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.

What is love? What is the source of its distinctive importance? How does love fit into a fuller account of values, and how should it be understood in the setting of the broader project — biological, psychological, neuroscientific — of understanding human and animal life.

25B  Modern Philosophy. Primus. MWF 8-9, Lewis 100.

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.

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.

Course enrollment is restricted to declared Philosophy majors.

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.

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 and our moral obligations concerning future people. In population-level bioethics, questions we will discuss include: the measurement and valuation of health; the concept of disability; cost-effectiveness reasoning and disability-discrimination; bioethics in a time of pandemic: quarantine, triage, and drug Trials; health inequalities and distributive justice; personal and social responsibility for health; paternalism, nudges, and incentives; standards of care in clinical trials; exploitation in clinical research. As taught this semester, Phil 106 satisfies the ethics requirement for the Philosophy major and minor.

116  Special Topics in Political Philosophy. Viehoff. TuTh 9:30-11, Social Sciences Building 56.

This course will focus on freedom and related issues. The first half of the class will explore different theories of what freedom is, and why it matters. The second half will turn to more applied questions, such as: What, if anything, is morally problematic about paternalistic policies? And how should we think about freedom of speech and its limits?

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

An advanced introduction to contemporary metaphysics, focusing on the ideas of freedom, time, persistence, and possibility.

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

An in-depth discussion of the nature of time, the nature of probability, and the connections between the two.

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

This course will focus on the philosophy and science of conscious experience. What is consciousness? Can it be explained scientifically, and if so, what would a mature science of it look like? Optimistic philosophers and scientists have proposed theories of consciousness, while pessimists argue that there are fundamental philosophical obstacles to achieving a fully satisfactory theory. We will consider a number of proposed theories, and assess some of the alleged obstacles, including the notorious “hard problem” of consciousness.

140B  Intermediate Logic. Holliday. TuTh 2-3:30, Dwinelle 88.

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

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.

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.

C158  Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy. Tomlinson. TuTh 9:30-11, VLSB 2038.

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.

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

This course will survey the philosophy of Aristotle with a focus on his practical philosophy. We will give special attention to two major themes and their relationship. First, how should we understand Aristotle’s eudaimonism, his view that the ultimate point of human life is happiness or human flourishing? Second, how should we understand Aristotle’s conception of justice as a virtue of human beings and political communities? Third, how should we understand the relationship between justice and happiness? We will read all of the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics, large portions of the Politics, and selections from a range of other works relevant to these questions.

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

In this course, we will study the distinctive metaphysical, epistemological, psychological, and ethical positions Spinoza argues for in his Ethics. We will analyze his arguments for monism and necessitarianism, evaluate his response to skepticism, assess the philosophical viability of his accounts of the human mind and human passions, and see whether the resultant picture of what constitutes a good human life is coherent (or attractive).

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 1-4, Philosophy 234.

The course will focus on a reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ““Philosophical Investigations””. The book remains one of the classics of 20th century philosophy. We will be looking at the bock in relation to Wittgenstein’s earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the later On Certainty.

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: Plato on Perception. Schroeder. Tu 10-12, Philosophy 234.

What do we perceive, and what is it to perceive? How does perception relate to thought, memory, pleasure/pain, and imagination? And how do our best available scientific theories inform our approach to theorizing about perception? We will look at Plato’s answers to these questions in his so-called “late” dialogues, especially the Timaeus, Theaetetus, and Philebus. The seminar will be organized around my monograph manuscript on Plato’s philosophy of perception, which we will read alongside relevant primary texts and selected secondary literature.

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: Coercion and Exploitation. Viehoff. Tu 2-4, Philosophy 234.

This course will focus on two topics at the intersection of interpersonal ethics and political philosophy: coercion and exploitation. We will be discussing contemporary philosophical accounts of the nature and morality of coercion (by Berman, Pallikkathayil, Raz, Scanlon, White, and others), and of the nature and morality of exploitation (by Cohen, Vrousalis, Wood, and others).

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