This course will train students to use philosophical methods to engage in rigorous investigation of ethical issues concerning the environment. Topics may include the moral status of non-human entities, individual responsibility in the context of collective harms, climate grief, the ethics of parenthood during a climate crisis, and the ethics of environmental activism.

This course concerns a range of ethical and aesthetic questions about places, whether of natural or cultural significance. How should we understand the value of nature? Is it relative to human interests, or independent of them? What is nature in the first place, and how is it distinguished from culture? Is scientific or cultural knowledge relevant to the aesthetic experience of nature? Does “natural beauty” have a role to play in guiding environmental preservation? When we seek to preserve an ecosystem or a building, what exactly should we be aiming to preserve? Should the history of a place guide our interactions with it? How should we navigate conflicts between environmental and cultural preservation, especially as they intersect with issues of race and class? How should a changing climate affect our environmental values? We will investigate these questions, among others, in contexts from wilderness to parks, cities to ruins.

The world around us is rich with aesthetic qualities. It is beautiful, awesome, enchanting, and sublime. Places have moods, vibes, atmospheres, and ambiances. How can we think rigorously and systematically about the aesthetics of the natural and built environment? What role, if any, should aesthetics play in environmentalism, environmental policy, and our relationship with the world we live in? This course will focus on contemporary philosophical work that seeks to answer these questions. Themes may include the place of science, imagination, history, and culture in aesthetic judgment, the role of aesthetics in conservation, and the relationship between aesthetics and climate change.

This course introduces basic philosophical methods and concepts by exploring a variety of approaches to some central philosophical problems. Topics covered may include the existence of God, the relation between reason and faith, skepticism and certainty, personal identity and the nature of time, and the compatibility of free will and causal determinism. Readings are drawn from historical and contemporary texts. Discussions and assignments encourage the development of the student's own critical perspective on the problems discussed.

A study of central issues in moral philosophy, with readings drawn from historical and contemporary texts. Topics include the nature of morality, conceptions of justice, views of human nature and their bearing on questions of value, competing accounts of the bases of moral judgment, and questions in contemporary applied ethics.

We are all regularly confronted by moral decisions and we all have views about how we ought to act. We tend to believe that some actions are morally required and some are morally wrong. This class will invite you to think critically about value (good and bad, right and wrong), and help you to identify and examine the reasoning that underlies many of our core ethical commitments. Normative ethics aims to provide systematic principles to guide and justify our moral decision-making. Applied ethics attempts to answer questions about what we should do in particular cases. Meta-ethics asks questions about the nature of moral claims and the source(s) of moral reasons. This course will treat all of these areas of ethics.

This course is intended to provide a supportive learning community for first-generation college students. Students with questions about the course should email the instructor prior to registering.

In this course we will explore the philosophical underpinnings and ramifications of the social structures which shape our lives. Among the topics we will consider are racism, gender, and disability. For each topic, we will investigate different accounts of what the phenomenon at issue is. Among the thinkers we will engage are Sally Haslanger, Charles Mills, and Tommie Shelby. Questions for discussion include: What are the implications of endorsing one account of an oppressive structure over another? How are oppressive social structures, e.g. ableism, transphobia, etc., mutually reinforcing? Does oppression manifest differently in different contexts?

This seminar undertakes a philosophical examination of the nature and value of friendship. Two questions will animate the course: What is a friend? And, why are friends valuable? Drawing examples from literature and films, we will examine different types of friendships and the features that characterize and sustain them. Many philosophers have argued that the best kind of friendship is one in which the friend is loved for her own sake; we will consider whether this is truly possible or whether all friendships are ultimately instrumental. We'll also examine how the partiality inherent in friendship conflicts with the demands of standard moral theories. Finally, we will compare the love that characterizes friendship with the feelings that sustain relationships with parents, children, and lovers.

A study of the philosophical, social, cultural, and political beliefs that led to the belief in witchcraft in early modern Western Europe and North America, and how these beliefs led to the violent persecution of over 100,000 people between 1400 and 1700. The analysis of this historical event engages several different areas of philosophy: metaphysics, morals, epistemology, standards of evidence, and gender theory. Topics include: magic and religion, the nature of evil, sexual politics, the politics of torture, skepticism, and contemporary witches.

An introduction to the work of Plato, Aristotle, and select Hellenistic philosophers that aims to develop students' skills in analyzing and constructing philosophical arguments with attention to historical context. Focusing on the ways in which various ancient philosophical views formed internally consistent systems, we will address a range of central topics in ancient thought, including issues in ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, and epistemology. The course will deal primarily with Plato and Aristotle and end with a briefer treatment of the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics.

In this course, we will examine a broad set of philosophical questions about art. What is art? Why does it matter? Are there objective standards of taste, or is beauty in the eye of the beholder? What is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics? In addition to these general questions, we will consider specific philosophical puzzles posed by other issues in the arts, which may include adaptation, guilty pleasures, snobbery, subtlety, AI-generated art, and the paradox of horror, among other topics. Cases will range from fine art to popular music to film and television.

The focus of this course will be the art of comedy and humor. We will approach them from a variety of angles: philosophical attempts to define humor, scientific investigations of the origin and meaning of laughter, moral examinations of the limits of comedy and its political power, and the theological question of the place of humor in a meaningful life. 

In this course, the artform we will focus on is video games. They raise interesting questions about the relationships between real and virtual worlds or real and virtual identities. Aesthetic issues we will discuss include: What is distinctive about interactive artworks? Are video games artworks at all? Why do we enjoy failing? Why do we care about fictional events? Ethical issues include: Is it morally wrong to enjoy virtual killing? Why is virtual killing acceptable but not other virtual immorality? Can video games make us more empathetic? How do virtual acts carry over to how we behave in the real world?

This course will explore a variety of philosophical issues concerning language: the different ways in which spoken language functions and conveys information, the alleged difference between speech and action and how it relates to freedom of speech issues (e.g., pornography and hate speech), the general problem of how words get attached to their referents, and criticisms of traditional conceptions of meaning and reference.

What's the purpose of government? Are there limits to what the state may demand of us? Does social justice require equality? Is taxation - or wage labor - theft? This course addresses these and other questions of political morality, through the lens of the major theories of Western philosophy. We'll also consider critiques of those theories, including the claim that they are sexist and racist. Topics will include Mill on the general welfare and the importance of liberty, Nozick on individual rights, Rawls and Dworkin on distributive justice and Marx and Cohen on equality. We'll aim to understand the principles and values underlying these accounts and apply them to contemporary debates over issues such as hate speech, sex work, public health insurance and poverty relief.

What is a mind? How is it related to a person's brain and body? These two questions have driven centuries of work in the philosophy of mind, and we will take them as our starting point. After considering a variety of answers, we will pursue several topics that challenge our best accounts of the mind: consciousness, mental representation, the emotions, free will, and the possibility of thinking machines. Our goal will be to connect central philosophical perspectives on these issues with contributions from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience.

Logic studies the principles of valid, or correct, reasoning. It does this by looking for ways to regiment the relationship between a conclusion and the claims that support it. In this course, we will learn how to translate sentences of English into a symbolic language that brings out their logically relevant properties, and we will study formal methods - methods sensitive only to the form of the arguments, as opposed to their content - that allow us to determine whether the conclusions of arguments follow from their premises. Some consideration is given to the limits of the system itself as well as to the relationship between logic and ordinary language.

 The world is a strange place, and understanding what is going on around us is no easy matter. Nowadays, awash in charges of 'fake news' and attacks on the credibility of scientists and other experts, it's getting ever harder to figure out what is true. But what is truth, anyway? Is anything objectively true? Who counts as an expert? How do we resist propaganda, misinformation, and outright lies as we negotiate competing world views? How can we proceed when faced with deep disagreements? What roles should values play in our enquiries? What constitutes genuine progress in our understanding of the world? In this course, we will examine these challenges to our attempts to understand and explain reality.  

This class will consider philosophical questions concerning the nature, appreciation and value of literary works, including: What is literature? What distinguishes fiction from creative nonfiction? Do fictional characters exist? Do emotional responses to fiction make sense? Are an author’s intentions relevant to interpreting their work? Can there be more than one correct interpretation of a literary work? Are some works of literature objectively better than others? What, if anything, can we learn from literature? Does reading literature make us morally better people? Is it wrong for non-minority writers to write from the perspective of members of minority groups? The course will cover these and other topics in metaphysics, value theory, philosophy of language and mind and include work by philosophers, literary theorists and creative writers.

A study of central themes in seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy. We will engage with questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and morals. Authors include Amo, Astell, Cavendish, Conway, Descartes, Princess Elisabeth, Heywat, Hume, Locke, Kant, and Wang Yangming. Among the topics: the nature of substance, the relationship between mind and body, the limits of reason, determinism and freedom, and the good life.

This course provides a systematic consideration of fundamental issues in the conception and practice of law. We will first consider the nature of law. Is law derived from moral principles or created by legislative fiat? Is international “law” law? We will then discuss moral limits on the law. Which principles should guide the state’s restriction of citizens’ liberties? Is refusal to obey the law ever justified? Next we will consider the ethics of criminal punishment. What, if anything, justifies punishment by the state? In what ways are policing and incarceration in the contemporary United States racially discriminatory? We will finish by considering questions of constitutional law and legal reasoning. Why have a constitution? When judges interpret the law, do they discover it or, in effect, make it up as they go along? Readings will include selections from philosophy, legal theory and court decisions. 

Christine Blasey Ford, Anita Hill, Rachel Jeantel, and Amber Heard each testified to having witnessed or experienced violence or harassment at the hands of a man. Despite their informed testimony, each was met with skepticism and disbelief by the public. What might explain the mismatch between the expertise of Ford, Hill, Jeantel, and Heard and the skeptical reception of their reports? We might think that their identities, particularly their gender and race, play some role. In this course, we will investigate how aspects of identity affect how we share and receive knowledge. Particularly, we will explore epistemic harms which uniquely or disproportionately affect marginalized knowers. These topics include epistemic injustice, epistemic exploitation, gaslighting, epistemic oppression, and microaggressions. Questions we will consider include: what is it for a person to be harmed in her capacity as a knower? Can institutions gaslight; can groups be gaslighted? What avenues of epistemic resistance are available to targets of microaggressions, epistemic exploitation, etc.? Are certain epistemic privileges available to marginalized knowers? We will read authors such as Kristie Dotson, José Medina, and Miranda Fricker.

An introduction to recent work in political philosophy on the ethics of international relations. The course will discuss some of the main theoretical approaches to the topic: realism, cosmopolitan egalitarianism, political liberalism, utilitarianism, and nationalism. We will also consider how these different approaches might be applied to some central moral controversies in international politics, including those relating to global poverty, human rights and humanitarian intervention, immigration, climate change, and fair trade.

This applied ethics course will examine some central problems at the interface of medicine and ethics and explore some of the social and ethical implications of current advances in biomedical research and technology. Topics discussed will include: drawing the distinction between genetic therapy and genetic enhancement; the permissibility of the practice of genetic screening and selective abortion; the status and interests of individuals at the margins of agency, such as infants, children and dementia patients; decisions about prolonging life and hastening death; and controversies about the use of memory-dampening drugs. Throughout, several key ethical themes will unify the course, including: the conditions for personhood and what we owe to persons; the value of autonomy and the right to make decisions about one's own body; and the importance of well-being and the purpose of medicine.

This course will examine some fundamental philosophical questions that arise about death. After comparing differing conceptions of death and differing views about whether we continue to exist after we die, we will consider whether death is bad for the person who dies. We intuitively think that our deaths are bad for us, but, as Lucretius famously points out, most of us do not lament that we were not born sooner. Is it problematic that we tend to hold inconsistent attitudes towards prenatal versus postmortem nonexistence? Is immortality desirable or valuable? How might our thinking about these issues surrounding mortality and immortality inform our thinking about the value of human existence and what makes a life worth living?

Fakes, forgeries, copies, knockoffs, imposters, posers, phonies: we have so many words for people and things that we judge to be inauthentic. But what exactly is authenticity? What, if anything, is valuable about it? In this course, we will explore the concept of authenticity as it surfaces in art, nature, food, culture, identity, technology, and history in an attempt to determine what is at stake in being the real deal.

In this seminar, we will closely examine the relationship between immorality and aesthetics, especially as it arises in the arts. Are morally objectionable artworks made aesthetically worse by their moral defects? Is it morally permissible to enjoy the work of artists who have done terrible things? How should we respond to the perceived immorality we might encounter in the arts, whether we are fans or critics? Cases may include museum art, documentary work, film and television, video games, etc.

What is justice? Is it better to be just than unjust? Plato tackled these perennial questions in the Republic. This seminar will undertake an in-depth examination of Plato's classic, with a focus on understanding how the metaphysical and epistemological arguments of the dialogue’s middle books relate to the ethical and political questions that frame the treatise. We will also investigate and evaluate Plato's views about the nature and constitution of the soul, human motivation and action (especially the relationship between reason and non-rational desires), the purpose and importance of education, and the role of women in the ideal society.

We all have friends and we tend to regard friendship as an important good. This seminar undertakes a philosophical examination of the nature and value of friendship. Two main questions will animate the course: What is a friend? And, why are friends valuable? We will examine different types of friendships and the features that characterize and sustain them. Many philosophers have argued that the best kind of friendship is one in which the friend is loved for her own sake; we will investigate whether this is truly possible or whether all friendships are ultimately instrumental. We'll also examine how the partiality inherent in friendship conflicts with the demands of standard moral theories. Finally, drawing on examples from literature and film, we will consider whether one has to be a good person in order to be a good friend.

The human imagination is a powerful creative tool. In this course, we will examine the imagination's nature, uses, and limits. Questions to be discussed include: What role do mental images play in imagining? What is the imagination's role in creativity? If fictional entities aren't real, why do we often have such powerful emotional responses to them? Are some things too bizarre or repellent to be imaginable?

Do we ever act with freedom of the will? To address this question, philosophers typically start by analyzing the concept of free will. Some conclude that a choice that is caused by antecedent states or is causally determined could not be an instance of free will. This approach can lead to skepticism about whether free will actually exists. Others start with the assumption that free will must exist because it is the trait that explains and justifies our practice of holding people responsible for what they do. This approach leaves open what free will might turn out to be. We will study variations on these two strategies in the work of historical and contemporary philosophers. We will also consider what feminist philosophers say about socio-political contexts that may impede or obstruct the exercise of free will.

Philosophical writing is often thought to be impersonal and abstract, focused on rigorous argument and high theory to the exclusion of personal narrative, voice, humor, and literary style. But not all philosophy takes that form. This seminar explores the alternative mode of more personal philosophical writing, as it appears in contemporary personal essays on philosophical themes and pieces of public philosophy with a personal slant philosophy (in, e.g., The New York Times, The Point, Aeon, and The New Yorker.) The course is structured as a writing workshop, and centrally aims to develop students’ confidence and skill in writing their own pieces of autobiographical philosophy. Students will create a portfolio of writing and workshop it closely with their peers and professor throughout the semester.

Language issues permeate the criminal justice system. If a police officer says, "You wouldn't mind if I looked inside your trunk, now would you?" is that statement only a question or is it also a request or even an order? Committing perjury requires uttering something false; can a misleading but true utterance constitute perjury? This seminar will explore various linguistic issues related to the law (and the criminal justice system more generally). Tools from the philosophy of language and linguistics will be explored and then applied to legal questions. Topics covered include: perjury, consent, Miranda warnings, verbal crimes (e.g., solicitation, bribes), threats and cross-burning, invoking the right to counsel, sedition, and free speech.

This seminar will explore a range of questions concerning life's meaning. Is meaning possible in a world without God? What is the difference between a happy life and a meaningful one? What is the role of love, achievement, knowledge, beauty, virtue and authenticity in a meaningful life? Do the stories we tell about our lives contribute to their meaning? Is life, in the end, absurd - or just kind of awful? Does meaning now depend on death later? We will discuss answers to these and related questions, using readings from both philosophy and literature.