Democracy gives people control over their government on a collaborative and inclusive basis, via operational and selectional constraints, thereby reducing the government's dominating power. This set of seminars will focus on why the formula requires control, not participation, and why it gives control to people severally, not to the people as a body; it will explore the operational constraints, such as the rule of law, and the selectional constraints, such as electoral process, on which it seeks to build control; and it will investigate the point of democratic control.

An examination of the moral principles governing love and sex. Questions to be addressed include: Do we ever owe it to someone to love him or her? Do we owe different things to those we love? Do we owe it to a loved one to believe better of him than our evidence warrants? What is consent, and why is it morally significant? Is sex between consenting adults always permissible, and if not, why not? Are there good reasons for prohibiting prostitution and pornography? Everyone has opinions about these matters. The aim of the course is to subject those opinions to scrutiny.

A historical introduction to philosophy since 1600, emphasizing close reading of classic texts, but including some attention to the scientific, religious, political, literary, and other context.

Logic is the study of the principles of valid reasoning. This course provides an introduction to symbolic logic, which studies the principles of valid reasoning from an abstract point of view--paying attention to the form of valid arguments rather than their subject matter. We will cover the basic concepts and principles of symbolic logic: validity, logical truth, truth-functional and quantificational inference, formal languages and formal systems, axiomatic and deductive proof procedures.

Can questions about what is right or wrong have real answers independent of any sort of divine authority? Are there moral principles that any rational person must recognize, or is morality essentially an expression of our feelings or a product of our culture? Are we morally required to do our part in making the world as good as it can be, or does morality give us permission to pursue our own peculiar enthusiasms and interests? What should we do about deception, unwanted pregnancies, and world hunger? This course will provide an overview of these and other issues in moral philosophy.

The choice of a kind of life involves both fundamental commitments and day-to-day decisions. This course is interested in zooming out and zooming in: how should we adopt commitments, and how do we realize them in ordinary life? What is the purpose of life, and how can you fulfill it? Should you live by an overall narrative, or is your life just the sum of what you actually do? Are commitments chosen or given to you? Are the decisions we think of as high stakes important at all? When should you relinquish what you thought were your deepest commitments? What should you do when commitments clash?

A survey of central issue in metaphysics, such as: What is time? Is it true that the past is fixed and immutable while the future is a branching tree of alternative possibilities? Or could we in principle change the past? What makes a certain object at one time identical with a certain object at a later time? Are human beings truly free, or are their actions determined by factors beyond their control? Or both?

An introduction to axiomatic set theory, up to the proof of the consistency of the axiom of choice.

Should defendants be convicted based on merely statistical evidence? To what extent are individuals responsible for group harms? Can voting in a non-swing state be justified? Are cosmological theories more plausible when they posit the existence of many observers? How much should we spend on existential risk mitigation? How valuable are miniscule benefits for enormous numbers of people? How does the possibility of cascading failure affect the value of preserving political norms? We will use probability and decision theory to investigate these and other questions in epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, and the law.

The philosophy department senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students undertake a substantial project of philosophical research under the supervision of a Princeton faculty member. Skills to be developed over the course of the senior thesis project include: how to manage time on a year-long project, how to locate tractable specific questions within a larger philosophical subject area, how to summarize effectively the current state of debate on an issue, how to situate a specific philosophical question in a larger context, and how to better write in a way that exhibits virtues including clarity, accuracy, and thoroughness.

The seminar studies Aristotle's views about sleep, dreams, and divination through dreams, focusing on the relevant treatises of the Parva Naturalia. Special attention is given to the applications of the matter/form distinction and of Aristotle's theory of the four causes. We are also interested in the relationship between these treatises of the Parva Naturalia and the scientific psychology of the De Anima.

A study of the thought of the great German pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer.

This seminar focuses on philosophical issues related to the moral significance of affecting the very far future. These include central topics on population ethics (the procreation asymmetry, nonidentity problem, and repugnant conclusion), decision theory (paradoxes of unbounded utility, probability discounting, risk aversion, and unawareness), and their intersection.

In this seminar, we apply theories of risk-taking to the epistemic domain to illuminate the norms that govern belief, credence, and related epistemic phenomena. Along the way, we consider applications to traditional epistemological debates, such as what knowledge requires, whether there is more than one rational doxastic response to a body of evidence, and whether practical or moral considerations make a difference to what we should believe.

A seminar for first-year graduate students in philosophy. Readings will be drawn primarily from contemporary analytic philosophy.

A course designed to promote cohesion among second year cohort; to fill in gaps in knowledge of classic and contemporary readings in philosophy and offer opportunity to share work in progress.

Open to post-generals students actively working on their dissertations. The seminar aims at assisting students in the research and writing and at developing their teaching skills by improving their ability to present advanced material to less expert audiences. Students make presentations of work in progress, discuss each other's work, and share common pedagogical problems and solutions under the guidance of one or more faculty members. It meets for two hours each week throughout the academic year.

A study of the fundamental questions of political theory as framed in the context of the institutions and writings of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, from the classical period into late antiquity and the spread of Christianity in Rome. We will canvass the meaning of justice in Plato's "Republic", the definition of the citizen in Aristotle's "Politics", Cicero's reflections on the purpose of a commonwealth, and Augustine's challenge to those reflections and to the primacy of political life at all in light of divine purposes. Through these classic texts, we explore basic questions of constitutional ethics and politics.

A study of fundamental questions of political theory framed in the context of the institutions and writings of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, from the classical period into late antiquity and the spread of Christianity. Topics include the meaning of justice in Plato's Republic, the definition of the citizen in Aristotle's Politics, Cicero's reflections on the purpose of a commonwealth, and Augustine's challenge to those reflections and to the primacy of political life at all in light of divine purposes. We consider both the primary texts and secondary literature debates to equip students with a working mastery of this tradition.