Course Descriptions – Spring 2024
GENED 1015 - Ethics of Climate Change (Stanczyk)
What are individuals, scientists, businesses, and governments morally required to do to prevent catastrophic climate change? And what is the right approach to thinking about this question?
PHIL 3 – The True and the Good (Nickel)
There are certain fundamental questions about ourselves and our place in the world that we need to answer as we live our lives, and in answering them, we shape ourselves into the kinds of people we become, for better or worse. This course is an introduction to some of the philosophical discussions that bear on these questions. Philosophy is too rich to cover exhaustively in one course, or one lifetime, so this course is a very selective survey, with a heavy emphasis on skill development so that students can draw on the resources of this rich field as they confront questions raised by their own lives.
PHIL31 - Saints, Heretics, and Atheists: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (McDonough)
Does God exist? What is the nature of evil and where does it come from? Are humans free? Responsible? Immortal? Does it matter? This course will explore foundational questions in the philosophy of western religion through the study of contemporary and classic works.
PHIL 103a – Art and Public Policy in Plato, Aristotle, and Beyond (Noe)
The aim of this course is, first, to introduce you to the social puzzle of art: how do we include art in our society? Should we? The second aim is to explore the political solutions to this puzzle offered by Plato in the Republic and the Laws, and by Aristotle in the Politics."
PHIL 129 – Kant’s Critique of Reason (Matherne)
We will focus on Immanuel Kant’s major philosophical work, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87). We will explore his systematic account of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.
PHIL 137 – Later Wittgenstein (Goldfarb)
A close reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, focusing on its treatments of meaning, reference, rule-following, cognition, perception, “the private mental realm”, knowledge, skepticism, and the nature of philosophy. Attention to Wittgenstein's philosophical methodology, with its claim to dissolve philosophical problems rather than propose solutions to them.
PHIL 144 – Logic and Philosophy (Goldfarb)
Three important results of modern logic: Gödel’s incompleteness theorems; Turing’s definition of mechanical computability; Tarski’s theory of truth for formalized languages. Discusses both mathematical content and philosophical significance of these results.
PHIL 145 – Modal Logic (Richard)
Modal logic studies the meaning and logical properties of words like ’necessarily’, ‘ought’, and ‘knows’, words whose logic is quite unlike that of the words studied in introductory logic. The course presupposes no prior logic (which means that it moves a tad quickly in the first two weeks). After mastering some modal logics, we will discuss applications of modal logic in
metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and computer science.
PHIL 159a -Epistemic Injustice (Robertson)
Who do we believe, who do we doubt, and who do we dismiss? Whose voices get amplified and whose get silenced? Whose ideas are taken up and whose are ignored? Who gets to be ignorant? These are epistemic questions: questions about how we acquire and share knowledge, information, and understanding. When we study epistemic injustice, we investigate how oppression and marginalization affect us not just legally or economically, but epistemically.
PHIL 159s – Skepticism (Rinard)
This course will focus on attempts to develop a workable skeptical philosophy. Much effort has been expended in trying to undermine skepticism. Here we will look at what happens if we take seriously the possibility that skepticism is actually true. How can we build a philosophy, and a life, that acknowledges the truth of skepticism? We will look at a number of different attempts to do this from a wide range of times. We will pay particular attention to the Ancient Greek Pyrrhonians and the Ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, reading both the original texts and later commentaries on them.
PHIL 171 – Well-Being (Behrends)
What makes someone flourish, or enjoy a life that's high in well-being? This seminar-style course will focus primarily on competing views that address this question, including hedonism, desire satisfaction theories, and objective list theories. We'll conclude by thinking about some metaethical questions about well-being: are well-being facts objective? Do they provide reason for action?; What is happening in our thought and language when we make judgments about well-being?; and so on.
PHIL 172m – The Many and the Few (White)
This course explores the tensions between our moral obligations to the many and the place of the few who have some special place in a life well lived—friends, family, fellow students, etc. We will consider the nature and justification of partiality; the challenges of squaring partiality with the impartial demands of morality; objections to moral theory based on its inability to accommodate partiality; whether, when and how aggregation is appropriate; and the place of love in ethics.
PHIL 186 - Feminism in Arts and Sciences (Werning)
This course addresses underlying philosophical assumptions in the arts and sciences from the perspective of feminist theories. We will discuss scientific case studies and artworks from the Harvard Art Museums, visit the Houghton Library, and participate in the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon.
PHIL 188a – The Philosophy of Jane Austen (Matherne)
Was Jane Austen a philosopher? Are her novels’ philosophy in another guise? Let's find out!
PHIL 247 – Social and Personal Identities (Richard)
We address two sets of questions. The first is from metaphysics: What sort of things are (human) persons? Are properties like sexual characteristics, gender, or race essential to them? The second set is from social philosophy: Assuming that social identities like genders are not biological properties, what are they? Are they in some sense socially constructed, and if so what exactly does that mean? Are they malleable in the sense that whether someone has such an identity is a matter of factors which can be affected by individual or group decisions? What are races, if indeed there are such things. While this seminar presupposes philosophical sophistication, students from other disciplines —for example sociology, gender studies, and AAAS —are very welcome.