2025-2026

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.

People differ from one another, and some of those differences really matter—for working together, for understanding each other, and for shaping who we are. Which differences have philosophical significance, and why? This course explores both the obvious social categories—race, gender, class, culture—and the more elusive, fine-grained differences that challenge the conceit of a universal human nature. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and literary texts, we’ll investigate how conversation can bridge (or deepen) these gaps, ultimately asking what it means to truly understand someone whose experience may be radically unlike our own.

People differ from one another, and some of those differences really matter—for working together, for understanding each other, and for shaping who we are. Which differences have philosophical significance, and why? This course explores both the obvious social categories—race, gender, class, culture—and the more elusive, fine-grained differences that challenge the conceit of a universal human nature. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and literary texts, we’ll investigate how conversation can bridge (or deepen) these gaps, ultimately asking what it means to truly understand someone whose experience may be radically unlike our own.

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.

What can reflection upon artificial intelligence teach us about human thought? This question may be asked and understood in many ways. Our concern will be philosophical: the insight we seek is into the nature and structure of thought as it is for the one thinking, as it informs, shapes, or constitutes the life of a thinking being. This course will lay the groundwork for pursuit of our question by (1) introducing and examining the idea of a model of a human intellectual capacity (2) outlining the basic concepts needed for understanding the architecture of the currently most noteworthy form of artificial intelligence—the class of language models known as GPTs, (3) introducing some of the philosophical ideas needed for analyzing the forms of thought that go into human linguistic communication, and finally (4) endeavoring to bring all of these elements together. (B)

As “theoretical reasoning” is the philosopher’s term of art for reasoning about what is true, “practical reasoning” means to name reasoning about what to do. But on the standard conception of the contemporary philosophical literature, there is no real distinction to be drawn here. “Practical reasoning” is just a species of theoretical reasoning, directed to truths about what we are to do. In this seminar, we will explore an older tradition, beginning with Aristotle and running through Hegel and Anscombe, which seeks to make out a much more interesting thought: that practical reasoning takes us not merely to a judgment of the truth of what we are to do, but all the way to the doing itself. Since reasoning is thinking, this conception implies that there is a form of thinking that is also, and equally, acting. We will read a range of texts from both the historical and contemporary literature, with a view toward seeing how we may make good on this difficult idea. And we will consider in a preliminary way the potential bearing of artificial intelligence upon our question. (I)

Aquinas regards justice as the preeminent moral virtue, and in the Summa theologiae he devotes more Questions to it than to any other virtue (II-II, qq. 57-79). With occasional help from other passages of his, and with an eye to his sources (especially Aristotle) and to later thinkers, we will first work through his general accounts of the object of justice (ius—the just or the right), justice as a virtue, the nature of injustice, and the distinction between distributive and commutative justice. Then, as time permits, we will discuss selected texts on more specific topics such as judicature, restitution, partiality, murder, theft, verbal injuries, fraud, and usury. (A)

The purpose of this course is to explore the relationship between the project of human freedom—the project of liberation—and the idea of enlightenment. The main theme is a question: Is liberation simply a matter of enlightenment? That is, does freedom come from a special kind of profound knowledge? Affirmative answers to this question can be found in many places across the world and history, from Gautama the Buddha and the Stoic Epictetus to Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant. Others have insisted that enlightenment, while part of liberation, is not reducible to it: liberation is a social, economic, and political process, facilitated by a kind of realization about one’s lack of freedom, but not reducible to it. This kind of thought is also ubiquitous: from Marcus Garvey and Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis and Catherine MacKinnon. Still others have been skeptical of enlightenment: most famously, Frankfurt school theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno.

At stake in this debate is a set of fundamental questions about the human condition and what one is to do with one’s life. Why, for example, are we supposedly unfree?  After all, many people—including many of you considering enrolling in this class—have relative freedom of bodily movement, the ability to choose when and where to eat your next meal, or whom to love. But all of these thinkers agree that we—all of us, from the college student to the political prisoner to the head of state—are unfree. Why? Understanding this striking claim will help us interrogate what it means to be a human being and what aspirations we may all be committed to simply by virtue of participating in a social order. Appreciating how different thinkers agree that we are all unfree, but disagree on why or what this amounts to, will also help us get into view their different ideas of what human freedom is, how it should be achieved, and therefore what should be done now. As such, we will have the opportunity to dissect and criticize the ideas, arguments, and values that are developed in favor of one position rather than another. By the end of the course, students should be able to articulate some ideas, arguments, and values of their own with regard to liberation and enlightenment. (A)

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.