Course Offerings

*this course can be found in LORIS under the subject-heading "History & Philosophy of Science"

An introduction to central topics in the history and philosophy of science in Western culture up to the end of the 18th century, including discussion of the emergence, success and relative prestige of science; the concepts of progress and revolution; and the establishment and implementation of the Newtonian worldview in its social context.

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.

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.

An introduction to modern philosophy, which will discuss its beginnings in the Renaissance and its development in the 17th and 18th centuries. Discussion will focus on thinkers such as Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Rousseau and Kant. The rise of science, modernity, the Enlightenment, empiricism, rationalism and idealism will be possible topics for discussion.

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.

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.

Traditionally, personal identity as a metaphysical issue has focused on the question, what is the criteria for a person’s persistence over time? The question became extremely pressing once philosophers rejected the notion of a single persisting and indivisible soul, and instead viewed us as reducible to complexes of changing physical and/or psychological elements. Reductionist attempts to answer the question have favoured a psychological criterion of identity, though some have proposed a physical criterion. One of the more radical strands of psychological reductionism involves the assertion that, given the malleability of the psychological relations over time that make up personal identity (relations that can weaken and even divide into separate streams), identity ought not to matter to us. The first part of this course examines reductionist accounts of personal identity from their origins in early modern philosophy through to the 20th century. The second part of the course considers recent supplements and alternatives to the traditional debate. Some of these emphasise practical over metaphysical identity, and introduce normative considerations about personal relations. Some have called for an increased attention to our role as agents. Others have emphasised narrative self-constitution, which involves in part determining for oneself who one really is. Yet another approach focuses on the phenomenology of the self, claiming that our sense of self is of a fleeting thing, barely present for more than a moment at a time. And a significant new entry into the field argues that personal identity theory has been misguided from the outset: instead of asking about persistence over time we must determine what kind of thing we are, the answer being we are biological entities or animals; had we settled this point first, it is suggested, many of the traditional disputes and wilder speculations within personal identity theory may never have gained ground.

This course will examine the relationship between conceptions of personal love and ideas of personal identity.  Romantic love, as a form of personal love, will be given specific attention. Some of the issues that we will explore are: Do we love ‘persons’ or is love directed towards ‘properties’?; the difference between the ‘grounds’ and the ‘object’ of love; a Euthyphro problem; Does romantic love require reciprocity? What role does ‘identification’ play in love?  Is the beloved ‘non-fungible’?

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics examines the question of how to live a good human life where the goodness of that life implies that it is intrinsically satisfying to the person living it. While there is broad agreement that a good human life will be a happy life, there remain disagreements about what constitutes a happy life. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle develops an account of the happy or excellent human life as a life of virtuous activity. He rejects the idea that a good or happy life can be achieved by following a list of ethical rules and instead develops an account of the virtuous life which includes, for example, sensitivity to the sort of situation one is in (is it time to be funny, to be courageous, to be generous?), the ability to identify and choose the mean, and the cultivation of appropriate sorts of emotional responses.

In this course, we will engage in close textual analysis of the Nicomachean Ethics; we will focus not only on developing sophisticated philosophical responses to Aristotle’s arguments, but also on the logically prior task of constructing well-supported textual interpretations.

Some philosophers argue that none of us can truly be responsible for our actions, since free will is an illusion. But many other philosophers and most ordinary folk do believe that persons can be responsible for their actions. Which actions? Surely not all of them—if you are stronger than I, grab my arm and use it to punch out the Dean, surely I am not responsible for having knocked out the Dean. If you put arsenic in the sugar bowl and I offer it up, unknowingly, to a guest who wants to sweeten her iced tea, surely I am not responsible for poisoning my guest, even if I am causally linked to her poisoning.

In this class, “Responsibility and Ignorance,” we will think about cases like this last one—the case where I, acting in ignorance, unknowingly poison my guest. When are persons responsible, or are they ever responsible, when they act in ignorance of some relevant fact? What about cases of moral (as opposed to factual) ignorance? Suppose that I think killing an innocent at the behest of my mob boss is showing loyalty and so morally laudable, not morally wrong. Can I be morally responsible for my own moral ignorance, and for acts that stem from such moral ignorance? Under what conditions, and why or why not? We will read mostly contemporary philosophers on this topic, that of the epistemic conditions on responsible action.

We will investigate the particular nature of photography and how it has shaped our understanding of the world and ourselves. Photography is different from other forms of image making by virtue of its causal connection to the world. But it is used to both reveal truths about the world and obscure them. A good subtitle for this course would be photographic detection and depiction. These two functions work in concert, making photography an unparalleled tool for investigating the world. What Patrick Maynard termed the engine of visualization, photography aids detection of what there is by producing marked surfaces that are eye-readable; unlike charts and graphs, unlike even writing, photography presents the world in a format that requires no special skills, indeed no skills beyond those we already possess from infancy by opening our eyes and looking. In this way, photography has taken a central role in our lives. From the outset the uses of still and moving photography have emphasized not just their causal creation (documentary) but their imagining function (fiction).  We will focus on this connection and explore its impact on the aesthetic nature of photographs.

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.

An exploration of the concept of love and its relation to the emotions in general. We will look at both historical and contemporary work in the philosophy of emotions as well as recent work in the field of moral psychology. The aim of this course is to give students a better sense of what is meant by calling love an emotion.

There is a longstanding assumption that the metaphysics of personal identity and our practical concerns about ourselves and others are inherently linked.  But forging that link has proven highly problematic.  This course is about that problem. 

 Personal identity theory is traditionally interested in the criterion for re-identifying a person over time.  By contrast, practical concerns about persons include such things as moral responsibility, prudence (the rational safeguarding of one’s own interests), anticipation of future pleasures and pains, self-directed reactive attitudes (such as regret, guilt, or shame), compensation for hardships, and social treatment.  Our prevailing question in the course is: does personal identity theory ground our practical concerns about ourselves?  This question will asked in relation to five theories of personal identity: the psychological continuity view; the biological view; the narrative view; the person life view; and the view that identity does not matter.  This five-part investigation will form the main part of the course, with strong emphasis on coming to understand the metaphysical commitments of each theory.  We will also consider more general methodological questions about the relation between the metaphysical and the practical, such as whether any theory of personal identity ought to ground all or any of our practical concerns, and what we ultimately want, need, or should reasonably expect from theories of personal identity. 

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.