PHI 260-001 History of Philosophy I:  From Greek Beginnings to the Middle Ages
Sanday MWF  10:00-10:50am  CB 203

The fundamentals of the history of philosophy are as important now as ever.  Virtue demands that we hold ourselves accountable to our understanding of the good, and reality seems to consist of independently existing individual beings.  But ambiguities remain.  What, if anything, legitimates one conception of the good over any other, or all others?  What distinguishes a living thing from other objects?  If there is an organizing principle governing the genesis of individual beings, what is it?  In this course we will study many of the most basic elements informing our attitudes toward interpersonal experience and reality.  We will be especially looking at the way our views of reality inform and shape our experience of ethical life, and vice versa, as reflected in the key texts of ancient and medieval philosophy.

PHI 305-001 Health Care Ethics      

Staff        TR    12:30-1:45pm   CP 211

PHI 305-002  Staff     MWF    3:00-3:50pm   CB 243

PHI 305-003  Staff     MWF  10:00-10:50am  TPC 212

A consideration of the ethical issues and difficult choices generated or made acute by advances in biology, technology and medicine.  Typical issues include:  informed consent, healer-patient relationships, truth telling, confidentiality, problem of birth defects, abortion, placebos and health, allocation of scarce medical resources, genetic research and experimentation, cost containment in health care, accountability of health care professionals, care of the dying and death.

PHI 317-001  Existentialist Thought and Literature

Staff   MWF 11:00-11:50am   CP 208

 A survey of existentialism as a literary movement as well as a philosophical one, with emphasis upon their intersection and interaction.  The course will trace the emergence of existentialist themes in modern thought and culture, and will analyze and assess the movements’ continuing significance.

PHI 330-001  Ethics

Superson  TR  9:30-10:45am   DH 331

This course will introduce the student to some of the main topics in ethics.  Half of the course will be devoted to moral theory.  We will cover topics such as universalism, classical and contemporary utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, social contract theory, intuitionism, virtue ethics, feminist ethics, and moral nihilism.  The other half of the course will be devoted to metaethics.  We will cover topics such as the status of morality, moral skepticism - including error theory, tolerance, and relativism - moral objectivism, and moral particularism.  If time permits, we will read a few of the most well-known contemporary articles on moral issues.

Grading will be based on several papers, and to a lesser extent, participation.

Texts:

Julia Driver, Ethics: The Fundamentals (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006). ISBN 1-4051-1154-2

Russ Shafer-Landau, Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004). ISBN 0-19-516873-9 

PHI 334-001  Business Ethics               

Staff   MWF  11:00-11:50  CP 345
PHI 334-401  Staff  MW  6:00-7:15pm   CB 243

PHI 334-402  Staff  MW  6:00-7:15pm   CB 347

An introduction to moral problems that arise in contemporary business practice and the ethical frameworks proposed to resolve them.  Topics will include areas such as truth-telling and integrity; social responsibility; property rights and their limitations; and justice in personnel and labor practices.

PHI 336-001  Environmental Ethics    

Staff  TR  3:30-4:45pm  CB 243

PHI 336-401  Staff  TR  7:00-8:15pm  BH 303

An introduction to moral problems that arise in human interaction with the natural environment.  Topics to be addressed include questions such as:  what is man’s place in nature?  Do nonhuman animals or ecosystems have intrinsic moral worth, and if so, how can it be respected?  What problems and ambiguities arise in attempting to live in an environmentally responsible fashion?  How can we adjudicate conflicts between social and environmental values?

PHI 361-001 Biology and Society

Sandmeyer   TR   9:30-10:45am  CP 211

Some questions that stand at the heart of this class are: What is biology, and how are the biological sciences structured? If biology is the study of living being, what, indeed, is life? Is an organism more than its genetic code, for instance? Or is there a necessary inter-relation between an organism, a species or even a nexus of species and its environment? Further, what ethical and/or social consequences does our understanding of the nature of life as such imply? In general, Biology and Society offers a critical examination of the interrelation between genetic and environmental factors that account for life at every level and pursues the societal and ethical implications of this interrelation.

PHI 506-001 Topics in Medieval Philosophy

Bradshaw   TR  11:00am-12:15pm  CB 205

The subject of this course will be the different ways philosophy developed in the early Middle Ages within the Greek-speaking East and Latin-speaking West.  We will begin with the first author to make a systematic attempt to reconcile Biblical teaching with Greek philosophy, Philo of Alexandria.  We will then read selections from the more philosophical of the Greek Church Fathers:  Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas.  The second half of the course will be devoted primarily to Augustine, reading from his Confessions, On the Trinity, and To Simplician.  We will end with the classic treatise on soteriology by Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man).  Although our primary focus will be on the distinctive features of each tradition, we will also keep an eye on their later repercussions—that is, how each helped shape the culture of its respective half of Europe, and how the Latin tradition, in particular, became the foundation for subsequent western philosophy.  We will also ask how philosophy might have been different had there been greater exchange across this linguistic and cultural divide.  Among the recurrent topics of the course will be the Trinity and Incarnation;  the meaning of theological language;  redemption, free will, grace, and predestination;  the mystical ascent to God;  and the question of how God can be both transcendent and yet fully present within creation.

This is not an introductory course.  Familiarity with ancient philosophy (especially Plato) will be presupposed, and some knowledge of the Bible will also be helpful.  If you are in doubt about the level of preparation expected, please consult the instructor.  The coursework will consist of short reflection papers, take-home exams, and a term paper.

Texts:  

Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (tr. Colm Luibheid)

Gregory Palamas, The Triads (tr. Nicholas Gendle)

Augustine, Confessions (tr. F.J. Sheed)

Course packet

PHI 516-001  Contemporary Philosophy:  Phenomenological Directions

Bruzina  TR  2:00-3:15pm.

In contrast to the common practice of studying philosophies as coherent efforts identified, summarized and compared in terms of their being the products of authors, we shall be studying the phenomenology begun by Edmund Husserl as a dynamic that has to be understood as an philosophical investigative program, which in its continuations, derivations, or transformations beyond Husserl himself is a concrete trajectory of the continuing effort that is philosophy. Our aim is to understand the contrasts that emerge in terms of the unfolding of problematics that develop within phenomenological history as a program. We shall follow how “subjectivity,” “intentionality,” “reduction,” “phenomenon,” and “world,” among other themes, get conceptualized, investigated, analyzed, and reconceptualized in a continual requestioning and self-critique that moves this philosophical trajectory through the twentieth century.  

The plan, then, is to study phenomenology as the program a) of its founding— namely, in Husserl’s huge project of investigation into transcendental constitutive origination, with the emphasis on his final idea of it, the Crisis­-writings—then in the program’s two most widely influential recommencements—that by Heidegger in terms of ontology and that by Merleau-Ponty in terms of fundamental aisthesis, with the emphasis respectively on Being and Time and Phenomenology of Perception.

*This course fulfills the 20th century M&E requirement for graduate students.

PHI 537-001 Philosophy of Law: Arendt and International Justice

Nenadic  TR  2:00-3:15pm  CP 367

This course centers on a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. We use it as a platform from which to address some of its present-day implications for international justice surrounding war crimes, in particular the crime of genocide. To that end, we address a number of intertwined topics. They include comparing different types of legal responses to genocide such as domestic legal actions versus international war crimes tribunals, especially in light of the United Nations’ problematic relation to genocide. We consider her clarification of a new type of crime under law, namely genocide, in relation to recent efforts to get sexual atrocities recognized as acts of genocide under law. Finally, we consider her delineation of a new face of evil for delineating what today we may refer to as a post-modern relation to evil, that is, one in which evil seems to have lost its meaning.

Probable readings:

Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) ISBN: 978-0-521-62695-8

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 2006) ISBN: 978-0-14-303988-4

Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003) ISBN: 978-0-8052-1162-7

Adam Lebor, “Complicity with Evil”: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006) ISBN: 0-300-11171-1

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) ISBN: 0-674-02555-5

PHI 565-001  Philosophy of Language

Batty  TR 12:30-1:45pm  CP 367

This is an upper-level introductory course in the philosophy of language.  We will first examine views on the nature of meaning, reference, truth and the relationships between them.  After this, we will turn to questions about the relationship between language and the acts we perform through its use.  Along the way, we will consider the ways in which meanings play a role in thought and, more generally, in our interactions with the world.  Among the philosophers we will study are P.F. Strawson, Bertrand Russell, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Saul Kripke, H.P. Grice and Hilary Putnam.

PHI 630-001  Seminar in Value Theory:  Normative Ethics

Sanday  M  4:30-7:00pm  CB 335

Normative ethics is an attempt to articulate values--establish ‘norms’--for human political and interpersonal interactions.  Such norms, however, rely on presumption about the nature of persons--indeed, rely upon a conception of the ‘normal’ person.  We will see, however, that both ‘normalcy’ and the universalist values attached to it are in fact always dependent upon a domain of human particularity that simultaneously supports and contradicts them.  Relying primarily upon the emancipatory accounts of interpersonal and political life offered by Hannah Arendt and John Russon, this course will investigate the claim that human flourishing depends on a critique of the very foundations of normative ethics.  In support of those texts we will also read and study Seneca, Kant, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (sec. B.IV ‘The Truth of Self-Certainty’), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, as well as selected essays on power and subjection by Judith Butler.

*This course satisfies the 20^th-century requirement in value theory.

PHI 715-001 Seminar in Recent Philosophy: Perception

Bruzina/Batty  R  4:30-7:00   CB 306

The seminar we wish to offer will draw into dialogue two philosophical approaches to perception, the Anglo-American analytic tradition and the German-French  phenomenological movement. Beginning with background considerations (mainly NeoKantianism and Naturalism), we shall study, analyze, and (re-)interpret selections from authors such as Austin, Strawson, Armstrong and Searle,  on the one side, and such writings as Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Ideas I,  and Crisis, and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.  Secondary literature will be an important component (e.g., Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life, Alva Noe’s Action in Perception might be a useful “bridging” text), as will a very short introduction to the neurology of sensing (e.g., taste and smell, perhaps also vision and hearing).  The emphasis will be on the critique of presuppositions and the careful scrutiny of the best positive philosophic proposals.  Regular contribution to seminar discussion will be required of students as well as one modest mid-term and one substantial term paper.

*This course fulfills the 20^th Century requirement for M & E