With the resurgence in anti-racist activism and the COVID-19 pandemic came a growing attention to racial disparities in health and healthcare. What are we to make of these disparities? What role do injustices - past and present - play in generating these disparities? More generally, what constitutes racial (in)justice in clinical care and research? This course will explore these questions, as well as the ethical and social implications of contemporary interventions offered to resolve racial disparities in healthcare.

We are what we eat--morally as well as molecularly. So how should concerns about animals, workers, the environment, and the local inform our food choices? Can we develop viable foodways for growing populations while respecting ethnic, religious, class, and access differences? The goal of this course is not to prescribe answers to these questions, but to give students the tools required to reflect on them effectively. These tools include a knowledge of the main ethical theories in philosophy, and a grasp of key empirical issues regarding food production, distribution, and disposal. Includes guest lectures, instructor-led small-group sessions.

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.

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.

The course will survey a range of different views about what it takes to be rational. Potential questions we will consider range from the everyday to the theoretical, including: Is there reason to vote in large elections if you know in advance that your vote will not swing the election? Could it be rational to make a sincere promise to spend the rest of your life with someone, given what is known about relationship failure rates? How should you respond to learning that you disagree with someone who seems equally well-qualified to judge the relevant issue?

We shall study Aristotle's contributions in logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, with emphasis on the ongoing philosophical interest of some of his central insights. We shall compare some of Aristotle's views with those of some of his successors, Hellenistic and beyond.

A survey of major problems and developments in twentieth century metaethics, from G.E. Moore to the present.

If we have any clear and distinct knowledge, then it's knowledge about mathematical facts. This knowledge is about abstract entities, and yet it plays a crucial role in our scientific endeavors. How is mathematical knowledge at all possible? What is it about the practice of mathematics that enables it to produce such apparently certain knowledge? We investigate the development of mathematical thought, focusing in particular on the early 20th century debates about the foundations of mathematics. We also consider issues emerging from the practice of mathematics, such as the legitimacy of using diagrams in proofs.

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?

In this course, we will study a variety of texts from the 16th through the 18th centuries, representing the philosophical traditions of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. We will seek to understand these in their historical and cultural context, while also seeking to discern what lessons they might hold for contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind. The course combines close primary-text readings from early modern texts with excerpts and discussions from contemporary writings in philosophy, literature, and art history to provide a comprehensive and global view of theories in the early modern period.

A study of philosophical analysis in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Topics include the later Wittgenstein, the ordinary language school of philosophy, Quine's naturalism in Semantics, Davidson's views on truth, and Kripke's reconceptualization of semantic and metaphysical categories.

We will introduce modern probability and decision theory and use them to tackle questions at the intersection of ethics, statistics, political science, and the law, such as: Is it possible for an AI-based categorization system to be minimally fair? Is it irrational to be exploitable by sequences of bets? What fraction of your resources should you risk when the odds are in your favor? Does evidence from physics show that there are many universes? What makes it reasonable to believe that the universe wasn't created yesterday? Should defendants be convicted based on merely statistical evidence? Can voting in a non-swing state be justified?

An overview of the philosophical movement known as German Idealism, and with the help of several of its critics. Issues covered include: how various thinkers position themselves between Kant and Spinoza; competing notions of freedom; Marx's critique of Hegel; Hegel's legacy in Black thought; and more.

This is a class on podcast production for aspiring humanists, as opposed to aspiring journalists, open to undergraduates and graduates. In this class, you will learn how to produce narrative-driven audio, like short segments, episodes, or series, on a humanistic subject matter, but tailored for a non-academic audience. We will cover the technical basics, such as working on a DAW, editing, and sound designing, and we will cover the craft of finding stories, interviewing, creating narrative arcs, tracking, and using archival tape. We will also have industry professionals guest lecture in the class. Projects will be completely audio-based.

We will read through Physics Book VIII in an attempt to understand its central argument for the existence of the unmoved mover of the heavens.

We consider the problems of natural kinds, species, and nominalism in early modern natural philosophy and metaphysics, and study the way debates about these shaped discussion of human racial difference. We consider the modern effort to identify and name divisions within the human species as part of a larger process of naturalization, and thus confront the question of the relationship between science and racism. We are attentive to the role of imperialism and slavery in framing philosophical discussion of human diversity. With readings from Grotius, Leibniz, Garcilaso de la Vega, Jacobus Capitein, Linnaeus, and others.

We learn about the craft of writing and producing philosophy for a wide public audience from practitioners inside and outside of academia. We look at various mediums and genres in which philosophy is made for the public: short-form opinion pieces, longform magazine pieces, regular columns, radio and podcasting, and video production. Students learn about the conventions of writing and speaking philosophically for nonacademic audiences and meet people who do this regularly as a full or part-time career. Students taking this for a unit produce a series of written or audio pieces aimed at nonacademic audiences.

We can share thoughts through language. But how do we do so effortlessly? Language is riddled with context-sensitivity. Further, what we communicate often goes beyond what's literally said. We can implicate, insinuate or hint, and speak figuratively, e.g. through irony, humor, or metaphor. We can communicate with others whether their interests and goals align with our own or not. We can successfully use words even when ignorant of what they denote. With such diversity, how is communicative success possible? We will focus on this and related questions through the lens of recent literature in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.

This course will draw on recent readings from psychology and philosophy to explore questions pertaining to the psychology, epistemology, and ethics of empathy.

The setting of spacetime physics is an excellent place to look for sharp answers to intuitive questions about the distinction between the subjective and the objective, and between appearances and reality. We look at what great thinkers (Newton, Leibniz, du Châtelet, etc.) have said about these issues, but we primarily try to find a view that fits with the best current scientific knowledge (in particular, the Special and General Theories of Relativity). For example, is the passage of time real or merely illusion? Or, is the "real" that which is independent of any reference frame?

We study the foundations and dynamics of belief polarization, with special attention to degrees of belief. Topics to include echo chambers, Bayesian black holes, conspiracy theories, rational disagreement, network effects in social epistemology, and belief fragmentation.

Machine learning - especially deep learning - is opening new horizons for research in the humanities and social sciences. This course offers a practical introduction to deep learning for graduate students, without assuming calculus/linear algebra or prior experience with coding. By the end of the course, students are able to code a variety of models themselves, including language and image recognition models, and gain an appreciation for the uses of ML in the humanities/social sciences. The course thus aims to support graduate students' professional development and is correspondingly offered in partnership with GradFUTURES.

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.

This course explores how political theorizing by Greek authors (classical and post-classical) drew on the figure of the lawgiver to animate questions about law and founding. It considers Plato and Aristotle on lawgivers against the backdrop of Herodotus and Greek oratory; moves on to later Greek biographers and historians such as Plutarch, and to the post-classical portraits of Moses as framed in Greek texts by Philo and Josephus; and asks how these approaches came to shape later interventions in the history of political thought. Students may write on reception of the figures studied as well as on the Greek sources themselves.

An examination of the most influential theoretical, pragmatic, and moral arguments regarding the existence and nature of God (or gods). Along the way, we consider debates about whether and how we can talk or think about such a being, and about whether mystical experience, miracles, and the afterlife are intelligible notions. Finally, we consider whether religious commitment might be rationally acceptable without any proof or evidence, and whether the real-world fact of religious diversity has philosophical implications. Course readings will be taken from both historical and contemporary sources.