Spring 2027

Undergraduate courses

R1B  Reading and Composition Through Philosophy. Crockett. MW 5-6:30, Social Sciences Building 80.

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

2  Individual Morality and Social Justice. Bailey. MWF 11-12, Berkeley Art Museum 1T75.

Here is a plausible generalization: We humans want to live good lives. But even if we can all agree about that, it is far from clear what it actually means to live a good life. So, it makes sense to ask: Is living a good life a matter of maximizing our pleasure and minimizing our pain? Finding meaning? Ticking off items on a list of accomplishments? Getting what we desire?

Some of us (Most of us? All of us?) also want to live moral lives. Here, too, though, questions naturally multiply. First, we can ask metaethical questions such as: are there such things as moral facts, really? If so, where do they come from? Are moral reasons universal, or are they culturally relative? Second, we can ask questions about what the morally good and the morally right actually consist in: Is doing the right thing fundamentally a matter of minimizing suffering, or of treating others with respect, or something else altogether? Could I ever be morally obligated to compromise my own personal values for the sake of the ‘greater good’?

We live out our lives in communities. The structure of our communities profoundly shapes what is possible for us. So, if we want the whole picture about what a good or moral life involves, we also need to think about which sorts of social and political arrangements are worthy of our approval or our loyalty. We should ask: How (if at all) should the ideals of freedom, equality, and tolerance inform our thinking about the nature of a just society? And: how should the long history of social injustice bear on our thinking about what a good society should look like, today?

This course will take up these interrelated questions about the good life, the moral life, and the just society. Along the way, we will apply the tools of philosophical analysis to several of today’s most contested ethical issues—including animal rights, duties to alleviate global poverty, civil disobedience and lawbreaking, reparations, and affirmative action.

Readings are drawn from both contemporary and historical sources. This is an introductory course without prerequisites. No prior familiarity with philosophy is required or expected.

12A  Introduction to Logic. Yalcin. MWF 11-12, Hearst Memorial Mining Building 390.

15  Love and Its Values. Noë. MWF 1-2, Stanley 106.

25B  Modern Philosophy. Primus. MWF 8-9, Berkeley Art Museum 1T75.

First, a note about the course’s title: “modern philosophy” is a term that has come to refer to philosophy written in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe; the philosophy written in this era is modern in the sense that it is not medieval or ancient philosophy. In this course, we will be reading works by central figures from this period, including Descartes, Elisabeth, Conway, Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Topics will include the extent and character of one’s knowledge of the world, the nature of bodies and causation, the role of God in nature, and the question of whether human actions are ever free.

100  Philosophical Methods. Lee. W 3-5, Moffitt 102.

104  Ethical Theories. Kolodny. TuTh 9:30-11, Moffitt 101.

This course will be a survey of arguably the greatest works of moral philosophy in the Western tradition—Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, and Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics—followed by some of the most influential writings of the past century. Interwoven throughout these works, so strikingly different in their methods and conclusions, are attempts to answer the following questions:

1. How should we live? Which goals or activities are the most important? Why? What makes them so?
2. Which actions or traits of character are morally obligatory or virtuous? Why? What makes them so?
3. Why, if at all, should we care about being moral? How are the answers to 2 related to the answers to 1?
4. What must we be like in order to be morally obligated, or capable of moral virtue? (After all, pebbles and insects don’t have moral obligations. In what way are we relevantly different?) In particular, must we have “free will”?
5. How, if at all, can questions like 1–4 have objectively correct answers?

106  Bioethics. Frick. TuTh 11-12:30, Moffitt 106.

116  Special Topics in Political Philosophy. Viehoff. MW 6:30-8, Social Sciences Building 140.

125  Metaphysics. Rubenstein. MWF 2-3, Dwinelle 219.

129  Special Topics in the Philosophy of Science. Rubenstein. MWF 12-1, Anthropology and Art Practice Building 155.

132  Philosophy of Mind. Lee. MWF 1-2, Moffitt 102.

140B  Intermediate Logic. Holliday. MWF 10-11, Moffitt 106.

148  Probability and Induction. Zhang. MWF 1-2, Moffitt 101.

155  Medieval Philosophy. Crockett. MWF 3-4, Moffitt 103.

This course will be a study of some of the major philosophical texts from the Medieval Period with a focus on issues in metaphysics and epistemology. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which the philosophers in this period assimilate Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy into religious thought and how they anticipate certain aspects of modern philosophy. Topics will include the nature of universals, individuation, the nature and existence of God, faith and reason, skepticism, freedom, human nature and human cognition.

161  Aristotle. Riesbeck. TuTh 3:30-5, Moffitt 106.

172  Spinoza. Primus. MWF 11-12, Wheeler 108.

187  Special Topics in the History of Philosophy. Noble. MWF 3-4, Social Sciences Building 166.

In this course we will explore a variety of philosophical accounts of the basic causes of human action from antiquity to the present. Some of the questions that we will consider are: What roles do rational and non-rational mental states play in generating action? Is weakness of will possible? What is a will anyway, and do we have one? What psychological factors might explain moral or altruistic behaviors? To what extent is human behavior explained by natural desires and by conditioning respectively? Are any of our actions caused or influenced by unconscious mental states? Readings will include selections from Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, G. E. M. Anscombe, and Tamar Gendler.

190  Proseminar. Sluga. M 2-5, Philosophy 234.

H196  Senior Seminar. Kolodny. Th 2-4, Philosophy 234.

A collaborative writing workshop. Students in the honors program will develop their thesis, which they will have started to write in the Fall in Philos H195. Other students will develop a paper from a previous course into a form suitable for a writing sample for applying to graduate school. Students will present drafts, followed by comments by an assigned respondent, and open discussion. As time permits, philosophical background for the work in progress may be read and discussed.

Enrollment is by instructor approval. Students who are not in the honors program, but who are interested in enrolling, should email Niko Kolodny (kolodny@berkeley.edu) with: (1) a list of courses taken or in progress in philosophy, together with grades received (or an unofficial transcript); and (2) a draft, outline, or description (as much as possible at this admittedly early stage) of the paper to be developed. Students who are in the honors program should email Niko Kolodny (kolodny@berkeley.edu) for an enrollment code, but do not need to give any additional information about courses or thesis topic.

Graduate seminars

290-1  Graduate Seminar. Schroeder. Tu 10-12, Philosophy 234.

290-2  Graduate Seminar. Novakovic. W 2-4, Philosophy 234.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an unusually adventurous text in the history of post-Kantian philosophy, a text that Hegel himself described as his own journey of discovery. In this seminar, we will read it as a work of epistemology, concerned first and foremost with addressing the question of how to achieve “real knowing of that which truly is”. We will discuss key sections that contribute to answering this question, focusing on the chapters on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and Spirit. We will also discuss some relevant secondary literature.

290-3  Graduate Seminar. Viehoff. Tu 2-4, Philosophy 234.

295  Dissertation Seminar. Dasgupta. Tu 4-6, Philosophy 234.