Course Offerings

The course provides tools for the analysis of reasoning and the construction and evaluation of arguments. Examples from newspaper articles and theoretical discussions of science and social policy will be discussed.

Analysis and critical evaluation of key socio-political concepts: the state, civil society, power and authority, individual freedom, property, human rights, justice, democracy, liberalism, conservatism, authoritarianism versus totalitarianism. Ideas of theorists like Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Rawls and others will be discussed.

An introductory study of a fundamental tool of rational thought: deductive logic. The basic concepts, principles, and techniques of formal logic are studied: valid and invalid arguments, the logical structure of statements and arguments, use of a symbolic language to represent arguments and symbolic techniques to facilitate their analysis and assessment.

Analysis and critical evaluation of the concepts of law, rights, and related categories and problems: commands, social rules, moral rules, primary and secondary rules, sovereignty, international law, war, punishment, social justice, property. Texts of classical and contemporary authors will be closely read and analyzed in class.

An examination of one or more themes in existentialist thought. Topics to be investigated will include authenticity, anxiety, being and meaning.

**Please note that this course was previously titled, "The Quest for World Peace". If you have previously taken PP230 under that title, you will not receive additional credit for this one. Please speak to the undergraduate advisor if you have questions.

This course explores issues related to the ethics of war and peace. In includes discussions of just war, ‘the duty to protect’ innocent third parties, the moral claims of combatants and non-combatants, terrorism, civil war, revolution, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, the ethics of post-war reconstruction and reconciliation (including the notion of political forgiveness), the concept of self-defence, the idea of ‘total war,’ the ethics of civil disobedience (violent and non-violent), arms races, and more. These and other issues will be explored against the background of more theoretical topics such as the limits of legitimate political authority, the problem of evil, and the problem of individual responsibility in collectives.

A survey of modern philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche. The Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement, idealism, positivism, utilitarianism, traditionalism and liberalism will be possible topics of discussion.

A survey of themes in 20th century philosophy, including such movements as pragmatism, logical empiricism, ordinary language philosophy, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, and the bridging of the so called analytical/continental divide.

This course explores core questions about the nature and compatibility of freedom, determinism, and responsibility. We will examine competing accounts of compatibilism and incompatibilism, and explore such questions as whether or not freedom and responsibility require alternative possibilities. Our ultimate aim will be to clarify what is necessary for free will and responsibility.

This course aims to introduce students to the thought of Emil Cioran. Considered by French critics as one of the foremost French-language stylists and awarded numerous literary prizes (Rivarol, Sainte-Beuve, Combat, Nimier), Cioran is little-known in North America. Romanian-born, he lived and worked in France from 1937 until the end of his life in 1995. His works contain a mixture of skeptical, Nietzschean and existentialist themes (anxiety, despair, suicide, the struggle with and against God and faith, mysticism, etc.).

While alive David Hume earned the nickname “The Great Infidel”; posthumous publications further cemented his reputation as the arch-critic of philosophical theism. But Hume explicitly denied both atheism and deism, frequently claiming to support “true religion”. After examining his most significant writings on religion, we shall explore three differing theories concerning Hume’s genuine stance on religion: the first deems Hume an “attenuated deist”; the second, an atheist/agnostic; the third, a defender of “true religion”.

This course will focus on an intersection of contemporary continental philosophy and feminist philosophy. We will investigate feminist phenomenology from historical, interpretive, and contemporary perspectives. We will begin with the foundational feminist phenomenological text The Second Sex and trace its effects through the work of Iris Marion Young, Sandra Bartky, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Franz Fanon. Themes we may investigate include ageing and temporality, bodily comportment, race, queer phenomenology, and spatiality and body size.

A study of historical and contemporary philosophical debates surrounding death and mortality.  Topics may include: the badness of death; the desirability of immortality and death’s contribution to the value of life; the rationality of fear of death; well-being in the face of mortality; grief; the survival of future generations.

If one grants that our actions flow from our characters—from the kinds of people we are, including our preferences, prejudices, and dispositions—then it seems that we can be responsible for our actions only to the extent that we are responsible for the characters that lead to them. In his infamous “basic argument” Galen Strawson argued that the kind of character one has is beyond one’s control, in which case we cannot be morally responsible for any of our actions. Philosophers have responded to Strawson’s argument in a variety of ways, but one of the most influential replies takes the form of Robert Kane’s libertarian theory of free will. Kane argues that we can interrupt the influence of the past and shape our own characters through the performance of “self-forming actions.” Such actions are the product of undetermined free choices that set new precedents for future action. Because such choices are undetermined, however, many worry they are the product of luck and so cannot serve as the ground for an agent’s moral responsibility. We will assess the resilience of Kane’s theory in the light of several versions of the luck objection, and we will explore some recent suggestions about how to reconceive the role that indeterminism might play in undetermined choices in an effort to avoid this objection.

This course explores claims made for cultural recognition and their normative status. Topics examined may include: the role of cultural membership and its relationship to individuals; claims for cultural recognition and their connection to concepts such as equality and justice; historical injustice and reparation; colonization and imperialism; liberalism and cultural diversity; individual rights and collective rights; toleration and its limits; human rights and global diversity; women and multiculturalism; and secularism, public reason, and cultural diversity.

This course will explore two aspects of the relation between philosophy and literature: philosophy in literature and philosophy of literature. From the very beginnings of literature, in the West with ancient Greek poets and playwrights, and earlier in works such as the 18th BCE Sumarian Epic of Gilgamesh, literature has explored philosophical questions of ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, logic and aesthetics.

But we may also ask philosophical questions about literature. These questions include what is the nature of tragedy and of comedy, what is literature and what isn’t, what is the ontological status of literature and of literary claims, what is the truth value of literary claims and forms like metaphor, and how does literary fiction work.

In this course we can’t cover all these topics, and we can’t read dozens of books. But we will make a start at exploring what literature is and how it contributes to philosophical knowledge.

Theories of personal autonomy focus on specifying the conditions some action, desire, decision, motivation, or life must meet in order to count as truly an agent’s own.  While some feminists have been critical of the value of theorizing about autonomy given its roots in an ideal of a detached, atomistic, contracting self, others recognize its value for analyzing the ways in which various forms of oppression affect the extent to which one is able to govern one’s own life.  The broad term, relational autonomy, covers work on theories of personal autonomy that take seriously the ways in which the self is embedded in and constituted by relations of various kinds; these relations include personal, political, social, historical, institutional, epistemological, metaphysical, physical, and legal relations.  In this course, we will engage the debates about how best to articulate and defend a theory of relational autonomy.

Descartes famously sought to retreat in order to inquire after knowledge in solitude: “I resolved to seek no other knowledge than that which I might find within myself, or perhaps in the great book of nature.”  Similarly Emerson, in his essay "Self-Reliance", emphasizes the good of intellectual self-determination: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion..the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” 

 Mainstream analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition has, in this vein, valorized the enlightenment ideal of intellectual autonomy, to the point where it long neglected to seriously consider the significance of epistemic environment and the social dimensions of knowledge. 

It is only in the past several decades that mainstream Anglo-American philosophy has taken up feminist philosophy’s more long standing interest in social epistemology.  

 This course will look at one of the most obvious dimensions of the social in connection to human knowledge: belief and knowledge gained via the testimony of others.  We will study the main theories of testimonial justification, and read Miranda Fricker’s groundbreaking work on malfunction and injustice in the reception of testimony, Epistemic Injustice.  We will read and consider critiques, extensions and applications of Fricker’s work, and also read recent work on trust and mistrust and epistemic vice and virtue, considering how we shape and are shaped by our epistemic environment.  

Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (WWR), published in 1819, is one of European philosophy’s most untimely works. The book sets out to overturn the historicizing trend in German philosophy exemplified in the pervasive influence of Hegel. Because it historicises ontology—Being just is the progressive development of Geist in time—Hegelianism is an intrinsically progressivist philosophy, a temporally unfolding version of Leibnizian theodicy. Schopenhauer thought this was shallow nonsense. The world is essentially pain, suffering, death and decay—the aimless, inescapable and historically unchanging striving of universal Will. Seeing this accurately, according to Schopenhauer, requires both overcoming Hegel and rehabilitating Kant. After grapping briefly with the fundamentals of Kantian metaphysics, we will read WWR closely, in the process discovering the deep appeal of a philosophy of pessimism. Contrary to its poor reputation (we still live in the shadow of Hegel, after all) we will see that philosophical pessimism can attune us to the profundity of tragic art, illuminate an ethic of compassion and pave the way to a more lucid and therefore emancipatory politics.

That the lives of human persons are temporally extended is clear.  But how or to what extent we take this into account in our theoretical and practical understanding of ourselves is less apparent.  Can we make sense of our life as a whole, or even large sections of it?  And is there any advantage to thinking in these terms?  Does our focus on present and short-term interests compete with the longer view of what is meaningful or valuable?  And, vitally, what propels us forward into the future and what obstacles can impede us?  This course will explore our lives in time through consideration of new and recent work on meaning, mortality, and the self.  Topics may include: varieties of self-constitution; well-being at and over time; boredom; depression; alienation; hope; longevity; and interest in the future beyond one’s own lifetime.

What constitutes human agency? What role does practical reason play in human agency? What role do the emotions play in human agency? What role does agency play in broader considerations of personal identity?  We will consider these questions as well as explore the notion of human freedom and the debate between (roughly) Humean and Kantian perspectives on the relation between (moral) motivation and desire.  We will examine these questions through the work of Harry Frankfurt, Christine Korsgaard, Susan Wolf, Charles Taylor, R. Jay Wallace, David Velleman, and others.

In the MA Research Seminar, students share their work in progress while developing their major research papers. Discussion of student projects and research questions in the early stages enables more rapid development of research skills, as students learn from the critique of their own and their peers’ work. The research seminar affords students the opportunity to get started in earnest on their MRP in the winter term so that substantial progress is made before spring. The distinctive theme of our program means there are common threads, concepts and problems amongst student projects even in disparate subfields. Students gain valuable insight and ideas from hearing other student work, and acquire valuable skills in learning to constructively interrogate and critique each others’ work. Getting started on what might otherwise be an intimidating project is collaborative.