Philosophy

A general introduction to philosophy, with emphasis on perennial problems such as the existence of God, human freedom, and moral obligation. The course is also intended to sharpen the student's skills of critical thinking.

A general introduction to philosophy, which may cover introductory topics in either topically or historically, with a focus on introducing students to some of the perennial problems and texts of philosophy. Specific course content varies by semester and by instructor. See https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/1st-courses-in-philosophy/ for further details of specific sections offered this semester.

This course will be an introduction to philosophy with a special focus on issues at the intersection of philosophy and religion and in the philosophy of religion. Topics to be discussed may include the nature and existence of God, faith and reason, religious experience, divine hiddenness, and the implications of belief in God for our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

This course will be an introduction to philosophy with a special focus on issues at the intersection of philosophy and science and in the philosophy of science. Topics to be discussed may include the nature and limits of scientific knowledge and the scientific method, the metaphysical foundations of science, puzzles to do with quantum mechanics and relativity theory, science and values, and the place of science in society and culture. For information about the current semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/1st-courses-in-philosophy/introduction-to-philosophy-philosophy-science/

This course will be an introduction to philosophy with a special focus on issues at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics and in the philosophy of mathematics. Topics to be discussed may include the role that mathematics has played in the history of philosophy and the role philosophy has played in the history of mathematics, the nature of the infinite, the relationship between mathematics and science, and the role of beauty in mathematics.

This course will be an introduction to philosophy with a special focus on issues in moral and political philosophy. Topics to be discussed may include justice, the nature of the good, eudaemonic and hedonic conceptions of happiness, virtue, ethical theory, moral relativism, feminist ethics, liberty, equality, and the foundations of rights, as well as particular applied topics in moral and political philosophy (such as economic justice and the ethics of war).

An introduction to philosophy focusing on questions and topics of metaphysics and epistemology, such as freedom, personal identity, the nature of mind, the existence of God, the nature of knowledge, skepticism, faith and reason, rationality, and evidence.

This course is a survey of the philosophy of art. We will explore questions such as: What is the meaning of a work of art and what does it mean to say that a work of art represents some subject "out there" in the world? What is the value of painterly representation? Can music be said to be representational in this way, or should we rather think of it as "expressive"? What is the value of music? What is the relationship between the medium of a work of art (e.g. the marked canvas of a painting) and the subject of that painting? How is "beauty" (and aesthetic value) related to our ethical judgment and sensibilities? Over the duration of the course, students will become familiar with central themes in the philosophy of painting, the philosophy of literature, and the philosophy of music. Our philosophical reflection will be motivated by the study of examples: for instance, in painting, we will focus on the Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento; in literature, on the novels of Jane Austen; and in music, on a selection of pieces from Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. In the last part of the class, we will discuss two big picture topics: (i) the extent to which technology transforms our aesthetic sensibilities (as when one performs Bach on a piano instead of a harpsichord); and (ii) whether the kind of aesthetic cognition we discussed in the case of art has an analog in the case of science.

Critical introduction to philosophy via a selection of fundamental works, problems, and arguments within political philosophy. Specific course content varies by semester; see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/1st-courses-in-philosophy/ for description of specific sections.

In this course, we will be considering philosophical issues raised both in and through literature. We will treat topics such as the communicative potential of metaphor, the translation of literature from one language to another, the relevance of authorial intention to interpretation, the ethical potential of literature, the nature of literary fictions, and the capacity of literature to afford knowledge or insight. We will also engage in depth with several works of literature, with an eye to considering whether philosophical reflection might be undertaken through literature, and if so, how.

This class has two components: a logic component and a paradoxes component. In logic, we study deductively valid arguments. An argument is said to be deductively valid if the truth of the premises guarantees the truth of the conclusion. But how do we tell whether an argument meets this condition? The first component of this course will examine a formal system that will allow us to determine mechanically whether an argument is valid or not. We will examine how to translate sentences of natural language into logical notation and vice versa. The system we'll study makes significant contact with mathematics, computer science, linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and, of course, philosophy. The second component of the course is about paradoxes. A paradox, as we'll understand the term, is an argument that begins from premises that seem clearly true... proceeds by reasoning that seems deductively valid... and arrives at a conclusion that seems clearly false. While paradoxes are fun to think about, they have also historically been associated with revolutionary advances in thought. This class will examine several of the most interesting philosophical, mathematical, and moral paradoxes, virtually all of which are regarded by practicing philosophers as unsolved. We will try our best to solve them together. Ultimately, the hope is that our study of logic will inform our study of paradox, and vice versa, and that together the combination will serve as a lively and memorable introduction to philosophy.

In God and the Good Life (GGL), you'll explore the big questions about how to live a meaningful life: what justifies your beliefs, whether you should practice a religion, what sacrifices you should make for others, and more. You’ll learn what the greats like Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes have to say on issues like these, and will work with your classmates in small, intensive dialogue groups to apply their insights to your own life today. By the end of the course, you'll have formed close intellectual friendships with your classmates, strong analytical skills, and most of all, a vision for what the good life can be.

This course explores some paradoxes that arise in natural language (e.g., liar paradox, truth-teller paradox, Curry paradox, validity paradox, property paradox, and more). Alfred Tarski suggested that some paradoxes arise in natural languages because of the "universality" of such languages. What the universality of natural language amounts to is a topic that we'll discuss. Some familiarity with formal logic and formal languages will be useful though not presupposed from the start.

Discussion for PHIL 10100.

This is the master course for GGL Sustained Dialogue: all students must enroll in one master course (Tuesday or Wednesday), and will be assigned a Sustained Dialogue section during the first week of the semester, based on students' interests and philosophical background.

GGL students are required to enroll in (and actively participate in) a weekly Sustained Dialogue group. These groups meet weekly on Tues or Weds evening from 8:00-9:00pm. Groups will be created the first week of the semester, based on students' interests and philosophical background. You must be available from 8:00-9:00pm on the night of the section you register for. A portion of your GGL grade will be determined by the quality of your work in your SD group.

A general introduction to philosophy, taught in a seminar format, with emphasis on perennial problems such as the existence of God, human freedom, and moral obligation. The course is also intended to sharpen the student's skills of critical thinking.

This course provides a themed introduction to Philosophy. Themes and content vary by semester. See https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/1st-courses-in-philosophy/ for details regarding this semester's offerings.

A general introduction to philosophy, taught in a seminar format for students in the science and arts and letters honors program, with emphasis on perennial problems such as the existence of God, human freedom, and moral obligation. The course is also intended to sharpen the student's skills of critical thinking.

Should you practice a religion? What do you owe other people? What would it take for your life to be meaningful? And how should you decide what to believe when it comes to big questions like these?In God and the Good Life, we're searching for answers. We'll read the best philosophical arguments addressing these questions. We'll share our reactions to the proposals in blogs and social media editorials. We'll come together as a large group to debate real world case studies that bear on these questions, hearing periodically from guest speakers making headlines in current debates about religion, morality and meaning. And we'll meet in small Sustained Dialogue groups to discuss our religious and moral identities and develop virtuous friendships (to borrow Aristotle's terminology). If you are excited about developing philosophical skills in an intense, creative community format---this is the course for you. This course fulfills the first philosophy requirement. Learn more about GGL at our course website: godandgoodlife.org. Or watch our course trailer: https://youtu.be/EMKbtSC3-2I

GGL students are required to enroll in (and actively participate in) a weekly Sustained Dialogue group. A portion of your GGL grade will be determined by the quality of your work in your SD group.

A general introduction to philosophy, which may cover introductory topics in either topically or historically, with a focus on introducing students to some of the perennial problems and texts of philosophy. Specific course content varies by semester and by instructor. See https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/1st-courses-in-philosophy/ for further details of specific sections offered this semester

A general introduction to philosophy, which may cover introductory topics in either topically or historically, with a focus on introducing students to some of the perennial problems and texts of philosophy. Specific course content varies by semester and by instructor. See https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/1st-courses-in-philosophy/ for further details of specific sections offered this semester.

Aristotle wrote that an effect of law is to make people good. In this course, we will examine the relationship between the good of individual persons and the goodness of societies. Readings will range from Plato and Aristotle, through Aquinas, and into the Enlightenment and important 20th-century figures. Course requirements will be four short papers and a final project.

Should you practice a religion? What do you owe other people? What would it take for your life to be meaningful?And how should you decide what to believe when it comes to big questions like these?In God and the Good Life, we're searching for answers. We'll read the best philosophical arguments addressing these questions. We'll share our reactions to the proposals in blogs and social media editorials. We'll come together as a large group to debate real world case studies that bear on these questions, hearing periodically from guest speakers making headlines in current debates about religion, morality and meaning. And we'll meet in small Sustained Dialogue groups to discuss our religious and moral identities and develop virtuous friendships (to borrow Aristotle's terminology). If you are excited about developing philosophical skills in an intense, creative community format---this is the course for you. Learn more about GGL at our course website: godandgoodlife.org. Or watch our course trailer: https://youtu.be/EMKbtSC3-2I This course fulfills the first philosophy requirement. The 20111 sections are restricted to sophomores and higher.

In our age, the nature of the human person has become increasingly important theme in philosophical anthropology. Is there a difference between being a member of the species homo sapiens and being a person? If a person is an animal with an inner life, can members of other species be considered as persons? Or must we say that contemporary sciences have shown that personhood is a kind of subjectivist illusion, that we are basically organic machines? Is there a spiritual 'self', and if so what must this be like? We will consider the nature of the human person in the light of contemporary challenges such as scientific materialism, Cartesian dualism, and political totalitarianism. Texts will be drawn from the Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, Karol Wojtyła Love and Responsibility, Adrian J. Reimers The Soul of the Person, Jacques Maritain The Person and the Common Good, and a course packet of readings. Course requirements: four or five quizzes, one term paper, and a final exam.

Existentialism is one of the most important European philosophical movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this class, we will aim to understand the progression and evolution of claims and arguments in the existentialist tradition, reading authors such Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marcel, Camus, and Sartre, paying close attention to their persuasiveness and implications for our lives. Through a close study of important existentialist texts, we will pose and attempt to answer such questions as: Which concepts can help us understand the meaning of everyday experience? What are the sources of value in life, and what are their limits? Who am I? What can I hope for? Can I be free?

In the contemporary teachings of philosophy, philosophy has become very much related to the philosophical concepts as well as the philosophical systems of the great thinkers argued in a sophisticated philosophical language. In other words, one might say that philosophy has become so much "technical." Naturally, it has become quite difficult to relate the philosophical concepts and the systems of the great thinkers to life itself. This course introduces the basic philosophical themes in relation to life, without heavily relying on philosophical concepts as well the history of philosophical thought. We will present, for instance, philosophical themes such as values, human, society, the idea of absolute, knowledge, being, truth, the nature of philosophical thinking, philosophy and science in regard to the personal existence of an individual. We will examine these philosophical issues under the guidance of two thinkers: A Polish Dominican logician Josef Maria Bochenski and a German existentialist philosopher Karl Theodor Jaspers. Each offers a different perspective on the same issue. Emphasis will be placed on attentive reading and discussion of the important points underlined in the class discussion and an in-depth understanding and evaluation of philosophical problems. We will also try to relate these philosophical problems to some current modern issues and daily life.

An examination of the following questions: What kind of differences separate men and women? Are these differences natural or are they socially produced, and are these differences beneficial to us or are they limiting? What does equality mean for people characterized by such differences?

An in-depth examination of the philosophical themes, ideas, and arguments in Augustine's classic Confessions, with attention to historical, theological, and literary context.

In this community-engaged course, you will journey through an active, experiential, and reflective introduction to the Philosophy of Education. We won't just learn content -- we will experience it and reflect on it in real time. We will critically examine historical and contemporary debates, with an emphasis on ethical, political, and social questions like: What is the purpose of education? What makes for a good or just educational system? What are the features of inclusive teaching? In this course, you will learn by doing--both in the classroom community we create, as well as in the broader South Bend community in which you will volunteer. Classtime will be active and engaging: you will work in small groups, discuss, and reflect on your own educational experiences, ideals, and aspirations. By the end of the course, you will articulate your own vision of the value of education and defend it by means of clear, careful, and sound argumentation. In addition, you will apply your personal philosophy of education to your own life by setting educational goals for yourself that align with your vision. This is a community-engaged, service learning course. As part of the course requirements, you will apply what you are learning in the classroom to experiences in the broader South Bend community by volunteering two hours a week as a tutor at Robinson Community Learning Center (RCLC).

This course will treat some central issues in the philosophy of mind, such as freedom of the will, personal identity, and the relationship between mind and body.

We'd like to know what there is in the world -- for philosophical reasons, and for practical reasons, and also out of good old-fashioned curiosity. This class will focus on one way to think rigorously about how to think about what there is. We'll discuss key introductory questions in metaphysics: questions about the existence and nature of causation, dispositions, possibility, objective truth, and fundamentality. And we'll think about answers to those questions which are entailed by valid arguments with plausible premises. Thus, we'll think about simple arguments for and against counterfactual theories of the phenomena above; simple arguments for and against skepticism about the existence of all those entities; simple arguments for and against primitivism about all those entities; and so on. Along the way we'll introduce some basic logical vocabulary which will make evaluating the soundness of those arguments easier. The goal for this class is to improve your ability to reason clearly about what there is, or might be.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was one of the most radical and uncompromising philosophers and persons of the 20th century. Her life was, from the very beginning to the very end, dedicated to the suffering of others (or “affliction,” as she came to call it), always in such a way that that dedication cost her personally as much as possible. Through it all, she was a philosopher, trying to make sense of her ethical and political commitments, her readings of ancient Greeks, and so on. This life and these thoughts led her to a surprising place – to the Catholic Church, or at least right up to the edge of it, since she never formally joined. Many of her last and most powerful pieces of writing – essays, letters, notebooks – deal with the relationship of humans to God, of what it means to be obedient to God. In this course, we will read a wide range of her writings, along with excerpts from the great texts of Greek and Christian thought that influenced her most profoundly. Among the topics to be discussed: what does it mean to be oppressed? What makes work dignified, or not? Why does God allow us to suffer, and what obligations does the suffering of others place on us? Is membership in a particular church community necessary for a full relationship with God? All the while, we’ll also ask: who was Simone Weil, and how does the way she lived speak to the challenges we face now in the 21st century?

Art and literature in the last two centuries have raised with special intensity old questions about beauty, both its enchantments and its temptations. This course will consider these questions anew, drawing from two giants of modern Catholic thought, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, an explicit follower of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the English novelist J.R.R. Tolkien, an implicit follower of St. John Henry Newman. Among the artists likely to be considered are Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O'Connor.

This course, cross-listed between the philosophy department and the gender studies program, invites students into an in-depth theoretical exploration of the self as seen through the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and disability. Engaging with the foundational texts in queer studies by philosophers such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Eve Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, and José Esteban Muñoz, etc., the course is designed to challenge and expand students' philosophical understanding of the self by introducing essential theoretical tools such as intersectionality, body, affect, disidentification, gender performativity and queer temporality, etc.. This course welcomes all students from historically underrepresented, minoritarian, marginalized groups.

This course examines philosophical perspectives on death and immortality from antiquity to the contemporary era. We begin with Plato’s Phaedo, which presents foundational arguments for the soul’s immortality. We then turn to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Seneca’s Stoic writings, which challenge the fear of death through materialist and rationalist perspectives. In Christian thought, Augustine (Confessions, City of God) integrates Platonic and biblical views on the afterlife. Modern existentialists, including Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Edith Stein, explore death’s role in human existence and its philosophical significance. Throughout the course, students will also be invited to consider this topic through selected works of art, from prehistoric funerary art to modern reflections on (im)mortality. By engaging with both philosophical texts and artistic expressions, this course encourages students to reflect on the meaning of death and the possibility of immortality.

Can we ever be certain of any of our beliefs? Do we experience the world around us, or do we just experience chemical reactions in our brains? Is there life after death? When people claim to see or experience God, should we take these claims seriously? Ancient and medieval philosophers thought the answers to these questions could be acquired through an adequate understanding of the human soul. This class will explore how Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Avicenna, Averroes, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas used their theories of soul to address these issues. Attention will be given both to the religious and historical background of various thinkers and to their relevance today.

Purpose: An introduction to some of the main themes in the ethics and metaphysics in Plato’s earlier dialogues Outline: The Euthyphro, an early dialogue of Plato, is concerned with the question ‘What is it to be holy?’ The answer that gets most thoroughly discussed is that to be holy is to be loved by all the gods. This answer raises the problem of whether what is religiously appropriate is determined by what a divinity likes or by some other characteristic. The Meno, also a rather early dialogue, addresses the more general question ‘What is virtue?’ with the aim of establishing whether virtue is acquired by being taught or by some other means. The course will focus on some arguments offered in these two dialogues. It will be concerned with the introduction of the theory of forms in Plato’s early work and with different characterizations of virtue. There will also be a brief discussion of some texts of the Republic to show how some of the ethical themes of the earlier dialogues are addressed in the metaphysical setting of the theory of forms.

This course delves into the history of modern philosophy, taking a unique approach that goes beyond traditional narratives. While we will explore the contributions of canonical men philosophers, we will also shine a light on the often-overlooked women philosophers of this period who significantly advanced Enlightenment thought. By putting these men and women philosophers into dialogue, we will examine their philosophical developments not just through their seminal works but also through their correspondences and interactions. We will engage with actual historical discourses and create new interactions based on their philosophical ideas. This method allows us to explore the most important topics in modern philosophy from multiple perspectives, understanding what these philosophers’ views are and how they communicated them. By reading different kinds of materials, we will aim to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the intellectual exchanges that shaped the philosophical landscape of the Enlightenment.

This course will examine the work that arose out of one of the most important periods in the history of philosophy, typically dubbed “German idealism.” These thinkers were obsessed with freedom: freedom of thought and religion, freedom in politics, and going so far to say that human beings are, in their very essence, free. And true to their commitment to the freedom of thought, they imagined humankind rising out of its immaturity, putting aside all traditional metaphysics that was detached from reality, and finally achieving sturdy and reasonable self-assurance of the workings of nature and society. However, in this, a great problem arose: if the world was absolutely determined in some scientifically demonstrable shape, how could humanity, which is a part of that fixed picture, be free? Freedom seems to suggest that a complete science is impossible, and a complete science risks abolishing human freedom. This is the question we will be examining through four important philosophers: Immanuel Kant, J. G. Fichte, F. W. J. Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel. They each took a novel approach to solving this problem of freedom and nature, and we will examine them in turn. Kant decided reason, a faculty of the mind, had to hold itself back from making any claims about how the world really is in itself, thus making room for freedom. Fichte insisted that a philosophical system of freedom can only be rooted on the self's absolutely free self-relation. Schelling saw the world as one of basic polarity, and against the human subject was the freely developing process of nature, and each limits and intertwines with the other, seeking harmony. Hegel believed that freedom itself has developed through human cultural history and only in recent history has freedom reached its highest phase of development. In examining these thinkers, we will consider their historical context and take a close look at the debates they all had with one another. Each of them was at time a collaborators with another before philosophical disagreements forced them apart. We will draw out these arguments and examine their strengths and weaknesses. By the end, we will consider whether their debates and arguments remain relevant to current manifestations of the freedom-nature debate.

This course is an exploration of the nature of love and its place in a good life. We'll start by asking what love is: is it a union (or at least a desire for union) with another, or a special kind of concern for another, or a way of seeing another's value? We'll then turn to a central debate about what justifies loving someone: is love justified by a person’s qualities, by the shared history of a relationship, by the value of persons themselves, or is love ultimately beyond such justification? Then, we'll turn to love's ethical significance. We'll consider whether love for particular others is in tension with the ethical ideals of fairness and impartiality, as well as the possibility of love being at the center of all ethics. We'll explore a few different kinds of love (romantic, familial, and friendship), reflect on ways love can sometimes go wrong, and ask whether love is essential to living a meaningful life.

This course explores the unfamiliar sides of familiar things we encounter in life, e.g., time, physical objects, artifacrs, from a philosophical viewpoint. Over the course of the class, we will raise fundamental questions about what metaphysical elements underwrite and explain the most ordinary parts of our daily life, such as how a physical object retains its identity over time, whether time really flows or the passage of time is just an illusion, and what is the basis of similarities in colors, size, etc., among different things. Students will read introductory books on these topics along with some representative articles selected from the philosophical literature.

The mathematician Andre Weil famously declared that "God exists because mathematics is consistent, but the Devil exists because we cannot prove it." This course will examine the discovery that prompted Weil's declaration: Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The incompleteness theorems are a pair of puzzling results on the limits of what can be mathematically proven. They raise fundamental questions about the limits of mathematical knowledge and the relation between truth and proof. They are also intimately connected to two topics at the heart of modern computer science and logic: Alan Turing's theory of computation and Alfred Tarski's work on the indefinability of truth. This course will discuss the foundational results of Gödel, Tarski, and Turing, and explore some of their consequences for philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and artificial intelligence.

This course examines contemporary issues in bioethics and care ethics through the lenses of feminist philosophy, queer and crip theory, and critical disability studies. Traditional bioethics often assumes an abstract, universal subject detached from social context. In contrast, this course foregrounds the bodymind—a term from Margaret Price and Eli Clare that emphasizes the interconnection of mental and physical experience—as a site of power, vulnerability, and resistance. We will read essays and case studies from philosophers of disability, bioethicists, and critical disability scholars such as Shelley Tremain, Kim Hall, Alison Kafer, Eli Clare, Eunjung Kim, Jina Kim, and Mel Chen, etc. This course will introduce essential theoretical tools such as biopolitics, cripistemology, compulsory able-bodiedness, curative violence, crip temporality, etc.

This course provides a general introduction to texts and topics from Asian philosophical traditions, such as Confucianism, Taoism and the various philosophical schools arising in Hindu and Buddhist contexts.

Tensions in our understanding of our concepts and the world can often give rise to paradoxes: situations where we are led from considerations we accept and may even find obvious to conclusions which we find very surprising or even ridiculous. This course examines a variety of paradoxes, both ancient and contemporary, with a view to working out how to deal with them. As well as the interest of the paradoxes themselves, we will also think a bit about the issues that come up for dealing with puzzling arguments: when should we follow an argument where it leads, and when should we think the argument must have a mistake in it?

Have you ever wondered about the meaning of it all? Though many philosophers, especially for a better part of the twentieth century were suspicious of the question, and despite the fact that it is often the subject of parody in pop culture, the question of life's meaning remains of deep and abiding human concern. In this course, we will tackle the question head on. To do so, we will explore a number of interconnected themes including intelligibility, purpose, significance, futility, naturalism, God, death, pessimism, and hope to name several. We will begin by considering thorny interpretive issues about how best to understand the question. In the heart of the course, we will compare theories of meaning grouped under the following broad categories: (1) Naturalistic Pessimism, (2) Theistic Optimism, and (3) Naturalistic Optimism. We will conclude by discussing a cluster of topics surrounding death, futility, and hope, weaving these themes back into earlier material. Along the way we will discuss questions like: Does the question of life's meaning make sense? Are we cosmically significant? Does life have a purpose(s)? Is God necessary for a meaningful life? Is leading a meaningful life about fulfilling your strongest desires? Can you be wrong about what constitutes a meaningful life? Can an immoral life still be a meaningful life? How can I avoid a midlife crisis? How do circumstances, like being locked in solitary confinement for long periods, threaten meaningful life? Is death good news or bad news for life's meaning? Is an afterlife necessary for a meaningful life? We will not limit ourselves to philosophy. Given that this is humanity's question, others from both within and outside of the Academy have as much to say. We will expand our exploration of the topic beyond the written medium to include film as we carefully listen to the diversity of voices speaking on life's grandest question.

In this course, we'll explore a number of questions concerning the nature of the human mind, human language and human culture and how they relate to one another. Topics that will be addressed include whether any of our knowledge is innate, to what extent the language a person speaks influences how they experience the world, and the relative importance of a person's genetic endowment and their culture for determining the character of the language they speak. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to these issues, drawing on work in fields such as philosophy, linguistics, psychology and anthropology.

This course focuses on the most puzzling questions about the world and our place in it, such as existence, the nature of space and time, the relationship between body and mind, the problem of causation, the nature of possibility, impossibility, and necessity, and the freedom of the will.

In this course we will survey influential figures and ideas from the Buddhist philosophical tradition, especially as embodied in the work of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophers. We will focus in particular on formulating and evaluating four distinctively Buddhist philosophical theses: no-self, impermanence, dependent origination, and emptiness.

A critical exploration of philosophical systems developed in the early modern period (from Descartes to Kant), exploring such themes as mechanism, mind, God, ideas, etc.

The history of humanity is riddled with leaders - from Adolf Hitler and Robert Mugabe to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln - who have used skilled oratory and rhetoric to convince. Yet, as these very examples show, the ability to persuade is distinct from the ability to convey the truth. Indeed, in the battle for public opinion, the truth wins only incidentally - it defeats falsehood only if the truth-tellers happen to be the most persuasive. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume put it, "'tis not reason, which carries the prize, but eloquence; and no man needs ever despair of gaining proselytes to the most extravagant hypothesis, who has art enough to represent it in any favourable colours." In the age of social media, cable news, and reality shows, snake oil is selling better than ever. As a consequence, knowing how to discern the unvarnished truth from a heaping mound of you-know-what is extremely valuable. By pairing the study of the abstract philosophical science of truth with the art of engaging and lively persuasion, this course will be part of your lifelong quest to acquire and hone this skill. This course will help you learn how to represent the truth in "favourable colours" of your own. You will practice arguing for your philosophical views through activities, projects, debates, and papers. You will work closely with your peers, relying on their insight and feedback to sharpen your argumentation skills and helping them refine theirs. Along the way, you will learn to cut quickly and easily through the drivel, hogwash, baloney, and poppycock of politicians to the substance of their arguments - if there is any. Topics covered will range from immigration to theism, affirmative action, and abortion. Figures studied will range from Sojourner Truth to Cicero, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Judith Jarvis Thomson.

Why are gender and sexuality such contentious moral issues? How ought we navigate disagreement about such issues in an increasingly polarized and pluralistic environment? What obstacles interfere with our ability to do so well, and how might we address them? This philosophy course will equip you to address these complex social realities. You'll hone your analytical skills via careful examination of arguments in films, news articles, and academic essays. By interviewing community leaders with different perspectives on these issues, you will gain insight into what shapes people's moral convictions and how to foster more productive civil and personal conversations among those who disagree. Upon successful completion of this course you will be better equipped to articulate a rationale for your understanding of gender and sexuality.

This course provides a critical philosophical articulation and examination of various conceptions of the soul, such as developed by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, etc. Content varies by semester. See https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/ for a description of content specific to this semester.

Work plays a deeply important role in our lives. Finding good work -- which, for many of us, means getting a meaningful job you're passionate about -- can seem like the crucial factor in determining whether your life goes well or poorly, and whether you end up happy and fulfilled or miserable and empty. But things aren't nearly so simple. What kind of work is available to anyone in particular is largely determined by factors outside of our control. And when it comes to work, we're notoriously bad at predicting what aspects of a job we'll find meaningful and fulfilling, and which will drain us of life and energy. In this course, we will focus on the most urgent questions facing anyone trying to discern what their life's work will be, such as: - What causes alienation, anxiety, and burnout at work, and are these things that can be avoided with foresight and careful planning? - What is "leisure" (as contrasted with "time off") and what role should it play if we want to be healthy, flourishing persons? Is there such a thing as "work-life balance"? - Do we live in a genuine meritocracy? And, if so, is this a good thing or a bad thing? How should we think about equity and equality in the workplace? - Is it dangerous (or perhaps wise) to see your work purely as an instrument of financial gain? Does work have the power to nurture (or destroy) your soul? The course will be organized by topic, and we'll read a broad range of thinkers from St. Benedict to Karl Marx and Max Weber to more contemporary thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and David Graeber (author of the provocative book "Bullshit Jobs"). We'll also watch a lot of the TV show " Survivor." Students will leave the course with their own "philosophy of work," captured in a living document that details their core beliefs about the role of work in living a good life.

This course will examine principal questions and debates in ethics, such as the nature of the good, different ethical frameworks (virtue, consequentialism, deontology), the nature of moral motivation, and particular universal or contemporary moral problems. For details about specific sections in a particular semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

An introduction to the field of moral philosophy, with major emphasis on contemporary moral issues.

This great books-style, discussion-based seminar introduces students to some of the most influential philosophical perspectives on what makes for true human flourishing. Students will read great works of fiction along philosophical texts as they wrestle with the nature of human flourishing in general as well the nature of specific virtues and vices. Feel free to email the professor for more information.

Luck is a constant in human existence: serendipitous meetings, one-in-a-million accidents, lottery winnings, surprise inheritances. At times it feels as though one's life is just a series of rolls of the dice. But just what is luck, and what should we make of its ubiquity? Are we only responsible for what we control? Do we only deserve what we have gained through skill or virtue? Or is our possession of skills and virtues, too, a matter of luck? Can we know things that could easily have been different? Are we justified in believing things that unluckily turn out to be false? Are we morally better than the people we might have been if we'd been born in a different time or place? As we consider these questions, we will investigate some foundational philosophical issues that turn out to have surprising (or not so surprising) connections to luck.

The aim of this course is to explore the ethical and political issues surrounding space exploration and consider how past and present realities constrain our future in space. We will first survey the present state of space exploration. This will include the privatization of space travel, military investment in the space industry, space policy and law, and the state of modern space science. Then, we will look to our future in space and consider questions such as: Does climate change justify/ necessitate colonizing other worlds? What are the ethics of terraforming? What types of extraterrestrial life are worthy of ethical consideration? Will space travel replicate or exacerbate existing structural oppression, and should we pursue ‘anti-colonial' space travel? Ultimately, students should be able to place space exploration in its social context and articulate a vision of space exploration that they believe best serves society.

This course surveys key issues in social and moral philosophy, with a particular focus on issues pertinent to marginalized groups. We will typically begin with an introduction to the general philosophical theories and then examine their implications for marginalised groups who may not straightforwardly fit within those theories, before finally considering how those theories may need to be adjusted to accommodate them. The topics we will cover include: Moral status: Why do we as persons matter morally? What is it to be a bearer of rights? Wellbeing: What does wellbeing consist in? Is what is good for us wholly self-determined? Is disability in itself bad for its bearer? Care ethics: How should our moral theories adjust to accommodate the vulnerable and dependent? Social Epistemology: What is it to take something on testimony? What should we make of testimony from a minority group that runs counter to general intuition? What is epistemic injustice? Social Ontology: What is a social group? What is race? What is gender? What is a team?

An examination of a number of the fundamental texts in political and constitutional theory, with an emphasis on works of special importance to the British and American political systems.

This course explores theoretical and practical issues arising in law. Topics will include some of the following: laws regulating speech; drug laws, the limits of the criminal sanction, and the debate about over-criminalization; self-defense; the foundations of criminal procedure. In class mid-term and short paper for each of the 3 class units. Regular attendance and participation in required Friday class discussion section.

This course will focus on the writings of Black political thinkers in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Through critical examination of the conditions against, and contexts within, which the political theories of these thinkers are situated, this course hopes to arrive at some understanding of the principles, goals, and strategies developed to contest and redefine notions/concepts of citizenship (vis-a-vis the imperatives of race/racism and the global colonial formations), humanity, justice, equality, development, democracy, and freedom.

An historically and philosophically informed close reading of one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy, Plato's Republic.

An introductory course in the application of philosophical methods to questions of aesthetics and art. Specific texts, themes, and problems discussed vary from semester to semester. See https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/ for details about current sections.

Philosophical exploration of ethical issues involved in data science.

Introduction and critical survey of representative theories, problems, and positions within research ethics. Content varies by semester. For current semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

In this course, we will examine the philosophical ideas of Karl Marx, including his views on work, human nature, and freedom. We will focus on reading primary texts, from Marx's early manuscripts to excerpts from Capital. Additional readings will include philosophical responses to Marx's ideas from other thinkers.

This course introduces students to important concepts, positions, and debates in applied ethics. The course begins with a primer on normative ethics. Students are introduced to two major views in normative ethics: consequentialism and deontology. These positions reflect two contrasting answers to the question as to what makes our actions right or wrong, and what we owe to one another, morally speaking. The remainder of the course tackles real-world ethical issues, and proceeds in four parts. PART I: We engage with questions concerning the ethics of eating meat. Given the huge amounts of animal suffering found in the meat industry, are we morally required to become vegans? PART II: We critically consider the moral problems raised by certain kinds of markets, including the black market in human organs, and the use of surrogacy, and sweatshops. PART III: In the third part of the course, we investigate core issues in the ethics of medicine. One such issue concerns the shape that a state’s organ donation system ought to take; should such systems be opt-in, or opt-out? PART IV: The course concludes by examining matters of justice; for example, issues of global justice raised by widespread poverty, and justice in the distribution of educational opportunities.

The topic of ethics of AI has received much due attention. However, there is much to be explored on the social and political implications of increasing AI integration. This course will grapple with questions concerning the use of AI in politics and government (domestically and internationally), in achieving collective social goals, and in preparing for future generations. Using tools from social and political philosophy, we will engage in thoughtful discussion of how AI is changing our world.

This course will introduce and explore fundamental questions about the natures of ethics and morality. To be clear: We will not be concerned to investigate which acts, behaviors, states of affairs, or general ways of living are right or wrong, good or bad, virtuous or vicious, and so on. The foregoing are questions one asks when doing ethics. But we will not (primarily) be doing ethics in this course. Rather, we will be taking a step back, or going a layer deeper, by asking questions about what it is we are doing when doing ethics. In other words, we will be asking questions of meta-ethics. More specifically, we will be asking: (i) Whether it is an aim of ethical thought and discourse to apprehend moral facts and properties (i.e., morality); and, if so, (ii) Whether there is such a thing as morality; and, if so, (iii) What morality is.

This course brings philosophical reflection to bear on some of the most pressing ethical issues facing modern society. Topics include technology ethics, environmental ethics, racial justice, and poverty. How much can you rely on AI before it compromises your autonomy? What, if anything, is lost when caregiving is outsourced to robots? What are the rights of future generations? Is it wrong to only have friends of the same race as yourself? How does lived experience confer authority? What do we owe the global poor? We’ll explore all these questions, and more, in this discussion-based seminar.

What are cities, and how do they work? How do present (and how will future) societies respond to the challenges of pollution, sustainable development, exploitation of natural resources, equal access to infrastructure, education and welfare, human rights, food production and distribution, and energy consumption? This course welcomes students to reflect on these questions and respond to these challenges through the emerging field of urban ethics. Through lectures and readings, we will ask: 1.) Can we define an “ancient urban ethics?" 2.) Which disciplines are involved in urban ethics, and what strategies—from environmental to social ethics—should inform it? 3.) What policies, planning documents, and environmental and information technologies from the past and present can we avail from around the world to understand urban ethics? To ground our discussions, we will read excerpts from classical literature, philosophy, and cross-disciplinary works. We will also engage resources including maps, drawings, art, photographs, and videos. As we will discover through discussion and participation, urban ethics is a field in which everyone is involved.

Natural goodness, the idea that something is good insofar as it fulfills its proper function or purpose, has deep roots in moral philosophy. The course begins with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which provides the foundational framework for this concept. We then explore Aquinas's development of Aristotle's view, especially how he integrates it with a theistic understanding of God's creative purposes and commands. Nowadays, we refer to this synthesis as 'Natural Law'. The second half of the course turns to the resurgence of interest in Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics since the 1950s, led by thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, C.S. Lewis, Philippa Foot, and John Finnis. Through close engagement with contemporary texts, students will assess whether these recent appropriations represent a faithful evolution of the classical tradition originating in Aristotle, or a more problematic devolution of it. Crucial questions to be addressed: What is goodness? What grounds goodness facts, if anything? What is obligation? What makes something obligatory? Can we explain goodness and obligation apart from God?

A survey of leading ideas in political and social philosophy primarily from the 18th - 20th Centuries. Problems considered will be: the relation of individual to society, the relation of society to state, liberalism, the relation of economics to politics, versions of socialism, etc.

What is effective leadership? What insights might philosophical texts and the experience of seasoned leaders give us? In this course, we will read and discuss the writings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas on ethics and virtue. As a counterpoint, we will read Machiavelli’s The Prince, which seems to have been written in reaction to a virtue-centered approach to leadership. A key component of the course will be to hear from accomplished leaders in various fields—business, education, the military, and non-profit organizations—to test our philosophical reflections against the actual experiences of successful leaders. Students will be asked to read the assigned texts thoughtfully, engage in class discussion, and write several short reflection papers and one longer paper.

This course is an introduction to the contemporary philosophical literature on hope and aspiration. The first half of the course will examine the nature and normativity of hope, with special attention to the role of hope in structuring human agency, building moral relationships, and facilitating social or political progress. The second half of the course will turn to aspiration in the context of pursuing strenuous, long-term personal goals. In particular, we will examine whether it is rational to make transformative choices, persevere against the odds, honor sunk costs, and make backup plans to safeguard potential failures.

Emotions are ubiquitous. Everyone has them. Everyone wants more of some kinds and less of others. Sometimes they help us act in line with our plans and intentions. Sometimes they interfere. Every day we make decisions (sometimes split second and unconscious ones) about whether to trust our feelings or to doubt and plow past them. Is this ever done in a principled way? We make decisions and judgments all the time about our emotions but how often are we able to articulate explicitly why we might trust our emotions in one situation but not another? Different virtue traditions offer conflicting perspectives on how we ought to govern our emotions such as cultivating emotions to be in harmony with one’s practical judgment as Aristotle thought or repressed because they tend to interfere with reasoning as the Stoics thought. These longstanding debates touch every aspect of daily life, yet there is still a surprising amount of disagreement over what emotions tell us and how we should manage them. This course serves as an introduction to virtue ethics with a special focus on various emotions and their role in evaluative reasoning and well-being. Core questions guiding our inquiry will be: * What are emotions? * How do they affect our attention and judgment? * How ought the virtuous person rely on their emotions? * What value do different emotions have?

This course is a comprehensive introduction to business ethics with a special focus on issues and representative cases drawn from business in recent years. Central questions concern the responsibilities of corporations, especially in regard to their stakeholders and the environment. These concerns range from questions about hiring, firing, and promotion, to executive compensation, to marketing ethics, to financial representation, and to religion in the workplace. The globalization of business is also a main focus, involving such issues as outsourcing (domestic and international), bribery, child labor, and the treatment of women in and beyond the company's home country. The work will consist in readings from texts and cases, short papers, and likely one or two or at most three short essay exams. The aim is both to advance understanding of business ethics and to help students make better decisions both in business practice in particular and in ethical matters generally.

Students will develop a detailed understanding of the applied ethics of eating, engaging with questions about animal welfare, duties to the environment, the exploitation of workers, eco-feminism, and the value of cultural traditions. This will involve discussion of actual, current conditions in our food supply chain. But we will be focusing on the application of broader ethical and metaethical questions they may have touched on in an introductory class, thereby deepening their understanding of the theoretical questions too. For example, are there objective moral facts about how we should eat, or only cultural norms? Does a consequentialist, welfarist view really support Singer-style veganism? Would Kant want us to eat fair trade, for the sake of human dignity? Are there distinct environmental virtues, or feminist reasons to (not) be vegan? The intention is to connect applied and theoretical ethics around a subject that will be engaging for students. They will be required to state and argue for the moral permissibility of their own eating intentions.

A critical survey of important texts and authors in Ancient Philosophy.

Film and philosophy can be studied together. On the one hand, films give rise to philosophical questions, for example, is justice simply the advantage of the stronger? On the other hand, if we have compelling philosophical categories, for example, on the nature of tragedy, we can ask richer questions of films. The course juxtaposes films with philosophical works. Our goal is three-fold: (1) to interpret the films as films; (2) to weigh philosophical arguments; and (3) to enrich our understanding of both realms, film and philosophy, by bringing the two spheres into conversation with one another.

A critical examination (either historical or topical) of central works and topics in political philosophy. For information on the works and topics covered in a specific section, please consult https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/

War belongs to the ugly reality of human history, and it would be naive to believe that this will change soon. The course addresses the specifically ethical dimensions involved with warfare - the question of legitimate reasons for going to war, the moral limits to warfare, and the moral challenges after the end of a war. We will proceed "inductively," starting with concrete issues, developing more general categories, and finally trying to find moral foundations. We will first read two dramas by Shakespeare and Schiller on two leaders in two of the bloodiest wars of European history, the Hundred Years' War and the Thirty Years' War, Henry V and Wallenstein, then study Michael Walzer's classical work Just and Unjust Wars and the recent book on post-war justice, a topic ignored by Walzer, by David Chwon Kwon: Justice After War. We will finally read the first and the third parts of my own book Morals and Politics, which lays out both foundations for ethics and moral strategies for dealing with some of the greatest political challenges of our time.

A critical introduction to attempts to understand rationality and rational decision-making, including the way that moral considerations enter into those deliberations. Topics may include: utility-maximization theory, introductory game theory, consequentialism, deontic reasoning, and the function of the good in practical reason, as well as the limitations of rationality.

Critical survey of important authors, topics, and texts in ancient and medieval philosophy.

I get it. Philosophy can be dry, inapplicable, and even boring. In Social Philosophy, we dive into topics that are current, in the news, and relevant to you. Social Philosophy takes philosophical theories and shows how they apply to topics like immigration, sports, feminism, and gender. The course will be divided into three sections. We will start with social metaphysics and talk about what groups are, whether groups can be responsible for things, gender, and disability. Then, we will do social epistemology and talk about testimony, epistemic injustice, the relationship between testimony and faith, and how we should respond when people disagree with us. The biggest part of the course will be on social ethics, where we will cover topics like our duties to help the poor/give to charity, immigration, war, sports, social media, and abortion. The class will be discussion based. There will be two papers, and each will require a rough draft or outline. There will also be a final evaluation of some sort (i.e. exam or project).

Course description: This is an advanced introductory survey of foundational texts in the history of modern European social philosophy. Readings from among: Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Freud, and Weber.

This class is dedicated to helping you develop your views on some of the ethical issues related to citizenship in sovereign/territorial states. Our focus will be on representative democracies like the United States, but many of the issues we will analyze and discuss have broad application. We will have five debates, each focused on one of the following questions: 1. Should citizens vote? 2. Should it be relatively easy to become a citizen? 3. Are political parties good? 4. Which voting procedure should representative democracies deploy in their legislatures? 5. Should only public funds be used for political campaigns? Much of the class will be dedicated to exploring different answers to these questions. Since many great philosophers of the past give persuasive answers to these questions, and our current thinking is indebted to them in many ways, we will spend some of our time studying their views. For instance, we will consider the views of James Madison on the influence of political parties. Nonetheless, our focus will not be on history for its own sake.

In this class we will examine the relationship of philosophy and narrative and the impact of narrative on change in ourselves and in the outside world. Although western philosophy is seen as the primary apologist of pure rationality, it had a close relationship to literature throughout times, beginning with Plato and his dialogues. However, there has often been (and still is until today) a fight between philosophers engaging in literary style (think for example of Rousseau) and those who condemned this form of writing as a "pseudo-science" (as did Voltaire, Rousseau's arch-rival). Our goal is to take a close look at this quarrel, the different ways of philosophizing and the arguments around it, asking ourselves how knowledge comes about and what makes a rational argument different from a literary, especially narrative, form of discovery. During this journey we will discuss the how, what-for, and why of philosophy and of literature. For this we will take on an interdisciplinary perspective, which will include not only philosophical thinking but also psychology and literature itself. Students with a love of literature, prospective philosophers interested in the intersection of literature and narrative, and prospective majors in English, foreign languages and literatures, and psychology might find the course especially attractive.

This course will explore the rich philosophical tradition inspired by the works of Plato, which was the source of a distinctive and highly influential set of interrelated ideas about God, human nature, the structure of reality, and happiness. We will explore Plato’s treatment of these topics in dialogues like the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus, in connection with relevant background material from Plato’s philosophical predecessors (particularly from the Pythagorean movement and from Parmenides of Elea). We will then trace the impact of Plato’s ideas in the centuries following his death, with attention to their development by later “Neo-Platonic” philosophers like Plotinus and Iamblichus, by Christian thinkers like Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa, and within lesser-known philosophical and religious movements from antiquity. Like all ancient philosophical traditions, Platonism was not just a collection of abstract doctrines, but a way of life aimed at leading its adherents to happiness and flourishing. Accordingly, we will seek to understand not just what Platonist philosophers believed, but how they actually lived their lives. In addition to in-depth reading and discussion of primary texts, this will involve trying out for ourselves some of the lived practices central to the Platonist tradition.

Departing from Michel Foucault's controversial theory of "race war", this class will examine the historical relations between the idea of race and material practices of violence. To do this we will focus on a selection of "debates about race" from across the Americas that in many ways define American modernity. These might include: Las Casas and Sepúlveda on the humanity of indigenous Americans; slavery and the formation of American nation-states; nineteenth-century race science, eugenics, and their rejection; the race-and-culture debates (e.g. Boas, Dubois, Freyre, against the race scientists); the so-called "problema indígena" debates in Latin America; race and rights struggles in the post-WWII era; immigration and migrant labor; Negro Sim (Brazil), Black Lives Matter (USA), and related protest movements worldwide; social media and the consolidation of white supremacist paramilitarism. Which selection of these topics we pursue will be guided by student interest. Language of instruction is Spanish and English. Comparative work is encouraged. This course can count for the Modern Latin-American area requirement for Spanish Major/Supplementary Major.

In this class we will examine the relationship of philosophy and narrative and the impact of narrative on change in ourselves and in the outside world. Although western philosophy is seen as the primary apologist of pure rationality, it had a close relationship to literature throughout times, beginning with Plato and his dialogues. However, there has often been (and still is until today) a fight between philosophers engaging in literary style (think for example of Rousseau) and those who condemned this form of writing as a "pseudo-science" (as did Voltaire, Rousseau's arch-rival). Our goal is to take a close look at this quarrel, the different ways of philosophizing and the arguments around it, asking ourselves how knowledge comes about and what makes a rational argument different from a literary, especially narrative, form of discovery. During this journey we will discuss the how, what-for, and why of philosophy and of literature. For this we will take on an interdisciplinary perspective, which will include not only philosophical thinking but also psychology and literature itself. Students with a love of literature, prospective philosophers interested in the intersection of literature and narrative, and prospective majors in English, foreign languages and literatures, and psychology might find the course especially attractive.

Measurement is a fundamental activity in modern science, both the natural and social sciences. While measurement is often considered as the hallmark of science that makes an activity “scientific,” there is little consensus among philosophers about how to define measurement, what kinds of things are measurable, or which conditions make measurement possible. By engaging with texts that build on concrete practices of measurement in historical and contemporary case studies, we will collectively explore questions such as: How do we know that an instrument, such as a thermometer, measures the quantity it is intended to measure? How are measurement units established, and how do they vary across different fields of science and culture? What does it mean to measure human attributes, such as feeling, if possible at all? Our journey begins with in-depth discussions on accuracy and precision, calibration, and standardization—the foundational concepts that make measurement possible. We then navigate the diverse landscape of philosophical viewpoints on measurement, encompassing operationalism, conventionalism, and realism. With these concepts and perspectives in mind, we will explore more case studies across various scientific domains, ranging from the physical and biological sciences to clinical medicine and social sciences, where you will discover issues more closely related to your own field of study. In the course, you will bring and elaborate your own case study related to your specific interests or fields of study. This case study serves as a focal point for actively applying concepts and approaches learned throughout the course, which will eventually crystallize into your final paper. From the course, you will come to see measurement not merely as a technical process but as a complex epistemic activity that demands critical examination, from experimental design to data interpretation. No prior background in specialized sciences is necessary to enroll in this course.

An exploration from the point of view of ethical theory of a number of ethical problems in contemporary biomedicine. Topics discussed will include euthanasia, abortion, the allocation of scarce medical resources, truth-telling in the doctor-patient relationship, the right to medical care and informed consent, and human experimentation.

This course will focus on the philosophical, ethical, and political dimensions of topics of environmental concern. Specific topics vary by semester. For more detailed information regarding current and upcoming offerings, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

An examination of such questions as: What are the moral responsibilities of the scientist? Should the scientist be held accountable for what might be done with the results of his or her scientific research? Does the scientist have any special role to play, as a citizen, in public debate about science policy? Should the scientist sometimes simply refuse to engage in some kinds of research because of moral concern about the consequences of research of that area? No special background in physics will be assumed.

The aim of this course is to introduce and explore two rival conceptions of the world --- each of which claims, as its source of legitimacy, unprecedented progress achieved throughout the recent history of modern science. The first conception, coming out of fundamental physics research, is often extolled for its elegant simplicity, and enjoys considerable popular acclaim: our entire universe, including all of space and time around us, has evolved over the past 13.8 billion years --- approximately uniformly expanding ever since initial conditions were set by the ‘Big Bang' (a topic that is, itself, a central focus of ongoing fundamental physics research). Meanwhile, the second conception is an ecological one: the world is a mess of unfettered complexity, but a mess that we try to shape into a patchwork reality in order to better navigate. Although garnering less popular acclaim, it is this ecological conception, and not the fundamental conception, that is closely allied with science-based approaches to public policy --- e.g. in response to anthropogenic climate change, or biosecurity in an era of pandemic --- and is therefore no less relevant to society. At the end of the course, we will ask and answer an outstanding question: how can it be that we embrace each of these conceptions of the world, simultaneously, as consequences of the role we entrust to modern science in society?

Philosophical exploration of the concept of infinity. Content varies by semester

Philosophy of Technology considers the nature of technology and its relationship to social values, economics, the natural environment, human values and science, among other things. It considers questions such as how the existing social context affects the development and adoption of technology, how technology affects the evolution of society, and to what extent we control our technology and to what extent our technology controls us. Specific themes and and questions vary from term to term.

This course will introduce students to fundamental ethical and social issues related to the design, development, and use of technology. Students will develop an understanding of philosophical ethical theories as a resource for analyzing how technology impacts both individual and collective civil, political, and human rights and issues related to autonomy, privacy, and identity, as well as how it reinforces power dynamics in society and its impacts on equity, justice, and fairness. Specific topics will include bias and fairness in algorithms, privacy, data governance and civil liberties, surveillance and power, social media, and the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Not so long ago, an engineer at Google claimed that a chatbot called LaMDA has achieved consciousness. While it may be doubtful whether this chatbot actually achieved consciousness, the chorus of technologists who believe artificial intelligence models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder. The most recent iteration of a chatbot called ChatGPT was able to pass exams from law and business schools. It took ChatGPT no less than 2 months to reach 100 million users. (For comparison, reaching 100 million users took the mobile phone 16 years, Facebook 4 years, and TikTok a year.) Truly, we are witnessing a revolution in time lapse that increasingly confuses the boundary between reality and science fiction. In this class, we shall embark on an adventure exploring the maybe not so fictional idea of an emerging consciousness in artificial intelligence and investigate the opportunity and risk potential of using AI for our society at large. Come to class and have a conversation with the future!

We shall study the philosophy of computability, following various philosophical issues and debates through history to contemporary times. Turing’s seminal 1936 paper greatly clarified the meaning of computability, introducing Turing machines, the halting problem, universal computers, and the concept of computable real numbers. His resolution of the Entsheidungsproblem provided a simple computability-based proof of the Gödel incompleteness phenomenon, challenging Hilbert’s program. His ideas on oracle computation lead to the hierarchy of Turing degrees, and the hierarchy of computational complexity similarly grows out of the P vs NP problem. Kolmogorov complexity reveals inherent limitations of our ability to gauge computational difficulty. The latter part of the course will focus on the philosophy of artificial intelligence, from classical treatments of the Turing test to the astonishing contemporary developments in artificial intelligence, which we shall explore with various student experiments using the latest AI services.

Critical survey of epistemology, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological sciences. Possible topics include taxonomy, biological explanation, species, teleology and function, chance, selection, and reductionism. Content varies by semester; for current offerings, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

Shall we have a game? The course will explore the philosophy and logic of games, exploring all things games. We shall begin with some elementary game theory and decision theory, including elementary probability theory, covering mixed strategies, Nash equilibria, the prisoner's dilemma, and Tit-for-Tat, and then eventually the fundamental theorem of finite games, game trees, the hypergame paradox, and many examples of finite games and their strategies, such as Nim and other games. The latter part of the course will delve into infinitary issues, including determinacy and nondeterminacy, connections with the philosophy of mathematics, Conway games, and the surreal numbers as games. It will be a highlight of the class to cover the analysis of various infinite games, including infinite chess, infinite draughts, infinite Hex, infinite Wordle, infinite Sudoku, and more.

This course introduces some epistemological and ethical issues broadly related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. The course begins with an introduction to the historical development and the technical basis of some contemporary AI technology. Topics may include: basics of linear algebra; machine learning; neural network; examples of contemporary AI systems. The second part of the course discusses some epistemological issues related to AI. Topics may include: the problem of induction, AI assisted scientific research; transparency and interpretability. The final part of the course discusses the interaction between AI and the human society. Topics may include: the meaningfulness of various human activities when AI's ability on them supersedes human; algorithmic fairness; predictive policing; digital labor.

Critical survey of selected topics, themes, positions, and arguments in the philosophy of science. Content varies by semester. For current semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

This course will cover topics in the growing field of technology ethics. Content varies by semester. For current semester, check https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

In this course, we will ask a series of questions about the human mind. Is the mind just the brain? Or is it more than the brain? In what way? How do we come to have minds? Can other animals have minds? Can computers have minds? We will look for answers to these questions from a wide range of philosophical and empirical studies.

Probabilistic methods are in use in a number of subfields in philosophy—and the influence of these methods, especially over the last couple of decades or so, appears to be growing. In this course we'll aim to develop a broad-ranging understanding of probabilistic reasoning in philosophy. We'll examine, in particular, how probabilistic methods have recently been applied to tackle some thorny philosophical problems. A self-contained introduction to formal and then philosophical aspects of probability will be followed by an exploration of how probabilistic methods have been used to address, inter alia, epistemological puzzles, as well as puzzles in the sciences (such as puzzles related to fine-tuning). (Note that only very minimal background in mathematics and in the sciences will be assumed---the course is indeed designed to be largely self-contained.)

We live in a fast-paced world where we are constantly bombarded with all sorts of information at any one point in time. Much of it, unfortunately, turns out to simply be BS. Just which of these information should we actually believe, then? “The one that is true, of course!” one might be quick to say. But assessing the truth of a belief or, indeed, even the reliability and trustworthiness of our sources of information is notoriously difficult, especially in light of so-called misinformation, disinformation, and “alternative facts” floating around. Knowing which sources to trust and what to believe, then, isn’t as straightforward as it might have initially seemed. What makes the matter worse is that it seems like in many instances, we are not only in the epistemic hook for believing the wrong things, but if the wrong things that we believe in happen to weigh in on a certain moral matter, we might become appropriate targets of moral blame as well. So, how can we avoid becoming both morally and epistemically blameworthy? In this seminar, we will read recent works on a broad range of contemporary social issues that are, at their core, epistemological in nature in the hope that these readings could inch us towards a satisfactory answer to the pressing question of what we should actually believe. We begin the seminar by examining the following two fundamental questions in traditional epistemology: (i) how should one respond to disagreement with people who seem to be just as smart and well-informed as they are, and (ii) whether factors that influence one’s beliefs without any regard for truth should have a debunking effect. We will then use these concepts to explore a whole host of topics in contemporary applied epistemology including (and among others) fake news, echo chambers, distrusting scientists, implicit bias, responsibility for one’s own and others’ ignorance, and gaslighting.

This course will provide an introduction to topics at the intersection of mathematics, language, and philosophy. Our focus will be the examination of cross-disciplinary work undertaken by mathematicians and philosophers at the turn of the 20th century. This work largely focused on the reciprocal relationship between mathematics and language. On the one hand, philosophers like Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein used ideas from mathematics to understand the nature of meaning in natural language; on the other hand, mathematicians like Gödel, Tarski, and Turing used insights gleaned from thinking about mathematics as a kind of language to prove famous results in the foundations of math and computer science. Exploring this dual relationship will be the focus of this course.

Climate change is a “moral storm” requiring swift and unprecedented human cooperation at both local and global levels to solve it. This pressing global crisis is pregnant with many interesting philosophical/ethical issues such as the responsibilities we have to address the climate problem, how climate change affects human rights and well-being, geoengineering, carbon capture and other greenhouse gas removal technologies and their ethical implications, climate refugees, indigenous people and their unique situation in a warming globe, what current generations owe future generations, what ethical concerns need to feature in a climate change policy etc. This course will draw from ethics, political philosophy, social justice, and other relevant philosophical sources to comprehensively explore these and other important ethical issues.

A historical and philosophical examination of the relations, if there are any, between science and religion with particular reference to the Catholic intellectual tradition. Through the use of historical materials the course will attempt to isolate and examine philosophical difficulties that might be thought to obtain between the claims made by Christian revelation and various scientific theories about features of the world. Emphasis will be placed upon distinctive ways in which the intellectual tradition of the Catholic church has faced the issues raised. Figures to be considered may include Augustine, Aquinas, Galileo, Bellarmine, Darwin, Huxley, Dawkins, Newman, Leroy, Zahm, LeMaitre, and Hawking, as well as others. Topics to be discussed are Language, Meaning, and Revelation, the Nature of Science, Theory, and Hypothesis, Evolution, the Big Bang, Soul and Body, Creation versus Making, Providence and Chance.

This course explores the ethical challenges posed by the ongoing revolution in the technology of war. After learning about some general, philosophical approaches to ethical decision making, we will examine a wide range of new weapons technologies, from "smart" bombs, drones, and robots to em (electromagnetic) weapons, cyberwar, and bio-enhancement, asking the question whether the existing framework of Just War Theory and the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) are adequate for war as it will be fought in the 21st century.

Robots or "autonomous systems" play an ever-increasing role in many areas, from weapons systems and driverless cars to health care and consumer services. As a result, it is ever more important to ask whether it makes any sense to speak of such systems' behaving ethically and how we can build into their programming what some call "ethics modules." After a brief technical introduction to the field, this course will approach these questions through contemporary philosophical literature on robot ethics and through popular media, including science fiction text and video.

The aim of this class is to provide an understanding of the fundamental issues and positions in the contemporary theory of knowledge.

This course surveys some of the main ways that philosophy and biology intersect. Possible topics include the nature of life, arguments from biological complexity to intelligent design, implications of Darwinian evolution for views about the nature of value, personhood, and freedom, and analysis of central biological concepts (e.g., natural selection, adaptation, function, development, and species) via philosophical methods.

Mental illness is an increasingly important yet sadly misunderstood topic in our society. This course is designed to help students analyze the phenomenon of mental illness in a philosophical way. Topics vary by semester. For the current semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

This course introduces philosophical ethics through an engagement with sustainability issues, which are at the intersection of environmentalism, social justice, and economic equality. We will cover issues such as the value of the environment, non-human animal welfare, food ethics, environmental justice, sustainable economy, and human-made global climate change. There are two central goals of this course. First, to engage students into ethical reflection regarding environmental and sustainability issues, and how these issues intersect with their lives and local communities. Second, to provide students with a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary to evaluate and generate ethical arguments both in general and applied to specific situations. This course will be heavily based on student participation, with an emphasis on class discussions. Students will also develop specific projects targeted to apply the conceptual tools presented in the course to specific issues salient in the local community. No prior experience with philosophy or environmental science is required.

Climate change and other environmental crises have prompted calls to expand justice beyond the spheres of duties to individuals and political communities. Not only animals but ecosystems could then be seen as objects of ethical and political concern. This course investigates these controversial claims and their conceptual foundations. We begin by investigating what ecosystems are, and then turn to how they might be said to have inherent value. Finally, drawing on recent work in the social sciences as well as philosophy, we will consider how individual agents could fit into such accounts of the world.

In this course we will examine some central feminist themes and issues by way of a philosophical examination of science fiction texts. Readings will include short science fiction stories, two or more science fiction novels, and a variety of texts in feminist philosophy and philosophy of gender.

Loss of health is a part of life. Medicine is one means by which this part of life is addressed, negotiated with, or battled against. In this course, we will explore the questions surrounding the nature and use of medicine in a variety of historical and social contexts. These questions will include, but are not limited to, the following: What is medicine, exactly? Is it a science or an art? How has the answer to this question evolved over the course of certain histories? Are diseases and medical causes, as typically conceived, mind-independent entities or human constructions? How do our worldviews and philosophical commitments affect what we observe and what we count as evidence? What kinds of medical epistemology are possible? Which ways of knowing should be granted authority? If medicine is defined as the practice of alleviating suffering, whose suffering should be alleviated and whose suffering is justified by the acquisition of further medical knowledge? What does it mean, existentially, to lose one's health? Finally, what should the aims of medical practice be? We will explore these questions in a philosophical manner using a variety of intellectual resources from philosophy, history, sociology, and contemporary medical science.

The aim of this course is to ask how our ways of thinking about nature, material things, and ourselves supports and/or obstructs our ability to engage in more sustainable environmental practices. Our questions will include, but are not limited to: What is nature and how are humans connected to, distinct from, or part of this nature? What does it mean to be sustainable? If our aim is to exist more sustainably, how should we think about nature to help achieve this end? What is waste, exactly? Whose way of life is being preserved by our present sustainability efforts in the West? How does gender, race, and culture shape how one is affected by (un)sustainable practices? To what extent are the formal structures of oppression conserved across sexism, racism, and environmental destruction? This course will draw heavily on ecofeminist philosophy to help answer these important questions.

Disagreement, especially about matters of empirical fact, is often seen as an impediment to rational discourse and the pursuit of truth. And yet, in the sciences, our primary source of knowledge about the world, disagreement is not only par for the course but, arguably, an essential feature of "the scientific method". In this course, we will engage in a philosophical analysis of the roots and resolution of disagreements between scientists in order to (1) better understand why experts come to disagree, and (2) gain a more nuanced picture of the everyday practice of science. Drawing on insights from the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, we will first consider some potential sources of disagreement, paying special attention to the contextual nature of evidence, scientists' diverse reasoning styles, and psychological bias. Then, we will put these conceptual tools to the test analyzing an assortment of in-depth case studies drawn from across the experimental and historical sciences, including: the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event (or, what really killed the dinosaurs?), John Snow and the cholera epidemic of 1854, spontaneous generation, ritualistic cannibalism, and the (first) detection of gravitational waves. In addition to greater familiarity with actual science in action, students will come away from the course with the tools to be more critically engaged with the beliefs of others as well as their own, especially regarding, though not limited to, scientific claims. No previous background in philosophy and/or the sciences is required.

Critical introduction to the main theories and applications of Game Theory

Critical examination of topics within epistemology applied to various practical areas of life. This semester focuses in Skepticism, Fake News, and the Ethics of Belief.

This course is designed for students with little prior familiarity with modern physics; formal mathematics will be kept to a minimum. The lectures start with an outline of Newton's laws of classical mechanics, and the problem Newton faced in distinguishing between absolute and relative motion of bodies. The question arises whether space and time are substances in their own right (Newton) or merely kinds of relations between bodies (Leibniz). The key concept that emerges is that of inertial frames of reference and how different such frames are related to each other. We discuss the fable of Albert Keinstein, who in 1705 anticipated part of Albert Einstein's discussion of this relation two hundred years later. This leads to a discussion of how Einstein came up with his theory of special relativity, which predicts the subtle phenomena of length contraction of "fast" moving rigid bodies and time dilation of "fast" moving clocks, as well as the relativity of simultaneity. Emphasis will be put on the debt Einstein owed to the so-called ether theorists of the 19th century, who were grappling with conceptual issues related to electromagnetism and in particular the behaviour of light. A philosophical debate has arisen in recent years as to how to understand the mentioned relativistic effects: are they the result of novel geometric properties of space-time, or special properties of the forces of cohesion that hold in rigid bodies and clocks? We will look at the arguments on both sides of the debate. Some simple physical arguments due to Einstein will then be examined which led him to his general theory of relativity of 1915: his revolutionary theory of gravity. An intuitive way of understanding the role "space-time curvature" plays in the theory will be discussed, as well as the way in which special relativity emerges from general relativity in the appropriate conditions. The final quarter of the course will concern the role of probability in quantum mechanics. Does this theory require us to change our notion of what probability means? A sketch of the different interpretations of quantum mechanics will be given, and the role of probability in each of them will be examined.

This course will closely consider the ethical responsibilities inherent in the process of technological innovation from the perspective of the innovator. Innovation is here broadly framed as ethical and social intervention in the life of users and society rather than merely technical invention. Topics covered include the nature of responsibility, values in design, the roles of regulation and of business models, and cases from social media, AI, and robotics.

Arguably the most important philosophical skill is the ability to reason and formulate arguments. Sound arguments and good reasoning methods allow us to effectively search for the truth of any philosophical question. In this class, we will consider the reasoning methods used in everyday language, mathematics, and the sciences. We will consider how successful these methods are and how they are able to produce knowledge and understanding. We will discuss the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning, common argument forms, mathematical proof, the role of rigor and intuition in mathematics, the aim of the sciences, and methods for prediction and experimentation in the sciences.

By now, it is no secret that the effects of global climate change could, within the next two centuries or so, cause cultures around the world - including the cultures of the affluent nations - to collapse. Those who would experience such cultural collapse, were it to occur, would be forced to live in ways radically different from their pre-collapse precursors. This course will invite students to think both imaginatively and philosophically about such a possibility. Our guiding questions for the course will be: (i) What is cultural collapse, and how might climate change bring it about? and (ii) How do the participants in a cultural tradition weather well the collapse of their own tradition? To lay the philosophical groundwork for the course, we will read from the work of L.A. Paul, Jonathan Lear, and Alasdair MacIntyre (among others). The semester will then culminate with readings from Lakota, Kiowa, Pueblo, and Navajo writers (among others) who have not only experienced cultural collapse first hand (to varying degrees) but have also written about it in an insightful way.

This is a course on the philosophy of representation in art and science. We will begin our investigation by pondering a puzzle about scientific representation that originates in an epistolary exchange between Einstein, Felix Klein and that august prophet of the power of "symmetry," Amelie Noether. To resolve our aporia, we will then embark on a journey that will take us from a discussion of "images" in Plato and the neo-Platonic tradition, to the exploration of the concepts of "idealization" and "embodiment" in a series of case studies (including the work of Giotto, Donatello, Veronese and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) and culminating in a study of the appeal to the physical imagination that Galileo was trying to make in his famous "ship" thought experiment. We will conclude by discussing the aesthetics of scientific representation more generally.

This course will examine principal questions in the philosophy of religion relating to the nature and existence of God, religious beliefs, religious experience, divine hiddenness, religious pluralism and exclusivism, immortality, the relationship between God and ethics, and other questions. For details about specific sections in a particular semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

This course will investigate the thought of arguably the two greatest medieval philosophers and Catholic philosophers--St. Thomas Aquinas and Bl. John Duns Scotus. They will be our guides for investigating questions concerning such topics as the possibility of change, the metaphysical structure of the world, whether natures are common (e.g., do all humans share one human nature?), the existence of God and His attributes, and the value of their thought today. We will pay attention to their points of agreement and disagreement, evaluating their arguments and positions.

The primary goal of the course is to introduce students to some of the central thinkers and historical controversies animating the French intellectual scene between the Reformation and the height of the enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Central authors include Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal; topics to be addressed include skepticism, natural philosophy, and rationalism, and the relationship of these to questions of morals, culture, and religious belief, including divine grace and the role of religious institutions.

G.K. Chesterton once said of St. Thomas Aquinas that "his philosophy, like his theology, is that of common sense." Chesterton may be right about that, but it's one thing for a philosophy to be common-sensical; it's another thing for it to be easy. The goal of this course is to enable student students to read Aquinas by focusing on a limited set of topics and helping students to learn about these topics while seeing their place in Aquinas's big picture. Possible topics include faith and reason; human nature, including the soul, the body, and the image of God; law and virtue; nature and grace; the "five ways"; and other topics drawn from his natural, ethical, and metaphysical thinking. For details about specific sections in a particular semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

From the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths and of Greek philosophy, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. In this class, we explore to what extent a secular ethical theory is possible. Readings range from antiquity to modernity, including Plato, Kant, Maimonides, Heidegger, and Simone Weil. These authors will help us answering questions, such as, ‘Do I need God’s assistance to become a good person?’, ‘Does the normative power of the moral law require God’s existence?’ ‘Does God need to reveal the moral law in order for me to know it?’

Is there a God—and if there is, how do natural things point to God’s existence? Do humans possess an innate awareness of God’s existence, or must God’s existence be demonstrated by reason? Is human knowledge possible without special assistance from God? This course explores these questions through the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, two of the greatest medieval thinkers. Topics covered include the metaphysics of natural objects, arguments for (and against) God’s existence, the innate knowledge of God, and the theory of divine illumination. We will compare, contrast, and critically assess each thinker’s arguments and consider how their thought remains relevant today.

Historical survey of and introduction to different philosophical conceptions of God from Plato to today

Over the last decade or so, there has been a new and prominent wave of "New Atheism," often promoted in popular books that reach a wide and, apparently, appreciative audience. Yet, atheism is as old as religion itself, and in the Western tradition has roots that extend into the earliest recorded history. In this class we will consider atheism on its own merits - its arguments, values, and intentions - but also as a historical phenomenon, tracing its original expressions and especially its rise during the "modern" period beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries. We will thus focus on Spinoza, Hume, d'Holback, Ludwig Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and among the "New Atheists" Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchins.

In line with the stated rationale of the University's "Second Philosophy" core of courses for students to provide them with "a chance to explore philosophical issues which may have been raised in their first philosophy course in more depth", this course will aim specifically at exposing students to a philosophical tradition in a religious culture (Islam) where issues in ethics, metaphysics and the reach of Reason were discussed in ways that may resonate with their discussion in other cultures and periods, but where these discussions nonetheless retain a culture-specific flavor. The course will first, acquaint students with important philosophical and intellectual figures and themes from early Islam (8th.century-14th). Making use of English translations of primary sources as well as of modern sources and critiques, the course will enable students to interact critically with the some of the major ideas that occupied the philosophical minds of that period. Second, however, the texts and themes that will be dealt with will be used as a means to develop students' abilities to navigate critically through arguments of major concern, such as on the infinity of time and space, the meaning of God, animal rights, the reach of reason in the search for unquantifiable answers, or as a cross-cultural language.

Discussion section for PHIL 20101.

This is the master course for GGL Sustained Dialogue: all students must enroll in one master course (Monday or Tuesday) and will be assigned a Sustained Dialogue section during the first week of the semester.

GGL students are required to enroll in (and actively participate in) a weekly Sustained Dialogue group. These groups meet weekly on Tues or Weds evening from 8:00-9:00pm. You must be available from 8:00-9:00pm on the night of the section you register for. A portion of your GGL grade will be determined by the quality of your work in your SD group.

Discussion section for PHIL 20408 Philosophy of Law

Discussion for PHIL 20602.

Discussion for PHIL 20652 Game Theory

The course provides a historical introduction to philosophical reflection through reading and discussion of major works in the Western philosophical tradition. The course requires attentive outside reading to enable the individual student to engage him- or herself in active classroom discussions and argumentation and thus to progress in the learning and practicing of philosophical analysis and thoughtful discourse.

This course offers an introduction to and critical assessment of some of the key figures of the phenomenological tradition, the most prominent European philosophical movement of the twentieth century, and the movement that inspired the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Particular attention will be given to the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir, as well as key influences on the development of phenomenology. Themes treated may include some or all of the following: intentionality, perception, consciousness, the life-world, the nature of human existence, freedom, embodiment, relations between self and other, empathy and intersubjectivity. Details will be updated before the commencement of the module.

PHIL 10020 Introduction to the Problems of Philosophy at UCD; This course provides an introductory analysis of some of the most exciting age-old problems of philosophy and the solutions offered to them, focusing on the logical structure of arguments. The following are typical among the several topics that will be examined (further details at the start of the module): 1. Scepticism and the possibility of knowledge; 2. Free will and determinism; 3. The human mind and consciousness ; 4. The nature of the self (personal identity); 5. The existence of God; 6. Reasoning and the world. An engaging secondary source overview text is: Simon Blackburn, _Think_ (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). A good guide for writing essays and learning to think philosophically is the following: Jay F. Rosenberg, _The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners_, 3rd ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1996), in UCD library. Selected primary readings will be made available on Blackboard during the semester.

This course provides students with an interdisciplinary view of reality, based on a reflection on three fundamental problems of philosophy: truth, goodness and beauty. Through text analysis and group dialogue, students will be able to identify, distinguish, value and argue the ways of interrogating reality that the humanistic, artistic and scientific disciplines have, as well as the paths they develop to try to answer them.

In this introductory critical reasoning course we'll learn how to argue well, and how to show when others are arguing badly. In particular, we'll learn to spot bad arguments - 'fallacies' - and rhetorical devices that can be used to trick us into accepting things we shouldn't. We'll also learn about 'inductively strong' and 'logically valid' arguments, which provide good reasons for accepting their conclusions. We'll learn how to check whether ordinary arguments are logically valid by translating them into a simple but powerful logical language. We'll think about some of the ways in which we might reason badly, even when we don't mean to (for example as a result of 'cognitive biases'). Finally, we'll think about paradoxes, such as that generated by the statement `This sentence is not true'. How do we solve them? What if we can't? And do they show that we need to rethink our approach to logic?

We all have opinions about what is true and false, right and wrong, what is just, divine, and beautiful, what the self, mind, and soul are, or what makes us free. But can we justify our opinions about such things? Have we given rational and open-minded consideration to criticisms and alternatives, or are our opinions perhaps based only on prejudices and assumptions? In this course you will learn to use philosophical thinking to test and improve your opinions and your ability to evaluate the claims of important philosophers. Through the study and discussion of philosophical texts, classic or contemporary, you will grapple with issues of fundamental human importance and develop your capacities for careful reading, clear writing and speaking, and logical argumentation. CD 202410 description: How can critical thinking help us navigate in a world on fire, where the climate crisis, wars, identity politics, domestic politics, and social media divide us as never before? How can we find the courage to think critically and independently when we increasingly obtain information, news, and fake news through echo chambers such as social media and we live in fear of being excluded from these echo chambers? And how can we bridge the gap between critical philosophy and praxis when division and fear of exclusion make the call for critically sound actions as important as ever? These three questions will guide the course, where we will unfold historical philosophical analyses of the present, that is, of the norms and values that we uncritically live by.

Existentialism and humanism are philosophical approaches that emphasize our freedom as human beings to take charge of our lives, holding that we have the capacities necessary to deal with the suffering and meaninglessness that sometimes affects us. The concepts we will examine include: individual freedom, human suffering, alienation, absurdity, the death of God, the human construction of meaning and power. This module explores the work of a number of philosophers who have argued for existentialist and humanist approaches. We will also consider critical reactions to those approaches, which have generated an anti-humanist perspective. A wide choice of study material will be presented, including texts by: * Kant * Schopenhauer * Kierkegaard * Marx * Adorno * Nietzsche * Sartre * Camus * Beauvoir * Foucault * Arendt

A general introduction to philosophy, which may cover introductory topics in either topically or historically, with a focus on introducing students to some of the perennial problems and texts of philosophy. Specific course content varies by semester and by instructor. This course is offered online only.

University of Galway: Explores the dualistic conception of the person, the critique of dualism, behaviourism as a philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism, the 'mystery' of subjectivity, Searle's biological naturalism, the 'mental science' project, artificial intelligence. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Philosophy of mind is one of the central areas in philosophy and has been a major focus of attention in recent years. It looks at different theories of how the mind stands in relation to the body and brain - is it a part of the physical body or of a different substance altogether? Students become familiar with some of the major historical and contemporary debates in this field of philosophy, such as whether or not the mind is physical in nature. The unit surveys a variety of competing theories such as behaviourism, mind-brain identity theory, functionalism and dualism. The answer to this debate helps determine the issue of whether one can build a machine that has a mind. Of course, this raises questions about what it is to have a mind - must there be some rudimentary intelligence? If a machine can play chess, does it have a mind? Does a mind (or its owner) have to house the capacity to feel such things as pleasure and pain? Must it be able to think - indeed what is it to have a thought about something such as a unicorn? Can we ever tell if a machine is conscious - and what is consciousness? Must something be conscious for it to have a mind? Consciousness is one of the biggest remaining mysteries in the world today and this unit addresses questions which enable us to think about the issue more clearly.

This module will introduce students to important historical and contemporary literature on the philosophy of love and sex. Love and sex are widely accepted as essential to a flourishing human life, yet few of us actually think critically about love and sex despite the fact that they both play a fundamental role in our lives. This module will strengthen students' critical thinking skills while exploring the conceptual, moral, political, and metaphysical issues raised by love and sex. Students will be encouraged to explore the relationships between these topics and to consider their application to debates and practices outside of philosophy.

Study of philosophers such as Nietzsche, Plato, Kant, Descartes, Schiller, Freud and their thoughts on the way humans function.

This module is a consideration of the many philosophical questions that are raised by the psychiatric notions of "mental disorder." Among the questions considered will be: * does depression have a meaning or it is simply an organic illness? * are paranoid experiences an effort to make sense of a broken reality? * what does it mean to describe some one's personality as "disordered"? * why do we hold some criminals less responsible than others because of a psychiatric diagnosis? * can we describe people as dangerous on the basis of a psychiatric diagnosis? A broader objective of the module is to find ways of elucidating the conception of "normality" that underpins the very idea of "disorder.

This London Seminar focuses on The Nature of Man and the Order of the World throughout the history of philosophy and the history of medicine from Hippocrates to the discovery of DNA. It is a demanding course that is taught using primary texts and original manuscript sources available in the Museums, Libraries and Archives of London. Classes will include the analysis of texts and artifacts and site visits to The British Library, The British Museum, The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, The National Gallery, The Wellcome Collection Library and Archives, The Royal Society of London, The Royal College of Physicians, The Science Museum London, The Old Operating Theatre Museum as well as The Gordon Museum at Guy's Hospital, London, which is one of the largest pathology museums in the world and the largest medical museum in the United Kingdom. The course will place an emphasis on the close reading of selected primary texts, supplemented by secondary specialist sources which will enable students to critically evaluate and interpret medical texts, terms, concepts, and theories in a philosophical context. It will also enable students to gain practical knowledge of how to use archival sources for philosophical research. It will give students a unique opportunity to study works of canonical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen, Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and Descartes in a medical context in relation to the works of historically significant physicians, naturalists, and scientists, such as Hippocrates, Vesalius, Harvey, Burton, Willis, Newton, Darwin, Crick and Watson. This course will enable students to understand the close inter-relationship between the study of natural philosophy and the study of medicine from antiquity to the 21st century, since both are dedicated to gaining knowledge about the function of the human body and soul, the order of nature, the cosmos, and the natural world.

The course is designed as a journey from the time of the historical Buddha (6th to 5th centuries BCE) to East Asia in medieval periods, then to the West in modern times. The journey will invite students to meet a number of Buddhist traditions and their eminent monks and thinkers. The meetings will happen through diverse mediums—reading Buddhist sutras (scriptures) and hagiographies, exploring Buddhist artifacts in museums, and watching films on Buddhist themes. Through these meetings, students will learn 1) what philosophical questions the Buddhist traditions have raised and answered and 2) how these questions emerged in their specific cultural and historical contexts. Throughout the journey, the course will closely examine their core practice: meditation. Students will learn that most philosophical questions raised within Buddhism cannot be entirely understood without looking into their meditation practice. The course will also examine how different traditions have developed different meditation theories and techniques. Although the course will mainly cover Buddhism in India and East Asia, students are encouraged to investigate other Buddhist traditions beyond these regions or compare Buddhism with different philosophical and religious traditions, such as Christianity or East Asian Daoism.

Broadly speaking, philosophical aesthetics breaks into three distinct areas: (i) definitional questions about what what makes art art, questions, that is, concerning whether art, as a general category, can be defined; (ii) questions of interpretation, concerning canons and protocols for understanding artworks, whether, e.g., an artist's intentions are relevant to the meaning of an artwork produced by that artist; and (iii) questions of value, concerning the nature of aesthetic experience, the character of beauty, and the general question of the objectivity or subjectivity of value in the domain of art. These three questions divide into many subquestions, some overlapping with one another and some not; further, they play out differently across different media of art: drama, music, opera, painting, sculpture, film, photography, architecture, and so on. We will pursue these questions and in a London-centric way, availing ourselves of the astonishing range of cultural offerings throughout the city.

Two conceptions of soul pervade the Western philosophical tradition, one manifestly theistic and one decidedly not. In the Christian philosophical tradition, for instance, the soul plays a central role in understandings of post mortem existence and personal identity, as well as in conceptions of the dignity of the human person. This approach to the soul we find explored and exalted in glorious detail in Augustine's Confessions. Still, the soul existed in the Western philosophical tradition before there was Christianity, however, most prominently in the systems of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle devoted an entire treatise to its consideration, De Anima, which depicts the soul not as a locus of personal identity or as an immaterial being capable of existing in its own right without the body, but as a principle of life, as that which differentiates the living from the non-living and which grounds the unity of the living system. These two conceptions of soul—as an (1) immaterial entity capable of surviving the death of the body and as a (2) principle of life for all living things—seem on the surface, and even a good deal below the surface—to be talking about two different sorts of things, accidentally (if understandably) given the same name, the soul. One bold hypothesis, owing above all else to the seminal synthesis of Aristotelianism within theistic philosophy, both Christian and Islamic, takes a different view: the soul understood as a repository of value and the soul understood as a principle of life are, on the contrary, one and the same. A crucial question about this proposed synthesis arises unavoidably: can one and the same soul hold both offices? Or is this synthesis really rather a mixture of inconsistent views, serving only to water down each while preserving nothing of value in either?

This course shall examine some of the central themes at the heart of American pragmatism. We shall begin by addressing the historical and scientific background informing the emergence of the pragmatist movement in nineteenth-century America. Taking the pragmatist denial of absolute beliefs as our guiding theme, the course shall explore the pragmatist writings of William James in the nineteenth-century and Richard Rorty in the twentieth-century. In particular, we shall focus on James's rejection of philosophical oppositions. Finally, we shall turn to the neo-pragmatism of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature paying particular attention to both his critique of the representational view of the mind and his recommendation of social pragmatism.

Is knowledge of the world possible? And is there even an objective world for our knowledge to be about? These are the topics of skepticism and relativism. Skeptics challenge our ability to know anything about the world. Relativists contest that there is no absolute, objective truth. In this class, we will study both historical and contemporary thinking about these perennial topics. We will address ancient arguments for skepticism, but also look to more contemporary relativistic thinking about science, morality, and other matters.

The goals of this class include: 1. To distinguish the diverse structures of knowledge. 2. Identify that behind the concept of knowledge, information and science, there is a concept of reality, and to be human implies the necessary action of social subjects.

Taught at a host institution. During this course, students will: 1) critically analyze the education phenomenon -- principles, practices, and sentiments -- from a philosophical perspective. 2) comprehend the interconnected role of education, the multidimensionality of human beings, and the the various visions underlying educational discourse. 3) appreciate the anthropological response to the Western Christian tradition and to evaluate its content regarding the educational process. 4) Analyze the consequences of education in a national and international context. When offered in London: In this London Seminar course we will read and discuss Newman’s classic Idea of a University. We will also do some preliminary secondary reading to help set the work in its historical context; in addition we will read some letters and memoranda from Newman’s time at the Catholic University in Dublin, to help fill in the gap between “idea” and “reality”. Our primary concern will be, first, to get control of the vision outlined in the book itself, and second, to use that as a point of reference in reflecting upon, and making articulate in conversation and writing, our own aspirations and experiences as students especially during our time together abroad in London.

SY - University of Sydney Description: This unit examines a major movement in 19th and 20th century European philosophy, with a focus on key questions and figures from the movement. Topics to be considered include: the possibility of morality after the death of God, meaning in human life, the self, freedom, finitude, and historicity. The unit develops these topics in communication with early modern and modern discussions on the role of feelings, passions, and lived experience in processes of self-constitution and the shaping of interpersonal relationships. Prior description: This course is an introduction to the main themes of (predominantly German and French) existentialism, retracing its phenomenological sources of inspiration. Phenomenological analysis is introduced in its various facets, from Husserl and Heidegger and Arendt. The issues of finitude, appearance, responsibility, political engagement, freedom, decision, alienation, absurdity, crisis, action, and emotions are explored. A special emphasis is placed on the relevance of these problems to present life.

The course will examine the development of the concepts of man, nature and God during the Renaissance, reflecting upon how philosophers tackled these themes at the time. Lessons will be divided into two parts: the first will deal with the theme of Renaissance anthropocentric finalism, a result of the affirmation of the alleged structural identity between microcosm (the human being) and microcosm. Later lectures will focus on the relationship with transcendence, moving from the idea that cosmos is the expression of infinite power, a thesis partially deriving from Modern Age Astronomy. The second part of the course will focus on specific philosophers and their reflections upon man, nature and God: Nicholas of Cusa, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Bernadino Telesio, Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella. Furthermore, in order to underline the strong bond that links these philosophers with the city of Rome, various on-site visits will be organizes to significant places and libraries that will be deemed relevant in reconstructing the Renaissance theoretical debate on the theme of nature.

This course introduces moral philosophy, the attempt to provide systematic explanations of standards for human conduct. Can we determine what the right thing is for us to do? How should society set its normative rules? How is a normative discourse possible? Selected texts provide the relevant context in which these questions will be examined. SI - National University of Singapore This course examines the ethical dimensions of everyday life in Singapore. It focuses on moral dilemmas that arise in the nations pursuit of happiness prosperity and progress. We will explore how moral reasoning from multiple perspectives applies to local concerns such as equality meritocracy multiculturalism immigration and marriage. This will challenge us to identify moral problems created by social and technological changes combine ethical principles with practical constraints and balance the interests of individuals and communities We will also consider how moral dialogue can be cultivated in Singapore's multicultural society so as to manage diverse traditions and divergent values. DU - Dublin City University This module provides an introduction to philosophical and theological foundations of Ethics. The module introduces participants to the study of Ethics and considers in a systematic manner fundamental questions such as how do I determine what is right or wrong, good or bad? Does having a bad intention matter if I do something good? Does morality depend on religion? Are there any objective moral values and principles? Does the end always justify the means? The module examines how philosophical ethical theories and reflection can influence moral decision-making. It also focuses on ethical reflection and deliberation within theological ethics.

This unit will analyse a range of theoretical and practical issues in the philosophy of law, both historical and contemporary. Issues addressed may include: legal obligation; punishment; legal responsibility; legal exclusion, including exclusion of race, gender, and class; citizenship; rule of law; legal pluralism; the nature of rights and duties; autonomy; and the relations between law and morality.

What is Black Political Thought? For what purpose was it established? What are its relationships to the anti-colonial idea of decolonization and the post-colonial critique of the colonial? This course aims to explore answers to some of these questions. The course focuses on the writings of Black political thinkers/concepts in the Americas, Africa, and Europe. Through critical examination of the conditions against, and contexts within which, Black political theories/philosophies are situated/produced, this course hopes to arrive at some logical understanding of the principles, goals, and strategies developed to contest and redefine the concept of citizenship (vis-a-vis the imperatives of race/racism and the global colonial formation), humanity (ontological implications), ethical commitments to justice, democracy, and freedom.

Taught at a host institution. Aesthetics: The Philosophy of Art is a unit that analyses philosophical issues surrounding the concept of art and entertainment. The discipline of Aesthetics includes comparative analysis of sculpture, painting, film, novels, and music. The study of Aesthetics examines what it is that people appreciate when they enjoy a piece of artwork by identifying characteristics that artworks hold in common. The unit provides an overview of the philosophy of aesthetics, it explores various theories of Aesthetics, and it evaluates the moral and intrinsic value of aesthetic experience. SY - Sydney, Australia Why is art important to us What is an aesthetic response to something What is the relation between art and aesthetics Is there such a thing as objective interpretation of an artwork Or is it all a matter of taste Should we believe in 'the death of the author' What is the relation between art and representation, expression and emotion We shall discuss these and other questions (eg. modernity, metaphor) from the perspective of an historical approach to the philosophical study of aesthetics and art.At the completion of this unit, you should be able to: LO1. This unit of study will acquaint students with contemporary ways of approaching and understanding art philosophically. Students will critically engage with key texts from historical and modern sources in the philosophy of art. This course will challenge students to ask what art is, how to and why it matters to us. Generically, this unit of study will impart new understandings of art and its philosophy, enhance reflective thinking skills, and enhance the ability to speak and write analytically, independently, and clearly. LO2. Identify, formulate and assess philosophical problems and demonstrate an understanding of important conceptual distinctions. LO3. Demonstrate disciplinary expertise in several major areas of philosophy, such as aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, the history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, theories of the self, philosophy of science, and political philosophy. LO4. Express themselves precisely and demonstrate an ability to make rationally persuasive arguments. LO5. Demonstrate sensitivity, intellectual honesty, generosity and cultural competence in interpretation and argument. LO6. Effectively apply philosophical knowledge and approaches to issues encountered in an interdisciplinary context LO7. Read, understand and critically engage with philosophical texts both historical and contemporary.

This module is a historical and critical introduction to the hermeneutical approaches in modern European philosophy. In this first part I commence by sketching out the three major concerns of this tradition, those of translating, or understanding and of expressing. The foundations of the hermeneutic tradition are to be found in the work of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, the last of whom saw hermeneutics as the appropriate methodology for the human sciences. I then go on to consider the phenomenological theories of interpretation set out by Edmund Husserl in his studies of expression and indication, and more originally of perception and temporality. I also explicate his account of the oral and graphic conditions of establishing and developing traditions with sedimented accomplishments bearing development. In the second half of this course, I pick up the phenomenological thread by following the work of Martin Heidegger. We begin by examining Heidegger's explicit account of language, meaning, and being-in-the-world. We then go on to the manner in which interpretation acts as a philosophical methodology for Heidegger; initially as a means of critique but also ultimately as a means of creation. We go on to read Paul Ricoeur's description of interpretation, noting in particular the manner in which he both inherits and modifies Heidegger's work. We also examine his account of temporality and history as defining the context of interpretation. As a contrast to Ricoeur's hermeneutic approach we look at the work of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, in particular the ideas of untranslatability and incompletion. Finally, we turn to the contemporary philosopher Barbara Cassin and her work on untranslatability as philosophically productive. With Cassin we finish by using translation and interpretation as paradigms for navigating the relation between the universal and the particular.

Critical survey and examination of Eastern philosophical texts, figures, philosophical methods, and modes of thought.

The aim of the course is for students to explore various facets of East Asian philosophy. Inspired by the ground-breaking works by historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), the course will guide students to approach philosophy as ways of life comprising both theory and practice, shaped by specific cultural and historical context. Throughout the course, students will explore core questions and challenges that had been raised in the history of East Asian philosophy and how each tradition and thinker tried to solve these issues. Students will first learn basic concepts which run through the history of East Asian philosophy (Week 1-5). Then they will be introduced to major traditions—Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist—who carried on developing more sophisticated theories and models of practice from the classical thought (Week 6-12). Finally, students will explore the application of philosophy in wider cultural context by examining various arts particular to East Asian context. (Week 13-14). Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to bring comparative aspects with other philosophical traditions, either from the West or from India.

Explores and introduces students to Greek philosophical texts in translation. Specific texts, topics, and themes vary by semester and location.

Santiago: Agricultural and Forest Ethics DISCIPLINE: Philosophy - Agronomy and Natural Sciences Sciences DESCRIPTION The course addresses the foundations of ethics as a practical philosophy, in its main historical-systematic expressions, and in their applications to agriculture, the environment, animals and the use of technology. It also develops the knowledge and attitudes that allow to the students of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering an ethical vision of the professional exercise, as well as an understanding of their role in society. Copenhagen: Environmental philosophy addresses the human relationship with the non-human world from a variety of philosophical perspectives: ethical, political, aesthetic, epistemological, and/or metaphysical. Questions explored may include In what sense are human beings a 'part of nature'? Does the natural world have intrinsic value, and what are our ethical obligations toward it? Can a distinction be drawn between humans and animals? Sydney: This unit presents a variety of philosophical issues associated with the study and management of the natural environment. We will look at questions such as: what does it mean to live in harmony with the environment? what is sustainability? why should we preserve biodiversity? what is the best way to achieve conservation goals? what are ecological models and how do they work? and what is the proper relationship between environmental science and the values found in environmental policy and management? Leuven: "The course intends to introduce the students into environmental philosophy... included under the umbrella of environmental philosophy is animal ethics and animal philosophy". This lecture and discussion based course is aimed at ecophilosophy, focused on the intersection of philisophy and ecology with a distinct aim at teaching students to think critically about these issues.

This course will closely consider the ethical responsibilities inherent in the process of technological innovation from the perspective of the innovator. Innovation is here broadly framed as ethical and social intervention in the life of users and society rather than merely technical invention. Topics covered include the nature of responsibility, values in design, the roles of regulation and of business models, and cases from social media, AI, and robotics.

This module will explore and clarify certain fundamental concepts of morality. Our emphasis will be on the way these concepts are deployed in ordinary situations between ordinary people, and on the way people might disagree about their application, on what the concepts mean and presuppose and entail. On what basis, exactly, does one person feel a moral obligation toward another? What is the difference between someone being responsible, someone taking responsibility, and someone being held responsible? If I forgive someone unconditionally, does this condone the wrong and show a lack of self-respect? Does humility involve deceiving yourself about your qualities? The module is designed for students with no background in philosophy at all. Note, however, that philosophy is more of a skill than a body of knowledge. That means that it cannot just be stuffed in at the last moment in preparation for an assessment; like all skills, it needs to be practiced. So it is perhaps more important in philosophy than in other disciplines to attend lectures and tutorials, to watch and engage in philosophy rather than merely to absorb it. Similarly, writing a philosophy essay is not simply a matter of accumulating and arranging facts; there is a skill of argumentation that needs to be practiced and developed. You will have to write a first draft of the essay, and perhaps discard it and start again, and again. This is normal for philosophy. Some people find philosophy frustrating and pointless for this reason, and that¿s fine to think that. Liking philosophy is often a matter of temperament. We will be providing you with lots of guidance in writing the essay, starting with this Module Outline.

This module will track philosophical, sociological and political concepts that shaped today's world views from the enlightenment via Nietzsche, psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism and others. Each week, theoretical concepts will be discussed in one class while music-related examples will illustrate those concepts in the second one (after all, I'm a music lecturer). Room will be given to questions raised by students regarding issues they are particularly concerned about. Paris, France (Sci Po) Freedom of expression is at the heart of very lively controversies. In recent years, notions such as "political correctness", cancel culture or "wokism" have been widely relayed in public debates, without the notion of freedom of expression, its limits or its purposes being rigorously analysed. At the intersection of philosophy, law, political science and linguistics, this course will return to the meaning of freedom of expression in modern and contemporary political thought and in several constitutional traditions in order to offer students more precise tools to analyze recent controversies: blasphemy, "hate speech", use of stereotypes, boundaries of humour, regulation of social networks.

What is the justification of state power and legal authority? What is a good political system? How do we relate our judgments about how the political world should be to the way it actually is at present? This course will examine such questions, which will involve a study of the genesis and structure of political entities and the mutual responsibilities of citizen and government.

Taught as "PHIL 258" - What is the justification of state power and legal authority? What is a good political system? How do we relate our judgments about how the political world should be to the way it actually is at present? This course will examine such questions, which will involve a study of the genesis and structure of political entities and the mutual responsibilities of citizen and government. NK - Nairobi, Kenya - Strathmore University The course covers a description of political and social institutions analyzed from the point of view of principles of classical philosophy. The dignity of the human being and the corresponding ideal social order are emphasized. The course reviews briefly the anthropological basis of a just social order. It examines the common good as an organizing principle of a just society; and presents a critical analysis of different political systems, their nature, origin and evolution; and finally the fundamental rights and duties of responsible citizens. BT - Bologna, Italy - Universita di Bologna The specific character of political philosophy will be the first object of study of the course. In the study of political philosophy, the approach of the history of concepts and constitutional history will be adopted, as they have been theorized by authors such as Quentin Skinner and Reinhart Koselleck. The main concepts of the lexicon of politics, such as State, sovereignty, freedom, equality, power, will then be examined, studying them within the doctrines of the main political thinkers of the Western tradition: Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Tocqueville, Mosca, Weber, Schmitt, Arendt and Rawls. PF - Paris, France - Sci Po This is a philosophy course that dives into the questions and debates surround the liberty of expression. Each class focuses on a different topic that arises with the freedom of expression including: judicial expression, sexual expression, religious expression, the right to offend, stereotypes, and more. The course has weekly readings from both historical philosophers and more modern and contemporary philosopher and topics arising in this day and age in France and all over the world.

.At the end of the course, the student will be able to exercise his profession in an upstanding manner, through the development of skills for critical analysis and resolution of ethical issues and controversies, which allow them to promote a society that is just, solidary and respectful of human dignity. IT - Trinity College - Dublin Whatever your future fields of work, whether in the traditional professions, as researchers or as innovators and entrepreneurs, graduates will encounter ethical challenges that have not yet been anticipated. The social and cultural transformations that are enabled by digital technologies and driven by globalization will touch all aspects of life, and will raise a host of new moral questions, and will re-contextualize existing ones. This module aims to equip students with the knowledge and skills to successfully negotiate these complex and multi-dimensional ethical environments via a multidisciplinary investigation of ethical reflection on practice. It will reflect and embody the multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural contexts of future work environments in its content and organisation, and aims to enable students: To develop the skills of ethical analysis and reflection, as these relate to their fields of study and/or work; To understand the different facets of ethical integrity as it is expressed in personal values and institutional cultures, and according to the different philosophical traditions of moral enquiry; To identify and resolve the ethical dilemmas as they emerge in specialist and multidisciplinary environments. On successful completion of this module, students should be able to: Identify and analyse critical ethical issues as they emerge in the dynamic and multi- dimensional contexts of research and work; Identify and evaluate the diversity of moral values as they are reflected in multicultural and pluralist contexts; Identify and assess the values that are operative and embedded in organizational cultures; Investigate and resolve moral dilemmas according to the ethical values and principles, including values of respect for human dignity, freedom, equality and fairness; Communicate and collaborate effectively in multi-disciplinary environments TJ - Tokyo, Japan In this seminar, we will read Care Ethics in the Age of Precarity to explore the relationship between care, precarity, and neoliberalism through the lens of care ethics. The book, an interdisciplinary collection of essays, examines care theory as a response to market-driven capitalism. We will begin by carefully analyzing the key concepts of "care ethics" and "neoliberalism" before delving into the authors' discussions of these themes. The contributors address a wide range of topics, including disability studies, medical ethics, responses to natural disasters, the posthuman, Japanese politics, and the COVID-19 pandemic, all within a global perspective. The seminar will be divided into two main parts: the first half of each session will focus on summarizing and understanding the assigned readings, while the second half will be dedicated to discussion based on students' weekly reaction papers. In addition, the class will provide foundational training in understanding philosophical concepts and formulating critical questions. All students are required to give a presentation. Further details will be provided during the first guidance session. (Depending on the number of students, the program could slightly change)

What does it mean to live a worthy life? This is one of the most fundamental questions of human existence and this course addresses the relevant issues through an engagement with various philosophical and religious traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Christianity, Islam and Secular Humanism. We shall discuss how the teachings of important historical figures from these traditions have influenced the choices of people over the centuries, and how they have been contextualized and adopted in contemporary society.

Reflects on bioethical positions through comparative analysis of global visions on moral problems in the field of life and health, in relation to biotechnological advances that have an influence within these areas, to develop adequate criteria to judge said problems. from an ethical, anthropological, legal and medical perspective SP CCH 3012 description: Bioethics was initially projected with very broad objectives. V.R. Potter understood it as a dialogue between scientists and humanists to preserve humanity from its self-destruction and promote quality of life. In his own words: "Humanity urgently needs a new wisdom that will provide it with the knowledge of how to use knowledge for man's survival and for the improvement of his quality of life. ... I propose the term bioethics in order to emphasize the two most important ingredients for achieving the new wisdom that is so desperately needed: biological knowledge and human values." The Encyclopedia of Bioethics, edited by Warren Reich in 1978, suggested the following definition of bioethics: "The systematic study of human behavior in the life sciences and health care, examining this behavior in the light of moral values and principles." Nowadays, bioethics is understood as a practical ethics applied to the life sciences, which tries to answer the ethical problems that arise. Bioethics has several fields. The most relevant are philosophical or fundamental bioethics (addresses the philosophical foundations of bioethics), environmental bioethics, research bioethics (with humans and non-human animals) and clinical bioethics. Today's complex multidisciplinary model of health care generates numerous ethical conflicts. When taking into account the values of all the actors involved, there is inevitably a disparity of criteria. The conflicts that are generated are not merely technical, they are also ethical, because the values of the people or institutions involved conflict. In this scenario, it is important for healthcare professionals to know how to consider the technical issues and values at stake (the preferences of those involved, principles, rules, etc.), in order to make good decisions. All the areas mentioned are of great importance, because of the issues they address and because their problems are very common. Many professionals face bioethical problems that are difficult to respond to (in clinic, research or in relation to the environment) and their training to deal with these problems is often deficient. Moreover, since problems in bioethics are complex, they go beyond the boundaries of a single profession. For this reason, multidisciplinarity is essential, the participation of scientists, health professionals, philosophers, jurists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists and any other professional involved in the most burning ethical issues in relation to the life sciences. It is necessary to improve the bioethics training of future professionals so that they can better face bioethical problems. Bioethics education has become a preferred area in Europe, the United States and the rest of the world, since the problems are not limited to a specific area: they are global problems.

Taught at a host institution. PHIL 20240 Applied Ethics at UCD; This module will comprise a detailed examination of the concepts of love and friendship. We will start by comparing the different objects of love: romantic partners, parents and kids, pets and cars, football teams and countries, justice and God. We will then ask about the relationship between feelings and action: is love no more than a random feeling to which one passively succumbs? Can love be sincere but nevertheless mistaken? What is the relationship between duty and love? Can love justify immorality? Is there such a thing as unconditional love? Should schools encourage their pupils to love their country? In terms of friendship, we will ask the following questions: are there objective rules for friendship? Can friendship survive great inequality? Are there any good reasons for betraying a friend?

University of Copenhagen: This course constructs a philosophical framework for the interdisciplinary examination of gender. Against a historical outline of the development of contemporary gender studies, we examine biological, sociological, and psychological perspectives on gender. These theoretical perspectives are put into discussion with ethical issues concerning sexuality, selfhood, personal identity, and autonomy. By the end of this course, you will be able 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. Our identity is rooted in our experience of gender. This experience is deeply personal, and yet there are biological and societal aspects to the experience of gender that complicate and challenge our sense of identity. The course will provide you with 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. The sessions are structured as a combination of lecture, discussion, and group work with a focus on engaging the student. Each session is framed by a systematic PowerPoint presentation of the themes and readings in question. The presentation will encourage and guide the discussion in the class. The student can expect a lively and systematically oriented teacher who will attempt to make the issues both interesting and relevant to a contemporary setting while maintaining a substantial theoretical level and the necessary historical perspective. Dublin: This module introduces students to contemporary feminist ideas and key feminist debates, specifically feminist gender theory (including discussions of Queer Theory and Hegemonic Masculinity), and feminist political ethics (including intersectionality) and theories of justice with a focus on vulnerability and precarity. The module illustrates the ideas by reference to campaigns that relate to women and girls human rights and gender justice in both Irish national and global arenas.

This course aims to provide a critical reading of the most important classical texts on virtue and vice in antiquity and examine their influence on current theories of virtue ethics and moral knowledge. It begins with Socratic considerations of "How should one live?" and questions about what constitutes well-being, the human good and happiness (eudaimonia). In the first half of the semester, we will analyze and evaluate arguments on the virtues of temperance (sophrosyne), prudence (phronesis), courage (andreia), and justice (dikaiosyne) in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. These texts introduce questions about moral perception, parts of the soul, the unity of the virtues, and distinctions between the moral and intellectual virtues. Special attention will be given to reading ancient philosophical texts closely, always using precise Stephanus and Bekker numbers to identify and clarify arguments and counterarguments. Classic articles and commentaries will be consulted as a guide to competing interpretations. With this training in the art of reading a text critically, in the second half of the semester we will consider contemporary issues in virtue theory which at points embrace or challenge Platonic and Aristotelian ideas about virtue and vice. A number of important questions will be analyzed and discussed. What is the nature of virtue and vice? What is the relation between virtue and happiness? Can virtue be taught? What is the distinction between the moral and the intellectual virtues? What is meant by a unity of the virtues? Is there a special relationship between virtue and knowledge, virtue and practical judgement, vice and error? Do virtues only apply to individuals, or can governments, political institutions and regulatory bodies embody virtues? By the end of the course, students will have acquired an in-depth knowledge of how considerations of virtue and vice play an important role in ancient and contemporary ethical theory, and how evaluations of human flouring can be assessed in terms of non-relative virtues.

The purpose of the course is to offer a historical and epistemological overview of empirical science, in order to better understand its nature and value, and the relationship between scientific knowledge, philosophy and theology. The first part of the course will present some highlights on the history of science, in its cultural and philosophical context, that will help to grasp the key elements of the nature of scientific activity. The second part will consider the method and the value of scientific knowledge, analysing the main interpretations proposed by some contemporary philosophers. The course will close with the study of the relations between scientific and philosophical knowledge, reflecting also on some historical conflicts between science, philosophy and religion.

Robots or "autonomous systems" play an ever-increasing role in many areas, from weapons systems and driverless cars to health care and consumer services. As a result, it is ever more important to ask whether it makes any sense to speak of such systems' behaving ethically and how we can build into their programming what some call "ethics modules." After a brief technical introduction to the field, this course will approach these questions through contemporary philosophical literature on robot ethics and through popular media, including science fiction text and video. This is an online course with required, regular class sessions each week. Class meetings are online via Zoom webinar software (provided by the University). <p> Note: this course is delivered fully online. The course design combines required live weekly meetings online with self-scheduled lectures, problems, assignments, and interactive learning materials. To participate, students will need to have a computer with webcam, reliable internet connection, and a quiet place to participate in live sessions.

This module deals with issues in the philosophy of language as well as with the methods and procedures of natural science. Component 1: Philosophy of Science - Dr. Simone Marini (email) The sciences are widely considered to be our most reliable sources of knowledge about the world. In this component we will investigate the main philosophical issues concerning the nature and status of scientific knowledge and methodology. The questions we will be asking include: What is specific to the scientific method, as opposed to other ways of knowing? Is the scientific method a good way of uncovering objective truths about the world? How can we characterise the structure of scientific explanation? How do scientific explanations relate to other sorts of explanatory practices? How are scientific theories constructed and confirmed? Component 2: Philosophy of Language - Dr. Simone Marini (email) It is hard to overestimate the importance of language to human beings. We use it to mediate our interaction with each other and the world, and we rely on it to make possible the expression of thought. In this component we will explore a range of foundational issues in 20th century analytic philosophy of language, including meaning, reference and propositional attitudes. In particular, we will be concentrating on philosophical attempts to understand our capacity to represent the world in thought and language. We will also consider the connections between the philosophy of language and issues in the philosophy of mind and epistemology.

Taught at a host institution. Students will read about and discuss the following topics: the existence of God,religion, revelation and discovery, and science and religion: enemies or allies.

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of religion. Topics covered include arguments for and against the existence of God; the divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, eternity, simplicity); immortality and the soul; the justification of religious belief; the relation between religion and morality. IC - Co. Galway, Ireland Science and God offers a comprehensive history of Western philosophy, focusing on the transition from chaos to order in both religion and science as disciplines. The course focuses on Greek philosophy, Christian religion, and Western scientific practices, from the early Greeks to modernity.

A critical survey of important texts and authors in Ancient Philosophy. Socrates poses a series of deceptively simple questions: What is justice? What is holiness? What is virtue? Strikingly, he contends that he is unable to answer these questions himself-and seems adept at showing that those who think they know the answers in fact do not. Using his elenchtic method (the 'Socratic method'), he is able to reduce his interlocutors to embarrassing perplexity and outright contradiction. One question from Socrates, then: do you think you can answer such questions? Plato and Aristotle, who followed in his wake in the rich philosophical milieu of ancient Athens, seem to think that they can develop the epistemological and metaphysical sophistication required to answer them satisfactorily. So, a second question from Socrates: are they right? IC PI 2113 description: This module focuses on core themes in ancient philosophy through the study of an individual text (for example, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics) or a survey of one theme in a range of philosophical movements in the ancient world.

Taught as PH 240 at host institution. The modern period is marked by great changes: the scientific revolution, technological progress, the rise of nation states, the Reformation and religious pluralism, the Enlightenment and its ideals concerning the use of reason rather than tradition, universal education, and a strong emphasis on the individual. Modern philosophy deals indeed with the issues raised by our attempts to understand reality scientifically, by our need to reconcile such attempts with traditional moral and religious conceptions and practices, and by our need to reconcile all of this with our commonsense understanding of our world and ourselves and with our social organization. The course is organized as a survey of the major authors and themes of the Modern period in philosophy, with a particular focus on two chief lines of research: epistemology and political theory - and their reciprocal connections and influences. We will examine the views of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant about knowledge and the nature of reality as well as their analysis in moral and political philosophy. Fremantle: PH 213 - This unit begins with an analysis of the various forces at work in the transition from the medieval world view to the renaissance or "modernity." The Unit then explores the rise of science and technology, and the impact of the modern approach on Western thought and culture. The unit also explores debates between rationalists and empiricists, particularly in connection with the philosophical disciplines of metaphysics and epistemology.

This course will concentrate on major figures and persistent themes. A balance will be sought between scope and depth, the latter ensured by a close reading of selected texts.

This course examines the sweeping transformations of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries by exploring some of the leading philosophers of that era. Topics include innovations in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophical theology, and the natural sciences, many of which continue to shape the agenda in contemporary philosophy.

Gateway Seminar for new and prospective majors and minors in Philosophy

Offered in the Spring term. Admission to the course only by instructor permission; limited to successful alumni of PHIL 10111 God and the Good Life. This course has three components. (i) Students will receive training to be a peer dialogue facilitator for God and the Good Life, learning how to lead GGL students in probative dialogue and self-reflection. (ii) Students will do intensive reading and discussion of approaches to living "the philosophical life." We will study the genre of philosophical apologies (including Socrates, Augustine, Cardinal Newman, Tolstoy and Friedrich Nietzsche). And We will look at radical proposals for living philosophically from Sextus Empiricus, St. Benedict, and the American pragmatists. (iii) Students will design and lead a practical philosophy immersion experience for seminar-mates. The expectation is that students in this course will serve at least one semester as a GGL fellow. Participation in this course is by invitation.

This gateway seminar for the Minor in Business and the Common Good will be limited to 24 Mendoza College students, with priority given to students intending to pursue the Minor. The seminar focuses on the place of wealth and commerce in a well-ordered life, both for the individual and the community. Among other topics, the course takes a special interest in the rich Catholic tradition of reflection on these topics, especially the Catholic social teaching relevant to business that has emerged in the last two centuries.

An introduction to the fundamentals and techniques of logic for majors.

Gateway course for the minor in Philosophy, Science, and Mathematics. Offered annually in the Fall semester, covering topics falling in the intersection between these three disciplines.

Science fiction has long been a vehicle for reflecting on the ethical and humanistic dimensions of technological advances. Fiction can offer ethical arguments for or against uses of technology. It can enable us to see threats, puzzles, and opportunities for moral progress that were previously unappreciated. Fiction can help us uncover inconsistencies in our reasoning about what is technologically possible. And reflection on the possibilities technology offers can help us appreciate dimensions of our humanity that were previously obscure to us. In this course, we'll consider how contemporary science fiction authors play these roles in our thinking about technology and ethics. We'll conduct a close study of writing from Ted Chiang, arguably one of the most important authors in this genre. Chiang will join us for 2-3 class sessions to offer masterclasses on his process of engaging with these ethical questions as a speculative fiction writer. We'll study recent technological developments, philosophical theories, and policy debates that these stories engage with. And we'll learn how to craft rigorous ethical arguments in three formats: philosophical analysis, policy brief, and narrative.

Coming to grips with American political thought is at once an historical and a philosophical task. Students in this course will take on that task under the guidance of one faculty member from the Department of History and one from the Department of Philosophy. The guiding questions of the course are: How have ideas about freedom, equality and the social contract played out in the history of American political thought? When have we realized those ideas and when have we failed? Do those ideas provide us adequate guidance? The exploration of American political thought will be divided into six periods: The Founding, the Civil War era, the late 19th-century, the New Deal to the 1960s, the 1960s to the 1990s, and the 1990s to the present. The course has no prerequisites, though students wishing to count it toward the Philosophy requirement must previously have taken "Introduction to Philosophy."

This course is designed for students with little prior familiarity with modern physics; formal mathematics will be kept to a minimum. The lectures start with an outline of Newton's laws of classical mechanics, and the problem Newton faced in distinguishing between absolute and relative motion of bodies. The question arises whether space and time are substances in their own right (Newton) or merely kinds of relations between bodies (Leibniz). The key concept that emerges is that of inertial frames of reference and how different such frames are related to each other. We discuss the fable of Albert Keinstein, who in 1705 anticipated part of Albert Einstein's discussion of this relation two hundred years later. This leads to a discussion of how Einstein came up with his theory of special relativity, which predicts the subtle phenomena of length contraction of "fast" moving rigid bodies and time dilation of "fast" moving clocks, as well as the relativity of simultaneity. Emphasis will be put on the debt Einstein owed to the so-called ether theorists of the 19th century, who were grappling with conceptual issues related to electromagnetism and in particular the behaviour of light. A philosophical debate has arisen in recent years as to how to understand the mentioned relativistic effects: are they the result of novel geometric properties of space-time, or special properties of the forces of cohesion that hold in rigid bodies and clocks? We will look at the arguments on both sides of the debate. Some simple physical arguments due to Einstein will then be examined which led him to his general theory of relativity of 1915: his revolutionary theory of gravity. An intuitive way of understanding the role "space-time curvature" plays in the theory will be discussed, as well as the way in which special relativity emerges from general relativity in the appropriate conditions. The final quarter of the course will concern the role of probability in quantum mechanics. Does this theory require us to change our notion of what probability means? A sketch of the different interpretations of quantum mechanics will be given, and the role of probability in each of them will be examined.

Discussion section for PHIL 30409 American Political Thought

The Maritain Center is pleased to sponsor a discussion group, the “Cercle d'études.” This title is meant to evoke a long-running discussion group hosted by the great 20th century Catholic thinkers Jacques and Raissa Maritain, devoted to open-ended explorations of vital philosophical and social issues. In that spirit, this discussion group will offer students a weekly opportunity to engage one another and faculty speakers on specific questions of deep interest, to be chosen by the student participants. Structure and organization: The Notre Dame Cercle d'études is meant to provide an opportunity for sustained discussion, and it is open to any undergraduate student from Notre Dame, St. Mary’s, or Holy Cross. It is offered as a one-credit course, but it is not necessary to enroll in the course in order to participate in the weekly discussions. In either case, there will be no outside preparation, and those who are taking the course for credit will be graded on a Pass/fail basis. Each week, we will welcome a guest faculty presenter, who will begin our conversation with a few remarks, no more than fifteen minutes in length. We will then open the floor for questions and discussions, in the spirit of a free-wheeling quodlibetal session in which the guest speaker will be invited to expand upon and defend their views. The session will conclude with fellowship, coffee, and snacks. In order to receive credit for this course, you will be required to attend the sessions and participate in the discussion. You may miss three sessions over the course of the semester, including university excused absences. If you are forced to miss more sessions due to extreme, unforeseen circumstances, come and discuss the situation with the faculty moderator. Beyond that, we confidently expect that all participants will exhibit the standards of courtesy and open-mindedness that are typical of Notre Dame students.

This class in ancient philosophy explores the writings of Plotinus, who contributed greatly to Neo-Platonism and inspired and informed early Christian philosophers and writers. IC PI 2113 description: This module focuses on core themes in ancient philosophy through the study of an individual text (for example, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics) or a survey of one theme in a range of philosophical movements in the ancient world. In this class, we will be examining a core idea in Ancient Thought (friendship) through the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus. Although the ideas we are presenting are ancient, they have interesting contemporary relevance not least for the way in which friendship is a central feature in successful living and something that today we push to the periphery or, feel that we don't have enough of. As we move through the semester, we'll engage critically with the accounts of friendship presented by these thinkers and discuss where they might matter for our own lives.

Taught at a host institution. Can I be certain that there is a world outside me, or am I confined to my own mind alone? What can I know about the world, if there is one? And if it exists knowably, how can I live with the people within it? Are we naturally selfish and dangerous? Or do we have a compassionate and gentle nature brutalised by a corrupt society? These are some of the questions to be discussed in this introduction to early modern philosophy of knowledge and social and political philosophy. The way of approaching these questions will be through a critical and historical treatment of writings. When taught at London Heythrop: PH 312 History of Modern Philosophy at Heythrop College. To enable students to think critically about central philosophical ideas and methods of early modern thinkers. A selection of thinkers will be covered from the following list: Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume and Kant. When taught in Twickenham, England, this course covers the era of Early Modern Philosophy. It begins with the decline of scholasticism and the emergence of fresh scientific methods of discoveries. Descartes is generally considered to be the key figure in this transition. We will also study some of Descartes' immediate successors (Hobbes, Spinoza, Wollstonecraft, Hume and Kant), and discuss how they still affect how we think today. The aim of this module is not just to make you acquainted with important thinkers from the history of modern philosophy, but also to enable you to actively respond to the ideas expressed. At the end of this module you will be able • to give a coherent, clear and accurate account of the key ideas in the history of early modern philosophy; • to understand the ethical implications of any account of the history of philosophy; • to write a commentary on a text from this period, consulting other sources where necessary and with proper reference; • relate some of the ideas discussed to contemporary issues and phenomena. • be familiar with the most important philosophical works of Descartes • understand the importance of methodology in the work of Descartes • understand the importance of Descartes as the key transitional figure in the emergence of modern philosophy • evaluate the implications of Descartes¿ work for religion and for science • be able to identify underlying issues in different kinds of debate • be sensitive and critical in interpreting texts from this period • be able to use specialised philosophical terminology • be creative in considering new ideas and ways of thinking • construct cogent arguments in evaluating the ideas considered This module has 20 credits at level 4 (i.e. first year). The module is core for all Philosophy students and optional for others. There are no pre-requisites. Tutor: Hannah Marije Altorf Room: D109 E-mail: Hannah.Marije.Altorf@stmarys.ac.uk Tel.: 020 8240 2351/4852 (int.) When taught at HKU Hong Kong: This course is an introduction to the thought of the major figures of Western philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. We will read major works from among Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and some lesser known pieces by some women writing in the era. In particular, we will focus on the topics of self, world, and God. What is the self? What makes me the same person over time? What is the nature of reality, and what can we know about it? What is the nature of God, and can we know whether he exists? We will explore how these important thinkers thought about these questions, and other important philosophical topics such as free will, causation, science, and skepticism.

"W0EA9A at KUL. The purpose of this course is to make the student familiar with the historical context, important thinkers and themes in medieval philosophy. The course focuses on the following historical context and basic concepts: Medieval philosophy in light of the problems of characterization and periodization; general overview of medieval philosophy; sources of medieval thinking; literary genres and institutions; logic and philosophy in the middle ages; theology and philosophy in the middle ages. Representative thinkers are: Anselm, Thomas Aquinas I, Thomas Aquinas II, Meister Eckhart, William of Ockham, women and medieval philosophy, Nicholas of Cusa."

PHIL 10070 Introduction to Greek Philosophy at UCD; This module offers a critical introduction to some of the most important and influential ideas and arguments of Ancient Greek Philosophy. The module is divided into two parts. The first part charts the course of philosophy from the earliest Greek philosophers, the 'Pre-Socratics', to the classic figures of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Questions for consideration will include the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, the question of knowledge, man's place in the cosmos, and his ultimate purpose. The second part of the module focuses on Socrates and his impact on philosophy. We will examine the evidence for Socrates' thought, concentrating in particular on some of Plato's so-called 'Socratic' dialogues. These short, lively dialogues offer excellent introductions not only to Socrates, but to the practice of philosophy itself. Topics to be considered include the following: the 'Socratic problem', the 'Socratic method' (the elenchus); the Socratic theory of definition; the Euthyphro dilemma; the paradox of inquiry; and the theory of recollection (anamnesis).

Logic course in Dublin.

This course will guide students to familiarize themselves with the basic principles, methods, and problems of phenomenology as a philosophical school by teaching Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and other phenomenological classics. SC - Santiago, Chile In this course, we will study fundamental themes in Edmund Husserl's philosophy, with an emphasis on his theory of logic, as elaborated in Logical Investigations and then, after adopting the genetic approach, in Experience and Judgment. In addition, we will read excerpts from: Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Inner Time-Consciousness, Ideas 1, Ideas 2, and Cartesian Meditations. Depending on the topic, we will explore connections with authors such as Descartes and Kant. This may include reading short excerpts from texts by these authors. For each session, participants must bring an assigned text (studying is not the same as reading). Given the well-known difficulty of Husserl's writings, these readings will generally be short (but dense). The course does not require prior knowledge of the author or the topics covered.

In ethics we examine critically the following questions: How do we define membership of a moral community? What is required to ensure `the good life?, `well-being? or `happiness? for myself and society? What principles, rights & duties are necessary to protect society and the environment? What competencies and personal qualities do we need to act as responsible moral agents? The unit explores the issues of subjective and objective values, relativism and absolutism, and the role of pleasure and pain in determining moral choices, concepts such as conscience, rights and duties, the moral law, the nature of moral reasoning and the status of moral truth. We survey the ethical tradition of both secular and religious thinkers from Classical Greece to the Modern day.

An introduction in the main themes of contemporary philosophical and political debate; a guide to critical discussion and to self-orientation in the ethical and political problems of contemporaneity.

PHIL 20060 Hume and Kant at UCD; In this course we will study selected writings from two of the most important philosophers of the Eighteenth century Enlightenment period: David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Topics will include scepticism and the nature of knowledge and belief; consciousness and the nature of the self; perception, identity, and causality. Hume's empiricist and sceptical naturalist outlook was famously opposed by the 'transcendental idealism' of Kant. Descendants of Humean and Kantian views are very influential in disputes today across the spectrum from metaphysics and epistemology to aesthetics, morality, and political philosophy, to this course will provide important background for many of our level three courses. (Students should be aware that Kant's writing in particular is somewhat technical and would be best approached by students who have already completed one or more philosophy modules.) When taught at NUS - "Two major philosophers are studied in this module: David Hume, in the first half, and Immanuel Kant, in the second. We will try to determine what each philosopher's fundamental approach to philosophy consists in, and how it gives rise to his views on the nature of causation, the external world, the self, and the limits of knowledge. As Kant's first Critique was a response to Hume's philosophical scepticism, we will pay close attention to his diagnoses of Hume's difficulties and his proposed solutions. "

Taught at a host institution. This unit introduces students to some central ideas in Eastern traditions such as Buddhism, examining these ideas from a Western philosophical perspective. Topics covered include the nature of reality, consciousness, the self, suffering and happiness, karma, free will, the scope of knowledge, ethics and the ultimate goal of human existence. Classical and contemporary sources are used. Some of these topics are approached with an eye to seeking convergence with ideas in Western philosophy, for example, in Hume's idea that there is no self, or in the sort of ethical framework that Buddhism adopts. **Course must be taken for at least 2.5 credit to qualify for second philosophy requirement.

This seminar addresses the fundamental ideas that organize, describe, and define public policy in the United States. Using a variety of classical and modern texts, we will consider how these fundamental ideas serve to shape both the debate regarding particular policies, as well as the institutions responsible for their implementation. Of special importance to the seminar is the development of critical and analytical skills to understand and evaluate public policy.

PHIL 30070 Philosophy of Language at UCD; Questions concerning language and the nature of meaning have been at the center of twentieth century philosophy. Moreover, philosophy of language has been the defining theme of the analytic tradition in philosophy. This course aims to introduce students to key issues and debates in contemporary philosophy of language by concentrating on the dual themes of meaning and reference. It addresses questions such as: What is the connection between language and thought? how does language connect with the world? what gives meaning to our utterances? what are the requirements for interpreting and translating other speakers? The course takes a historical-thematic approach The first section of the course focuses on key texts by the originators of the analytic tradition in philosophy - Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. In the second section, we look at the development and critique of the earlier themes by contemporary American philosophers of language including Quine, Davidson, Kripke and Putnam.

Independent study while abroad.

Discussion for Game Theory

A detailed and systematic reading, in translation, of the fragments of the pre-Socratics and of the following Platonic dialogues: <i>Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Protagoras, Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium</i>, and <i>Theaetetus</i>.

The aim of the course is to render the students familiar with the most complex theories of the soul that were developed in antiquity and help them to study the validity and the soundness of the arguments developed in favor of them. While ancient philosophy did not yet grasp the radical difference between first-person and third-person approaches to the life of the mind, its attempts to understand the nature of the soul are very rich and at variance with each other. We will gain an overview of the theories of the soul by probably the three greatest ancient philosophers, Plato's, Aristotle's and Augustine's (while we will ignore the materialist conceptions of the Epicureans and the Stoics, Aristotle will teach us much about pre-Socratic notions). We will first read Plato's Phaedo, a dialogue in which Socrates, shortly before his execution, discusses arguments for and against the immortality of the soul. In this context, his theory of the Forms plays a crucial role. We will also have to discuss the difficult hermeneutic question of how Plato’s own opinions can be traced based on those of his dialogue’s interlocutors. For he himself does not appear in the Phaedo or in any of his dialogues. We will spend most of the semester with Aristotle's treatise On the Soul and his so-called Parva naturalia, a collection of short essays dealing with mental phenomena such as sensation, memory, dreaming etc. An important difference between Plato and Aristotle is that the latter develops his philosophical psychology in accordance with his philosophical biology and thus connects the various types and activities of the soul with different organic functions. He furthermore uses basic concepts from his new metaphysics to elucidate the nature of the soul. Finally, we will see how two short treatises by the young Augustine try to combine Platonic ideas with the new Christian beliefs.

A critical introduction to one or more strands of Chinese Philosophy, historical or contemporary. Content varies semester by semester. For information about the current semester, see philosophy.nd.edu/courses/majors-minors-courses/

The course offers a survey of medieval philosophical thought from Augustine to William of Ockham, although emphasis will be given to the principal figures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The development of medieval thought will be treated within the institutional and historical framework of the period, including the reception of Greek and Arabic thought, the educational programs of universities and religious orders, and the role of ecclesiastical censure.

An examination of the major philosophical and theological writings of St. Anselm. His <i>Monologion, Proslogion</i>, and <i>Cur Deus Homo</i> will be of central concern, but several lesser known texts will also be read. Topics discussed in these writings include arguments for the existence of God, the divine nature, the Trinity, the Incarnation, freedom (and its compatibility with divine foreknowledge), and truth.

Students embark on a journey into medieval rabbinic theology through a close study of The Book of Knowledge. This canonical work, composed in twelfth-century Cairo by the Andalusian emigre Moses Maimonides, distills the vast domain of rabbinic theology into a concise legal code. The book treats central topics of religion—divinity, prophecy, cosmology, angelology, moral character, physical regimen, education, idolatry, repentance, and eschatology—in a philosophical vein. Students not only gain access to these central topics in medieval Jewish theology, but also consider the codification of these topics within the evolution of rabbinic thought, and its broader intellectual context within the medieval Islamic world. Maimonides (who was studied by a host of Christian scholastics) is of central importance for students of medieval theology and philosophy, and similarly relevant for students of comparative theology, systematic theology, as well as those researching the cultural history of the medieval Mediterranean. *Course contains a graduated study component to accommodate students learning at the advanced undergraduate level, graduate students, and any developing proficiency in medieval Hebrew.

In this course, we will be reading Dante's Commedia as well as works by Aristotle and various ancient and medieval philosophers. Our aim will be to understand the way an Aristotelian worldview informs the Commedia. We will look at the cosmology of the work and how it responds to ancient and medieval theories of the cosmos. We will also investigate the ethics of Dante's famous journey to hell, purgatory, and heaven with a view to identifying its Aristotelian elements. For instance, what is the role of pleasure in the ethical life? What is the highest good of the human being? How should human beings live in such a way as to achieve their highest end? All readings will be in translation.

An examination of Thomas Aquinas' analyses of justice, pardon, and mercy. The course aims at understanding these virtues in Aquinas against the background of classical thought, examining both continuities with ancient Greek and Roman figures, like Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and Cicero, as well as discontinuities. Central to the course will be delineating the role of compassion if any in the expression of these virtues.

Critical introduction to Aquinas's philosophical writings on the soul in the Summa Theologiae and other writings.

A close examination of the philosophical arguments within the first thirteen questions of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, including arguments about the distinction between philosophy and Sacred Theology, the existence of a god, divine simplicity, divine perfection, divine goodness, divine infinity, divine immutability, divine eternity, divine unity, how God is known by us, and how God is spoken about by us.

Advanced survey of Aquinas's philosophical writings on human nature, such as The Treatise on Human Nature (Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89), his Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, and Disputed Questions on the Soul.

An intensive reading of Hegel's <i>Phenomonology of the Spirit</i>. Issues discussed will be Hegel's conception of self and society, his treatment of culture, art, and religion, the nature of dialectic, his views on systematic holism and critique, etc.

A comprehensive consideration of the major themes in Kierkegaard's thought, including: the relation of art, ethics, and religion to life, knowledge and morality, the nature of subjectivity, what constitutes effective philosophical communication, etc. Main texts vary, but include the following (in whole or in part): Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, and Sickness unto Death.

This course is on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, his attempt to confront our finite minds with reason’s infinite demands. We will examine why Kant thinks reality depends partly on our minds and how this makes possible metaphysical knowledge about the general structure of space, time, quantity, quality, relation, and modality. We will consider why Kant denies such knowledge about the soul, the world, and God, thereby making room for rational faith within ethics and science. We will also ask whether metaphysics can stand as a science separate from physics and mathematics, and what it means to critique reason itself. No prior knowledge of Kant is required. We will read the text closely and discuss it critically, aiming to grasp its main arguments, its architectonic, and its mind-bending ambition.

Many of the deepest ideas about God, the mind, the soul, the nature of embodiment, and beauty spring from the highly influential but understudied school of philosophy often referred to as Neoplatonism. Neoplatonists took themselves to be the philosophical heirs of Plato, but also sought to reconcile Plato's doctrines with Aristotle's as well as bring systematicity to Plato's famously unsystematic dialogues. Neoplatonists were system-builders interested in the connections among connecting metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, and natural theology. The course will explore how neoplatonists approach these philosophical sub-disciplines are shaped in light of their foundational principles such as the priority of unity over multiplicity, the priority of intelligibile (mental) being over material being, the inherent link between beauty and desire, and that all caused things act as images or expressions of that which causes them. Much of the Neoplatonic tradition was explicitly and proudly monotheistic, and partly for this reason, was highly influential in the intellectual development of Judiaism, Christianity, and Islam. In fact, Neoplatonic representatives can be found in each of the major monotheistic religions (and course readings will reflect the diversity of religious traditions in which neoplatonic thought flourished).

The topic of this team-taught graduate seminar (crosslisted for qualified advanced undergraduates) will be the thought and work of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche and their complex relationship. Neither figure needs an introduction: they both exerted extraordinary influence in their respective realms, reaching far into the twentieth century and beyond, and both left legacies that became entangled in some of the worst developments of the past one hundred years. We plan to focus, however, on the works themselves: Wagner's operas, particularly Der Ring des Nibelungen, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal; some of Wagner's musicological and cultural-critical writings, such as Opera and Drama and Religion and Art; Nietzsche's own books, beginning with his very first one, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1871), which was inspired by and dedicated to Wagner, and concluding with the scathing denunciation of him in The Case of Wagner, written in 1888, the last frenzied year before Nietzsche's mental breakdown. The course materials will all be in English. We will also offer a one-credit companion reading course on selected texts in the original German, discussing them with particular emphasis on their grammatical and stylistic qualities. This reading is intended to help students who already know some German to develop their capacities and to encourage those who have not yet begun studying German to do so.

An introduction to some of the most important thinkers and issues in the Arabic-Islamic philosophical tradition. Some emphasis will be placed on the high classical period (9th to 12th centuries) (e.g., Ibn Sina [Avicenna], al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd [Averroes]), though we will also cover some significant post-classical, modern, and contemporary thought (e.g., jihad and feminism). Other broad topics to be addressed include the existence and attributes of God, the nature and order of the cosmos (including causality), human nature, the relation between religious revelation and philosophical reasoning, and the proper ethical ordering of human life and of the political state. We will discuss these ideas as they operate within the Islamic world and also how they interact with the Western philosophical tradition.

An introduction to the arguments and themes of phenomenology, a school of philosophy based on the description of lived experience that had a broad impact on 20th-century philosophy.

This seminar will provide an overview of the early Heidegger's engagement with Phenomenology, broadly construed. Among figures to be included will be Husserl, Scheler, Jaspers, Cassirer, Carnap.

An intensive survey of the two main strands of German philosophical thought in the twentieth century: phenomenology and critical theory. Readings from: Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. Topics include: the future of the idea of subjectivity, the relation of self to society, the role of art in self-understanding, the importance of history to philosophy, and the nature of the philosophical enterprise.

Marcel Proust's À la Recherche Du Temps Perdue (In Search of Lost Time) has been called the most important novel of the twentieth century. Previous to its final inception, its author was uncertain of the work's status. "Must I make of it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?" (Notebook of 1908). Recent research has revealed the extent to which Proust himself was substantially trained in philosophy (for example, the metaphysics of Schopenhauer or the aesthetics of Hegel and Schelling). Perhaps even more significant is the extent of the influence of The Search on philosophers after it. Among others, Proust's work played an essential role in the arguments of Adorno or Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, Kristeva and Deleuze, or Nussbaum, Pippin, and Taylor. This seminar will begin by reading extensive parts of this multivolume work in translation and considering the philosophical positions it transforms. We will then examine Proust's influence in a number of areas of philosophy. This in turn will allow us to confront the relationship between philosophy and literature more particularly. Requirements: Midterm, Research Paper, Seminar Presentation.

This seminar will involve an extended investigation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of embodied experience in his Phenomenology of Perception. We will also examine his modifications of Husserl and Heidegger’s classical accounts of phenomenology. Further, some time will be spent comparing Merleau-Ponty’s treatment with similar formulations in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Finally, in consultation with students’ varying interests, we will discuss subsequent challenges and developments to the account, including Merleau-Ponty‘s own later work.

An advanced introduction to the thought of Michel Foucault. Readings and discussions from four works: The Order of Things, Archeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and the first volume of History of Sexuality. Focus is on the nature of power, transgressive experience, self-transformation, the invention of the concept of the subject, and social ontology.

This course will provide an introduction to the philosophy of Edith Stein. Edith Stein was an important member of the phenomenological movement: she was Husserl's first assistant (Heidegger followed after) and wrote important works in this tradition. She was also a scholar of scholastic philosophy. One of her last works is a treatise on systematic metaphysics that integrates insights from phenomenology, neo-Kantianism, and scholastic metaphysics. We'll begin by discussing the general philosophical and contextual background to Edith Stein's early works. We'll then discuss portions of several of her works, ranging from her first book The Problem of Empathy up to Finite and Eternal Being.

The first third of the seminar is devoted to gaining the necessary background to discussing Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France of the late-1970s. The principal background text is Discipline and Punish. We then turn to three, consecutive sets of lectures: Society Must Be Defended (1975-6), Security, Territory, Population (1977-8), and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-9). The works will be read in English translation and discussion is in English. French is always a plus, however.

Critical introduction to and examination of recent work in Continental Philosophy

This course will focus on philosophical paradoxes that arise in the context of ethical theorizing. For the purposes of this course, we’ll understand a paradox to be a set of propositions each of which seems true, but which together entail (via a set of seemingly valid inferences) a logical contradiction—that is, a proposition, P, and its denial, not-P. Paradoxes are fun, surprising, and even confounding. But they aren’t just entertaining; they’re important. They have historically marked crises in human thought, provoking us to rethink previously unquestioned assumptions. The result, in many instances, has been an important revolution in our thinking. By studying these paradoxes, we will learn how our thinking can go wrong in rather subtle and surprising ways. What’s more, we will learn about ethical theories such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. The course requirements are Attendance and Participation (10%), one In-Class Presentation (15%), two Take-Home Assignments (each 15%), an In-Class Midterm Exam (20%), and In-Class Final Exam (25%).

Art and literature in the last two centuries have raised with special intensity old questions about beauty, both its enchantments and its temptations. This course will consider these questions anew, drawing from two giants of modern Catholic thought, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, an explicit follower of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the English novelist J.R.R. Tolkien, an implicit follower of St. John Henry Newman. Among the artists likely to be considered are Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Flannery O'Connor.

Critical introduction to the ethics of climate change.

Advanced survey of significant authors and primary texts in the history of ethics. Specific authors and texts vary by semester. Examples of possible authors include Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Zhuangzi, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Diderot, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bentham, Mill, Anscombe, and Foot.

How can we understand the process of artistic creation? What is creative inspiration? Are there rules that govern artistic genius? Is creativity uniquely human, or can a computer be truly creative? Through readings including selections from Aristotle’s Poetics, Kant’s writings on Genius, contemporary literature on human-AI interactions in artistic production, and more, this course examines the intertwined concepts of art and creativity using examples from music, painting, theater, dance, photography, and poetry.

This is a hybrid lecture/seminar course in which we consider several of the main topics in aesthetics and the philosophy of art: what beauty might be, what makes something a work of art, the nature of aesthetic representation, the nature of artistic expression, the function of criticism in the reception of art, the relation of art to morality and to politics. Readings are approximately divided equally from the history of philosophy and art criticism and more contemporary materials. Both materials from Anglo-American and more European perspectives are considered. Close attention to and analysis of art works (i.e. painting, poetry, film, music) will be undertaken in order to "test" the theories we consider. Readings from: Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, R.G. Collingwood, Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Arthur Danto, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin and others.

What is the nature of music? What is its meaning and value? Is it representational or expressive (or both), and how does it stand in relation to paradigmatically representational art forms such as painting? What role does tonality play in imparting meaning to music? These are some of the questions that we will explore in the course. We will consider various examples, including some drawn from Baroque music and (classically-inspired) jazz. The ability to read music is a prerequisite for this course, and some competence with an instrument will be extremely helpful.

This course will survey a variety of philosophical issues pertaining to gender and feminism. Topics we expect to cover include the metaphysics of gender (e.g., the sex-gender distinction, the nature of masculinity and femininity, gender essentialism vs. gender constructivism); implicit bias and hermeneutic injustice; sexual harassment, violence, and the nature of consent; gender, feminism, and religion; and intersectionality.

This class will take an interdisciplinary approach to addressing interconnected issues in feminist philosophy on the topics of love, beauty, and (sexual) objectification. Likely topics include (i) the nature of sexual objectification and its relationship to the phenomenon of dehumanization, (ii) objectifying and non-objectifying modes of "loving" others, with special attention to the role of empathy in this distinction, (iii) the idea that beauty norms function as global ethical ideals, (iv) the idea that norms of feminine bodily comportment are shaped both by the prevalence of sexual objectification and the threat of sexual assault, and (v) some of the consequences of various ways in which these different issues (especially iii and iv) are intertwined.

The course will investigate some of the main debates in contemporary philosophical approaches to the aesthetics of film. Of particular concern will be questions that orbit the experience of fictional film. What is the relation between subjective and objective camera shots and point of view? What are points of view in film? What is the difference between fictional narrative film and photography? Theatrical drama? Painting? Other questions posed and discussed: What is the importance of genre to film? What is a genre? Can films be moral or immoral? If so, does that affect our aesthetic experience of film? What is non-narrative film? What is documentary? The class involves both philosophical and film theoretical readings and out-of-class screenings of films to sharpen discussion of the issues.

This course will deal with a range of core issues in contemporary meta-ethics. Topics covered will include the question of whether our moral judgements truly describe some feature of our decisions, actions and character; the objectivity of moral judgements; whether our ordinary moral judgements might be radically mistaken; and what methods are appropriate for moral inquiry.

This course will begin by considering three challenges to a reason-based morality: 1) It’s all relative, 2) It’s better to be an egoist, 3) Morality is determined by religion not reason. Assuming we can overcome these challenges - if we can’t, we will stop the course right here - but if we can, we will then evaluate three traditional moral perspectives: 1) Kantian morality (It is all about doing your duty), 2) Utilitarian morality (It is all about maximizing utility) and 3) Aristotelian morality (It is all about being virtuous) to see if one of them is better than the others. That accomplished, we will then take up three challenges to a traditional conception of morality: 1) the Feminist challenge (Traditional morality is biased against women), 2) the Environmental challenge (Traditional morality is biased against nonhuman living beings), and 3) the Multicultural challenge (Traditional morality is biased against non-Western cultures). Assuming we think some defensible form of morality survives these challenges (We will take a vote), we will then go on to apply that morality to the solution of the following problems: the Distribution of Income and Wealth, Distant Peoples and Future Generations, Work and Family Responsibilities, Women’s and Men’s Roles, and Institutional Racism with a particular focus on the Ethics of Climate Change. Requirements: Three papers 7-10 pages (2100-3000 words) e-mail comments on all readings, and participation in class discussions.

The goal of this class is to help students think philosophically about ways in which social structures and norms involving gender, race and class affect our personal decisions about what and how much to eat, contribute to disordered eating, impact the environment and workers in the industries that produce our food, and impinge on a variety of other concerns that have been the focus of feminist theorizing.

“Democracy & Virtue?” investigates a simple question: Does democracy foster virtue? The class will approach this question, first, through a philosophical investigation of the nature of political regimes, including democratic regimes. This investigation will take place via a careful reading of and discussions about Plato’s Republic. The class will then turn to an examination of America as a modern constitutional democracy. Our primary text for this part of class will be Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Additional readings from Montesquieu, The Federalist, and Catholic writers will also be introduced. Students should expect to read carefully and deliberately and to participate extensively in class, which will be conducted as a seminar conversation.

The influence of John Rawls’s work on academic political and moral theorizing, especially on the academic disciplines of political and moral philosophy, would be difficult to overstate. The theoretical ambitions and the clear normative implications of his book A Theory of Justice showed the academy how much could still be accomplished in political philosophy. The book’s systematicity and clarity showed that these accomplishments could be won without loss of rigor. Its obvious connections to Kant and the social contract tradition did much to revive philosophers’ interest in the history of liberal thought. This seminar will begin with a careful study of parts of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and of some of his later works. Rawls's theory has attracted criticism from a number of quarters. Some of the most interesting criticisms have come from the late Gerald Gaus and his students, who have argued for a quite different and anti-Rawlsian way of reasoning about fundamental political questions, and who have questioned Rawls's focus on what he called a well-ordered society. The latter part of the seminar will be spent reading and assessing some of their criticisms.

An overview of central topics in philosophy of law, followed by consideration of a range of theoretical issues in general criminal law.

An examination of major theories of justice, both ancient and modern. Readings include representatives of liberal theorists of right, such as John Rawls, as well as perfectionist alternatives. The course also serves as the core seminar for the philosophy, politics, and economics concentration.

A critical survey of thinkers, ideas, and works in Islamic political philosophy.

The last three centuries have seen the worldwide rise of Commercial Society and Democracy, creating the distinctively modern culture we now inhabit, and that inhabits us. This distinctive modernity has inspired both celebration and critique, the subjects of this seminar. The seminar emphasizes depth over breadth, exploring with intensity and leisure a very few works of deep cultural significance. The works chosen will vary from semester to semester to reflect faculty and student interests. Possible choices range from economic and social analysis to works of outstanding aesthetic distinction. For fall 2024, the seminar will focus on Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, and Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

This seminar treats one line of thought in modern political philosophy that poses a direct challenge from the Left to liberal theories of democracy: anarchism. Issues covered: anti-Statism, the relation of civil society to politics, conceptions of work, theory of property, nature of revolution, and anarchism's view of socialism and communism. Selected readings from: William Godwin, Joseph-Pierre Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Gustav Landauer, Emma Goldman, Rudolf Rocker, and David Graeber.

Against a backdrop of large-scale society, mass movements, and technological bureaucracy, the invocation of "conscience" recalls the individual human person as a meaningful actor in the political sphere. But what is conscience, and what are its rights and responsibilities? What is it about conscience that ought to command governmental respect? Are there limits to its autonomy? What role should conscience play in questions of war and peace, law-abidingness and civil disobedience, citizenship and political leadership? And how does the notion of conscience relate to concepts of natural law and natural rights, rationality and prudence, religion and toleration? This course engages such questions through readings from the Catholic intellectual tradition (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More, Fransisco de Vitoria, Desiderius Erasmus, John Henry Newman, Karol Wojty'a/John Paul II, and Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI) and other writers of the history of ethical-political thought (Cicero, Seneca, John Locke, Mahatma Ghandi, Jan Pato'ka, and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn). We consider also various contemporary reflections on conscience expressed in films, essays, letters, plays, short stories, speeches, and declarations, beginning with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and Václav Havel's speech "Politics and Conscience." This class serves as both the capstone course for the interdisciplinary minor Philosophy in the Catholic Tradition and an upper-level elective for Political Science majors and Peace Studies minors. Its format combines lecture and seminar-style discussion.

An exploration of philosophical issues concerning race. Possible topics include the existence and nature of race, the science of race, race as social construct, and various social and policy issues concerning race.

This course will provide a critical evaluation of the most compelling contemporary political perspectives along with their foundations and practical requirements.

This class will examine the natures of a wide range of social entities and phenomena. Topics discussed will include the metaphysics of social kinds, including gender, race, and disability; the metaphysics of social groups (like baseball teams and the Beatles) and social entities (like restaurants); and the metaphysics of food. We will end by discussing the metaphysics of collective responsibility.

An examination of the nature of metaphysics and of those metaphysical issues that have proved central in Western philosophical tradition. Topics discussed will include mind-body problem, freedom of will, universals, substance, time, categories and God.

An upper level survey of philosophical problems in the philosophy of action or a focused exploration of a particular problem or theme in philosophy of action. Content varies by semester.

Could the type of time travel that you see in movies and read about in books actually happen? In this seminar, students will learn how to think carefully and thoroughly about this and related questions about the metaphysics of time. For example: does time really exist, or is it a mere human construct? Is the present metaphysically privileged in some way, or is the present just like the past and the future? Are pastness, presentness, and futurity objective properties of reality or human projections? Is time like space? Does time actually "pass"? Does time have an intrinsic direction? What must time be like in order for time travel to be possible? Is it possible to go back in time and kill a version of your past self? This seminar will explore central questions about the metaphysics of time and time travel through advanced metaphysics and science fiction.

What is Matter? The seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher René Descartes had an elegant answer to this question: the essence of matter is extension—extension in length, breadth, and depth. And since Descartes also held that the mind is indivisible while everything extended is divisible, the classic mind-body problem was born: How are we to find a place for the mind in a material world? But the material world has changed fundamentally since the seventeenth century, or at least our conception of it has, and we no longer have an elegant answer to the question, "what is matter?" if we have an answer to it at all. This course grapples with the difficulty of understanding the concept of matter (as well as its close relative, the physical) and explores some implications of "the thinning of matter" for our philosophical theorizing about mind and meaning in a post-physical world.

David Lewis was a very influential philosopher of the late twentieth century, and his work still plays a central role in setting the agenda in areas of philosophy including metaphysics, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. This course will consist of engaging with over a dozen of Lewis's most influential papers and chapters, together with readings from subsequent philosophers which engage with the arguments Lewis offers. Topics include the nature of the mind, the nature of experience, possibility and necessity, causation, the role of context in language and epistemology, the nature of value, and a reflection on Lewis's philosophical method.

The aim of this class is to provide an understanding of the fundamental issues and positions in the contemporary theory of knowledge.

Advanced introduction to topics in epistemology and the philosophy of mind related to the nature and rationality of belief and the nature of meaning and intentionality.

This upper division course will be an introduction to American Pragmatism ranging over the classical texts of Pierce, James and Dewey to the contemporary texts of Putnam and Rorty.

A detailed consideration of the central methodological and epistemological questions bearing on science.

This course is an introduction to some of the foundational questions about probability from a "statistics first" point of view. We will begin with an elementary review of statistical inference, hypothesis testing and asymptotics, which will provide a background context for our discussion of why probability is empirically relevant, and what we should think probabilities are (on the basis of being empirically relevant in this way). By way of illustration, we will discuss these philosophical questions about probability in the context of simple examples drawn from physics and economics. The assessment will include several problem sets, a midterm exam and a final exam.

This course will explore the efforts to reduce biological phenomena to physical explanations in the modern and recent period in the efforts to gain a physical understanding of life. The course will be divided into 5 sections: (1) Early Modern discussions (Harvey, Descartes, Newton); (2) The development of “organic” physics around 1800 (Lavoisier, German biophysics); (3) The debates over mechanism, vitalism and holism in the early 20 th century and the impact of the “new” physics (Loeb, Driesch, Niels Bohr, Schrödinger); (4) the foundations of “molecular” biology (Jacob, Monod, Delbrück, Watson and Crick; systems theory); (5) Toward a “Phenomenology” of Life (Husserl, Hans Jonas, Robert Sokolowski). Students will be asked to complete two take-home midterm examinations and a written final.

Science and social values? The established wisdom has it that science offers us the truth about the empirical world - what is rather than what ought to be - and that social values have little to do with it. How else explain the fact that science can be used for both good and ill and that the results of science are (or at least should be) accepted as authoritative by people of widely different ethical and political persuasions? According to this view, in short, science is, or at least ought to be, "value-free" or "value-neutral." In this course we shall explore how recent research in history and sociology as well as philosophy of science has raised serious questions regarding this established wisdom and how such notions as scientific objectivity and autonomy and the role of science in a democratic society has had to be revised accordingly. Since this is a seminar course, students will lead class discussions, present the results of their individual research projects to the group, and have the opportunity to further develop these projects using the feedback from the group. The aim, of course, will be for students to develop fully informed and defensible responses to the controversial terrain we shall be exploring.

Probabilistic methods are in use in a number of subfields in philosophy---and the influence of these methods, especially over the last couple of decades or so, appears to be growing. In this course we'll aim to develop a broad-ranging understanding of probabilistic reasoning in philosophy. We'll examine, in particular, how probabilistic methods have recently been applied to tackle some thorny philosophical problems. A self-contained introduction to more formal aspects of probability will be followed by an exploration of how probabilistic methods have been used to address, inter alia, various epistemological puzzles, as well as puzzles in the sciences (such as puzzles related to fine-tuning). (Note that only very minimal background in mathematics and in the sciences will be assumed---the course is indeed designed to be largely self-contained.)

Within the last 10 years historians of science such as Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Peter Galison, and Naomi Oreskes, have been promoting a new area of enquiry - Proctor calls it agnotology, the study of ignorance - which they suggest is of as much relevance to philosophers and social scientists and others as it is to historians. Indeed, the suggestion is that agnotology offers a new approach to the study of knowledge, an approach at least as complex and important as its more established sister, epistemology. In this course we shall focus especially on socially constructed ignorance - the kind exemplified by governmental secrecy and censorship, or industry-engineered confusion (think of the tobacco industry or the pharmaceutical industry), or the 'virtuous ignorance' that would ensue if certain kinds of research (think of race- and gender-related cognitive differences research) were no longer supported. This will lead us to consider the kinds of freedom of research and other social structures that need to be in place to support the legitimate quest for knowledge, and thence to the recognition that agnotological/epistemological questions are also, ultimately, political questions.

Through much of its history, academia has been gendered in a particular way -male dominated, focused on men's interests, and privileging those interests -and much of it still is. In response, the area of enquiry known as women's studies or gender studies emerged in the 1970s as part of the feminist movement. In this course we will explore gender, the concept that lies at the heart of this area of enquiry. We will find that this concept is as complex and multi-faceted as the diverse disciplines from which it now draws and as political as its feminist origins suggest. We will also find that it is fraught with controversy. Though the disciplines that contribute to the idea of gender comprise nearly all of academia, we will concentrate on the sciences, from which the concept of gender first emerged. We will start with the gendered origins of the concept - the gender of science - and then proceed to the science that developed as a result - the science of gender; and we will conclude with some questions concerning the connection between the two - the gender of science and the science of gender. No particular scientific background will be presupposed, and visits from science faculty will be organized to help us understand the terrain we will be covering. The rest of the time the course will be run as a seminar. Students will lead class discussions, present the results of individual research projects to the group, and have the opportunity to further develop those projects using feedback from the group. Throughout, our aim will be for each student to develop a fully informed and defensible response to the controversial terrain we will be exploring.

New technologies reshape our lives and our world at an ever-accelerating pace, often for the better, but sometimes for the worse. Anxiety grows ever more acute that we have passed a tipping point beyond which intentional, human control of technology development is impossible. But we must assert such control as we can. An emerging body of philosophical literature proposes different mechanisms for doing that. Starting from deep philosophical reflection on the nature of technology, itself, and the manner of its social and cultural embedding, this literature moves on to assay the many urgent ethical questions posed by such technologies as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robots, autonomous systems, and nano-scale engineering. Contributors to this literature often conclude with proposed, general policy-making frameworks and specific policy advice. This course will survey the most important such literature. The course is designed for advanced undergraduates and selected graduate students. It assumes no specific background, beyond a good undergraduate preparation in philosophy, with, perhaps, some focus on ethics and some ability to digest a modest amount of technical information.

Technological innovation often outpaces critical reflection. In this upper-level seminar, we will explore a variety of metaphysical and ethical issues raised by some of these more recent innovations. Although the underlying questions are not novel, developments in artificial intelligence, bio-engineering, robotics, virtual worlds, and social media have raised important philosophical questions about the nature and value of human persons and social structures. In this course, we will explore accounts of persons and values and see how they apply to current debates surrounding some of these newer digital technologies. We will also look at how technological developments might, in turn, shed light on traditional philosophical questions about persons and values (e.g. computational theories of mind and rational choice theory). We will also explore the arguments of some prominent anti-technology movements. Towards the end of the semester, we will turn to very concrete cases, such as social media usage, digital distraction, and privacy issues, to consider how we might apply some of our philosophical conclusions to our everyday practices. This is a majors-level philosophy seminar. Before taking this course, students must have completed a minimum of two other philosophy courses, including PHIL 30302. Class expectations include regular contributions to discussion, outside class exercises, several shorter writing assignments throughout the term, and a longer, research-based seminar paper.

This course will explore the philosophical bases of modern physics and cosmology

This course will provide an advanced survey of current work on the role of mathematics in scientific theories and practice and associated philosophical questions.

In this class we will read two of the great thinkers of the 19th century, Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Writing during a time of increasing prosperity, liberty, and enlightenment, both found much that was troubling or naïve in the age’s conviction in the liberating and transformative power of reason, and provided analyses of the human condition and the self whose power and insight continue to provoke and challenge. We will focus on three themes that unite this analysis of the human condition: suffering, freedom, and transformation through love. Suffering makes us conscious of our limitations, our helplessness, our lack of control, and yet every human being must form the self in freedom. Can suffering lead to increased self-knowledge and transformation? When does suffering lead us closer to God? Does suffering purify love, or poison it? What is the relationship between suffering and freedom? To what extent does one's suffering limit the exercise of freedom? Can the suffering self make choices out of love that increase one's freedom, transforming the self? When freedom is made subject to nothing but reason it becomes trapped in its own irresolvable perplexities concerning its origin and its destination. The course will raise the question of what “the self” is, how suffering, freedom, and love are related to the self; how relationships structure, limit, and potentially transform the self; in what sense the suffering of despair represents the disordered self; and the different ways that Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky envision faith and love as unifying and completing the self.

Should you believe in God? Are the arguments/evidence for God any good? And what would it take for belief (or faith) in God to be reasonable? Can we know God exists? This course will have two main parts. First, we'll explore some of the evidence and arguments bearing on (particular forms of) theism, evaluating their probative force. In this part of the class, we'll talk about, e.g., religious or mystical experiences and the problem of evil. In the second part of the class, we'll explore questions about what would need to be true in order for us to have epistemically proper faith or belief in God. We'll talk about, e.g., the nature of faith, intellectual virtue, and externalism in the theory of knowledge.

A close reading of the first 43 questions of the first book of the <i>Summa Theologiae</i>. These questions, which deal both with the divine essence and with the three divine persons, provide a comprehensive survey of St. Thomas's <i>Metaphysics</i>.

This course provides an introduction to medieval rabbinic theology through the close study of The Book of Knowledge, a canonical work that defines the curriculum of Jewish thought. This foremost work, composed in twelfth-century Cairo by the Andalusian emigre Moses Maimonides, distills the vast domain of rabbinic theology into a concise legal code. The book treats central topics of religion - divinity, prophecy, cosmology, angelology, character formation, education, idolatry, and repentance (among others) - in a philosophical vein. Students will not only gain access to these central topics in medieval Jewish theology, but also study Maimonides's codification of these topics within the evolution of rabbinic thought, and its broader intellectual context within the medieval Islamic world. Maimonides (who was studied by a host of Christian scholastics) is of central importance for students of medieval theology and philosophy, and similarly relevant for students of comparative theology, systematic theology, as well as those researching the cultural history of the medieval Mediterranean.

Dualist and reductionist emphases in recent analyses of mind. Topics covered will include identity of mind and body, intentionality, actions and their explanation and problems about other minds.

The aim of this course is to provide an overview of the field. Major topics include the relation between truth and meaning; truth-conditional semantics; the meaning of sentences, proper names, definite descriptions, general terms and indexicals; the relations between expressing a belief, making a statement, and uttering a sentence.

This course examines a range of metaphysical, ethical, and social questions about artificial intelligence. Questions to be addressed include: Could a computer be conscious? Is there anything the human mind can do that a machine couldn't be programmed to do? What are the similarities and differences between human and artificial intelligence? What are the likely cultural and economic effects of AI? What moral principles should guide our use of AI? Is it likely that we'll create AGI (artificial general intelligence), and would this pose an existential threat to humanity?

Prerequisite: PHIL 30313 Formal Logic This course is an introduction to various philosophical issues that have motivated work in non-classical logic. Topics may include truth, falsity, necessity, moral obligation, "future contingents" (e.g., it will be true that you take this course), negated existence claims (e.g., it's false that Mickey Mouse exists), and more. We will discuss both the philosophical ideas and the target logical frameworks, focusing on how to construct your own "logic" for philosophically perplexing phenomena.

A survey of central issues in the philosophy of mathematics.

This course is an introduction to the metatheory of first-order logic, the central system of logic for both philosophical and mathematical purposes. We begin with the basics of set theory, and then move on to first-order logic proper, covering the completeness theorem and associated results. This material is essential for those who want to understand elementary philosophical debates about the use and the significance of logic, the history of logic, and the connection between languages and models. Prerequisite: for graduate students: Formal logic or equivalent; contact the professor if you are unsure about your preparation. Prerequisite for undergrads: Philosophy or philosophy-associated major or minor + formal logic or instructor approval.

This course provides an introduction to the basic concepts and results of mathematical logic and set theory.

Advanced introduction to the philosophical investigation of the nature of truth.

This course covers topics in the metatheory of modal logic. We will start with some basic correspondence theory, and then move on to discuss completeness and the finite model property. If we have time, we'll also cover some recent work on the relationship between modal logic and classical logic.

Mathematical proofs are the cornerstone of truth. Proofs verify medical devices and spacecraft work properly. They help establish guilt or innocence. The theme of this class is to explore the notion of proof with certain logical systems with the motivation of understanding mathematical proofs or reasoning. We will study proofs in extended syllogistic logics, propositional logic, other logical systems close to natural language, and first-order logic. We will show some of these systems are complete (every true statement is provable) and decidable (there is an algorithm for deciding truth) and others are not. We will explore what this means. Along the way we will hopefully learn more about how people reason.

Thinking about infinity has been part of philosophy since its earliest days, and mathematical advances in the theory of infinity mean it remains an important area for philosophy today. This course will examine some ancient and early modern puzzles about infinity as well as contemporary philosophical issues. Issues to be discussed will include puzzles about infinite divisibility of space and time; paradoxes of infinite decision theory; infinite regress arguments; and paradoxes associated with the "absolute infinite" in mathematics.

This course looks at some of the famous incompleteness and undecidability results from the first half of the twentieth century. We'll start by discussing the notion of computability and then use this notion to examine the limitations of (even ideal) computers. We'll then move on to look at Goedel's first and second incompleteness theorems, the undecidability of arithmetic and of second-order logic, and the undefinability of truth. Finally, if there's time, we will discuss some of the technical and philosophical ramifications of this material.

This course will discuss how to analyze and evaluate strategic decision making.

This course will provide a leisurely but rigorous-enough walk through issues at the intersection of the topics of truth, paradox, and logic. PHIL 30313 or equivalent required.

This course explores advanced questions related to selfhood and personality identity. Course focus varies by semester. Information on a specific semester can be found at philosophy.nd.edu/courses/majors-minors-courses/

A critical examination of current work being done in decision theory, analyzing the rational structure of agents' choices.

1. Read and understand the most representative dialogues of the author. 2. Distinguish the periods of philosophical development of the author. 3. Define the philosophical doctrines of the author and his transformation. 4. Know the main themes and interpretative difficulties of the Platonic work and its commentators. 5. Recognize the historical and cultural circumstances of the author's time. 6. Give a comprehensive view of Platonic philosophy and its main influences through Western philosophy.

Taught at a host instutition. This course will focus on Aristotle's major work "The Metaphysics", which deals with his search for "being qua being". We will go through the work chapter by chapter, addressing Aristotle's concerns in the order in which he made them known, and will discuss the strength of his arguments. In addition, we will try to see what tenets of Aristotle's Metaphysics can still be defended today.

Same as PHIL 24234 but additional work will be required. The course is designed as a journey from the time of the historical Buddha (6th to 5th centuries BCE) to East Asia in medieval periods, then to the West in modern times. The journey will invite students to meet a number of Buddhist traditions and their eminent monks and thinkers. The meetings will happen through diverse mediums—reading Buddhist sutras (scriptures) and hagiographies, exploring Buddhist artifacts in museums, and watching films on Buddhist themes. Through these meetings, students will learn 1) what philosophical questions the Buddhist traditions have raised and answered and 2) how these questions emerged in their specific cultural and historical contexts. Throughout the journey, the course will closely examine their core practice: meditation. Students will learn that most philosophical questions raised within Buddhism cannot be entirely understood without looking into their meditation practice. The course will also examine how different traditions have developed different meditation theories and techniques. Although the course will mainly cover Buddhism in India and East Asia, students are encouraged to investigate other Buddhist traditions beyond these regions or compare Buddhism with different philosophical and religious traditions, such as Christianity or East Asian Daoism.

PI 3013 Topics in Continental Philosophy at Trinity College; The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to phenomenology by focusing on the writings of Husserl and Heidegger and to show the extent to which themes raised within phenomenology are of philosophical significance today. Topics covered include: intentionality, philosophical scepticism, anxiety and death.

PHIL 44402 - Virtues & Vices Same as PHIL 24546 - Virtues & Vices, with additional work required. This course aims to provide a critical reading of the most important classical texts on virtue and vice in antiquity and examine their influence on current theories of virtue ethics and moral knowledge. It begins with Socratic considerations of "How should one live?" and questions about what constitutes well-being, the human good and happiness (eudaimonia). In the first half of the semester, we will analyze and evaluate arguments on the virtues of temperance (sophrosyne), prudence (phronesis), courage (andreia), and justice (dikaiosyne) in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. These texts introduce questions about moral perception, parts of the soul, the unity of the virtues, and distinctions between the moral and intellectual virtues. Special attention will be given to reading ancient philosophical texts closely, always using precise Stephanus and Bekker numbers to identify and clarify arguments and counterarguments. Classic articles and commentaries will be consulted as a guide to competing interpretations. With this training in the art of reading a text critically, in the second half of the semester we will consider contemporary issues in virtue theory which at points embrace or challenge Platonic and Aristotelian ideas about virtue and vice. A number of important questions will be analyzed and discussed. What is the nature of virtue and vice? What is the relation between virtue and happiness? Can virtue be taught? What is the distinction between the moral and the intellectual virtues? What is meant by a unity of the virtues? Is there a special relationship between virtue and knowledge, virtue and practical judgement, vice and error? Do virtues only apply to individuals, or can governments, political institutions and regulatory bodies embody virtues? By the end of the course, students will have acquired an in-depth knowledge of how considerations of virtue and vice play an important role in ancient and contemporary ethical theory, and how evaluations of human flourishing can be assessed in terms of non-relative virtues.

This course will examine a number of the fundamental texts in political and constitutional theory, with an emphasis on works of special importance to the British and American political systems. Throughout the semester, three fundamental questions will be addressed. First, what is (or should be) the end or goal or purpose of government? Second, what system of government best achieves that end or goal? And third, are the answers to the first two questions the same at all times & places? This course is distinct from PHIL 24407. It requires more demanding coursework.

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of religion. Topics covered include arguments for and against the existence of God; the divine attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, eternity, simplicity); immortality and the soul; the justification of religious belief; the relation between religion and morality. This course is the same as PHIL 24801 but additional work will be required.

Same as PHIL 24432 East Asian Ways of Life: Philosophy and Practice, with additional work required. The aim of the course is for students to explore various facets of East Asian philosophy. Inspired by the ground-breaking works by historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), the course will guide students to approach philosophy as ways of life comprising both theory and practice, shaped by specific cultural and historical context. Throughout the course, students will explore core questions and challenges that had been raised in the history of East Asian philosophy and how each tradition and thinker tried to solve these issues. Students will first learn basic concepts which run through the history of East Asian philosophy (Week 1-5). Then they will be introduced to major traditions—Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist—who carried on developing more sophisticated theories and models of practice from the classical thought (Week 6-12). Finally, students will explore the application of philosophy in wider cultural context by examining various arts particular to East Asian context. (Week 13-14). Throughout the course, students will be encouraged to bring comparative aspects with other philosophical traditions, either from the West or from India.

Same as PHIL24408 - 01 but additional work will be required. This course introduces some central philosophical problems arising from the theory and practice of law in Britain and the USA. Philosophy of Law is concerned both with understanding what the law is and what the law ought to be; it is concerned both with how we determine what the law is and how we ought to respond to it. The aim of this course is to introduce students both to the descriptive and the normative side of law. We will consider: the nature of law; the nature of fundamental legal roles (subject; legislator; judge); what the aims of law ought to be; philosophical issues in criminal law and tort law; and what sorts of basic challenges can be made to philosophy of law as a discipline.

This course offers a philosophical perspective on the nature of scientific knowledge and the place of the sciences in society. Examples are drawn from a range of disciplines, over a period extending from classical natural philosophies to the present day. The course examines how theories are tested and changed; the nature of causation, laws, and explanations; whether science provides an increasingly accurate account of reality, and problems in scientific and biomedical ethics. HG 202320 - 3 credits The course will give an overview over recent developments in Anglophone philosophy of biology. By including a recent history of the philosophy of biology, students will also learn about the past of the discipline. The focus of the course will be Darwin's evolutionary theory as well as its relevance, and its limits, for dealing with traditional philosophical problems, such as the body-mind-problem and the evolution of moral behavior. A paper of twenty pages is needed to get credits.

Same as PHIL 24233 - Philosophy & History of Medicine, with additional work required. This London Seminar focuses on The Nature of Man and the Order of the World throughout the history of philosophy and the history of medicine from Hippocrates to the discovery of DNA. It is a demanding course that is taught using primary texts and original manuscript sources available in the Museums, Libraries and Archives of London. Classes will include the analysis of texts and artifacts and site visits to The British Library, The British Museum, The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, The National Gallery, The Wellcome Collection Library and Archives, The Royal Society of London, The Royal College of Physicians, The Science Museum London, The Old Operating Theatre Museum as well as The Gordon Museum at Guy's Hospital, London, which is one of the largest pathology museums in the world and the largest medical museum in the United Kingdom. The course will place an emphasis on the close reading of selected primary texts, supplemented by secondary specialist sources which will enable students to critically evaluate and interpret medical texts, terms, concepts, and theories in a philosophical context. It will also enable students to gain practical knowledge of how to use archival sources for philosophical research. It will give students a unique opportunity to study works of canonical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen, Bacon, Boyle, Locke, and Descartes in a medical context in relation to the works of historically significant physicians, naturalists, and scientists, such as Hippocrates, Vesalius, Harvey, Burton, Willis, Newton, Darwin, Crick and Watson. This course will enable students to understand the close inter-relationship between the study of natural philosophy and the study of medicine from antiquity to the 21st century, since both are dedicated to gaining knowledge about the function of the human body and soul, the order of nature, the cosmos, and the natural world.

This course considers the meaning of the word: made flesh, made text, and made literary and theological tradition. In conversation with Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and Toni Morrison, we will ask questions such as: "How does genre inform our notions of truth?"; "What is the relationship between tragedy and comedy in theological reflection?"; "How does human suffering and evil shape how we speak of God?" Such questions will be addressed, in particular, by reflecting on how the texts studied invite us to think about human finitude, failure, and forgiveness. To enrich our discussions, throughout the semester we will also actively engage beyond the classroom in the local area and region, typically this includes attending a play at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre, and a day trip to the University of Cambridge.

With consent of instructor and approval of department, advanced students are permitted to take a tutorial with a faculty member. Readings will be assigned in a particular area and writing assignments required.

With consent of instructor and approval of department, advanced students are permitted to take a tutorial with a faculty member. Readings will be assigned in a particular area and writing assignments required.

An opportunity for senior philosophy majors to work on a sustained piece of research in a one-to- one relationship with a faculty member.

From Hebrew Scripture to modern science fiction and horror, prophecy has long served as an incredibly powerful mode of literary expression, often grappling with questions of divine authority, historical and/or personal crises, political intrigue, and the boundaries of human knowledge. The seductive authority of prophetic speech—its claims to types of certainty, inevitability, and divine warrant—can obscure competing motives that blur the boundaries between revelation, persuasion, and spectacle. At the same time, the seeming anarchy of prophetic forms can be deployed to resist typical aesthetic models and produce revolutionary and/or rupturing ideas. In this course, we will explore these ideas and others at the intersections of literature and prophecy, examining how prophetic voices and writings (whether sacred, political, or poetic) challenge conventional notions of truth, time, types of knowing, and authorship. We will read texts spanning multiple genres and historical periods, including excerpts from Hebrew Scripture, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Kafka, Ballard, Kōbō Abe, Borges, Morrison, Gibson, Le Guin, Butler, Chiang, Cadigan, Danielewski, VanderMeer, and Samuel R. Delany. Alongside primary texts, we will also engage with critical theories regarding prophecy, voice, reception, and affect in order to consider how literature appropriates, imitates, subverts, and (re-)creates prophetic authority. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify how prophetic modes negotiate truth, time, and authorship; trace the material infrastructures that enable or constrain prophetic voices; distinguish between teleological “fulfillment” models and open, affective, or probabilistic ones; and critique the politics of inspiration as it moves between sacred text, rhetoric, and popular culture. In short, we will investigate how prophetic discourse has shaped literary production and traditions, and how writers have both exploited and contested the risks and promises of speaking in the name of divinity and the future.

Violent video games make people violent. Philosophers waste their time debating whether tables exist. The ideas behind these statements can be traced back to an “ancient quarrel” between poets and philosophers (Plato, Republic). By reading philosophical and literary texts by great poets and philosophers, including (among others) Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Shelley, Shakespeare, and Keats, this course will explore the “ancient quarrel” between poets and philosophers and its continuing relevance in modern art and culture. In class discussions and written assignments, we will learn to make arguments about the philosophy of literature and practise literary analysis of both philosophical and literary texts.

What makes a work of literature "beautiful"? What makes it "ugly"? Is it really in the eye of the beholder or is there an objective dimension to our aesthetic judgements? And what role might theological modes of thinking play in our perception of the beautiful in contemporary society? In this course, we will trace the development of these aesthetic questions, paying particular attention to works that complicate the binary between beauty and ugliness. We will consider various conceptions of beauty, from the classical confluence of form and splendor to the "pleasing terror" of the Romantic sublime, reading authors ranging from John Donne to T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth to James Joyce on our way to developing a nuanced theological aesthetic vocabulary for appreciating both art that attracts and repels.

An in-depth examination of the philosophical themes, ideas, and arguments in Augustine's classic Confessions, with attention to historical, theological, and literary context.

We can only live good lives, the philosopher Hannah Arendt proposed, if we can make reasonable guesses as to what the future will bring. (Will your major connect you to an important career? Will your family thrive as the years advance? Will Notre Dame beat Michigan next time?) But what happens when our expectations are upended? How can we live good lives if we have no clear sense of how to deal with the challenges of today - no clear sense of what tomorrow will bring? In this class, we will look at how Christians responded to the end of the world. This does not mean an imminent apocalypse (though sometimes that was expected), but the collapse of a civilization, a cultural order, or a set of shared expectations that shaped how people made sense of the world and made choices within it. We will focus on two periods of social disintegration: the early Middle Ages, when the age-old Roman Empire (which had seemed to Christians like a providential gift for the spread of the Gospel) collapsed, and the 20th century, when the globe was shaken by world wars, genocides, atomic bombs, and a moral and metaphysical confusion that, some argue, persists to this day. Thereby, we will attend to three issues. First, the theology of history or of providence. How do Christians make sense of God's activity in history, with its moments of disaster and prosperity? Second, the choices people make about how to live a good life within history, which together constitute a morality. Third, and most importantly for our purposes, how do we understand the world we live in and the choices we make within it? Is the world improving, laboriously but steadily? Do we live in a world that trembles on the surface but remains solid at its foundation? Is the world on the verge of collapse? Whatever the case may be, how should we live within it?

This course examines philosophical perspectives on death and immortality from antiquity to the contemporary era. We begin with Plato’s Phaedo, which presents foundational arguments for the soul’s immortality. We then turn to Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Seneca’s Stoic writings, which challenge the fear of death through materialist and rationalist perspectives. In Christian thought, Augustine (Confessions, City of God) integrates Platonic and biblical views on the afterlife. Modern existentialists, including Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Edith Stein, explore death’s role in human existence and its philosophical significance. Throughout the course, students will also be invited to consider this topic through selected works of art, from prehistoric funerary art to modern reflections on (im)mortality. By engaging with both philosophical texts and artistic expressions, this course encourages students to reflect on the meaning of death and the possibility of immortality.

Has envy simply become the “acceptable” vice in a culture that pulsates with comparison and competition? This course retrieves a robustly theological portrayal of envy from within the Jewish-Christian tradition, engaging not only theological treatises—e.g., patristic homilies, Gregory the Great’s Moralia, Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae—but also the important witness of literary texts. While the Christian tradition has been clear (if not unanimous) on the grave and destructive nature of this vice, literary texts illuminate more sharply the unfolding of envy in the human heart as well as its fragmentation of relationships on many levels, ultimately alienating the soul from God. Beyond providing an anatomy of envy, theological and literary voices will be explored also for the remedies proffered to heal this vicious human inclination.

This course will consist of a historical survey of the cross and crucifix in Christian theology, popular piety, ritual practice, and art, beginning with the biblical text of the New Testament, moving through church history, and finally interacting with contemporary theological conceptions about the Cross and atonement theory. This course is particularly interested in the various images of the cross in Christian art and architecture and how these interact with and reflect shifting theological thought in the eastern and western traditions. Topics include the discovery and dissemination of relics of the True Cross, the emergence and development of crucifixion iconography, hymns dedicated to the cross, and the liturgical feasts and veneration of the cross.

John Henry Newman once claimed that truth is upheld in the world not by systems, books, or arguments, but by “personal influence.” How might Newman’s statement apply in our era — one with declining in-person social interactions and a rise in online "influencers," personalized advertising, and parasocial (one-sided) relationships? Today, influence gurus peddle persuasion tactics, and it seems everyone has something to promote. Can we still discover the line between ethical influence and manipulation? This course explores this question through a deep look at the nature, danger, and promise of influence as seen in classic and contemporary texts and sources on Christian ethics. Classic texts will include Plato’s Phaedrus, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Students will examine the popular advice from some of the past century’s best-selling self-help and business books, including Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, and You Have More Influence Than You Think by Vanessa Bohns. Students will learn to analyze each approach through the lens of Christian ethics, drawing from Neo-Thomist, Girardian, and Personalist thought as well as from papal encyclical letters. Through contemporary case studies — including a look at the life of the recently-canonized Saint Carlo Acutis (“God’s Influencer”) — students will develop a robust framework for ethical persuasion. The course will culminate with each student composing a personal charter for his or her ethical influence. Whereas much of the professional writing about influence tends to sever professional life from personal values and purpose, this course will integrate them, resulting in a coherent and normative vision of the influential life.

This course will challenge us to take a less impoverished view of devotional poetry, eschewing texts and themes we find familiar or trite, but rather looking for what is weird, uncomfortable, and wonderful in Christian texts. We will find talking trees, shape-shifting, and levitation in our texts, as well as mind-bending plots and doctrines, which shake the soul of the devotee awake, not put it to sleep. We will survey the strange and unusual in English devotional literature from its very beginning with the Christian missions to England in the sixth and seventh centuries, all the way to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in the later twentieth. As we move through centuries of devotional poetry, we will consider questions like these: what is strange to us in these texts? What might their original authors have found strange? How does this strangeness increase devotion? How does it change, challenge, or strengthen belief? Texts in Old English and all but the clearest in Middle English will be provided in translation. After the “Reformation” unit, there will be both Catholic and Protestant texts represented in the syllabus. Our timeline, however, will place some emphasis on the “Catholic Literary Revival” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as this movement was itself viewed in its time as quite strange and sometimes unchristian (or at least scandalous) by the Protestant majority in England. Our class sessions will revolve around lectures and seminar-style discussions, except on Fridays, which are reserved solely for discussions and student presentations on the readings.

In contemporary teaching, philosophy has become "technica" presented through the philosophical concepts and the philosophical systems of the great thinkers in a sophisticated philosophical language. Naturally, it has become quite difficult to relate philosophy to life itself. This course introduces the basic philosophical themes in relation to life, without heavily relying on philosophical concepts as well the history of philosophical thoughts. We will present, for instance, philosophical themes such as values, society, the idea of absolute, knowledge, being, truth, the nature of philosophical thinking, philosophy and science in relation to the personal existence of an individual. We will examine these philosophical issues under the guidance of two thinkers: A Polish Dominican logician Josef Maria Bochenski and a German existentialist philosopher Karl Theodor Jaspers. Each offers a different perspective on these issues. Emphasis will be placed on attentive reading and discussion of the important points underlined in the class discussion and an in-depth understanding and evaluation of philosophical problems. We will also try to relate these philosophical problems to some current modern issues.

Celebrated the world over for the unprecedented breadth and depth of his fictional worlds, J.R.R. Tolkien is less frequently praised for the quality of his prose. Decried by many contemporary critics for his anachronistic style, flat characterization, and florid descriptions, it has only really been since the turn of the millennium that Tolkien’s esteem as the ingenious inventor of Middle-earth has begun to be mirrored by an improving reputation as a technically skilled writer. In this course, we will work our way chronologically through Tolkien’s Middle-earth oeuvre—his legendarium—in order of composition, from well-known texts such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to lesser known and posthumously published works ranging from The Silmarillion to the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, paying particular attention to how Tolkien curates his oft-derided yet oft-imitated writerly voice. In studying Tolkien’s writings, we will consider how Tolkien not only became the voice of his generation but continues to speak to audiences today.

This course explores how, from the ancient Greeks to our own time, literature has expressed our relationship with the Other as a way to make sense of and face life's limitations and death. By unsettling our "default" attitudes of individualism, literature's powerfully communitarian nature reconnects us with the search for reality's ultimate meanings--whatever we may call them--a search that is religious by nature. By way of analyzing major figures both from the Italian (including Dante, Petrarch, and Pasolini) and American (O'Connor, Baldwin, and Carver, among others) literary traditions, as well as recent contemporary literary trends, including postcolonial and migration literature (Hosseini), this course will allow the students to think about literature as a laboratory of a unitary, essentially religious, vision of knowledge and as a fundamental tool for sparking one's intellectual, aesthetic, and social interests.

Many places of worship hang a sign of invitation: All Are Welcome! But what happens when an aspect of an individual's identity or beliefs comes into conflict with their religious community? Which differences are tolerated, and which are shunned? Who belongs, and who is cast out? From Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories to Kendrick Lamar's hip hop albums, the American literary imagination has long been interested in examining the conflicts between identity -race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability - and religion. Together we will read a variety of American literature, including poetry, science-fiction, drama, and literary essays, paying attention to religious outcasts, misfits, and minoritized peoples as they search for belonging within established communities, or attempt to forge new spaces for themselves. Readings will include James Baldwin, N. Scott Momaday, Tony Kushner, Octavia Butler, more contemporary writing by Molly McCully Brown and R.O. Kwon, as well as music, film, and podcasts.

This course will examine principal questions in the philosophy of religion relating to the nature and existence of God, religious beliefs, religious experience, divine hiddenness, religious pluralism and exclusivism, immortality, the relationship between God and ethics, and other questions. For details about specific sections in a particular semester, see https://philosophy.nd.edu/courses/2nd-courses-in-philosophy/.

The primary goal of the course is to introduce students to some of the central thinkers and historical controversies animating the French intellectual scene between the Reformation and the height of the enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Central authors include Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal; topics to be addressed include skepticism, natural philosophy, and rationalism, and the relationship of these to questions of morals, culture, and religious belief, including divine grace and the role of religious institutions.

From the beginning of the Abrahamic faiths and of Greek philosophy, religion and morality have been closely intertwined. In this class, we explore to what extent a secular ethical theory is possible. Readings range from antiquity to modernity, including Plato, Kant, Maimonides, Heidegger, and Simone Weil. These authors will help us answering questions, such as, ‘Do I need God’s assistance to become a good person?’, ‘Does the normative power of the moral law require God’s existence?’ ‘Does God need to reveal the moral law in order for me to know it?’

Is there a God—and if there is, how do natural things point to God’s existence? Do humans possess an innate awareness of God’s existence, or must God’s existence be demonstrated by reason? Is human knowledge possible without special assistance from God? This course explores these questions through the philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, two of the greatest medieval thinkers. Topics covered include the metaphysics of natural objects, arguments for (and against) God’s existence, the innate knowledge of God, and the theory of divine illumination. We will compare, contrast, and critically assess each thinker’s arguments and consider how their thought remains relevant today.

This course is on the religion, philosophy, and intellectual history of China and introduces the student to the worldview and life experience of Chinese as they have been drawn from local traditions, as well as worship and sacrifice to heroes and the cult of the dead. Through a close reading of primary texts in translation, it also surveys China’s grand philosophical legacy of Daoism, Buddhism, “Confucianism,” and “Neo-Confucianism.”

Why do we tell stories? Myths and legends can help us understand what the people who created them have valued at different places and times. These texts have been interpreted as vessels of national identity, points of access to divine truth, indices of level of civilizational development, and pedagogical tools. They have also inspired some of the most compelling works of art ever produced. Students in this course will learn more about some of the many cultures of Eurasia, the world’s largest continent, spanning West Asia (the Middle East), Central Asia, and Eastern Europe, from these cultures' perspectives. They will read about what role Raven played in the creation of the world, learn the secret of the legendary Simorgh, and watch the tragic love story between a forest spirit and a human. They will consider the links between ancient folklore and contemporary fantasy. They will also have the opportunity to think about the role these stories play in the cultures that produced them and in their own lives. This class is co-taught by two scholars with different backgrounds: a historian of West Asia and the United States and a specialist in the literature of Russia and the former Soviet Union. In this class, students will learn how scholars in different disciplines (including not just literature and history but also folklore and anthropology) might approach the same works very differently and learn how to articulate their own scholarly positions. Assignments include a folklore collection, an in-class presentation on one of the cultures studied, and a creative adaptation of a myth. Students will also be graded on class participation and given weekly online reading quizzes.

The English word “love” encompasses a variety of meanings: love of one’s family, love of one’s country, love for a friend, even God’s love, but the subject of much Western poetry and popular songs for centuries, to say nothing of countless stories, is erotic love—our desire to possess another, to become one with another. In Japan’s classical literature, erotic love is often seen as a kind of “demonic” or spiritual possession, an out-of-body passion so powerful that it transcends even death. In this course we will explore how this view of love compares to our own views, as depicted in Japanese fiction, poetry, and drama. If our view of love has been largely shaped by our Judeo-Christian tradition, the various images of love we find in Japanese literature were shaped by a quite different tradition: the indigenous religion of Shinto (‘the way of the gods’), and Buddhism and Confucianism imported from China. How different are these views from our own? If we believe that erotic love is a universal human attribute, how and why does culture, ours or any other, rein in such basic human impulses and to what end?

During the 19th and 20th centuries many European intellectuals attempted to explain and define “religion” often in an effort to explain it away. Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman famously declared that God was dead and Sigmund Freud maintained that religion was nothing more than an illusion. Others assured that religion was soon to disappear and that science and art would occupy the space that it once held. In this course we will examine how several 19th- and 20th-century Spanish writers attempted to represent the changing definitions of religion, challenges to them, and religion’s supposed disappearance. Through an exploration of the fictional worlds these authors create, we will grapple with the questions these writers so desperately tried to answer: Was religion disappearing? Was it being replaced? Was it transforming? If so, what did this mean for Spain during this time? What would it mean for Spain’s future?

Though William Faulkner is one of the most significant and critically scrutinized novelists of the 20th century, both the author and his work remain shrouded in mystery. How did this seemingly provincial writer from the rural American South, with almost no formal education, come to be one of the most internationally influential, acclaimed, and debated writers of the 20th century? Why do his morbid and exhaustingly difficult stories continue to inspire critical interest with each new generation of readers? What questions and concerns animated his radically experimental imagination? Of all the mysteries that continue to haunt this vast critical legacy, there is perhaps none more intractable than the matter of religion. Though Faulkner's novels are charged with biblical references and elaborate Christian symbolism there is no scholarly consensus as to the significance and function of these disorienting and often grotesque biblical allusions, or even whether the fiction is grappling with any distinctly religious questions or concerns. Though some theologically minded critics, such as Thomas Merton, have heralded Faulkner’s fiction as biblically prophetic, there are others who interpret his work as fundamentally secular, deeply critical of religion, and even nihilistic. This course will explore the matter of Faulkner and religion by focusing on the influence of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures on several short stories, public addresses, and major works. The course will not only provide an opportunity for deep reflection on the relationship between theology and literature—metaphysics and modernism—but also the opportunity to engage one of the most enduring, challenging, and rewarding novelists of the 20th century.

This course engages critically and charitably with the discipline of women’s and gender studies from a Catholic theological perspective, examining the tensions and intersections between these two domains. The work of Catholic philosopher Prudence Allen provides the backdrop of the course, namely her framework for categorizing different approaches to conceptualizing the sexes based on the criteria of equal dignity and differentiation. We will use (and modify) this basic schema in considering various historical and contemporary approaches to the nature and relationality of the sexes. We will revisit ancient cosmologies, compare pre-modern approaches (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hildegard), trace the querelle des femmes (“the woman question”) debates of early modernity, and consider modern and contemporary conceptions of sexual difference that arise in the era of feminism. After following this historical arc, we will move into an in-depth, comparative analysis of concurrent 20 th - 21 st century developments in 1) secular gender theories (e.g. Beauvoir, Butler, Bettcher) and 2) Catholic theology of sexual difference (e.g. Stein, von le Fort, von Balthasar, John Paul II, and Catholic “new feminism”). With this substantive foundation in place, the course will culminate by considering “live questions” and controversies about men and women in our current cultural context, both within the Church and across society as a whole. A recurrent theme of this course is that the claims one makes about gender arise from underlying assumptions about the nature of reality as a whole. These foundational assumptions must be teased out and clearly articulated in the process of meaningful dialogue and reaching conclusions on normative questions. This process of “framework articulation” will be an integral part of course lectures, class discussions, and written assignments.

How did the medieval Church’s great women mystics create a space where they could connect with God? Despite enclosure in convents, many medieval nuns held religious authority and contributed to the life and literature of the Catholic tradition. Paradoxically, the convent was a privileged space of female culture, where women authors and mystics flourished. This course will explore the spaces, both architectural and spiritual, where medieval nuns explored their relationship with God and wrote to help the souls of others. Focusing on Germany and on remarkable women such as Hildegard of Bingen, students will contextualize medieval women's mysticism in its historical milieu, including the realities of female enclosure, the daily round of convent life, and liturgical worship. We will compare mysticism in the convent to the writings and social context of women mystics in the city or at noble courts. In Spring 2025, this course will make a class trip to Germany during Spring Break to visit the sites of medieval convents and continuously active communities of nuns. Students must apply to the instructor to participate in this course.

This course serves as an introduction to the ways in which the Holocaust has been remembered and examined through literature, from early survivor narratives to second-generation works and the recent culture wars in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Although the course will provide a very brief introduction to the historiography of the Holocaust, our main focus is on close readings of various literary works. That is, we will study how trauma is mediated, transformed, and communicated through written works. Contingent upon funding, the course will include a study tour to Berlin and to Auschwitz, where we will visit memorials and documentation sites, speak to representatives of Jewish organizations, and get a better sense for the continuities of Jewish life in Central Europe throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. All expenses for this study tour will be covered by the University, and students must be able to commit to the entirety of the trip.

This course is designed both as the gateway philosophy requirement for the Minor in Philosophy, Religion, and Literature and as a upper-division philosophy course.

In this interdisciplinary course, students will trace the development of Christian theology and culture in Eastern Europe: from the baptism of Rus in 988 to the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and from the liturgical theology of Fr Alexander Schmemman to the arthouse religious cinema of the post-Soviet period. Throughout the course, students will grapple with the "accursed questions" that have long defined Russian religious thought, while also examining the diverse and divergent images of Christ presented by Russia's greatest theologians, artists, philosophers, and writers.

Combining philosophy and literature in a study of romantic love, this seminar will include works by Plato, Shakespeare, and Thomas Mann, as well as exploring more recent movies and Catholic writings.

This course explores how theology and literature can combine to enrich our understanding. Focusing on the work of Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and Primo Levi, students will address questions such as: ‘How does the way we use language bear upon our notions of truth?'; ‘How are the intellect and the imagination engaged by literary texts?'; ‘How does all this relate to how we think about God, human nature, and the relationship between them?' Such questions will be addressed, in particular, by reflecting on how the texts studied invite us to think about love, forgiveness, vulnerability and creativity.

We will focus on a tragic tradition that challenges philosophy's ideals of dignity, reason, and self-control. Key authors will include Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, and Thomas Mann. We will also plan to attend a performance of Wagner's opera The Rheingold. This course is the Philosophy and Literature gateway seminar for the Minor in Philosophy, Religion, and Literature, but it is open to other students.

This course has as its essential context the crisis of authority of discourse in the modern period subsequent to literature gaining independence from Christianity. It focuses specifically on the three main postures literature strikes vis-a- vis confessional forms of Christianity no longer thought to have cultural capital. (i) The antithetical posture. Here Christianity is viewed exclusively in negative terms as repressive, authoritarian, and obscurantist, the very opposite of the true humanism that is literature?s vocation. Readings here include Voltaire and Camus. (ii) The retrievalist posture. This posture is fundamentally nostalgic. The loss of Christianity?s cultural authority is mourned, and literature is seen to be an illegitimate substitute. Readings include Dostoyevski and Marilyn Robinson. (iii) The parasitic posture. Here Christianity is criticized but not totally dismissed. Portions of it are savable, especially select elements of the New Testament which emphasizes human being?s capacity for knowledge and freedom. Central here is the work of the Romantic Shelley and American Transcendentalist Emerson. In addition to these, we consider James Joyce. In addition to the figures and texts covered in the class, I will refer in passing to quite literally dozens of authors who illustrate one or other of these positions. Perhaps one of them is a favorite of yours.

In this course we will explore the profound connections between literature, science, and what it means to be human. We will carry out such exploration by reading together the work of Jewish Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi, doing so in the light of one of the central ethical principles governing Levi's work: friendship. Jewish Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi is considered one of the most important authors of the 20th Century. Levi's The Periodic Table (1975) has been referred to as "the best science book ever", and his If This Is A Man (1947/1958) is widely regarded as one of the most thought-provoking accounts of humanity ever to have been written. We will read both of these, together with a number of other works by Levi, including poems, essays, short stories, and a novel. By doing so we will give ourselves the opportunity of diving deeply and fruitfully into reflection on some vital questions: what is a human being? what is the relationship between friendship and truth? what is the relationship between suffering and knowledge? how are the humanities and the sciences connected to each other?

Taught in Italian, this course offers the opportunity for an in-depth study of Italian life, history, art, and religion, through detailed study of one of Italy's best known and most loved cities: Siena. One of Italy's great medieval cities, Siena stands to this day as one of the most interesting, intriguing and fascinating examples of defining dynamics of Italian culture: the inspiring relationship between art and public life; the nourishing importance of food and wine; the fruitful tension between tradition and innovation; the constructive encounter of sacred and secular. Siena is home to some of Italy's most wondrous art (Duccio, Martini, Lorenzetti, Beccafumi) and some of its most breathtaking architecture (its Duomo, its Palazzo pubblico). It also produces some of Italy's most distinctive food and wine products (carne chianinia e di cinta senese, panforte, Chianti). In the late Middle Ages it was the home of Saint Catherine and Saint Bernardino, as well as one of the most powerful political and economic centres in the Italian peninsula. It is home still today to one of Italy's most lively, intense, dynamic, and controversial traditions: the Palio. All of this life, culture, and devotion is brought together in Siena in and through the contrade, a form of communal living originating in the Middle Ages and evolving ever since. It is also all brought together in and through a particularly profound devotion to Mary, to whom the city has been dedicated since 1260. In all of these respects - and more - to study Siena is to give yourself the opportunity of enriching in uniquely profound ways your understanding of Italy. Through its research component, the course will allow you to do so by developing in academically rigorous ways your own specific and particular interest in Italian life and culture.

In this course, we will be reading Dante?s Commedia as well as works by Aristotle and various ancient and medieval philosophers. Our aim will be to understand the way an Aristotelian worldview informs the Commedia. We will look at the cosmology of the work and how it responds to ancient and medieval theories of the cosmos. We will also investigate the ethics of Dante?s famous journey to hell, purgatory, and heaven with a view to identifying its Aristotelian elements. For instance, what is the role of pleasure in the ethical life? What is the highest good of the human being? How should human beings live in such a way as to achieve their highest end? All readings will be in translation.

When European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic, it precipitated American Transcendentalism, this nation's first great literary movement. The Transcendentalists were a loose group of rebels, dreamers, and freethinkers who, inspired by both the American Revolution and the new European philosophies, set about the immodest task of remaking America - and thence, they hoped, the world. Inspired by resistance to their radical ideas, these men and women - including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May Alcott -launched a daring movement to renew American religion and philosophy and create a new and genuinely American literature - and, as if that weren't enough, to reform a nation shot through with the contradictions of slavery, economic inequality, social injustice and environmental destruction. Did they succeed? Was their idealism a noble dream destroyed by the violence of the Civil War? Or did their hard work bring real progress to an American society still indebted today to this band of dreamers? That's our dilemma: both answers are correct. How are we still living the consequences of their failures, and their successes? Can their dreams still speak to us today, in our own moment - shot through as it is with so many similar contradictions?

What is religion? What is literature? And why should we study them together? This course (a gateway seminar for the PRL minor) will provide a rigorous introduction to the study of religion and literature. Readings will be drawn primarily from the Western tradition, and authors will include Augustine, Dante, Dostoevsky, Flannery O'Connor, and Jorge Luis Borges.

The quest for living a life near to and consecrated to God has been a fundamental goal for Christians since the beginning. One of the most important ways of achieving this goal has been through the formation of communities living deliberately through a particular rule and set of customs, sustained by a liturgical practice, and nurtured through artistic processes and the artistic products of members of the community. This course explores these subjects, over time and in many modes of religious life. Students learn how to understand the great varieties of experiments with religious life that have been conducted over the centuries, some of them still active and flourishing today. Why is Christianity a powerfully communal faith? How do Christian communities dialogue with God. How have the arts made by Christian communities sustained them, especially as related to practices of worship? Every week we engage with these questions, but from numerous theological positions. Religious communities who seek to live close to God often emulate the communal life established by Jesus for and with his disciples. Religious orders have reformed and refined the sense of community found in the New Testament, especially as they have tried to recreate the first century in their own times. But they have also constantly revisited the practices established in the first century, and looked at the writings of the saints who developed later communities of prayer. This course studies the classic and most influential documents created to govern ways of life, including the Rule of St. Benedict, the Rule of St. Augustine, and comparable documents from the Cistercian, Carthusian, Dominican, Franciscan, Carmelite and Bridgettine religious orders. Our study incorporates views of the ways of life still practiced today, including the Benedictine nuns of Regina Laudis (Bethlehem, CT) and the male and female branches of the Congregation of the Holy Cross (CSC). In each case, there will be investigation of the literary, musical, architectural and visual arts of the featured communities, with emphasis on works of both male and female artists.

This course offers an entree to themes at the intersection of liturgy, theology, and aesthetics. The class will introduce students to major questions in theological aesthetics as they relate to liturgy. To what extent is beauty part of divine revelation, and how does "liturgical beauty" reveal? What role does art, drama, and poetry play in liturgical rites? Is there a beautiful way to participate in the liturgy, and if so, what is it? How does one judge the beauty of a prayer, a rite, a church, a sermon, or a piece of music? The course will examine these questions, not simply through an examination of systematic texts but through historic study of specific incarnations of liturgical beauty. These incarnations of beauty will include rituals, prayer texts, sermons, devotional books, mystagogical treatises, liturgical drama, poetry, hymnody, architecture, as well as painting and iconography.

To imagine is to form a mental concept of something which is not present to the senses. Imagination therefore deals with "framing". Like everyone else, Africans ponder over their condition and their world on the basis of their experience, history, social location and other realities which provide the "frame" through which they construct and address reality. In this course, through the study of some significant African literary works and some literary works about Africa we will study the self-perception of the African and the way the African has ethically viewed his / her reality and tried to grapple with it over a period of time (colonialism, post colonialism, apartheid) with regard to various issues on the continent (political challenges, religion, war and peace) and over some of the social questions (class, urbanization/ city life, sex and sexuality, relationship of the sexes), etc. We will read such authors as Joseph Conrad, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chimamanda Adichie, Syl Cheney-Coker, Tsitsi Dangaremga, Nawal El Sadawi, Ferdinand Oyono , and some others. Using these and many authors we will ask questions about what constitutes the moral imagination, how such an imagination is manifested in or apparent in the social, personal and religious lives of the various African peoples or characters portrayed in these literary works; to what extent the moral sense has helped/ conditioned or failed to influence the lives of these peoples and characters. We will also inquire into the extent and in what ways the writers in our selection have helped to shape the moral imagination of their people.

This course will focus upon Plato's Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Symposium.

What is love? How is love related to the ideal and how does the attempt to live out love's ideals bring the ideal and the real into collision? Why does love so often seem to fail, or even to open us up to greater kinds of failure than had we never loved? Why is love so often bound together with - death? We will explore these questions by philosophically working through the most prominent philosophical project devoted to understanding the nature and implications of this collision, the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and his psychology of passion and the self. We will read selections from the foundational works in which he develops a variety of perspectives concerning the collision of passion and life (including Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death), paying caring attention to the difference between the three different perspectives he provides on love: the "aesthetic" understanding of love, the "ethical" understanding of love, and the "religious" understanding of love. We will be particularly concerned with how love can be incorporated (or not incorporated) into the structure of the self and the results of so incorporating it. We will therefore also pay careful attention to idea of the self, temporality and anxiety, and the possibility of the self's misrelation, that is, despair - especially focusing on his analysis of the ultimate cause of despair and the possibility of its being overcome.Following Kierkegaard's lead, we will frequently recur to theater and drama in order to bring these ideas to bear upon narratives of love. We will be particularly concerned with classical ballet, the form of art most persistently concerned with just this collision of the ideal of passion and the reality of love lived out in action. We will analyze the basic aesthetic elements of ballet - how it utilizes music, motion, and narrative to develop an idea?and use this knowledge to carefully observe the collision between the ideal and the real, the relation between anxiety, temporality, and love, and the danger posed by despair to the fulfillment of love in Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Adolph Adam's Giselle, Minkus's Don Quixote, Prokofiev's Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, and Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. We will also consider Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.

In the wake of the Reformation-era's massive upheavals came the greatest flowering of devotional poetry in the English language. This body of literature offers its readers the opportunity to explore questions pertaining broadly to the study of lyric and to the study of the relationships between religion and literature. Early modern devotional poetry oscillates between eros and agape, private and communal modes of expression, shame and pride, doubt and faith, evanescence and transcendence, mutability and permanence, success and failure, and agency and helpless passivity. It experiments with gender, language, form, meter, voice, song, and address. We'll follow devotional poets through their many oscillations and turns by combining careful close reading of the poetry with the study of relevant historical, aesthetic, and theological contexts. You'll learn to read lyric poetry skillfully and sensitively, to think carefully about relationships between lyric and religion, and to write incisively and persuasively about lyric. Authors we'll read may include Thomas Brampton, Richard Maidstone, Francesco Petrarca (in translation), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne Locke, Mary Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Henry Constable, Fulke Greville, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and the great hymn writer Isaac Watts.

G. K. Chesterton was a man with many sides, but this course will confine itself to only one, and that is his theological front. About his conversion to Catholicism he wrote to a friend, "As you may possibly guess, I want to consider my position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am to be inside it or outside it." We will consider his position by reading primary works in theology that led up to and followed his decision, among them "Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man," biographies of St. Thomas and St. Francis, "The Thing," and "What's Wrong with the World." In these we will follow his own advice that "To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. It is so in exactly the same sense in which to recover from palsy is not to leave off moving but to learn how to move."

In Western cultures, no single volume has inspired as much creative work - and as wide a range of creative responses - as the Bible. The study of the Bible in turn deeply influenced the discipline of literary studies, as ways of reading and interpreting the Bible gave rise to practices of literary interpretation. In this course, you'll have the opportunity to participate in centuries-old traditions of discussing, interpreting, and responding creatively to biblical texts. We will read key narratives from the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament alongside literary adaptations and interpretations by authors including William Shakespeare, Robert Southwell, Mary Sidney, George Herbert, John Milton, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Martin Luther King, George Oppen, Marilynne Robinson, Dawn Karima Pettigrew, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Written assessments will include responses to our readings and analytical essays. There will also be a creative option for the course's final written project.

The philosopher Mircea Eliade, in his classic work, The Sacred and the Profane (1957), states: “Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane” (10). Seemingly oppositional modalities, the sacred and the profane are central to the poetics of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the author of such works as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky, who for a lifetime preoccupied himself with pro and contra states of being and action, complicates the bearing of oppositionality itself. Idiots, madmen, ascetics, holy fools, buffoons, schismatics, zealous monks, self-sacrificing women, and other eccentric personalities make up Dostoevsky’s oeuvre and speak to his enduring interest in a broader understanding of the sacred and the profane, which in this course, we will examine as umbrella categories to better understand the ways in which the author complicates the relationships between them. Could this direction help us elucidate Dostoevsky’s approach not only to ethical issues and life’s “accursed questions” but also to eccentricity and otherness in general? Closely studying the contradictions and instances of symbiosis arising in each of these categories within their historical, religious, socio-cultural, and medical contexts will help us in our endeavor, as well is provide insight into our own fascination with this celebrated writer of human personality for whom perhaps the sacred was also a way of orientation in chaos.

Dostoevsky’s fascination with Shakespeare and his inquiry into the “accursed questions” began when only a teenager. Both authors are interested in the visibility of action as a manifestation of subterranean issues, what seems and what appears, and the psychic drama reflective of political and cultural problems that their characters internalize. In this course, we will explore the complex layering that allows the two authors to explore and comment on the dialectical relationship between human beings, the self’s interaction with the self, and the role of art for the audience. Can the two authors’ works be considered life manuals where they lay out the poetics of existence? We will be looking at some of their works, including Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), Hamlet (Shakespeare), and others, as processes where the first step is to identify societal issues as riddles, followed by the acknowledgment that a certain riddle is a worthy pursuit.

In her book Wonderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Sulnit writes, "The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts." In this course we will examine notions of journey, pilgrimage, space and subjectivity through the lens of walking. We will look at representations of walking in a variety of genres: essay, graphic novel, fiction, film, prose and poetry and use the practice of walking as a platform to write provocative texts that contemplate the body, architecture, language, philosophy, religion, nature, music and film. Students will engage with course themes and motifs by writing fictions, poems and essays of their own.

How did the New Testament come to be? This course will offer a critical introduction to the documents that make up the canon of the New Testament, considering questions of both origin (authorship, date, circumstances) and content (structure, purpose, theology). Beginning with the earliest traditions about Jesus, the course will in turn examine the entire New Testament as well as some non-canonical texts.

This course explores the light that the Book of Job can shed on our understanding of the relationship between literary and theological reflection. An initial reading of the Book of Job itself will open up the questions (concerning, for example, human vulnerability and divine unknowability) that will then provide the conceptual focus for the rest of the course; in which we will examine texts - by Primo Levi, Shakespeare, Dante, Julian of Norwich, Gregory the Great and Catherine of Siena - shaped in different but richly complementary ways by a profoundly compelling engagement with the questions raised by Job. Through such examination, and in conversation with contemporary literary and theological studies, students will be invited to reflect closely on the distinctive contribution that the coming together of literary and theological reflection can make to our thinking about meaning and truth.

Dante I and Dante II are an in-depth study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its historical, philosophical and literary context, with selected readings from the minor works (e.g., Vita Nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia). Dante I focuses on the Inferno and the minor works; Dante II focuses on the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Lectures and discussion in English; the text will be read in the original with facing-page translation. Students may take one semester or both, in either order.

Dante I and Dante II are an in-depth study, over two semesters, of the entire Comedy, in its historical, philosophical and literary context, with selected readings from the minor works (e.g., Vita Nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia). Dante I focuses on the Inferno and the minor works; Dante II focuses on the Purgatorio and Paradiso. Lectures and discussion in English; the text will be read in the original with facing-page translation. Students may take one semester or both, in either order.

Why did the Middle Ages produce so many legends, so many stories about gods, heroes, and fantastic events? What do the origins of these stories tell us about medieval European culture and the way it used both writing and the fantastic? What do the differences between different versions of the same story reveal about the stories' audience and composition? Why do some of these stories still resonate powerfully today? These are the kinds of questions we will ask as we survey a range of medieval works representing a variety of literary traditions, including Anglo-Saxon (Beowulf), Norse (the Poetic Edda and Hrolf Kraki's Saga), French (the Song of Roland), Italian (the Inferno), Welsh (the Mabinogion), and Finnish (Kalevala).

This class introduces John Milton's poetry in the context of his life and times and with attention to current critical issues. Much of the course will be focused on Milton's major poems: his early masque, Comus, his grand epic, Paradise Lost, his brief epic, Paradise Regained, and his late tragedy, Samson Agonistes. We will also explore Milton's influence on the Romantics and beyond, looking at William Blake's water-color illustrations of Milton's poetry, at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and at the Miltonic influence in classic Frankenstein films and in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI has said that the two greatest evangelical tools we have are the Arts and the Saints. This course examines the lives of the saints and the way their stories have been told through the ages. Part of our larger goal, then, will be retrieving this particular art of storytelling. Students will be asked not only to read the lives of the saints, but to write the life of a saint, too. In order to examine these stories most fully, we will spend time thinking about topics such as scriptural exegesis, martyrdom, relics, the communion of saints, medieval legends, art, and modern vitae or novels.

In the medieval play The Castle of Perseverance, a stage direction indicates that the Devil should go to battle against Mankind with gunpowder burning out of his hands, ears, and arse. The spectacle must have been at once terrifying and hilarious. But how on earth was it staged? This course will consider early English dramatic representations of the Father of Lies, pondering whether audiences were meant to laugh at the Devil or with him. In the first half of the semester, we will study demons and the characters who invoke them in traditional sacred drama, from the earliest surviving play written in England through the three major genres of medieval English theater: the cycle play, the saint’s play, and the morality play. We will see the Devil prosecute Adam, Satan tempt Jesus, King Herod slaughter the Innocents, and the Vices lure Mankind to damnation. Combining demonic dissimulation with cunning craft, they make sin appear glamorous, not only to other characters in the play but also, perhaps, to the audience. In the latter half of the course, we will turn to the crafty villains of early modern commercial theater and closet drama. The new genres of history and tragedy confront the audience with diabolical characters that nevertheless seem charismatic or sympathetic. Spanning nearly 300 years of dramatic performance, our readings will push us to consider how medieval and early modern playwrights represent the nature of evil and the bounds of human freedom. Course Readings: Le Jeu d’Adam; The York Corpus Christi Plays; The Digby Mary Magdalene Play; The Castle of Perseverance; Mankind; Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus;William Shakespeare, King Richard III, King Henry IV Part I, Othello; Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Miriam; Ben Jonson, The Devil is an Ass; John Milton, Comus.

This course will cover eight of Shakespeare's plays: All's Well That Ends Well, The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Othello, and The Winter's Tale. In each case we will focus on the dramatic representation of intractable ethical problems and ask how the play encourages its audience to reflect on moral conflict. In addition to the plays, readings will include material on classical ethical theories as well as modern moral philosophy.

The course highlights a series of topics, personalities, and ideas of Russian religious thought from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. The overview is provided against the background of religious history of Muscovy and Russia, with its wide, and often neglected, variety of denominations and spiritual movements - Orthodox, Old-Believing, Sectarian, Catholic and Protestant. Special attention will be given to the role religious thinkers and theologians from Ukraine played in the intellectual history of the Russian Empire. The course is based on reading and discussion of primary texts in translation. The students will be introduced to the works of Feofan Prokopovich, Hryhory Skovoroda, Piotr Chaadaev, Aleksey Khomyakov, Vladimir Solovyov, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel Florensky, Georges Florovsky, and Alexander Schmemann. Thematically, the course material is focused on topics of political theology, theology of history, theology of culture, theology of ritual, and issues of Christian unity.

If you know anything about the Victorians, you probably think of them as uptight and judgmental. That was certainly how the people who became their children and grandchildren saw them. But their preoccupation with correct moral behavior was for them the pursuit of heroic ideals. They dreamed of grand actions undertaken out of commitment to noble principles and the common good. This class will involve the intensive reading of four Victorian works that express Victorian longings for a goodness big and glamorous enough to be almost mythic. We'll read two narrative poems: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, about a woman's formation into a poet and Alfred Lord Tennyson's Victorian adaptation of Arthurian legends Idylls of the King. We'll also read two Victorian novels, Charles Dickens's Bleak House and George Eliot's Middlemarch, which associate the romance of doing good with the romance of the marriage plot. We'll also sample from a wide variety of Victorian economic, political and scientific thought that complicated the Victorians' longing for goodness. Along the way we'll confront the same questions the Victorians did: What are your obligations to your community? Should only local injustice matter to you? Does the definition of goodness depend on historical context? When is commitment to ideals a form of integrity and when is it fanaticism? Is the world simply too complex for individual goodness to matter?

To imagine is to form a mental concept of something which is not present to the senses. Imagination therefore deals with “framing”. Like everyone else, Africans ponder over their condition and their world on the basis of their experience, history, social location and other realities which provide the “frame” through which they construct and address reality. In this course, through the study of some significant African literary works and some literary works about Africa we will study the self-perception of the African and the way the African has ethically viewed his / her reality and tried to grapple with it over a period of time (colonialism, post colonialism, apartheid) with regard to various issues on the continent (political challenges, religion, war and peace) and over some of the social questions (class, urbanization/ city life, sex and sexuality, relationship of the sexes), etc. We will read such authors as Joseph Conrad, Amos Tutuola, Chinua Achebe, Athol Fugard, Wole Soyinka, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chimamanda Adichie, and Nawal El Saadawi. Using these and other authors we will ask questions about what constitutes the moral imagination, how such an imagination is manifested in or apparent in the social, personal and religious lives of the various African peoples or characters portrayed in these literary works; to what extent the moral sense has helped/ conditioned or failed to influence the lives of these peoples and characters. We will also inquire into the extent and in what ways the writers in our selection have helped to shape the moral imagination of their people.

This course examines theology and poetry as two forms of attentive living directed toward love of God and neighbor through a comparative consideration of the meaning of work and the experience of time. These issues are examined in each of the four main parts of the course. In the first part, we examine attentiveness as a distinctive intellectual and spiritual problem for our time. In the second part, the focus will be on social scientific theories of work and how these relate to recent studies about subjectivity and the valuation of work in digital spaces (especially workplaces). In the third part of the course, the focus will shift to the construction/disciplining of subjectivity in Christian liturgical and monastic practices, focusing especially on the interplay of communal prayer and manual labor that has traditionally been part of Christian monastic discipline. In the fourth part, we conclude with a consideration of the work of creating and "reading" art (especially poetry and painting) in light of the social changes to work and the theological interpretations of work studied in the preceding parts of the course.

Gerard Manley Hopkins has a strong case for being the greatest Roman Catholic poet after Dante. He is certainly among the greatest among those who have written in English. But Few realize that Hopkins’s theological writings are among the most creative and far-reaching of the late nineteenth century. This class introduces students to Hopkins’s greatest poems and theological essays, his education at Oxford, his formation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, and his relationship to theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Bl. John Duns Scotus, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Supplementary readings will include the nineteenth-century Anglican and Catholic divines that influenced Hopkins, such as Henry Liddon, Benjamin Jowett, Brooke Foss Westcott, J.B. Lightfoot, William Bernard Ullathorne, Frederick William Faber, and St. John Henry Newman.

This course has as its central context the crisis of discursive authority in the modern period both subsequent and consequent to literature gaining its independence from Christianity and its central focus on the different attitudes literature takes towards Christianity on a spectrum that at one end is unrelentingly critical as anti-humanist and at the other affirming of Christianity rather than literature as the true humanism. The reading list includes Camus, Dante, Joyce, Dostoyevski, and Shelley.

In the Philosophy, Religion, and Literature Capstone Seminar, students in the PRL minor work one-on-one with a faculty member on a capstone project. The capstone project will typically be an essay of at least 25 pages on a topic of the student's choosing which has the approval of the faculty member directing the project and which brings together themes in philosophy and/or religion with literature. In addition to the main advisor, each student will also work in consultation with another faculty member from a different discipline but one also related to the student's interdisciplinary project. The capstone project will be evaluated by both faculty members.

Advanced survey of Aquinas's philosophical writings on human nature, such as The Treatise on Human Nature (Summa Theologiae 1a 75-89), his Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, and Disputed Questions on the Soul.

A comprehensive consideration of the major themes in Kierkegaard's thought, including: the relation of faith to art, knowledge and morality, the nature of subjectivity, what constitutes effective philosophical communication, etc. Main texts vary, but include the following (in whole or in part): Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, and Sickness unto Death.

A critical survey of thinkers, ideas, and works in Islamic political philosophy.

This course will focus on the last 120 years in literary history, zeroing in on one particular problem - the writing of religious poetry - in order to probe the philosophical collisions that resulted in what we now call our "post-secular" era of thought. Beginning with Gerard Manley Hopkins at the end of the nineteenth-century and major modernists who continued to write powerfully after WWII - T.S. Eliot, David Jones, W. H. Auden - the syllabus will chart a course through the rapidly changing poetic forms of two further generations of poets working devotedly, if differently, out of various religious systems of belief. The many dilemmas of postmodernity include redefining the very notion of "belief" itself after the secular revelations of science and modernity; we will explore the theoretical issues involved in order to better understand what's at stake for each writer we encounter, among them Brian Coffey, Wendy Mulford, Fanny Howe and Hank Lazer. We will ask, among other things, why ancient mystical frameworks seemed newly hospitable, for some, in the face of postmodern suspicions about language and institutions, while for others embracing the sciences renewed faith; we will consider the crucial input of Judaism in Christianity's rethinkings of language and religious experience as well as consider how issues of race and gender inflect changing relationships between poetry and religion. Students will emerge conversant with major debates in contemporary literary theory as well as with developments in poetry since Hopkins; perhaps even more importantly, they will each have had the chance to research some particular aspect of our subject(s) that arouses passionate interest and results in an article-length term paper developed slowly over the course of the semester. In other words, this course offers students the exciting (and measured, not frantic) experience of writing toward publication, just as their professors do. In addition to the term-paper, seminar-level participation is expected, as well as two days of leading class discussion (partnered by a classmate or two). No prior expertise in reading poetry is necessary for this course. (Note: if you have taken my University Seminar, The Death and Return of God in Radical Poetry, you may not take this course; it shares too many of the same materials.)

A close examination of several philosophical themes and arguments within the first thirteen questions of the first part of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, as well as texts elsewhere in his work on faith, and related discussions in other authors as the occasion arises. The course will focus upon certain topics to the exclusion of others. Topics of particular interest in the thirteen questions are the relationship between what Aquinas calls Sacra Doctrina and the exercise of reason apart from Sacra Doctrina in relationship to the nature of philosophy; the nature of faith, the demonstration of the existence of a god, the simplicity of a god, the perfections that pertain to a god, our knowledge of God, and how we speak about God.

A directed reading is the equivalent of a regular PRL course in terms of assigned reading and writing. The student and faculty advisor determine the reading list and writing assignments. It may not duplicate an existing course. Students must complete the required forms in order to receive permission to take the course.

This class teaches how to use the basic tools and concepts of economics to analyze the economic effects of legal rules, regulations, and enforcement methods. Examples of this "economic approach" to the study of the law are taken from the basic bodies of law in a civil society: property law, tort law, contract law, and criminal law. The course also explores the role of the state in creating and enforcing a body of law that promotes economic growth and development.

A one- or two-credit colloquium required for the PPE minor devoted to the critical reading and discussion of one or two major works, normally taken each semester for three semesters following the Justice Seminar for a total of 3 credits.

With consent of instructor and approval of department, advanced students are permitted to take a tutorial with a faculty member. Readings will be assigned in a particular area and writing assignments required.