies? How do racism and ableism shape health care experiences and outcomes? Students learn major ethical frameworks used in medical decision-making, such as the 'four principles' approach, as well as lesser-known alternatives that pose challenges to them, including care ethics and reproductive justice. Through taking this course, students also gain skills in ethical reasoning and argumentation, and learn to apply them to contemporary healthcare policies and practices. Counts as a Biomedical Context Course for the Biomedical Sciences major, a Health and Society Course for the Pre-Health Chemistry Major, and as an elective in the Public Health program.

• Counts as: HU
• Ethics and Values
• Pre-requisites: One PHIL course or BIOL-102 or BIOL-216 or PH 216

Language is ubiquitous in our lives. We use it in class, we use it to talk to friends, to read great works of literature, to harm others, to tell jokes, and perhaps, even to think. Our use of it is so common, that it almost begins to seem transparent. We forget we are using language, and we forget what a simply astonishing fact it is that we can understand each other at all. When we think about language, we usually have in mind learning this or that language. But how does language work in the first place? How do words get their meaning? How do the meanings of sentences arise out of the meanings of words? How do words relate to things in the world? How does language relate to thought? How can we use language to communicate rich, context-sensitive meaning? What is a language? In this course, we will investigate the complex and fascinating issues that arise when we turn our attention onto the very ability we use when doing everything from philosophy to texting friends.

• Counts as: HU
• Knowledge and Reality
• Pre-requisites: None

Artificial Intelligence has been described as everything from the key to a prosperous human future, to an existential threat to our very survival. This course examines the nature of Artificial Intelligence, exploring what work in the field can tell us about the human mind. Topics include the analogy between the human mind and a computer, philosophical challenges to developing a genuinely artificial intelligence, and the nature and prospects of generative AI technologies (such as ChatGPT) to qualify as intelligent. The course will conclude with an examination of the ethical implications of AI technology, including on misinformation and when implemented in technologies such as self-driving cars.

• Counts as: HU, QLR
• Knowledge and Reality
• Pre-requisites: Any PHIL course OR CS-256 OR DATA-234 OR STAT-213

SENIORS ONLY. This course provides an opportunity for critical reflection on the nature and value of philosophy itself. What is philosophy? What are the methods of philosophical inquiry? Does philosophy have value in today's world? We read what other philosophers, past and present, and in both Western and non-Western traditions, have had to say about these questions. Other members of the philosophy department will visit the class to share their own perspectives and methods. Students practice and reflect on a variety of philosophical methodologies and will be encouraged to clarify their own philosophical identities. Prerequisite: PHIL-201, 203, or 208, or permission of instructor. Limited to senior philosophy majors and minors.

• Counts as: HU
• SYE
• Pre-requisites: Senior philosophy majors and minors only.

Under faculty supervision, the student assists in the teaching of an elementary course in philosophy. Limited to majors.  You can find out more information on the Philosophy Tutorial page.

• Elective
• Pre-requisites: Permission only

Intended for students who are eligible for honors and wish to fulfill their SYE requirement by completing a philosophy thesis during the senior year. In the fall, the student registers for 498 and conducts research under the supervision of a faculty member. In the spring, the student registers for 499 and develops a philosophical thesis and defends it in a departmental seminar. Students interested in this SYE option must submit a research proposal in the spring of their junior year. Limited to majors.  You can find more information on the Honors Thesis Guidelines page.