This is a required course for the ten Graduate Prize Fellows (GPFs) in the University Center for Human Values. It is expected that the GPFs register for the course in both the fall and spring semesters of the year they are GPFs. The course has three central goals. First, the seminar is designed to support students' dissertation work while providing special aid to the human values aspect of the dissertation. Second, the seminar has an intensive focus on in-person academic performance skills. Third, the seminar aims to help graduate students to work toward the academic job market.

This transdisciplinary course investigates `home' as a central concept in both environmental studies (settler-colonial vs nomad) and arthouse cinema (anthropocentric vs environmental perspective). With the help of examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises, we will experiment with a possible compromise between the civilizational paradigms of settler colonialism vs nomadic homelessness.

In the twentieth century, Europe underwent a range of wrenching social and political upheavals that brought into question received truths about politics, the role of religion, the relationship between the sexes, and the place of Europe in the wider world. Over the course of the semester, we will study a range of different thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida, examining how they responded to these upheavals and offered new ways to thinking about the world and our place in it.

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.

An introduction to theories of social justice and examination of their implications in areas of contemporary social and political controversy. The first half of the course introduces the problem of social justice and examines two classic positions, as articulated by John Locke (name associated with liberalism, property, and capitalism) and Karl Marx (name associated with the critique of capitalism). The second half of the course focuses on contemporary theories of justice. We will read authors such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and examine controversies over poverty, gender, racial injustice, equal opportunity, and environmental justice.

What, if any, norms of justice apply to the institutions and practice of world politics? Topics may include "political realism" and skepticism about global morality; just wars and justice in warfare; ethics of humanitarian intervention; the nature and basis of human rights; world poverty and global distributive justice; climate change; democracy and accountability in global institutions. Readings chosen from recent works in political philosophy.

Debates in political theory typically revolve around questions relating to ends, such as "What does a perfectly just society look like?" But very few societies have fully achieved the ends set out by political theorists and much real-world political practice is about enacting means in pursuit of a given end. This course is about social change and the means deployed to achieve it. We will examine the philosophical questions surrounding means such as violence, disobedience, strikes, boycotts, and nudging. Examining these means will involve engaging with some of the most important and enduring problems in political theory.

With a focus on contemporary controversies in public life, this course surveys philosophical and theological perspectives on the ethos of liberal democracy oriented toward rights, equality, and freedom. For example, what do Christian beliefs and practices imply about issues related to feminism, racism, nationalism, and pluralism? What is the relationship between religious conviction, morality and law? Special emphasis on selected political and economic problems, bioethics, criminal justice, sexuality, the environment, war, immigration, and the role of religion in American culture.

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.

We are what we eat--morally as well as molecularly. So how should moral concerns about animals, workers, the environment, our health, and our communities inform our food choices? Can we develop an effective and just model for feeding growing populations while respecting religious, class, and cultural differences? The main goal of this course is not to prescribe answers to these questions, but to give students tools to reflect on them effectively. These tools include a working knowledge of the main ethical theories in philosophy, and a grasp of key empirical issues regarding the production, distribution, consumption, and politics of food.