Philosophy

Is justice the guiding ideal of human action? Or a weapon the powerful use against the weak? Does democracy work, or should we leave government to experts? What is change: is the seed the same as the tree that grows from it? Is our world made up of objects and properties, or of processes and motions? These questions, and others, were subject to intense and profound investigation in the ancient Greek world. In this course, we join in this investigation alongside thinkers like Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. We will learn to interpret their works using philosophical analysis, and understand the context of their philosophy using historical and sociological analysis. 

This is an independent research course with research arranged between the student and faculty member. The specific research topics vary each term and are described on a special project form for each student. A substantial paper is required. The number of units varies with the student’s project, contact hours, and method of assessment, as defined on the student’s special study project form.

This course will introduce students to some of the main authors and concepts associated with structuralism, as well as to its legacy in authors and texts that in France came to be known as neostructuralist and elsewhere are most widely known as “poststructuralist.”  

It is probably safe to suggest that the various thinkers and movements that came to be known collectively under the banner of “structuralism” represent one of the most important and influential moments in 20th century European, and particularly French, thought. Although it may be said to find its beginnings in linguistics, structuralist thinking quickly expanded into a wide variety of fields, from anthropology and psychoanalysis to philosophy, aesthetics and literary theory.  

The course focuses upon works that have had an important direct or indirect influence on the aesthetic tradition while exploring how the terms “structuralist” and “poststructuralist” are both highly problematic and contested; as a result, students will examine the various aspects that might make thinking “structuralist,” as well as examining some of the limits that led many thinkers to attempt to move beyond it. 

Suppose one event happens, and then another. What does it take for the first to be a cause of the second? We will consider answers to this question that reduce causation to laws of nature and to counterfactual facts. Then we will turn to grounding, which is the relation of determination that physicalists take to hold between physical facts and mental facts. We will look at the recently popular idea that grounding is closely analogous to causation, or even a kind of causation.

This course explores topics at the intersection of philosophy of mind and language, such as whether thought depends on talk or vice versa, whether we think in words or images, whether those words are words of English or a sui generis mental language just for thinking, whether animals which can't talk can think and whether the mind is like a computer. These questions are central to contemporary philosophy and language and are also an important case study in the relationship between the methods of analysis, experiment and introspection in philosophical psychology. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course constructs a philosophical framework for the interdisciplinary examination of gender. Against a historical outline of the development of contemporary gender studies, it examines biological, sociological, and psychological perspectives on gender. These theoretical perspectives are put into discussion with ethical issues concerning sexuality, self hood, personal identity, and autonomy. The course develops skills to make sense of the interdisciplinary examination of gender and discuss the historical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of what it means to exist with a gender identity. It provides a philosophical foundation for thinking critically about the complexity of human experience of gender. The most important elements of this philosophical foundation are a sense of history, conceptual clarity, and an understanding of interdisciplinary methodology. 

This course examines the modern Japanese sense of cultural, social and national identity, as analyzed by social scientists, cultural historians, and scholars of Japanese thought. Topics include famous studies of the Japanese self by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and socio-linguists, supplemented by a historical perspective focusing on the samurai heritage and the ideas behind the Meiji Restoration. Japanese language is not required.

This course offers in-depth analysis and discussion concerning key texts from the history of aesthetics and addresses current debates in aesthetic theory. Issues covered include the beautiful and the sublime, classicism and romanticism, tragedy and the absurd, modernism and post-modernity.

This course offers contemplative reading and discussion of the works of Copenhagen’s most radical author, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard's thoughts about the struggle for meaning take us through unusual philosophical territory. His works—which are as novelistic as they are philosophical—treat themes like the existential meaning of anxiety and despair, beauty and boredom, humor and seriousness, the sicknesses and health of the soul, the joy and pain of embodiment, and, finally, commitment and love.

In this course, students engage with the major metaphysical systems of Western philosophy, examining how each coordinates subjective experience with objective reality. Philosophers include Plato, Kant, and Mill. The course requires students to take prerequisites.