This course introduces students to the field of African American Studies through an examination of the complex experiences, both past and present, of Americans of African descent. Through a multidisciplinary perspective, it reveals the complicated ways we come to know and live race in the United States. Students engage classic texts in the field, all of which are framed by a concern with epistemologies of resistance and of ignorance that offer insight into African American thought and practice.

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.

As I expect this to be the last time I teach a graduate seminar at Princeton, it seems a suitable occasion for a critical assessment of my work in ethics. The idea is that graduate students and some invited guests will present critiques of my work to which I will respond, followed by discussion. Topics to be covered include the foundations of ethics, utilitarianism, the ethics of our treatment of animals, our obligations to assist people in extreme poverty, and issues in bioethics, including my critique of the traditional ethic of the inviolability of human life.

In this course, we will survey some of the key issues that emerged in Philosophy during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, using classical texts from the period. Issues to be discussed may include authority, both political and intellectual, personhood and the individual, religion and science, free will, experience and reason, materialism and the mind, and the limits of human knowledge. Figures discussed may include Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, Galileo, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume.

An introduction to central topics of moral philosophy. Questions include: What makes an action morally right or wrong, and why? Is the right action the one with the best consequences? Do our intentions matter for the rightness of our actions? Is there a moral difference between killing someone and letting someone die? Is there 'moral luck'? What makes someone's life go best for her? What is the moral status of future persons? Is abortion morally permissible? Is it permissible to kill animals to eat them? Is there a single true morality or is moral truth relative to cultures? Does anything really matter or did we just evolve to think so?

An introduction to central questions of philosophy. Topics include: The rationality of religious belief, our knowledge of the external world, freedom of the will and the identity of persons over time.

Racism is a blight wherever it exists and calls for racial justice are still essential.This course aims to show how philosophy is integral to thinking through some major issues to do with race, racism, and racial justice today.In this course we will consider broad questions vital to understanding current racial issues.What is race? What is racism? How does intersectionality complicate our understanding of these questions? We will also consider more specific questions and particular issues around racial justice. Is racial profiling wrong? What should we think about affirmative action? Should there be reparations for (past?) racial injustices?

An examination of Nietzsche's central views, including the role of tragedy, the place of science, the eternal recurrence, the will to power, and the primacy of the individual. We will also examine Nietzsche's ambiguous attitude toward philosophy and his influence on literature and criticism.

The course will consider selected issues in the intersection of philosophy and cognitive psychology.

Why do we like some works of art more than others? Can an evil artwork be beautiful? How do aesthetic and interpretive norms vary across mediums? The aim of this course is to introduce students to philosophical issues about the nature of art objects and their interpretation, with a special focus on film and literature. On-going topics of discussion will include the relationship between moral and aesthetic evaluation, the interpretive significance of medium, and the nature of fictional representation. Assignments will include watching films, which will be central subjects of class conversation.

Philosophical issues about space and time -- from the early modern period to the present. Some of the issues covered include: substantivalism vs. relationism, incongruent counterparts, spacetime symmetries, apriori knowledge, non-Euclidean geometry, conventionalism, and general covariance. Readings are drawn from Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Kant, Poincare, Reichenbach, Earman, and Belot, among others.

In this course, we will study various conceptions of personal identity, self-consciousness, and the self in the early modern period. We will look at questions and debates that cut across a range of sub-fields in the history of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of mind. The course combines close primary text readings from early modern philosophical classics with excerpts and discussions from contemporary writings in philosophy, literature and art history to provide a comprehensive view of theories in the early modern period, highlighting the many possible ways students can approach a set of questions.

We shall study the ethical theories and contributions to moral philosophy of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers.

An introduction to non-classical formal logics: temporal, modal, conditional, relevantistic, intuitionistic.

Designed to introduce advanced students to empirical results in the psychology of group-based bias, to analyze these results along several philosophically important dimensions. We will discuss approaches to the semantics of generic statements, such as 'dogs bark', and consider whether these approaches extend to linguistic expressions of stereotypes, such as 'women are nurturing.' We will explore the psychological nature of stereotypes, as informed by both empirical findings and philosophical insights. The students will consider the epistemic import of stereotypes. Finally, we will consider several ethical views of stereotypes.

This seminar will focus on the philosophy of moral agency and responsibility, blame and punishment. It will examine how human interactions are permeated by evaluative understandings of agency and responsibility, and whether such evaluative understandings are well grounded. It will consider what implications this has for inter-personal relations, as well as for social institutions such as criminal justice. We will approach these issues from a multi-disciplinary perspective, examining how philosophical, scientific and institutional considerations can be brought into useful contact with one another.

Seminar reconstructs and evaluates the key philosophical ideas presented in Plato's Phaedrus. We pay special attention to the philosophical methodology employed in the dialogue.

The seminar examines Kant's main writings in practical philosophy. The goal is to understand Kant's ethical thought generally, but in this edition we pay particular attention to his account of moral motivation, practical belief, and moral argument.

This course focuses on Descartes and later 17th C reactions to Descartes, both positive and negative. We begin with a survey of Descartes' central philosophical writings, emphasizing the Meditations and the Passions of the Soul, though taking account of his scientific writings as well. We then examine some contemporary reactions to Descartes, beginning with the Objections and Replies to the Meditations, and discussing later texts. Figures to be discussed may include Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, Cavendish, Spinoza, More, Malebranche, and others.

This graduate seminar provides a graduate-level introduction to some topic(s) within moral philosophy. A detailed syllabus is made available before the semester starts.

In this course, we will explore an important theme in the philosophy of art and art-making of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially pronounced in German Romanticism, and going through the 20th century to certain key segments of artistic, literary, and musical modernism. An oft-expressed ambition is that art will somehow step in and fill the void left behind by waning religion. Central to our investigation of variations on this theme will be the underlying philosophical question of what it would be for art to take over for religion or to be a kind of secular religious substitute, and in what respects, if any, art might accomplish this.

The idea is to look at some central capacities of the human mind beginning with judgement and reasoning, including reasoning from perception, then moving on to discuss the capacity to make value judgements, ascribe and assume responsibility, and achieve the status of a person.

A study of selected issues surrounding the notions of essence and grounding, such as the logic and nature of essence, its role in metaphysical explanation, and its connection to modality; the nature of grounding, the philosophical work it can do, and its relationship to other forms of explanation; skepticism about essence and grounding.

This course investigates Albertus Magnus' conception of place, by offering a philosophical introduction to Albert's treatise De Natura Loci ("On the Nature of Place"). The course provides a close reading of this text in its own right and also studies the text in its historical context by identifying its main philosophical and scientific influences in the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist traditions and in Ptolemy. The seminar is based on a new English translation of Albert's Latin text.

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

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.