Should we create smarter, more virtuous people? This seminar will explore the ethical, legal, and social implications of using various medical technologies to alter human cognition. We will discuss the neuroscience and medical means used to alter human cognition. We will, then, critically evaluate philosophical arguments regarding the use and distribution of neurointerventions: Is there a morally relevant distinction between treatment and enhancement? Do we ever have a moral obligation to enhance ourselves? Do cognitive enhancements impede or bolster the principles of a liberal democracy? These and other questions will be explored.

The course discusses classical Greek perspectives on the gods and theology, drawing from both "philosophy" and "literature" and exploring their intersections and divergences. Topics include myth and myth-criticism, cosmology and cosmogony, allegoresis and hermeneutics, ritual and divination, and agnosticism and atheism. Major authors include Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Empedocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, the sophists, the Hippocratic authors, Xenophon, and Plato. The course works closely with texts in the original, but is open to students who wish to engage intensively through translation.

Few concepts in the theory of art and literature have been as long-lived, as influential and yet as obscure as mimesis. In what sense does mimesis imply likeness, artifice, making or performance? To what degree is it a natural or human phenomenon? What, finally, is the role of the production and recognition of mimesis in understanding? We'll discuss some ancient, medieval, and modern approaches to these questions, studying works of literature, philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. The arts to be considered include poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance.

A seminar on the nature, varieties and powers of signs as defined and evoked in the philosophy, theology, and poetry of the Middle Ages. Subjects to be discussed include typologies of natural and artificial signs, theories of imposition, analogy and equivocation, self-signification, and "efficacious" meaning. Case studies are furnished by the sacraments, romance obscenities and euphemisms, proper names, Tristan and Yseut's "potion," Lancelot's cart, and the dates of Villon's Testament.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a period of daring innovation. Figures like Descartes and Galileo challenged the inheritance of antiquity. Figures like Leibniz and Berkeley challenged what passed for common sense. Figures like Spinoza and Hume challenged what was accepted as religion. In this class we will introduce students to the study of philosophy by exploring some of the philosophical projects these thinkers and some of their contemporaries pursued, and in that way trace the emergence of the modern philosophical sensibility.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

Proofs of some of the principal results regarding first-order languages (and the theories expressed in them): Church's undecidability theorem, the Lowenheim-Skolem Theorem, Gödel's theorems on the completeness of first-order logic and the incompleteness of arithmetic; because several of these concern the possibility of devising computational tests for semantic properties (logical validity, truth), an introduction to the theory of computability (Turing Machines/ recursive functions); if time permits, some properties of second-order logic.

This course focuses on several problems in the philosophy of mind: the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, the problem of personal identity, the problem of free will, and the problem of perception.

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 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.

This course introduces students to the political and social philosophy of Marxism, and poses a critical question. Can the philosophy, so grounded on economics and class oppression, properly account for the ills of racial oppression? In exploring this question, we will look at the theoretical work of Black revolutionaries inspired by Marxism, such as Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones and Walter Rodney; as well as work by some contemporary philosophers. This course will familiarize students with the thought of historical figures, and different views of the relationship between racial and class oppression, and how they operate.

We take it for granted that normal adults are responsible for what they do. But what does this mean, and is it really true? The course will address central issues in ethics, moral psychology and the philosophy of law. What is free will, and do we possess it? Do our practices of censure and criminal punishment presuppose that we are free? Does reflection on human freedom motivate a revision in these practices?

A study of the central arguments of Kant's greatest and most influential philosophical work, the Critique of Pure Reason.

In this seminar we study aspects of Spinoza's philosophy relevant to the German philosophical tradition (including his monism, his identifying power and right, and more), and then closely examine some key episodes in that tradition's engagement with Spinoza. Among other things, we consider here the early reception of Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, Leibniz's response to Spinoza's necessitarianism, Hegel's critique of Spinoza's metaphysics, and Nietzsche's embrace of Spinoza's anti-anthropocentrism.

The subject of this course is the close relationship between themes in philosophical logic and philosophy of language in Frege's later work and the early Stoics. The course offers an introduction to the main elements of Stoic logic and linguistic theory and to Frege's late papers (esp. 'Thought', 'Negation', 'Compound Thought') and their parallels in his posthumous work. We juxtapose and contrast these theories and consider the considerable methodological difficulties that arise when one compares philosophical works form very different eras and cultures.

This course familiarizes students with recent work in (analytic) Marxist philosophy. The course looks at a range of topics foundational to Marxism, such as how to understand some of Marxism's condemnations of Capitalist society; whether particular "Marxist methodologies" are valid, and whether Marxism is viable as a framework for understanding class and issues affecting other social identities. In particular, we look at debates about: exploitation, alienation, domination; immanent critique, functional explanation; class, Patriarchy, racism, imperialism; as well as other topics of particular importance in recent Marxist thought.

Standard idealizations in formal epistemology and decision theory don't leave room for uncertainty, incoherence, or lack of precision about (1) how one should or will respond to one's evidence; (2) what new hypotheses one might form; (3) the impact of one's decisions on future values or distant future states of affairs; (4) what states of affairs are valuable; (5) which normative theory is correct. This seminar explores responses to these phenomena, with emphasis on performance-based evaluations of these responses, such as money pump arguments, diachronic exploitation arguments, and value of information arguments.

This course concentrates on visual perception as the purest case of the mind-body problem.

This course is a survey of some contemporary work on Monism. There are many different kinds of Monism, but they are unified in thinking that, in various different areas, there is ultimately only one thing, or only one kind of thing. We look at several different arguments that have been given for Monism in metaphysics, in the philosophy of science, and in the philosophy of mind.

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.

A systematic study of the salient features of legal systems, standards of legal reasoning, and the relation between law and morals.

This course offers an introduction to deep learning, which is the core technology behind most modern AI applications, aimed at students with minimal coding experience/mathematical background. Emphasis will be placed on gaining a conceptual understanding of deep learning models and on practicing the basic coding skills required to use them in simple contexts. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand, code and train a variety of basic deep learning models, including basic neural nets, image recognition models, and natural language processing models. As a capstone, students will build their own tiny GPT-style text generator.