For course days and times, please go to Course Search and Enroll
Jump to Fall 2025 Undergraduate Courses
Jump to Fall 2025 Graduate Courses
Summer 2025 Courses
210-1 Reason in Communication June 16 – July 13 ONLINE
Instructor: TBD
Online: Asynchronous.
Argument in familiar contexts; emphasis upon developing critical skills in comprehending, evaluating, and engaging in contemporary forms of reasoning, with special attention to the uses of argument in mass communication media.
210-2 Reason in Communication May 19 – June 15 ONLINE
Instructor: TBD
Online: Asynchronous.
Argument in familiar contexts; emphasis upon developing critical skills in comprehending, evaluating, and engaging in contemporary forms of reasoning, with special attention to the uses of argument in mass communication media.
211 Elementary Logic June 16 – July 13 ONLINE
Instructor: TBD
Online: Asynchronous
The formal characteristics of logical truth and inference.
241 Introduction to Ethics June 16 – July 13 ONLINE
Instructor: TBD
Online: Asynchronous.
Nature of moral problems and of ethical theory, varieties of moral skepticism, practical ethics and the evaluation of social institutions.
243 Ethics in Business June 16 – August 10 ONLINE
Instructor: TBD
Online: Asynchronous.
Case studies of moral issues in business; types or reasons appealed to for settlement.
244 Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Ethics June 16 – August 10 ONLINE
Instructor: TBD
Online: Asynchronous.
Introduction to contemporary moral and political issues in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Ethics, integrating urgent problems, controversies, and continuously updated case studies. Introduces basic technical concepts such as the bias/variance tradeoff, the reference class problem, and inductive risk. Covers topics such as data and privacy, the impacts of automation on society, and the use of algorithms in medicine and criminal law.
341 Contemporary Moral Issues May 19 – June 15 ONLINE
Instructor: Peter Vranas
Online: Asynchronous.
Under what circumstances, if any, is abortion morally permissible? Should the death penalty be abolished? What causes terrorism, and is it ever morally permissible to torture terrorists? This course teaches students how to think systematically about these fascinating questions. The emphasis is not on defending particular answers but is instead on providing students with the tools they need to reach their own answers.
441 Environmental Ethics June 2 – June 22 MWR 8:00 – 10:00am ONLINE
Instructor: Frederic Neyrat
Online: Synchronous: Requires participation in online learning at the day/time listed.
Adequacy of ethical theories in handling such wrongs as harm to the land, to posterity, to endangered species, and to the ecosystem itself. Exploration of the view that not all moral wrongs involve harm to humans. Inquiry into the notion of the quality of life and the ethics of the “lifeboat” situation.
Fall 2025 Undergraduate Courses
For course days and times, please go to Course Search and Enroll
Jump to Fall 2025 Graduate Courses
101-2: Introduction to Philosophy
Instructor: TBD
Introduction to various philosophical questions and to the strategies that philosophers use to address these.
101-3: Introduction to Philosophy
Instructor: Michael Titelbaum
My 8-year-old daughter once asked me, “Why isn’t it okay to hurt someone’s feelings if you don’t like them?” I responded that it’s never okay to hurt anyone, no matter how you feel about them. She said, “I know that. I’m just trying to wonder it deeply.”
Philosophy is a business of wondering deeply. Sometimes we wonder about things that are obvious, so we can understand them better. (Do I have free will? How do I know the universe is more than 5 minutes old?) Sometimes we wonder about things that are difficult, or controversial. (Is there a right way to live? Can I trust the opinions of experts?) But more than just wondering, philosophers make progress on these questions by reasoning through them carefully and rigorously. Come join the fun!
101-4: Introduction to Philosophy
Instructor: Farid Masrour
What is the meaning of life? What is the nature of consciousness? Are there moral rights or wrongs? Do we have free will? Does God exist? Can AI really think? Philosophers have asked questions like these for a long time, long before natural sciences such as physics, biology, and chemistry emerged out of philosophy. This course surveys and evaluates some of the answers that philosophers have given to such questions. However, our goal is not merely to learn about philosophical ideas and methodology; an equally important goal is to reflect on a broader set of questions about philosophy’s role in addressing them. Many scientists and scientifically minded philosophers think that natural sciences provide answers to some or even all of these questions. For example, they argue that scientific methods fully explain consciousness, that everything is ultimately physical, that free will is an illusion, and that moral values are merely products of societal conventions. But is this correct? And how should our answer to this question inform our conception of philosophy and its role in intellectual inquiry? Throughout the course, we will discuss these questions in depth. In doing so, we will not only assess the limits of scientific explanation but also consider whether philosophy itself has a distinctive contribution to make.
101-5: Introduction to Philosophy
Instructor: Alexander Roberts
A remarkable feature of many central questions of philosophy is that they can be stated in particularly simple terms. Does God exist? Do we have free will? When is an act right or wrong? What are we able to know about the world? However, as we will see in this course, these easily statable questions are far from easy to answer. To attempt to determine their answers, we will study and critically evaluate some of the most influential arguments in the history of philosophy. Throughout the course, students will become acquainted with the distinctive methods of philosophy. In the graded assignments, students will be expected to apply these methods in justifying their own answers to philosophical questions.
101-6: Introduction to Philosophy
Instructor: Annina Loets
Many people ask themselves philosophical questions from time to time. If God exists, why is the world so messed up? What is beauty? Am I justified in believing the experts? Does anyone ever truly have a choice? Would it be wrong to get an abortion? Philosophers don’t merely ask themselves such questions, but they aim to provide general and principled answers to them and to support these answers by rational argument. The aim of this class is to introduce you to a wide range of influential philosophical arguments and get you started on crafting good arguments of your own. If you do the work, this class will teach you how to think, speak, and write more clearly, and how to employ these skills in pursuing the questions you care about, whether philosophical, or not.
101-7: Introduction to Philosophy
Instructor: Martha Gibson
The aim of this course is to introduce the student to philosophy, both the subject matter and the method. We will study some different areas in philosophy and the problems and questions addressed therein. But we will also study how philosophers go about answering these questions – what kinds of arguments they give, what reasons led them to their views. We will evaluate whether their arguments are good ones and try to understand what work needs to be done to build adequate accounts of such things as knowledge, free will, moral goodness. The different areas of philosophy we will study include the following : Epistemology or the theory of knowledge which is concerned with questions about the nature and extent of knowledge; Philosophy of Religion, where we will examine arguments for and against the existence of God; Ethics, where the focus will be on whether there really is such a thing as right or wrong, and if so, what makes something right or wrong; and finally, Free Will, where we will examine whether human beings can have free will if their actions are a part of the natural, causal order.
104-1: Spec Topics in Philosophy for Freshmen FIG and Honors Optional
Topic: Death and Sex
Instructor: James Goodrich
The natural and social sciences tell us something about who and what we are. How should this affect what we should and shouldn’t do with our lives? In this course, we will approach this broad question within two different topics: Death and Sex. We will consider questions like, “What is Death?,” What are we?,” “What makes death bad and life good?,” “What makes killing wrong?,” “What is sexual orientation?,” “How does sexual consent work?,” “What is biological sex?,” “What is gender?,” and “How and to what extent do the natural and social sciences help us answer these questions?”
104-2: Spec Topics in Philosophy for Freshmen FIG
Topic: Children, Marriage and the Family
Instructor: Harry Brighouse
This is a class in moral philosophy that examines the ethical questions surrounding family life. We shall be looking at a series of issues concerning a very specific area of morality: the issues concerning children, parents, and family life. What moral norms or values ought to guide both public policy and personal behavior? How should those norms guide us? So, it is very tightly focused on issues that you ought, already, to have thought about. In addition to the philosophical readings, we will be reading a good deal of non-philosophical literature. In order to reflect critically on the norms and values relevant to the family, we have to know something about the family: what families have actually been like and what they actually are like, as well as about their effects on the social environment. Here are just three of the topics we will discuss:
• Should parents be licensed?
• Should the government promote marriage?
• How much should parents control their children’s values?
The class involves reading, a little lecturing, and a lot of discussion. The new ideas you encounter will stretch your imaginations, will also help you to think better about some of the central decisions in your life, like whether to have children, how to raise them, whether to marry (and if so, who you should choose!). We’ll form a community of learners: you will get to know your classmates. You will discover that, even within a small class, students have had very different experiences of family life, and you will get to understand and reflect on their perspectives. No prior exposure to Philosophy is needed; and most students find, to their surprise, that they want to take at least another course on the same kinds of issues.
210-1: Reason in Communication
Instructor: TBD
Argument in familiar contexts; emphasis upon developing critical skills in comprehending, evaluating, and engaging in contemporary forms of reasoning, with special attention to the uses of argument in mass communication media.
211-2: Elementary Logic
Instructor: John Mackay
This course is an introduction to formal logic, the study of valid reasoning. An argument is valid if its conclusion follows from its premises. We will study methods for proving that an argument is either valid or invalid. Much of the class will involve working with a formal, symbolic language in which the form of sentences is made explicit. We will study both truth-functional and quantificational logic and use a deductive proof procedure for each.
211-4: Elementary Logic
Instructor: Bruno Whittle
Logic is the study of arguments. An argument, in this sense, is a bit of reasoning, that starts from certain assumptions, and extracts some piece of information from these. For example: Helen is a bear; all bears gamble; therefore, Helen gambles. There are two things that we can ask about an argument. (a) Are the starting points true? And (b) does the end point really follow from these? We will focus on (b). (Your other classes should all, in one way or another, help you with (a).) We will learn some general techniques for determining whether a claim follows from some others. These will allow us to evaluate arguments regardless of their subject matter—be it chemistry, politics, or where to go for dinner. We will use a precise artificial language that allows perspicuous representations of natural language arguments, and that also allows rigorous methods for determining what follows from what.
211-5: Elementary Logic
Instructor: Alex Meehan
We often reach conclusions by means of arguments, in which we put forward a series of premises on a conclusion’s behalf. A crucial question is whether the purported conclusion really does follow from its premises. Logic is the study of reasoning and this relation of “following”. One way to approach following is to consider a range of arguments, both good and bad, in the hope that the difference between what logicians call “valid” arguments (in which the relation of following is present) and “invalid” ones (in which it’s absent) will eventually sink in. But we will proceed more systematically. Elementary Logic will be a course in formal or symbolic logic. We’ll begin with arguments stated in English. We’ll translate these ordinary-language arguments into a symbolism or artificial language, in which the features on which validity depends are laid bare. We’ll then apply formal techniques in order to decide whether the original English arguments are valid. Might this method lead us astray? Are there types of arguments or reasoning that our formal techniques cannot capture? We will touch on these “meta” questions, among others, as the course proceeds.
241-2: Introductory Ethics Fulfills Category B
Instructor: TBD
The course will examine a number of prominent moral theories including utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue theory. We will attempt to understand and evaluate their various claims about what has fundamental value as well as their approaches to moral reasoning and recommendations for right action.
241-3: Introductory Ethics Fulfills Category B
Instructor: Emily Fletcher
In this course we will investigate the ethical dimension of human life. What makes an action right or wrong? What obligations do we have to other people or the community and what do we do when these obligations conflict? What makes someone a good or bad person? How do we make ethical judgments and can they be objective? We will examine three historically important theoretical approaches to ethics (virtue ethics, utilitarianism and Kantian ethics), as well as objections that have been raised against each of them.
241-4: Introductory Ethics Fulfills Category B
Instructor: Russ Shafer-Landau
This course presupposes no prior philosophy background and will offer a lightning survey of such topics as the nature of the good life, the meaning of life, free will, whether morality is just ab human creation, the basic principles of moral duty, and a handful of contemporary moral issues such as animal rights and abortion.
241-5: Introductory Ethics Fulfills Category B
Instructor: TBD
The course will examine a number of prominent moral theories including utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and virtue theory. We will attempt to understand and evaluate their various claims about what has fundamental value as well as their approaches to moral reasoning and recommendations for right action.
243-1: Ethics in Business
Instructor: TBD
Case studies of moral issues in business; types or reasons appealed to for settlement.
243-2: Ethics in Business
Instructor: TBD
Case studies of moral issues in business; types or reasons appealed to for settlement.
244-1: Introductory Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Data Ethics
Instructor: Annette Zimmermann
In-depth examination of contemporary moral and political issues in AI and Data Ethics, integrating urgent controversies and continuously updated case studies. Covers topics such as the use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement; algorithmic decision-making in hiring, finance, medicine, and education; the ethics of AI-powered creativity; the rights of those interacting with AI (e.g. the right to be treated as a individual, the right to an explanation, and the right to be forgotten) as well as the rights of artificial agents themselves. Includes critical engagement with cutting-edge research in applied moral/political philosophy, such as on competing theories of justice and political legitimacy as well as on key normative concepts like trust, accountability, autonomy, privacy, explainability, coupled with relevant recent work in computer science and applied statistic
304-1: Topics in Philosophy: Humanities
Instructor: Harry Brighouse
Note: Enrollment is limited to First-Year Interest Group Students who took 304 in Fall 2024. This course is about love, sex, friendship and partiality. Philosophers spend a lot of time thinking about the structure of thought, language, and reasons. They have, at least in the western tradition, paid less attention to the more visceral and emotional aspects of human experience. In this course, we’ll use some of the tools developed in philosophy to examine questions central to most of our lives: what makes a relationship a friendship?; what do we owe our friends, and how can we be good friends?; what is love, and why is it such an important feature of human life?; when is love bad, and when is it good?; what is sex?; when is sex wrong, and when is it good?; can friends be lovers? We’ll take our starting points as the readings that I have assigned. But this is primarily a discussion-based class; I want you to think hard about what we read and the issues that get raised, and to contribute to each other’s (and my) learning about them.
341-2: Contemporary Moral Issues Does NOT fulfill Comm B requirement
Instructor: TBD
A philosophical study of some of the major moral issue in contemporary society, such as those concerning abortion, euthanasia, punishment, property, politics, sex, nuclear disarmament, and world hunger.
341-3: Contemporary Moral Issues Does NOT fulfill Comm B requirement
Instructor: TBD
A philosophical study of some of the major moral issue in contemporary society, such as those concerning abortion, euthanasia, punishment, property, politics, sex, nuclear disarmament, and world hunger.
341-4: Contemporary Moral Issues Does NOT fulfill Comm B requirement
Instructor: Peter Vranas
Under what circumstances, if any, is abortion morally permissible? Should the death penalty be abolished? What causes terrorism, and is it ever morally permissible to torture terrorists? This course teaches students how to think systematically about these fascinating questions. The emphasis is not on defending particular answers but is instead on providing students with the tools they need to reach their own answers.
341-5: Contemporary Moral Issues Does NOT fulfill Comm B requirement
Instructor: TBD
A philosophical study of some of the major moral issue in contemporary society, such as those concerning abortion, euthanasia, punishment, property, politics, sex, nuclear disarmament, and world hunger.
341: Contemporary Moral Issues Fulfill Comm B requirement
A philosophical study of some of the major moral issue in contemporary society, such as those concerning abortion, euthanasia, punishment, property, politics, sex, nuclear disarmament, and world hunger. (Fulfills Comm B requirement).
Lec. 92 Instructor: TBD Fulfills Comm B
Lec. 94 Instructor: TBD Fulfills Comm B
Lec. 94 Instructor: TBD Fulfills Comm B
430-1: History of Ancient Philosophy
Instructor: Paula Gottlieb
Metaphysics and Epistemology in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle
Unscrupulous politicians, democracy in peril, foreign interference, fake information, and the plague. Welcome to Athens in the fifth century BCE! The philosopher Socrates, who lived in such turbulent times, said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and his most famous follower, Plato, argued that the examined life requires consideration of what we can know (epistemology) and what exists (metaphysics). In this class we’ll be studying in depth and with close attention to the texts, Plato’s, Aristotle’s and earlier philosophers’ attempts to answer the following questions: What sorts of things are there in the world? Is a world of change consistent with a world of enduring objects? What would be a satisfactory account of unity and diversity? What sort of knowledge, if any, can we have of the world in which we live? Why are reason and logic important? Why become a philosopher and what is the difference between the philosopher and the sophist?
Good participation in section is required. There will also be tutorials. Class participants will be asked to write a series of 1500-word essays answering specific and challenging questions on assigned texts or particular topics. They will then come in pairs to see the instructor for an hour or so, during which time they will read out and discuss their work. Grades will be assigned to the written work. The point of the tutorial is purely educational and fun
432-1: History of Modern Philosophy
Instructor: Steve Nadler
In this course we will read a selection of philosophical works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was a crucial period for the early development of modern philosophy (which, at the time, included what we now consider “science”). The philosophers we will study will be drawn from among René Descartes, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, George Berkeley, David Hume and Immanuel Kant. We will cover topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical theology, and moral and political philosophy.
440-1: Existentialism
Instructor: Henry Southgate
Feeling like life is absurd, that existence is meaningless? Worried that you aren’t living authentically? Then a course in Existentialism is just what you need. Study the classic texts of this intellectual movement that expressed despondency about Western civilization, its decadence, and its values, and that explored the implications of the concept of freedom for the nature of the self and the meaning of life. Along the way you’ll meet the likes of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and De Beauvoir.
454-1: Classical Philosophers
Topic: Plato and Aristotle on Friendship
Instructor: Paula Gottlieb
What is friendship? Why is friendship important? What kinds of people make the best friends? Can lovers be friends? Can parents be friends with their own children? Can you be happy without friends? Can you be friends with an inanimate object? When, if ever, should you break off a friendship? What is the connection between friendship and a just society?
We’ll be considering these questions and others as we read Plato’s Lysis and selections from Aristotle’s ethical and political works.
There will be at least two tutorials. Class participants will be asked to write a series of 1500-word essays answering specific and challenging questions on assigned texts or particular topics. They will then come in pairs to see the professor for an hour or so, during which time they will read out and discuss their work. Grades will be assigned to the written work. The point of the tutorial is purely educational and fun.
The class will be run like a seminar, with a great deal of discussion. There will also be three tutorials. Class participants will be asked to write a series of 1500-word essays. They will then come in pairs to see the professor for an hour or so, during which time they will read out and discuss their work. Grades will be awarded to the written work. The point of the tutorial is purely educational and fun.
503-1: Theory of Knowledge Fulfills Category A
Instructor: TBD
A survey of problems concerning the nature, sources, and limits of human knowledge, including such topics as scepticism, the concept of knowledge, sensory perception, evidence, justified belief, induction.
516-1: Language and Meaning Fulfills Category A
Instructor: John Mackay
The course will cover some of the main themes in the philosophy of language. The human ability to communicate information about the external world through language is remarkable and raises a number of philosophical questions. Topics to be considered include: what it is for a linguistic expression to be meaningful; how it could come about that a linguistic expression – which is at some level just an arbitrary group of sounds or symbols – could have a meaning; how both the mind and the external world interact with language to determine meaning; how speakers use and manipulate language in different settings to communicate different kinds of information; and the way in which the meaning of a term depends on context.
530-1: Freedom Fate and Choice Fulfills Category A
Instructor: Martha Gibson
This is a course on the freedom of the will. We will cover the following kinds of material: classic arguments from fatalism and determinism to the effect that human beings do not have free will; ‘compatibilist’ accounts of the freedom of the will which maintain that we can have freedom of will, even if past events and the laws of nature determine what we do; and ‘reason-responsive’ accounts which tie the freedom of the will to the agent’s ability to make rational decisions. We will examine the sort of cases in which it seems people do not do what they do of their own free will— e.g., cases in which the impediment seems internal and psychological, (addiction or phobia) and cases in which the impediment seems external (coercion). We will see whether it is possible to give a theory that accounts for all of our intuitions about when people do act of their own free will. Readings will include classic philosophers—Descartes, Locke, Moore— but most of the material will be from more contemporary sources—Van Inwagen, David Lewis, P.F. Strawson, Rogers Albrittion, Gary Watson, Harry Frankfurt, and others.
541-1: Modern Ethical Theories Fulfills Category B
Instructor: James Goodrich
Physicists are after the “theory of everything” — a single, elegant, and unified theory that explains everything about the physical universe. Could there be such a theory for morality? Could a single, elegant, and unified theory explain the morality of war, abortion, and ghosting your ex? In this course, we will dive deep into moral philosophy and ask how close humanity has come or could come to uncovering “the moral theory of everything.”
541-2: Modern Ethical Theories Fulfills Category B
Instructor: TBD
Ethical theories and problems as discussed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prerequisites: Junior Status 3 credits in philosophy or consent of instructor.
541-3: Modern Ethical Theories Fulfills Category B
Instructor: TBD
Ethical theories and problems as discussed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prerequisites: Junior Status 3 credits in philosophy or consent of instructor.
549-1: Great Moral Philosophers Fulfills Category B
Instructor: Russ Shafer-Landau
This course will consider a number of central moral questions–what is the nature of human flourishing? What is the ultimate standard of rightness? Where does morality come from?–as they are addressed in classic texts by Plato, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Mill, and a handful of 20th century thinkers.
549-2: Great Moral Philosophers Fulfills Category B
Instructor: TBD
Major themes of moral philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Bentham and Mill, with critical study of outstanding works.
551-1: Philosophy of the Mind Fulfills Category A
Instructor: Farid Masrour
This course surveys central topics in contemporary philosophy of mind. We will discuss issues such as the relationship between the mind and the physical world, whether a scientific understanding of consciousness is possible, theories of mental representation, the nature of perceptual experience, and whether minds could be modeled as computers.
551-1: Philosophy of the Mind Fulfills Category A
Instructor: TBD
Nature of mind (mental states such as thinking and feeling) and its relation to physical states, with emphasis on recent advances in philosophy and psychology.
553-1 Aesthetics Fulfills Category B
Instructor: Bruno Whittle
The aim of this class is to think, talk and write about art. Questions considered may include the following. What is art? What is the point of it? Can we evaluate art objectively? Is arguing about taste pointless? Is art a form of self-expression? If so what exactly does it express? What is style, and what is beauty? There will be an emphasis not just on thinking and talking, but also on writing: form as well as content, experimenting with different ways of writing. To this end, we will read mainstream philosophical texts, but also essays in different styles (e.g. by artists or critics).
555-1 Political Philosophy Fulfills Category B
Instructor: Harry Brighouse
This course is an advanced introduction to political philosophy as it is practiced today. We shall look at leading contemporary theories of distributive justice, such as egalitarian liberalism and libertarianism, and shall explore contemporary issues of interest to political philosophers, such as the rights and responsibilities of victims of injustice, justice and the family, justice in the education system, and how justice matters for personal and intimate relationships.
555-2 Political Philosophy Fulfills Category B
Instructor: Annette Zimmermann
This course is a discussion-heavy, highly interactive, advanced introduction to contemporary analytic political philosophy. We will cover three broad themes: competing theories of state authority, and their implications for the obligation to obey the law, for the ethics of political resistance, and for different justifications of punishment; competing theories of distributive justice, and their broader implications for topics like global justice, intergenerational justice, and environmental justice; as well as competing theories of democracy, and their implications for the value of democratic legitimacy, the accountability of public officials, and for taking collective responsibility for wrongdoing.
562-1: Special Topics in Metaphysics
Topic: Time Travel
Instructor: Peter Vranas
If you believe that time travel is a frivolous topic, good for science fiction but not for rigorous scientific or philosophical investigation, think again. The physical possibility of time machines has recently become the subject of an active debate in leading physics journals. Concurrently, the philosophical literature concerning the metaphysical issues related to time travel has mushroomed. This course examines the physics, the metaphysics, and the paradoxes of time travel. No knowledge of physics is presupposed.
562-2: Special Topics in Metaphysics
Topic: Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
Instructor: Alex Meehan
Physics is one of our best sources of knowledge about the nature of the world. The theory of quantum mechanics is an incredibly successful physical theory that allows us to predict the behavior of microscopic systems like particles. But this theory is also infamously difficult to interpret. If you have heard about quantum mechanics, you may have heard that it tells us some surprising and novel things, such as: systems change their behavior depending on whether we are observing them; consciousness plays a role in fundamental physics; cats can be both dead and alive simultaneously; the universe is fundamentally indeterministic. Does quantum mechanics actually have these implications? If not, what does it tell us about the world? This class will explore these questions. We will look at the formalism underlying the theory of quantum mechanics, and then we will investigate the various interpretations of that formalism that physicists and philosophers have proposed, and assess the philosophical issues at stake. No background in physics is required, however students will be expected to learn some mathematical formalism, such as how to add and subtract vectors and take inner products, as we go along. If you are not sure if you have enough math background, please contact the instructor. (More details on the math background: If you learned about vectors in high school or a university math class that is probably enough; if you don’t have that specific background but are otherwise comfortable with formal areas, such as symbolic logic, that may also be enough, but you should email the instructor to check.)
562-3: Special Topics in Metaphysics
Topic: TBD
Instructor: TBD
An intensive study of one or more topics such as: existence, universals and particulars, space and time, individuals, individuation, categories, substance and attribute, necessity, events and processes.
Fall 2025 Graduate Courses
For course days and times, please go to Course Search and Enroll
701 Reading Seminars (combined with Graduate Seminars) nstructor Consent
701-001 Reading Seminars Topic: TBD
Instructor: TBD 701-001 meets with 835-1. Please see the description of 835-1 below.
701-003 Reading Seminars Topic: TBD
Instructor: TBD 701-005 meets with 920-1. Please see the description of 903-1 below.
701-004 Reading Seminars Topic: Taxonomy and Classification
Instructor: Aja Watkins 701-005 meets with 941-1. Please see the description of 920-1 below.
701-006 Reading Seminars Topic: TBD
Instructor: TBD 701-005 meets with 941-1. Please see the description of 941-1 below.
835-001 Advanced History of Philosophy
Topic: TBD
Instructor: TBD
Seminar on the history of philosophy focusing on a period or figure(s).
902-001 Proseminar in Philosophy
Instructor: Alex Roberts and Jesse Steinberg
The seminar for incoming students is required. It provides a background in core analytic philosophy across diverse specialties. There will be a close reading of texts and an emphasis on writing skills
903-1 Seminar: Epistemology
Topic: TBD
Instructors: TBD
Seminar on epistemology.
904-1 Teaching Philosophy
Instructors: Harry Brighouse
Becoming a better teacher requires that you have good content knowledge, but it also involves the development and practice of complex skills. What we’ll do in this class is very preliminary: we’ll introduce you to some specific strategies that will help you induce your students to learn; we’ll develop a common language for discussing teaching and (by actually discussing specific instances of teaching and learning); and we’ll introduce you to some intellectual resources for considering and reflecting on the kinds of issues that will arise regularly throughout your career as a teacher. Because we want to introduce strategies, because strategies can’t work without content, and because there is some literature we want you to think about, we’ll structure most classes by using the strategies we want you to learn to facilitate discussion of the literature we want you to think about.
920-1 Seminar-Philosophy of Science
Topic: Taxonomy and Classification
Instructor: Aja Watkins
Scientific inquiry is often facilitated by the organization or categorization of objects or processes into classes or kinds. This course will investigate what it means to taxonomize or classify the natural world, how scientists identify criteria on which to base their classifications, and the impact that classification has on scientific investigation. Students will have an opportunity to become experts at classification practices in their areas of interest, as well as develop an understanding of relevant philosophical literature on natural kinds and related topics.
941-1 Seminar – Ethics
Topic: TBD
Instructor: TBD
Seminar on ethics.