This course will challenge you to examine your life from an ethical perspective. What should your goals and values be? We are living in a world in which some enjoy many luxuries while others live in extreme poverty. Climate change poses a threat to both present and future generations, as well as to the natural environment. What should you do about these issues? Other questions to be discussed include: abortion, euthanasia; the claim that all human life has equal value; the moral status of animals; and the ethics of what we eat, concern for the long-term future, and why we should act ethically.

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.

The ancients were fascinated by dreams and debated a variety of views about the nature, origin, and function of dreams. Are dreams divine messages about the future, our souls' indications of impending diseases, or just distorted versions of earlier thoughts? Do dreams have meaning and if so, how can we understand them? We will explore ancient approaches to dreams and their enigmas in literature and philosophy, medical texts, and religious practices. Although our focus will be on Greek and Roman texts, we will also pay attention to earlier Near Eastern sources as well as modern dream theories from Freud to scientific dream research.

Foucault argued that, starting at the end of 18th century, the object of power becomes biological life; politics becomes "biopolitics." He claimed that statistics plays a major role in that change. We explore those arguments, while testing a third: biopolitics takes as its object not so much real as probable lives. Starting with Pascal's "wager" on the afterlife and Leibniz's "palace of destinies," we discuss modern demographics, statistics as a political science, and later developments, from theories of civil safety to techniques for valuing (and devaluing) lives, exploring the ethical and political questions they raise.

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.

This course discusses the ideas and arguments of major ancient Greek and Roman philosophers and thereby introduces students to the history and continued relevance of the ancient period of western philosophy. Topics include the rise of cosmological speculation, the beginnings of philosophical ethics, Plato's moral theory and epistemology, Aristotle's philosophy of nature, metaphysics and ethics. The course ends with a survey of philosophical activity in the Hellenistic and late ancient periods.

This course will focus on the conditions for personal identity over time, with implications for the beginning and end of life. We will investigate what it is rational to care about in caring about survival or continued existence, and whether our account of what it is rational to care about should change if we discover either that (1) there is no human soul or (2) no self or subject behind our various conscious acts.

The concepts of causation, laws of nature, and objective chance are central to scientific theories and have long been of interest to philosophers. This class will explore different philosophical theories of these concepts. Along the way, we will discuss the question of realism vs anti-realism in science, the relationship between fundamental physics and the special sciences, the status of natural kinds, and the problem of induction.

This course considers how findings from cognitive science might change our understanding of various philosophical matters, especially the philosophical project of conceptual analysis. Along the way, we look in depth at various topics at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, including concepts, generics, and essentialism about natural kinds.

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

An examination of central questions in the philosophy of religion, from both historical and contemporary points of view. We will examine questions in metaphysics about the existence and nature of God, in epistemology about the justification of religious faith, and in ethics about the relationship between religion, meaning, and morality.

Are we living at the hinge of history? Is the best future for humanity one in which we become a vast interstellar civilization? Can we positively influence the long-term trajectory of our species? This course will examine both motivations and difficulties for longtermism, a novel position in ethics which says that ensuring a flourishing future for humanity should be our top moral priority. Topics will include population ethics,decision theory, the size of the future,cluelessness about the long-run effects of our actions, moral uncertainty, advanced artificial intelligence, and what to do if you are interested in existential risk mitigation.

An exploration of Aristotle's Metaphysics Gamma, with emphasis on the philosophical questions surrounding the definition of metaphysics, focal meaning, the establishing of principles.

A critical examination of select issues in recent epistemology.

This course takes up questions relating to the metaphysics and natural philosophy of Leibniz. Of particular interest is Leibniz's account of substance, body, and the relation between metaphysics and physics in Leibniz's system as it evolved from his early writings to his last thoughts. If time and interest permit, we can also take up other topics, including (but not limited to) Leibniz's logic, his differential and integral calculus, his theory of relations, and his scatological poetry in Latin and French.

This seminar serves as an introduction to various issues in formal ethics. Our guide is John Broome's books Weighing Goods and Weighing Lives, which together advance a theory of welfare aggregation across people, under uncertainty, and over time. Topics include the following: distributive equality, the value of additional lives, ex ante vs. ex post approaches to social risk, separability and Pareto principles, the structure of betterness relations, and axiomatic foundations of utilitarianism.

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.

What are the implications of quantum physics for philosophical issues - metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic? We survey several answers to this question from figures such as Bohr, Hermann, Bohm, Everett, Bell, and Rovelli.

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 classics of analytic 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.

A seminar on Kant's ethics, metaphysics, and social/political philosophy insofar as they relate to his thinking about religion. Kant famously criticizes traditional theistic proofs as illegitimate speculation, but his own positive project involves God in important ways, even in the Critical period. In this course, we look at the pre-Critical theology, the Critical arguments against dogmatic and ecclesiastical religion, the positive arguments for "practico- theoretical" and "moral" faith, and the roles played by the concepts of evil, grace, hope, and progress in an enlightened, moral religion.