Departmental Courses

What is art? Why should we care about it? The predicament of modernism is that we can no longer rely on our traditional answers to these questions. Modernism, says the philosopher Stanley Cavell, is “a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted…the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence.” The artist in the modernist predicament cannot make art without trying to answer these questions for themselves. But without history and convention to help us answer these questions, how do we know what would, and what could, count as answers? What is it for art to exist and why should we hold onto its importance?

In this class, we will investigate art, philosophy and the modernist predicament through a study of Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? along with works by Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, T.S. Eliot, Kierkegaard and others. We will also listen to the music of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, John Cage, Ligeti and more. Ultimately, we will ask: Do we still share in the difficulties of modernism? Or are the difficulties of art and philosophy in our modern world something else entirely?

Decisions about medical treatment and medical policy often have profound and complex moral implications. This course will examine such issues as paternalism, autonomy, informed consent, assisted suicide, abortion, organ markets, genetic testing, and the definition of death. The primary teacher is a philosopher, but there will be guest lectures by physicians and medical lawyers. The goal is to have state of the art, interdisciplinary conversations. (A) 

In this course we will explore some of the central questions in epistemology and metaphysics. In epistemology, these questions will include: What is knowledge? What facts or states justify a belief? How can the threat of skepticism be adequately answered? How do we know what we (seem to) know about mathematics and morality? In metaphysics, these questions will include: What is time? What is the best account of personal identity across time? Do we have free will? We will also discuss how the construction of a theory of knowledge ought to relate to the construction of a metaphysical theory-roughly speaking, what comes first, epistemology or metaphysics? (B) 

This course will be an introduction to the philosophy of mathematics. In the first part of the course we take a close look at traditional issues in the philosophy of mathematics such as the realism / anti-realism dispute and the epistemology of mathematics. In the second part of the course we look at a selection of more contemporary topics, focusing on threats to traditional ways of thinking of mathematics posed by Godel's Theorems, Lakatos' conception of mathematics, and the use of computers (including AI) in mathematics. (B)(II) 

An examination of ancient Greek philosophical texts that are foundational for Western philosophy, especially the work of Plato and Aristotle. Topics will include: the nature and possibility of knowledge and its role in human life; the nature of the soul; virtue; happiness and the human good. 

Topic: Dialectic

Dialectic is a central concept for some of the most influential philosophers of the western tradition – most prominently Plato and Hegel, for each of whom it can seem synonymous with philosophy itself – but has received surprisingly little attention as a topic unto itself. Indeed, with its close associations with paradox, contradiction, and the apparent rejection of logical laws, the very idea of dialectic has come into ill-repute, dismissed by figures as diverse as Heidegger and Russell as a kind of sophistry or obscurantism; moreover, the concept has been employed in such a variety of contexts, from metaphysics to the philosophy of history, that it can be difficult to discern whether it constitutes a single topic at all. In this course we shall trace the history of dialectic from its origins in the dialogues of Plato, through its revival in Kant’s critical philosophy, to its best-known form in Hegel’s logic, with the aim of drawing out a common strand uniting these diverse historical manifestations, namely an understanding of dialectic as in first instance a form of philosophical logic reflecting an underlying concern with the possibility of philosophical method. We shall also examine the relation between this and other influential conceptions thereof and consider some prominent criticisms of the idea of dialectic; time permitting, we shall conclude with a discussion of what, if anything, a conception of dialectic in the context of contemporary philosophy might look like.

In this seminar we engage in an in-depth examination of a focused philosophical topic—in a manner akin to that of a graduate seminar. Readings are challenging, but there is no presumption of prior expertise in the course topic. 

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout. 

An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such. 

This course provides a first introduction to formal logic. In this course, we will introduce proof systems for both propositional and first-order predicate logic and prove their soundness and completeness. (B) (II).              

What does it take to be a good person?  How should we think about good and bad in human life? One prominent strand of thought on these questions is focused on strengths of character, drawing from work by Aristotle. Rather than working directly from Aristotle's writings about ethics and politics, we will think about the aspects of his metaphysics that bear on thought about human nature and good human conduct.  We will consider his views on substances, causality, and life as a framework for our thinking. Having thought about humans in general, we will focus our attention on what makes a human being an exemplary one of its kind—virtue—and what makes for a sound human community.  In this work, we will pay special attention to contemporary philosophical work that is openly indebted to Aristotle. 

This course is designed to provide MAPH students – especially those interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy – with an introduction to some recent debates between philosophers working in the analytic tradition. The course is, however, neither a history of analytic philosophy nor an overview of the discipline as it currently stands. The point of the course is primarily to introduce the distinctive style and method – or styles and methods – of philosophizing in the analytic tradition, through brief explorations of some currently hotly debated topics in the field. 

This course introduces students to contemporary debates among political philosophers about the value of equality. We begin with arguments for and against distributive equality, the view that justice demands that everyone possess equal amounts of some good or bundle of goods. We then examine arguments for and against relational egalitarianism, the view that our relationships to one another ought ideally to be free of hierarchy. (A) (I) 

Although Sigmund Freud was often dismissive of the views of philosophers, both his theoretical and clinical works bear on, or directly engage with, questions that are central to the philosophy of mind—questions having to do with the nature of, and relations between, consciousness, perception, memory, speech, and various ways in which a mind may be either unified or disunified. The aim of this course is to introduce students to (some of) Freud’s writings from an, as it were, philosophical vantage point. In pursuing this aim, we’ll be greatly aided by Jonathan Lear’s richly rewarding (and simply titled) Freud. (I plan for us to spend some significant portion of the course moving back and forth between Lear’s book and writings by Freud that Lear aims to elucidate therein.) In addition, we’ll be drawing on works by a variety of other psychoanalysts and philosophers of psychology, among them: Christopher Bollas, Donald Davidson, Adam Phillips, Paul Wachtel, and Richard Wollheim. (B) (II)

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam. 

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

Kant’s first Critique, and the Critical philosophy as a whole, appeared relatively late within Kant’s own philosophical career. An understanding of Kant’s philosophical trajectory during the 1750s, 1760s, and through 1770 is an essential foundation for grasping the problems and positions that appear in Kant’s most famous work. Readings will include the Nova Dilucidatio, the essay on negative magnitudes, and the Inaugural Dissertation. 

The Eudemian Ethics is one of Aristotle’s two major works about the nature of human happiness. Although not as famous as its Nicomachean counterpart, it is filled with distinctive, fascinating, and philosophically appealing discussions about virtue (including the super-virtue, “noble-goodness”), deliberation, luck, friendship, and the relation of all of these to “living well.” It also contains important discussions about philosophical methodology and ethical teleology. We will read our way through some of the EE’s most interesting arguments, taking advantage of the many recent articles written about them.

This course will look carefully at some of Sellars’s most important philosophical writings, focusing especially his classic monograph Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind and various closely related writings, with an eye toward those aspects of his treatment of topics that have continued to prove influential in recent philosophy. We will end the course with a closer look at Sellars’s interpretation of Kant, with special attention to how his own philosophy builds on and reworks a number of Kantian themes. Throughout the course, we will attend to those contemporaneous philosophers whom Sellars himself engaged most with (e.g., Lewis, Ayer, Schlick, Chisolm) in order better to understand his criticisms of them, as well as to those philosophers who over the past several decades have contributed most to the revival of Sellars’s thought (e.g.  Rorty, Brandom, McDowell) in order to compare and assess the very different strands of Sellarsian philosophy currently on offer in the contemporary journal literature.

Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.

Is there a right way to live life? Is it possible to know how to live life this way, just as you might know how to cook fried rice, repair brakes, or write computer code? Some philosophers have thought so: they sought to model the task of living on the paradigm of art, craft, or science. In this course, we will study the ancient Greek and Roman origins of this ambitious and transformative ideal, the so-called “art of living”, especially as it is developed by Plato and the Stoics. Then, we will consider criticisms as well as extensions of this project in the modern era. (A) 

“From the moment he falls in love, even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is.”  

         -Stendhal

“When [we] are just and loving, we see [the beloved] as she really is.” 

         -Iris Murdoch

Does love blind us to the reality of the beloved or does it allow (or even lead) us to see more clearly? Love is often thought of as a form of madness which obscures the lover’s vision. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch disagrees with this commonplace: for her, love is a form of attention, or of seeing and valuing the reality of the beloved. 

In this class, we will investigate this tension between the idea that love blinds and the idea that love reveals. Our primary focus will be on theories of love in analytic philosophy, but we will also read literature which will serve as a way of testing and investigating these theories.

We will begin with Dante, whose Commedia figures and thematizes the relationship between vision, knowledge and love. As we move from Dante to Iris Murdoch, Harry Frankfurt, Stendhal, Roland Barthes and others, we will test these and other conceptions of love by looking at examples of love in literature and film. Our goal will not simply be to define love; instead, we will try to better understand the nature and significance of love in life and in our lives.

This course is about the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues: about his ‘philosophy,’ and about the man (the character) himself. We will approach these as two sides of the same coin (the character as embodying philosophy); both are paradoxical and elusive; we will try, not exactly to pin them down, but to enter into and develop a feel for them. 

Cognitive science studies how minds work by integrating insights from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and anthropology. This interdisciplinary approach raises questions about what counts as an explanation of cognition, how different kinds of models hang together, and how empirical findings bear on philosophical theories of mind.

 The course will begin by examining the behaviorist program, which aimed to explain cognition without appeal to internal mental states, focusing instead on observable stimulus–response patterns. We will consider its motivations and limitations, before turning to the rise of representational theories of mind. These theories explain cognition in terms of internal mental states that represent aspects of the world. They also emphasize the ways these representations can be transformed to guide thought and behavior.

 Topics will include the nature of representation in cognitive science, Marr’s three levels of explanation, the language of thought hypothesis, the role of computational models—including large language models—in cognitive science, the boundary between perception and cognition, and the promises and perils of evolutionary approaches to the mind.

 If time permits, the course will also explore alternative approaches to the study of mind—such as Freud’s psychoanalytic framework and Slime Mold Time Mold’s “The Mind in the Wheel”—as case studies for assessing what counts as a legitimate paradigm in the science of mind. (B)

This course introduces students to philosophical debates about the foundations and methodology of economics as a field of study. Together we'll examine questions such as the following: What exactly is economics and what are its aims? Is the field defined by its subject matter or its methodology? Should positive economics be regarded as a value-neutral enterprise? Or does it inevitably need to make value-laden assumptions-about, for instance, rationality, well-being, distributive justice, etc.-that stand in need of justification? Should there be limits to what can be bought and sold on markets-and, if so, what should those limits be? Readings will include works by philosophers and economists. (A)

At the time of Michel Foucault’s death in 1984, both his fame and his capacity to inspire controversy were at their height. Foucault’s views on power, knowledge, and genealogy were widely influential during his lifetime. Forty years after Foucault’s death, interest in Foucault is once more on the rise. The purpose of this class is to provide a philosophical introduction to Foucault’s ideas. Topics to be discussed include madness and social construction, the historical preconditions of knowledge, genealogical critique, reform’s perilous potential, and the “technologies of the self”. Particular attention will be given throughout to how Foucault engages with Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. We will end by examining Foucault’s reception in the work of Judith Butler, as well as contemporary criticisms of Foucault. (A)

In this course, we will engage with one of the fundamental texts of practical philosophy, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In addition to reading the text closely, we will critically discuss secondary literature, as well as contemporary attempts to revive and enlist Aristotle, with the aim of familiarizing ourselves with the work’s themes, understanding major fault lines in its interpretation, and appreciating its enduring significance. Topics to be considered include happiness and the good life, virtue, and practical reasoning. (A)

A study of conceptions of the relation of the human intellect to reality in medieval and early modern Europe. Figures studied include Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Descartes, Elisabeth of the Palatinate, Conway, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.

We will study the foundations of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Our central text will be his Critique of Practical Reason. We will also draw on key passages from his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, his Metaphysics of Morals, his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

An investigation into what philosophy and linguistics can teach us about LLMs, and vice versa. (B)

This is a two-part course, taught in the Winter and the Spring. Students may take one part without the other. The first part will be organized around the first half of Stanley Cavell’s major philosophical work, The Claim of Reason. We will focus on the following topics: the role of criteria in epistemology, skepticism about knowledge of the external world, the nature of agreement in judgment, and the relation between meaning and use. In these connections, we will also read work by G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, H. H. Price, J. L. Austin, Thompson Clarke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Barry Stroud, and others.

In a way the course is text-oriented: our focus will be much of the first three books of Aristotle’s Physics. But the topics of these texts comprise a substantial portion of most anyone’s list of ‘Aristotle essentials’: his hylomorphism, definition of nature, theory of causes, chance and luck, natural teleology, nature and necessity, definition of motion. In addition to being a good introduction to a substantial portion of Aristotle’s ‘system,’ studying these texts will help develop facility in handling some of Aristotle’s philosophical vocabulary and distinctions. (A) (III)

In this course we examine questions such as: What is a city? What (if anything) is distinctively good about city life? Cities have been criticized for being dirty, polluted, overcrowded, ugly, lacking in opportunities to connect with nature, chaotic, alienating, and dangerous—to the extent that these criticisms are accurate, can they be addressed without abandoning urban life altogether? And what are the makings of a just city, if such a thing is possible? To tackle these problems we will read authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Rousseau, Emerson, Dickens, Marx and Fanon, among others. 

This will be a close reading of Sartre’s great early work, Being and Nothingness (1943), focusing on his account of consciousness, freedom, anguish, and bad faith, as well as his conception of basic relations to other persons such as desire, shame, and love. We may also spend some time considering the development and critique of Sartre’s ideas in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and in her classic work of philosophical feminism, The Second Sex.

In this seminar we will read, write, and think about central metaphysical concepts – concepts such as substance, essence, quantity, identity, part and whole, causation, and infinity – as they develop in the early modern period. Figures we are likely to read include Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, and Leibniz. We will occasionally look to the medieval tradition to which these thinkers are indebted, and against which they are reacting, as well as to recent scholarship on the period.

We'll read and discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Our central concerns will include: (1) Wittgenstein's metaphilosophy, (2) meaning and rule-following, (3) privacy and expression. (B) (II)

We'll read and discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Our central concerns will include: (1) Wittgenstein's metaphilosophy, (2) meaning and rule-following, (3) privacy and expression. (II)

In this seminar we will discuss the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, and psychoanalytic understandings of human well-being.  Readings will be drawn from work by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Hans Loewald, and others   

Practices of enslavement are common in recent human history. Focusing on transhistorical practices offers a unique opportunity to learn about the communities in which they occur, comparative aspects of slavery, and how slavery and labor are bound up in all aspects of a society, from the economy to politics to art and culture. This course will be about the entanglements of slavery and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome and their transhistorical implications. The main questions of the course include: What were the realities of slavery at the time that prominent ancient philosophers lived? How did they engage with these realities in their philosophical works, both in obvious and non-obvious ways? What were the legacies of ancient philosophical writings about slavery in later discussions of slavery in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere? How can contemporary perspectives on slavery help us to understand the institution? And what can be learned about how slavery is represented in different cultures by focusing on ancient Greek and Roman philosophers? The course is organized around key ancient texts and topics in ancient and contemporary slavery studies. 

The seminar will be a consideration of some problems about what it is to encounter, recognize, and understand another subject — a mind that is not one’s own. Questions to be considered include:

1. ​What role, if any, does our understanding of our own minds plays in grounding our understanding of other minds?

2. ​In what ways does our knowledge of other persons depend on perception? What role does perception of bodies play in our awareness of other minds? Can we perceive the mental states of another person, or must we always make an inference from something exterior and visible to something interior and invisible?

3.​ Does understanding other minds require possession of a “theory of mind”? To what extent is our understanding of other minds appropriately conceived as a kind of theoretical understanding?

4. ​How is our capacity to understand other subjects related to our capacity to stand in relations of “mutual recognition” with other subjects? Is the idea of another mind fundamentally the idea of a “second person”, a “you” to my “I”?

5. ​What is the relation between understanding other minds and feeling concern for other persons? Is our capacity for shame, empathy, a sense of justice, etc. grounded on our understanding of other minds, or do such forms of concern for others themselves ground our understanding of what another mind could be?

Paradoxes are conflicts in our own thought. Many of the most fundamental, frustrating, disturbing, and exciting concerns in philosophy and the sciences are to be found where paradoxes arise. In this course we will investigate paradoxes in logic, in metaphysics, in ethics, in action theory, in epistemology, and elsewhere. We will also try to understand the nature and sources of paradox—since the very possibility of paradoxes is, itself, a paradox. (B)

In this course, we will read, write, think, and talk about moral philosophy, focusing on Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and work by John Stuart Mill. We will work through our texts with care. We will conclude with a criticism of utilitarianism. (A) 

This course explores the question ‘What is art?’ when applied to visual works of art. Another way of forming the question is: ‘What differentiates a work of art from something which is not a work of art?’. The course follows several attempts to answer this question including the representational, expressive, formal, emotive, conventional and historic theories. In the second part of the course, we will address the question: ‘How do we best understand a work of art?’. We will see how these questions are related. Each topic in this course will focus on a single work of art so that the philosophical reading will be understood and evaluated in light of a guided analysis of the work in question. 

This course introduces students to key concepts, texts, and figures from the phenomenological tradition as it emerged and developed in Germany and France over the late-19th and 20th centuries. Students will engage with questions of intentionality, temporality, embodiment, finitude, and meaning-making. The course will pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities between key figures. Major figures covered include Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre. (B)

Bullshit is everywhere — in politics, advertising, corporate speak, academic jargon, and data science. But what exactly is it? How does it differ from lying and deception? What features of language, institutions, and data make it so easy to produce and so hard to call out?

This course takes bullshit seriously as a philosophical topic. We begin with foundational questions: What is bullshit, and what distinguishes it from lying and deception? We then turn to language, examining how features of natural language — such as implicature, presupposition, vagueness, and euphemism — give speakers systematic resources for bullshitting while maintaining plausible deniability. The third unit considers bullshit and labor: the proliferation of "bullshit jobs," the language of corporate and bureaucratic life, and why so much modern work seems to demand it. We conclude with bullshit and data, asking how statistics, models, and algorithms can be deployed to mislead, and whether AI systems can be bullshitters in a philosophically interesting sense.

Readings draw on philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and sociology. No prior background in philosophy or formal methods is required.

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through nineteenth-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of agency and morality. Kant’s famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals rejects any appeal to nature or religious authority and instead grounds moral obligations in the very idea of freedom conceived as something that is for everyone. This thought ultimately leads to the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century thought-–for the first time in the history of philosophy, history comes to be a topic for philosophy. We will study how these ideas are taken up and transformed in the works of philosophers like J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. 

Topic: Thinking and Speaking

According to one intuitive picture, the capacity to think is prior in nature to the capacity to express one’s thought linguistically. After all, can’t we perfectly well imagine a thinker locked in their own mind with no means of expressing themselves? Since the late 19th century, this intuitive picture has come in for sustained philosophical criticism from several directions. Thought, critics argue, is itself an essentially linguistic capacity and the very idea of a non-linguistic thinker a chimera. In this course, we will take up some of the most prominent objections to the intuitive picture with a view to evaluating their success. Among the questions that will structure our inquiry are the following: Is the relation between thought and language one of conceptual priority or mutual dependence? How should we understand the ability of language to figure as a vehicle for the communication of thought? Does it make sense to speak of language determining or constraining thought? If thought is essentially linguistic, what implications does this have for our conception of the self and its relation to society? While the focus of the course will be on approaches to these questions from within analytic philosophy, we will also draw on ideas and arguments from linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and the continental traditional. Readings will include selections from Frege, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Brandom, Sapir, Chomsky, and Foucault, among others.

An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such. 

In the course of discussing how it is that a philosophical problem arises in the first place, Wittgenstein says, “The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.” This isn’t the only place where Wittgenstein speaks as if being gripped by philosophical problems is a matter of succumbing to illusions--as if a philosophers are magicians who are taken in by their own tricks. In this course, we’ll discuss philosophy and magical performance, with the aim of coming to a deeper understanding of what both are about. We’ll be particularly concerned with Wittgenstein’s picture of what philosophy is and does. Another focus of the course will be the passion of wonder. In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates say, “The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” And when magicians write about their aesthetic aims, they almost always describe themselves as trying to instill wonder in others. Does magic end where philosophy begins? And what becomes of wonder after philosophy is done with it? (B) (II) 

This is a two-part course, taught in the Winter and the Spring. Students may take one part without the other. Part II of Forms of Knowledge will be organized around the second half of Stanley Cavell’s major philosophical work, The Claim of Reason. We will focus on the following topics: the possibility of a private language, knowledge of other minds, recognition, alienation and the second person. In these connections, we will also read work by Thomas Reid, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Cook, Alan Donagan, George Pitcher, G. E. M. Anscombe, John McDowell, Vincent Descombes, Richard Moran, Anita Avramides, Stephen Mulhall, and others. 

This course will explore the notion of “nous”, which could be translated as “mind,” “intellect” or “thought,” in the works of Anaxagoras, Plato, and Aristotle. Ancient theories of nous broadly understand nous to be something impersonal, divine, and to denote a form of thought prior to discursive scientific thinking. Further, nous is understood by all three philosophers as having a cosmological significance. We will attempt to understand the development of this idea, the reasons for its significance in ancient theories of the soul, of epistemology, cosmology, and of metaphysics. 

In a way the course is text-oriented: our focus will be much of the first three books of Aristotle’s Physics. But the topics of these texts comprise a substantial portion of most anyone’s list of ‘Aristotle essentials’: his hylomorphism, definition of nature, theory of causes, chance and luck, natural teleology, nature and necessity, definition of motion. In addition to being a good introduction to a substantial portion of Aristotle’s ‘system,’ studying these texts will help develop facility in handling some of Aristotle’s philosophical vocabulary and distinctions.

While the focus of this course will be on reading Leviathan, our broader ambition will be to understand how the account of the human being and the political developed in that text fit within Hobbes's broader philosophical and intellectual project. As such, we will also consult a number of other texts (e.g., the Elements of Philosophy) to get a sense of that project.

Preparing papers to submit to journals for review and revising papers in response to the feedback received from journal editors and referees is an essential part of professional academic life, and students applying for academic positions with no publications to their name are at a disadvantage in today’s highly competitive job market. The Department of Philosophy has therefore instituted the Paper Revision and Publication Workshop to provide our graduate students with support and assistance to prepare papers to submit for publication in academic philosophy journals. The workshop was designed with the following three aims in mind:

1. to provide students with a basic understanding of the various steps involved in publishing in academic journals and to create a forum in which students can solicit concrete advice from faculty members about the publishing process;

2. to direct and actively encourage students to submit at least one paper to a journal for review on a timeline that would allow accepted submissions to be listed as publications on a student’s CV by the time they go on the academic job market; and

3. to create and foster a departmental culture in which the continued revision of work with the ultimate aim of publication in academic journals is viewed as an essential aspect of the professional training of our graduate students and in which both faculty and students work together to establish more ambitious norms for publishing while in graduate school.

Iota is a relatively neglected book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; but it’s primary topic—unity—is an important theme running throughout the work. In this course we will make our way through it, slowly and carefully, guided by Castelli’s translation and commentary in the Clarendon Aristotle series and select secondary literature.

Body modification is a way to control what is most intimately ours—our bodies.  At its best, it empowers us make choices about our own bodies, turning them into tattooed canvases, finely-honed athletic machines, or just safer and more pleasant places to live. At its worst, it is a tool that others can use to coerce us: controlling our ability to reproduce, forcing our bodies into uncomfortable shapes because society deems them “normal”, or pressuring us toward the costly and ultimately futile pursuit of beauty, youth, and thinness. This course explores the ethics of body modification, considering examples from tattooing to plastic surgery to athletic training to psychoactive drugs.

Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.