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.

forthcoming

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.

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.

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.  

How should we govern ourselves as the planetary force we have become? What does a politics of planetary health—a symbiosis of human and earth system flourishing—look like? These are tough questions because climate change has altered the terms of political affiliation. Since our carbon pollution affects the life chances of people far removed from us in space and time, we have become members of a common public with all these people. With this in mind we will explore three sets of problems and questions. (1) Expertise as it relates to climate policy, and how this is connected to the promise (or threat) of a global scientific technocracy. To what extent should we welcome a world order structured by scientific expertise about the earth system? (2) New earth politics and the nation-state. Does the project or prospect of governing the planet undermine the legitimacy of the nation-state? Is there a form of nationalism—call it ecological nationalism—that expresses our attachment to both planet and country? (3) Narratives of planetary health. If achieving planetary health is our goal what collective narratives or epistemic frameworks will get us there?

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.