2025-2026

This course is a survey of recent work in feminist political philosophy. We’ll focus on three interrelated themes: objectification; the relation of gender oppression to the economic structure of society; and the problem of “intersectionality,” that is, the problem of how to construct adequate theories of gender injustice given that gender “intersects” with other axes of oppression, e.g. race and class. Authors we’ll read include: Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Bartky, Angela Davis, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Serene Khader. (A)

Plato’s theory of forms is perhaps the first complete philosophical idea in the Greek tradition. It is so fundamental to the activity of philosophy, that the entire subject might be summarized as “a series of alternatives to Plato’s theory of Forms.” We sketch out the development of this theory from its earliest presentations in dialogues like the Republic through Plato’s own reconsideration of the theory in Parmenides, to the late presentations of the theory in Sophist and Philebus. (B)

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)

This course will be on the part of the law known as private law — the part that adjudicates disputes between private citizens where one person is alleged to have suffered harm through the wrongdoing of another. Among the questions with which we will be concerned are the following: What constitutes a legal harm in such a context? What, in the eyes of the law, counts as one person being the cause of another person’s suffering? What sort of redress or compensation may one justifiably seek for such suffering? Who has a right to decide such questions? What justifies the use of sanction or force — and when is it justified — in the enforcement of such legal decisions? The first half of this course will present a selective historical genealogy of our contemporary understanding of how to go about answering such questions. The second half of the course will be on contemporary theories of private law. The historical portion of the course will begin by examining the origins of the modern distinction between private and public law in Aristotle’s ancient distinction between corrective and distributive justice. Next we will briefly consider what private legal adjudication looks like in the absence of the state, first by reading an Icelandic Saga and then by watching John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. (A)

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.

Advanced Study: Philosophy

Advanced Study: Philosophy

Advanced Study: Philosophy

A close reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ, along with Jonathan Beere’s Doing and Being. (III)

A close reading of Plato’s Hippias Major, Protagoras, and Gorgias. (A)