Spring 2026

Undergraduate courses

R1B  Reading and Composition Through Philosophy. Crockett. MW 2-3:30, Evans 61.

This is a seminar in reading and writing philosophy. Students will practice analyzing, critically assessing, and writing about philosophical texts. The class will also involve student presentations and review of others students’ written work. Readings will include texts in ethics and aesthetics. This course fulfills the university’s second-semester reading and composition (R&C) requirement.

2  Individual Morality and Social Justice. Bailey. TuTh 12:30-2, Hearst Mining 390.

An introduction to some issues in moral and political philosophy guided by two overarching questions: What is the relationship between acting morally and living a good life? And: What makes a society just?

5  Science and Human Understanding. Dasgupta. MWF 3-4, Cory 277.

This course will survey a range of philosophical topics relating to modern science. Topic 1: Science and Religion. Is there a scientific explanation of our existence? Does the “Fine Tuning” of the laws of physics imply that the universe was designed by a creator to support life? Topic 2: Science and Society. What is the role of science in a democracy? What obligations do scientists have to citizens, and citizens to scientists? Topic 3: The Philosophy of Computer Science. Elon Musk recently said that we probably live in a computer simulation—is he right? What is the “singularity” and how should we prepare for it? What is the ethical status of an artificial intelligence? Topic 4: The Metaphysics of Science. Does science discover a read-made world that exists “out there”, independently of us? When biologists sort organisms into species, are they carving the world “at its natural joints” or do their categories more reflect their own way of thinking? Topic 5: The Epistemology of Science. Scientists typically extrapolate from data, making predictions about the future that have not yet been observed. Is there any non-circular argument that their predictions will be reliable? If not, does this mean that science is ultimately based on faith? The course is designed for students across the university; no prior knowledge of philosophy or science is required.

12A  Introduction to Logic. Mancosu. TuTh 2-3:30, Hearst Mining 390.

The course will introduce the students to the syntax and semantics of propositional and first-order logic. Both systems of logic will be motivated by the attempt to explicate the informal notion of a valid argument. Intuitively, an argument is valid when the conclusion ‘follows’ from the premises. In order to give an account of this notion we will introduce a deductive system (a natural deduction system), which explicate the intuitive notion of ‘follow’ in terms of derivational rules in a calculus. This will be done in stages, first for propositional reasoning (only connectives such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if… then…’ and later for the full first-order calculus (including expressions such as ‘for all…’ and ‘there exists…’. In addition, we will also develop techniques to show when a claim does not follow from the premises of an argument. This is done by developing the semantics for the propositional and the predicate calculus. We will introduce truth-tables for the propositional connectives and ‘interpretations’ for sentences of first-order logic. At the end of the course, if time allows, we will also cover some metatheoretical issues, such as soundness and completeness of the propositional calculus.

25B  Modern Philosophy. Crockett. MWF 11-12, Hearst Field Annex A1.

In this course we will study the philosophical views of the most important and influential thinkers in early modern philosophy (roughly, the 17th and 18th centuries). This period in western thought was nothing short of extraordinary in that it saw the overthrow of a philosophical and scientific worldview that had dominated the west for over one thousand years. Prior to the 17th century, philosophy had been a blend of church doctrine and classical philosophy, and its methodology had been quite narrowly defined. The unfortunate effect of both the church’s influence on scholarly endeavors and the strictly defined methodology was that philosophical and scientific creativity was largely stifled. By the 17th century, however, the medieval worldview was beginning to crumble due in large part to a variety of subversive scientific discoveries. Advances in physics, astronomy and chemistry undermined central assumptions of classical science, which resulted in the wholesale abandonment of medieval philosophy more generally. Thus the scientific revolution of the 17th century set off an explosion of inspiration and creativity in the world of philosophy. It forced thinkers to make a new start in answering fundamental questions about the world such as: What is the nature of mind? What are the limits of human knowledge? What is a person? What is the basic stuff in the world? These thinkers were the radicals of their day, and their views have shaped the way we practice contemporary philosophy. In fact, many of the philosophical questions we ask today could not have been formulated before these thinkers began to challenge philosophical orthodoxy. For that reason, studying the moderns is of central importance for understanding contemporary philosophy, and for understanding the nature of philosophical revolutions more generally.

100  Philosophical Methods. Lee. Tu 4-6, Social Sciences Building 60.

This course is intended to improve the student’s ability to read and write philosophy. Special emphasis will be placed on developing analytic skills. This term we will be examining a number of philosophical texts on the problem of personal identity. There will be short written assignments each week, as well as a longer final paper, which will focus on the essays we are reading. In addition to two hours of lecture, students will meet in tutorials with a teaching assistant in order to discuss the reading, their weekly writing assignment, and the preparation for the final paper.

Text: Personal Identity, edited by John Perry, University of California Press

THIS COURSE IS RESTRICTED TO PHILOSOPHY MAJORS

104  Ethical Theories. Kolodny. MWF 10-11, Wheeler 102.

The fundamental concepts and problems of morality examined through the study of classical and contemporary philosophical theories of ethics.

106  Bioethics. Frick. TuTh 12:30-2, Social Sciences Building 170.

This course aims to introduce you to a range of philosophical debates in clinical and population-level bioethics. Among the topics in clinical bioethics that we will discuss are • The ethics of killing • Abortion • Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia • Pre-commitment in bioethics • Genetic enhancement • The Non-Identity Problem In population-level bioethics, questions we will discuss include • The concept of disability • The measurement and valuation of health • Cost-effectiveness and disability-discrimination • Bioethics in a Time of Pandemic: Quarantine, Triage, Drug Trials • Health inequalities and justice • Personal and social responsibility for health • Paternalism, nudges, and incentives • Standards of care in clinical trials. As taught this semester, Phil 106 satisfies the ethics requirement for the Philosophy major and minor.

109  Freedom & Responsibility. Wallace. MWF 9-10, Wheeler 222.

The goal of the course is to provide a selective introduction to historical and contemporary debates about the issues of freedom and responsibility. We will look at the following questions (among others): What is freedom of the will? What is it to be a free agent, or to have freedom of thought? What is involved in moral blame and moral accountability? What kind of freedom do we require to be morally responsible or blameworthy for what we do? Are freedom and responsibility possible if our actions are ultimately governed by deterministic laws? Can moral agency be realized in a world of natural causal processes?

Readings will be drawn from both historical and contemporary sources.

As taught this semester, Phil 109 satisfies the ethics requirement for the philosophy major.

114  History of Political Philosophy. Sluga. TuTh 11-12:30, AAP Building 155.

The course is not intended to provide a general survey of the history of political philosophy. It will focus, rather, on three moments in the development of political realism: (1) Aristotle’s Politics, (2) Machiavelli’s Discourses and Hobbes’ Leviathan, (3) Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.

As taught this semester, Phil 114 satisfies the ethics requirement for the philosophy major.

119  Feminism & Philosophy. Bailey. TuTh 9:30-11, Cory 247.

This class is an introduction to a range of historical and contemporary feminist issues. Is there an essential difference between women and men? If so, what is the nature of this difference and what are its moral, social, and political implications? If not, what explains the apparent differences? How do questions about gender intersect with questions about race, class, religion, and cross-cultural difference? Can a psychological account of how we tend to sort people into distinct social categories illuminate how we ought to understand these categories? Can assumptions about gender compromise scientific objectivity? This course introduces philosophy students to these and related questions in feminist thought, concluding with analyses of a few specific debates in contemporary feminist epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics.

125  Metaphysics. Gómez Sánchez. MWF 1-2, Wheeler 222.

Metaphysics is concerned with very general questions about the objective nature/structure of reality. In this course we will tackle four foundational metaphysical questions, through the lens of contemporary analytic metaphysics: (i) what is it for something to be possible or impossible? (ii) do the natural laws of our world leave any room for free will and/or moral responsibility? (iii) what does it take for a person to persist from one time to another (e.g., from childhood to adulthood)? (iv) what is the nature of time?

126  Philosophy of Physics. Rubenstein. TuTh 9:30-11, Wheeler 102.

This course will focus on the foundations of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is arguably the most predictively successful theory ever devised, but also the most mysterious and counter-intuitive. We will explore some ways of understanding it, and the philosophical problems that these interpretations raise. Topics include: the orthodox interpretation, the measurement problem, non-locality, entanglement, the collapse of the wavefunction, the many worlds interpretation, the nature of probability, the metaphysics of the wavefunction, and recovering the “manifest image” from the theory.

We will follow David Albert’s book Quantum Mechanics and Experience, which I recommend that you purchase if you can. The necessary physics will be presented from scratch, but solid high school physics and mathematics and at least one previous philosophy course is strongly recommended.

As taught this semester, Phil 126, can satisfy group A of the Epistemology/Metaphysics requirement.

140A  Intermediate Logic. Holliday. TuTh 12:30-2, Wheeler 102.

Major concepts, results, and techniques of modern logic. Basic set-theoretic tools. Model theoretic treatment of propositional and first-order logic (completeness, compactness, Löwenheim-Skolem). Philosophical implications of these results.

Prerequisite: 12A or equivalent with consent of instructor.

148  Probability & Induction. Zhang. TuTh 11-12:30, Social Sciences Building 60.

The sun has risen every day in the past. Will it rise tomorrow? A gambler just lost ten bets in a roll. Should they be more confident that they will win the next one? How should we make predictions and generalizations based on data collected in the past? Probability theory is a powerful tool for studying such questions. This course is an introduction to the fundamental concepts of probability and inductive logic. We will examine their philosophical foundations and also apply the formal apparatus to philosophical problems such as the problem of induction and theory confirmation.

Recommend prerequisites: PHIL 12A (not required)

As taught this semester, Phil 148, can satisfy group A of the Epistemology/Metaphysics requirement.

C158  Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy. Coseru. TuTh 9:30-11, Wheeler 30.

This is an introduction to Buddhist philosophy, extending from its origins (as preserved in the early sūtra literature), down through its evolution into multiple competing philosophical traditions (Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, Pramāṇavāda, and so on). We will explore Buddhist approaches to issues in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, language, and ethics. One theme running through the course will be radical skepticism; we will explore how Buddhist philosophers questioned not only the existence of an enduring or essential self but also the existence of an external (mind-independent) world, and how their analyses impacted their understandings of meaning in language, their accounts of the nature and function of consciousness.

As taught this semester, Phil C158 may satisfy the more inclusive history requirement (which is: 153, 155, 156A, 160-188)

160  Plato. Hobbs. TuTh 6:30-8, Wheeler 222.

This course is an introduction to the Platonic corpus, with special attention to Plato’s mature metaphysics and epistemology. We will begin by considering the philosophical program of Socrates as portrayed in Plato’s early dialogues and consider how Plato’s characteristic metaphysical and epistemological interests and theories (such as the Theory of Forms) emerge from this program. We will then consider the further development of Plato’s views in later dialogues, including the Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Sophist.

178  Kant. Warren. TuTh 2-3:30, Wheeler 222.

In this course we will examine some of the major metaphysical and epistemological themes of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We will be focusing particularly on Kant’s views on the following topics: a priori knowledge and how it is possible, space and time, objectivity and experience, self-knowledge, and transcendental idealism and the contrast between appearances and things in themselves.

Several short papers and two longer papers will be required.

Students who wish to enroll in this course should already have taken at least two philosophy courses, and in particular, Philosophy 25B (History of Modern Philosophy: 17th&18th centuries), or the equivalent [detailed focus on the primary texts of at least four of the following philosophers: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz].

184  Nietzsche. Kaiser. MW 6:30-8, Wheeler 222.

The course will focus on key ideas in Nietzsche’s philosophy, such as his theory of drives, perspectivism, analysis of nihilism, revaluation of values, ‘will to power’, art, and the ‘affirmation of life’. We will discuss, among other works, extensive excerpts from The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of Morals, the late-note collection The Will to Power, as well as a few shorter essays.

H196  Senior Seminar. Lee. Th 10-12, TBA.

198BC-2  Berkeley Connect. Schneider. W 6-7, Evans 7.

198BC-1  Berkeley Connect. Schneider. W 5-6, Evans 7.

Graduate seminars

290-1  Graduate Seminar: Explaining Action. Yalcin. W 12-2, Philosophy 234.

We’ll ask what action is, and we’ll ask how explanations of action that cite contentful states of mind — especially, belief, desire, knowledge, and intention — work. We’ll especially discuss: (i) the idea that knowledge is in some sense explanatorily more fundamental than belief (“knowledge first”-ism); (ii) the formal structure of intention, with an eye towards its apparent question-sensitivity; (iii) the group-level concept of public information, and the question what a group’s public information has to do with its capacity for coordinated action. Readings just might come from philosophers like: Davidson, Dennett, Dretske, Fodor, Greco, Lederman, Lewis, Setiya, Skow, Stalnaker, and Yablo.

290-2  Graduate Seminar: Extended Hilbert’s program: three consistency proofs for Peano Arithmetic. Mancosu. Tu 10-12, Philosophy 234.

The seminar is devoted to three extensions of Hilbert’s program that came in the wake of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. After some sections devoted to Hilbert’s original program, we will work through the details of three consistency proofs for Peano Arithmetic. The first is due to Gödel and Gentzen who independently showed that the consistency of Peano Arithmetic can be reduced to the consistency of Heyting’s Arithmetic; the second, due to Gentzen, uses transfinite induction up to the ordinal epsilon zero; and the third, the so-called Dialectica interpretation due to Gödel, appeals to recursive functionals of finite type. For the first two proofs we will use P. Mancosu, S. Galvan, and R. Zach, An Introduction to Proof Theory. Normalization, Cut-Elimination, and Consistency Proofs, Oxford University Press, 2021.

290-3  Graduate Seminar: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Probability. Rubenstein/Zhang. Tu 2-4, Philosophy 234.

This course will be an introduction to foundational questions in the metaphysics and epistemology of probability. Topics to be discussed include various metaphysical accounts of probability, norms for rational credence (including those governing the connection to objective probability), and the interaction between conditionals, credence, and chance.

290-4  Graduate Seminar: The World. Noë. Tu 12-2, Philosophy 234.

This is a graduate philosophy seminar on the world. For the philosophers for whom the concept of the world figures prominently, “the world” is not another name for the earth, or the physical universe, or even for reality. What is the world, then, and why has its concept proved to be so indispensable to philosophical reflection?

Our focus in this class will be on the writing of Merleau-Ponty and Jonathan Lear, but we will also read Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Murdoch, among others.

Among the questions we will ask are: Do people share a world? Can they? Is the world something we can change? Can one lose the world (or one’s world)? Is there a link between the very idea of the world and mysticism (or religious standpoints or insights)? What does the world have to do with the mind, with consciousness, with experience, and with what is sometimes called the given? How does the world bear on the problem of freedom?

Although this is a class for graduate students of philosophy, where appropriate the instructor will welcome students and researchers with different backgrounds.

290-5  Graduate Seminar: A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Primus/Carriero. Tu 4-6, Philosophy 234.

A study of Spinoza’s Ethics. Even attention will be paid to all five parts of the work, and special attention will be to the relationship between the metaphysical and ethical dimensions of the work. We will carefully make our way through the entire treatise, studying Spinoza’s account of God and the ways in which Spinoza’s arguments take us in the direction of naturalism (Part 1), his treatments of the human mind (Part 2) and our affective nature (Part 3), Spinoza’s arguments concerning the ways in which the affects either advance or hinder our wellbeing (Part 4), and what he says about the conditions for peace of mind and human blessedness (Part 5). Topics to be taken up along the way include Spinoza’s denial of free will and what follows from it, his account of the relation between mind and body, his theory of desire as striving (conatus), his alleged hedonism or psychological egoism and its fit with his views about benevolence and social harmony, and Spinoza’s apparent identification of theoretical and practical reason.

290-6  Graduate Seminar: Feminist Epistemology. Novakovic. Th 2-4, Philosophy 234.

This course will cover topics in feminist epistemology with special attention to standpoint theory. Standpoint theory treats standpoints that emerge from experiences of oppression, exploitation, and marginalization as epistemically privileged. Questions we will consider are: what is the authority of experience, are there uninterpreted experiences, how do experiences of hermeneutical injustice propel conceptual change, when is suffering a source of knowledge, what does consciousness-raising accomplish, and is ideology a problem for standpoint theory? We will also discuss historical predecessors: Hegel, Marx, Georg Lukács, and Angela Davis.

290-7  Graduate Seminar: Authority and Its Problems. Viehoff. W 2-4, Philosophy 234.

This seminar focuses on three closely related topics central to political and social philosophy: the nature and justification of practical authority; what (if anything) makes authority relations morally problematic; and paternalism. We will discuss work by Enoch, Quong, Raz, Ripstein, Shiffrin, Tadros, and others.

290-8  Graduate Seminar: Kadish Workshop. Wallace. F 12-3, Philosophy 234.