Philosophy

People often talk about the problem of evil, but what do they mean? In its religious version, evil is the problem: If there is a good and all-powerful God, why does He allow evil? In its nonreligious version, the problem is: Why are humans evil? And can evil be overcome? We will track the problem of evil from the death camps to the notion of sin and of a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Students will be expected to bring a written question on the reading to each class and to write a paper analyzing a topic or reading; students may also be asked to do short, in-class presentations. Our focus in group conference will be on rhetoric. We will learn about the design of oratory in the ancient world. We will do this partly for practical reasons, to help us think about how to write anything designed to persuade and, partly, to help us think about the purposes and possible misuse of persuasion. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, addressing fundamental questions about being and time, about the human condition, and about ethics and politics, science and religion. Despite the universal nature of these questions, for most of these 2,500 years philosophy was practiced (at least publicly) mostly by men. It was not until the 20th century that this convention began to be significantly challenged, both practically (by the fact that more and more women entered the forefront of philosophical work) and theoretically (by questioning the historical contents of this male-dominant tradition). This yearlong course will be a survey of continental philosophy in the 20th and 21st centuries that, countering the aforementioned tradition, focuses exclusively on the work of women in philosophy. Among the authors we may read are Sarah Ahmed, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Karen Barad, Talia Bettcher, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Luce Irigaray, Melany Klein, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Maria Lugones, Simone Weil, Sylvia Wynter, and Virginia Woolf. Some of these philosophers are feminist or consider sexual difference as philosophically pertinent, and some are not. One way or another, surveying their thought will be our means for acquiring a comprehensive view of key developments in continental philosophy in the last and present centuries, including phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, structuralism and poststructuralism, feminism, Black feminism, decolonial, and queer theories. This is a reading- and writing-intensive course (readings will not normally exceed 30 pages per week, but philosophical texts can be extraordinarily demanding). Students will be evaluated based on weekly reading assignments, participation in group work and group discussions during class, and timely submission of three short papers each semester, as well as demonstrable investment in conference work throughout the year. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and group conferences that may include academic skill development such as time management and effective communication, as well as research, reading, writing, and editing. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

In this course, we shall begin by reading Schelling’s Bruno, which seeks redemption through a mystical “pantheism”—the teaching that the world is one with God. We shall then go on to read various texts from Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejects the mysticism of Schelling but still wants to save the world and seeks to do so through what one could call an atheist pantheism, which redirects the passion for transcendence to an embrace of life on Earth. Students will be expected to bring a written question on the reading to each class, to present short sections of the reading, and to write a paper analyzing a topic or section of the class reading.

What is being? What is time? What is justice? What is truth? What is the best way to live, and should we fear death? More than 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece, a tradition of asking this sort of question developed under the name “philosophy,” which is Greek for “love of wisdom.” Veering away from the mythological and religious traditions dominant at the time, the first writers we now recognize as “philosophers” broke radically new ground for self-understanding and set the stage for modern scientific, political, and theological ideas. In this course, we will read the earliest surviving texts of this tradition by a group of authors who are now known collectively as the “Pre-Socratics.” These include Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Ancient Atomists, to name a few. These texts are fragmentary, since the full works are lost. The ideas that we find in them are creative, inspiring, and often funny. Studying them is an opportunity to reflect on what “philosophy” means and an invitation to philosophize, perhaps becoming philosophers ourselves. This survey course on the origins of philosophy is designed both for beginners, for whom it would serve as an introduction, and for those more experienced in philosophy who wish to enrich their knowledge of its roots. We will accompany our readings of the first philosophers with commentaries by later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, and with occasional reference to non-Greek or non-philosophical sources.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often regarded as a foundational figure in the development of the Western ideal of authenticity—the belief that a moral life entails uncompromising loyalty to one’s true self. Rousseau dedicated his life to the pursuit of a formula in which authenticity could serve as a path to happiness. And yet, time and again, he found himself entangled in paradoxes that were not merely philosophical but vividly reflected in his own life. His educational theory is a cornerstone of modern humanistic educational thought, yet he entrusted all five of his children to a public foundling hospital shortly after birth. He denounced popular entertainment but authored the best-selling novel of the 18th century. He professed deep Christian faith, while his books were burned as heretical. He argued that romantic love is an essential part of human existence while spending his final years in near-total solitude. This seminar welcomes anyone interested in modern philosophy, theories of the self, and the fragile threshold where bold ideas encounter human vulnerability. Rousseau was not only a thinker of inner conflict, he was also a political revolutionary whose writings have been interpreted as foundational to modern communism, liberal democracy, and even totalitarianism. His influence stretches across the ideological spectrum, making him a key figure for understanding both the promises and the perils of modernity.

Do you have any reason for caring about anyone else? Is it rational to do so? Is it nice to do so? Is it irresponsible not to do so? If we ask—“What is ethics?”—one of the most basic answers is that it seems predicated on, and concerned with, the distinction between oneself and others. This course will investigate this basic distinction. Questions of focus will include: How are we to understand the concept of otherness? Where does it originate? Does a sense of responsibility follow from a recognition of the other? While, at the most fundamental level, otherness may be understood as simply what is not me, it comes to be conceived in more determinate terms, such as nationality, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, sexuality, political affiliation, and various other categories. We will also examine encounters with nonhuman forms of otherness as they come to bear in nature, as well as in art. The course will begin by considering how the Enlightenment’s theory of individualism grants us a new perspective on what it means to be a self and then how this allows us to envision another’s perspective. To build our views as we proceed, we will draw insights from Hegelian ethics of recognition, feminist ethics of care, and Levinasian ethics of responsibility. Authors studied will include, among others, Hegel, Freud, Beauvoir, Sartre, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Glissant, and Plumwood.

Political theory consists of a discourse of thinking about the nature of political power; the conditions for its just and unjust use; the rights of individuals, minorities, and majorities; and the nature and bounds of political community. Rather than tackling pressing political problems one at a time, political theorists seek systematic solutions in overall visions of just societies or comprehensive diagnoses of the roots of oppression and domination in political orders. This course will focus on modern writers who shaped the terms and concepts that increasingly populate political imaginations the world over; that is, the conscious and unconscious ideas about rights, power, class, democracy, community, and the like that we use to make sense of our political lives. Thinkers to be considered will include: in fall, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant—the long social-contract tradition; in spring, Hegel, Marx, Mill, and Nietzsche—the long tradition in critical theory. By studying these thinkers, we will be better positioned to answer the following questions: What is the nature of political power? What is the content of social justice? Does democracy threaten basic individual rights? Is it more important to respect the individual or the community when the interests of the two conflict? Is a market economy required by, or incompatible with, democracy? What aspects of human potential and social worlds do different grand theories of political life illuminate and occlude? Finally, this course will also pose the issue of the worth and legitimacy of European modernity; that is, the historical process that produced capitalism, representative democracy, religious pluralism, the modern sciences, ethical individualism, secularism, fascism, communism, new forms of racism and sexism, and many “new social movements.” Which of the ideas that jostle for prominence within this tradition are worth defending? Which should be rejected? Or should we reject them all and instead embrace a new, postmodern political epoch? In answering these questions, we will be forced to test both the internal coherence and the continuing relevance of the political visions that shape modern politics.

While important trends in contemporary culture and politics seem to promise not only “the death of philosophy” but also the arrival of a “"post-truth epoch,” the oldest discipline itself seems not to have gotten the memo. Instead, the last 50 years witnessed a blossoming of original, important, exciting, and genuinely new work in systematic philosophy. Spanning different traditions (analytic and continental) and locations (Anglo-American, German, French, Italian, postcolonial, etc.), the reemergence of systematic philosophy revisits many of the most important questions that occupied the grand tradition for much of the last 2,500 years: What matters in life? What do we owe to each other? What do we mean by the truth? In what does human agency consist? Does human morality stem primarily from reason or emotion or from their combined operation? What is the nature of justice? Is it always wrong to lie? Can all aspects of human experience be accounted for in terms of biological processes, or do some escape reductive scientific explanation? At the same time, new issues of race, gender, identity, and, ultimately, the claim to universal knowledge and authority made on behalf of philosophy itself have been added to the range of traditional issues addressed by contemporary philosophers. This course is for any student interested in coming up to speed with important developments in recent philosophy and will focus on the big ideas from some of the most important recent thinkers. We will not only survey some of the most important and challenging works in contemporary philosophy but also put these thinkers in dialogue with each other, testing the insights they generate and also, by comparing them with one another, the blind spots they produce.

The magnum opus, Ethics, of great early modern Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1633-1672) will serve as the focus of this course. German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi once wrote that “Spinoza is the only philosopher who had the courage to take philosophy seriously; if we want to be philosophers, we can only be Spinozists.” Even if Jacobi’s statement is exaggerated, it is certainly true that studying Spinoza will make us better philosophers. But Spinoza promises much more. He claims that those who follow the guide of his Ethics become freer, wiser, and, above all, happier. Ethics is a notoriously difficult and enigmatic text, written in the form of geometrical proofs, even concerning psychological, moral, and theological matters. Yet, many philosophers and poets considered it exceptionally beautiful. Among the questions the book tackles are: What determines our desires, and in what ways can we, or should we, control them? In what ways can we be free, and in what ways are our behaviors and desires predetermined? In what ways can we be unique, and in what ways are we an inherent part of a greater whole? As we will learn, Spinoza argued that God and Nature are synonyms and that, to achieve an eternal and blissful life, we do not need to die and go to heaven. We do not even need to change the world or ourselves. All we need is to understand the way things are.

What is education for? And what kind of human being does it aim to shape? This seminar will invite students to explore education not merely as a set of practices but, rather, as a reflection of our deepest convictions about human nature, freedom, and society. Through philosophical inquiry, students will develop critical, reflective, and ethically grounded perspectives on their role as educators. The seminar will be structured around four compelling visions of the human being, each giving rise to a distinct educational ideal and each delivering a pointed critique of dominant educational paradigms. Through readings in Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, we will examine classical humanism and its belief in a universal human essence that education must actualize through the pursuit of virtue, fulfillment, and happiness. We will then turn to the Romantic-Naturalist tradition—Montaigne, Rousseau, and Fröbel—who emphasized the child’s innate goodness and warned against educational systems that suppress natural growth. The existentialist approach, represented by Nietzsche, Sartre, and Greene, shifts from self-realization to self-creation, challenging us to resist conformity. Finally, we will explore critical pedagogy through the works of Freire, Giroux, hooks, Arendt, and Adorno, who argue that education must address broader social injustices and guard against the political dangers of uncritical obedience. This seminar will offer students not only a rich encounter with the history of educational thought but also an invitation to take a stand—to reflect on who we are, who we aspire to become, and what kind of education might lead us there.

Presumably, you care about movies. Why do you care about movies? Because they entertain you? Because they are beautiful? Because they are informative? Because they make you feel things? The guiding thought of this course will be that we care about movies because they participate in the practice of philosophy—or at least they have that potential. Of course, this also presumes that we care about philosophy—a claim that will take some time to defend. To test that hypothesis—that films have the potential to participate in the practice of philosophy—we first need to consider what the practice of philosophy is. Then, we will need to say something about what film is. And then, we can examine whether film can do philosophy. In the first part of the course, we will analyze the medium of film in order to clarify the characteristics of film that would allow it to be philosophical. In the second part of the course, we will explore how those characteristics of film contribute to how we think philosophically about our lives. In particular, students will explore problems pertaining to subjectivity (What it is to be a human being?) and to ethics (How do I know the right thing to do?). Each week, we will watch a film—including Jeanne Dielman, Psycho, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Get Out, and Spring Breakers—and read a philosophical text—including Aristotle, Cavell, Merleau-Ponty, Parfit, and Adorno—with the aim of placing the two in conversation. 

Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy with his Copernican turn, which limits our knowledge of the world to our subjective experience of it. Kant elaborated this thought in the three volumes of philosophy that comprise his critical system. After investigating questions pertaining to knowledge in the first critique and problems of validating moral judgment in the second critique, Kant shifts in the third critique—our object of study—to elaborate on the forms of judgment that we employ in making sense of beauty in nature, works of art, and the meaning or purpose of life. The first part of the book focuses on aesthetic judgments; in it, Kant asks: What do we mean when we call something—for instance, a sunset or even a painting of a sunset—beautiful? The second part of the book investigates teleological judgments; in it, Kant asks: How do we judge something to be alive? Not only does this book establish many of the central questions of modern aesthetics—such as: How can aesthetic judgments be objective?—but it also addresses the antagonism between freedom and nature, the experience of the sublime, the emergence of artistic genius, the postulation of a sensus communis (common sense), and the relation between beauty and morality. Over the course of the semester, we will observe the vast influence of the Critique of Judgment on both art and the philosophy of art. We will complement our reading of Kant’s text by considering modern thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, Achille Mbembe, and Hannah Ginsborg. As well, Kant’s ideas will be appraised in consideration of the works of Beethoven, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Jo Baer, Marcel Duchamp, and James Turrell, among many others.