The 2023-24 Graduate Course listings have been posted below.
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About our Graduate Courses
⚠ Students who are not graduate students in the Department of Philosophy must secure an instructor’s approval before taking a graduate-level philosophy course. This level of approval will be sufficient for students of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST) who are seeking to enrol in a course with a faculty member cross-appointed to IHPST and for Centre for Medieval Studies students.
All other students not enrolled in the Department of Philosophy must have their request approved both by the course instructor and by the Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy (DGS). Requests to the DGS should be submitted with a transcript (if no grades have been received in the current University of Toronto graduate program, then the transcript from the previous degree should be attached).
Find detailed guidelines about how to enrol in courses on ACORN on our instructions sheet.
Fill out the SGS Add/Drop Course(s) Form, have it signed by the instructor, and submit it to the Graduate Administrator.
Students from other Ontario universities must request enrollment in U of T graduate-level courses through the Ontario Visiting Graduate Students Exchange Program. Contact the Graduate Office of your home university for more information.
We anticipate that all Philosophy graduate courses will meet in person. This is subject to change pending governmental and university health advisories.
Breadth Requirements
History of Philosophy and Philosophical Traditions Drawn from Geographical Regions
- Ancient
- Medieval
- 17th and 18th Century
- 19th Century
- 20th Century
- East Asian Philosophy
- South Asian Philosophy
(Note: This list is flexible and may be expanded to accommodate a wider range of philosophical traditions from geographical regions, depending on courses offered in any given year).
Contemporary Problems of Philosophy
- Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science (MES)
- Values (Ethics and Metaethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion) (V)
- Mind, Language, Logic (MLL)
2023-2024 Graduate Courses
(TENTATIVE AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE)
Please note that course locations can be determined through Quercus for enrolled students. Philosophy students interested in auditing a course or who haven’t made up their minds yet can contact Evan Drapeau for information about the course location.
Fall 2023 Graduate Courses
HPS4011F Cognitive Technologies: Philosophical Issues and Debates – CANCELLED
MST3301F Themes in Medieval Philosophy: Back to the Future. Time, Being and Duration in Late-Antique and Medieval Thought
Instructor: Pasquale Porro
Time: Mon 2-4 PM
Start Date: September 18
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO Medieval
Description: The primary aim of the course is to show how medieval debates on time, through the overlap between physical instances and theological needs, attempt to overcome some of the limitations of the Aristotelian approach, such as the difference in ontological status between the parts of time and the lack of a concept capable of expressing the simple duration of being.
More specifically, the course aims to trace
• the confluence between the Aristotelian doctrine of time and specific elements of the Greek and Latin Neoplatonic tradition;
• the main transformations that Aristotle’s concept of time underwent in the Middle Ages, with particular attention to the Latin Scholastic debates of the 13th and 14th centuries; and
• the reinterpretation of the peculiar Aristotelian asymmetry between the immutability and determinacy of the past and the indeterminacy of the future;
• the development in Latin Scholasticism of new models of duration unrelated to the Aristotelian tradition. These models were elaborated mainly (but not exclusively) in the field of angelology; but they were soon used to compensate for the apparent lack in Aristotle of an adequate measure of the duration of the substantial being of ordinary sublunary things.
The course will consist of 4 main sections:
(i) Introduction: ‘Time Travel’ and Time Asymmetry in Medieval Thought
(ii) The reception of the Aristotelian theory of time in Latin Scholasticism
(iii) Non-Aristotelian concepts of time in Latin Scholasticism
(angelic measures and the question of the duration of substantial being)
(iv) Determinacy of the past vs. indeterminacy of the future in the Scholastic debates
PHL2005F Plato’s Metaphysics
Instructor: Lloyd Gerson
Time: Mon 9 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES/HIS Ancient
Description: This course is an advanced introduction to Plato’s metaphysics and its centerpiece, the theory of Forms. We will examine central texts in the dialogues regarding the arguments for separate Forms and their relation to the sensible world via what Plato calls “participation.” We will also examine Plato’s arguments regarding the relations among the Forms themselves, and his introduction of the concept of “internal” relations. We will also consider the Forms in relation to what Plato calls “the unhypothetical first principle of all,” namely, the Idea of the Good. Along the way, we will also consider how Plato integrates his epistemology with his metaphysics. The goal of the course is to establish one pole of the fundamental axis in the history of philosophy, that is, Platonism vs. naturalism (or: anti-Platonism).
See the full syllabus: https://philosophy.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/PHL-2005F-2023-1.pdf
PHL2019F Topics in South Asian Philosophy: Seeing and Subjects
Instructor: Jonardon Ganeri
Time: Tue 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: In aesthetics, considered as a branch of the philosophy of perception, it is common to distinguish between seeing-as and seeing-in. Seeing-as consists in seeing an object under a concept. Seeing-in is the mode of seeing involved in, for example, seeing a horse in the painted surface of a canvas. The course will investigate how this distinction is understood in classical and contemporary South Asian Philosophy. We will review classical sources including Nyāya philosophy of perception and Indian aesthetics (so-called rasa theory). We will also examine the work of two 20th-century Indian philosophers: Krishnacandra Bhattacharyya (1875–1949) and Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935–1991). We will explore K.C. Bhattacharyya’s theory of seeing absences, and the relationship he claims to exist between absence perception and subjectivity. We will examine B. K. Matilal’s reconstruction of a relationist theory of perception from classical Nyāya sources, as well as his account of amodal completion, the phenomenon by which one sees a whole object despite being in visual contact with only its front surface. In all this, we will draw extensively on contemporary analytical philosophy of perception to guide and structure our explorations.
PHL2057F Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy: Early Modern Naturalisms – Spinoza and Hume
Instructor: Donald Ainslie and Michael Rosenthal
Time: Fri 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS 17th and 18th Century
Description: Spinoza and Hume seem to endorse contrasting but extreme versions of the commitments that structure early modern philosophy – what we now call ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’. But they also share a common overall naturalistic outlook, holding that we need not or cannot go beyond the natural in pursuit of philosophical understanding. This seminar will explore overlapping strands of thought in these two titans of 17th- and 18th-century philosophy, focusing in particular on their treatments of substance, the self, causality and reason, free will, and religion and politics.
PHL2101F Seminar in Metaphysics: Modality, Time, and the Self
Instructor: Michael Caie
Time: Tue 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This seminar will survey a cluster of related topics in the metaphysics of modality, time, and the self, as well as related issues in epistemology, language, and mind concerning our thought and talk about each of these subject matters. We’re all naturally inclined to regard other selves as equally real as ourselves: there’s no sense in which you are more real than your best friend. But what about other times, such as the far future or distant past, when compared with the present time? What about other possibilities, such as those where you never discovered philosophy, when compared with the ways things actually are? We’ll introduce some central debates about each of modality, time, and the self. We’ll then devote the seminar to exploring the multifarious connections between these topics. Does adopting a certain view about one of the topics create pressure to adopt an analogous view about the others? Our focus throughout will be on contemporary work.
PHL2115F Topics in Epistemology: The Self and Normativity
Instructor: David Barnett and Brendan de Kenessey
Time: Wed 9 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES/Values, depending on final paper topic
Description: This is a seminar on topics in ethics and epistemology related to the self. A punchy version of our overarching question is how who we are affects who we ought to be. Less punchily but more accurately: How do the attitudes one already has, and how one relates to those attitudes, affect what attitudes one ought to have, or actions one ought to do? In epistemology: How does what you already believe affect what you ought to believe? In ethics: How does what you value or intend affect what you ought to value, intend, or do? We will also be interested in the relation one must bear to one’s attitudes to count as ‘owning’ them as one’s own.
PHL2117F Social Formal Epistemology
Instructor: Jonathan Weisberg
Time: Mon 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES/MLL
Description: This course introduces various topics and techniques used in formal approaches to social epistemology. We’ll begin with a primer on the Bayesian approach to individual epistemology, then survey a variety of topics in social epistemology, for example, learning from the opinions of others, group agency, wisdom of the crowds, the epistemic value of diversity, epistemic network models, and misinformation and polarization.
PHL2141F Political Philosophy: Compliance, Disobedience, Rebellion
Instructor: Brookes Brown
Time: Wed 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: This class considers the ethics of how citizens relate to laws and legal institutions. Under what conditions, if any, are citizens obligated to comply with laws? When do they have a right—or even an obligation—to disobey? And when do they have a right or a responsibility to resort to more active forms of protest or violence?
PHL2142F Seminar in Political Philosophy: Ethics of Policing
Instructor: Avia Pasternak
Time: Thu 9 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: Policing is an integral part of the state. Many liberal authors believe that even in the just state, a police force would be necessary to ensure compliance with the law, and that the state’s legitimacy is embodied in citizens’ trust that the police serves and protects them. However, we do not live in just states. In states as we know them, police are at the front line of a criminal justice system often marred by racial, gendered, and economic structural injustices. Moreover, the police itself, as an institution, often fails to protect equitably at least some of the populations it is meant to serve. In our world, the police are all too often agents of injustice, rather than of justice.
In this course we will explore and investigate the ethics of policing in an unjust world. We will examine some of the ethical dilemmas that police themselves face, as agents working in an unjust yet (arguably) necessary institution. We will explore the normative dimensions of the relationship between citizens and police, and how oppressed citizens may respond to police. Finally, we will consider the way forward for the police—from abolition to reform.
PHL2148F Philosophy of Law: Hobbes’s Political and Legal Philosophy
Instructor: David Dyzenhaus
Time: Wed 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values/HIS 19th Century, depending on final paper topic
Description: In Behemoth, Hobbes says “that what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them” and that “[t]he virtue of a subject is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth.” This claim is at the same time debunking (nothing more to virtue than obedience to law) and commendatory (understanding that one’s duty is to obey the law is the mark of virtue). Any tension here can be ironed out by supposing that while virtue does not exist outside of civil society, once civil society is established, virtue becomes possible through the ability of subjects to conform their actions to their sovereign’s law. The same is true of Hobbes’s many discussions of virtue in Leviathan. Yet Hobbes also says in chapter 15 of Leviathan that the “Science” of the laws of nature set out in that and the preceding chapter are the “true and onely Moral Philosophy,” and thus also the “science of Vertue and Vice,” that the laws of nature oblige in the state of nature (albeit only in conscience), and suggests in various ways both that it is possible (though dangerous) to be a virtuous or “Just man” in the state of nature and that such men may have an important role to play in establishing civil society. Our course will explore the puzzles raised by Hobbes’s discussion in Leviathan of virtue and duty to obey the law in light of his theory of the role of legal order in maintaining the political order of the modern legal state.
PHL2171F Philosophy of Mind: New Books in Philosophy of Mind
Instructor: Nathan Charlow and Imogen Dickie
Time: Thu 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: We will work through three new books in philosophy of mind, picking up necessary background as we go. Each block of work on a book will culminate in a question-and-answer session with the author. Our three books, in the order in which we will tackle them, are –
*Causation in Psychology* (John Campbell, Berkeley – Campbell will visit us on Sept. 28)
*Feeling Like It* (Tamar Schapiro, MIT – Schapiro will visit on Oct. 26)
*Talking About* (Elmar Unnsteinsson, University College Dublin/University of Iceland – Unnsteinsson will visit on Nov. 30 )
Campbell’s book is in metaphysics of mind. Schapiro’s discusses issues in the theory of action. Unnsteinsson’s is at the boundary of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. The class will cover a range of issues under these headings, and will be suitable both for people new to the philosophy of mind, and for people with experience in the area.
PHL2172F Seminar in Philosophy of Mind: The Structure of Consciousness
Instructor: Andrew Lee
Time: Wed 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: This seminar will examine a variety of philosophical questions about the structure of consciousness. These include: How do the structures of conscious experiences relate to the structures of their physical correlates? Do experiences have parts? Does consciousness come in degrees? What are dimensions of consciousness? Are experiences continuous or discrete? How are quality-spaces structured? What are global states of consciousness? What does the state-space of experiences look like? Readings will focus on recent work in analytic philosophy.
PHL2198F Advanced Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
Instructor: Michael Miller
Time: Wed 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This course offers an advanced introduction to several contemporary topics in the general philosophy of science. Topics to be considered may include inductive inference, confirmation, models and theories, scientific representation, approximation and idealization, realism and empiricism, reduction and emergence, explanation, causation, and experimentation.
PHL2222F MA Proseminar I: Ethics (required for and limited to Philosophy MA students)
Instructor: Nathan Howard
Time: Fri 9 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL
Description: Over the last fifty years, philosophers have spent a great deal of attention on reasons. That is in part because there are many prominent interesting questions to ask about reasons. But to an even greater extent, it is because reasons have been found, or at least alleged, to be hiding behind even more prominent questions – lying in the interstices between issues in not just normative ethics and metaethics, but social and political philosophy, philosophy of law, aesthetics, philosophy of action, epistemology, moral psychology, and other parts of the philosophy of mind. Answering these other questions has seemed, to many philosophers at least, to require first answering or at least defending answers to related questions about reasons. This course offers an introduction to some of these questions and to the hidden questions that themselves lie behind those questions. We will examine both influential primary texts and ground our discussion in the survey provided by The Fundamentals of Reasons.
PHL 3000Y PhD Professional Development Seminar
Instructor: Donald Ainslie
Time: Mon 6–9 PM (Fall 2023 and Winter 2024)
Description: The aim of this course is to prepare students entering the job market for careers as professional philosophers. Students will present and receive feedback on work from their dissertations, and receive training on preparing dossier materials, creating a website, and interviewing. This course is CR/NCR and is required for those who wish to use the departmental placement services.
PHL3000F MA Professional Development Seminar
Instructor: Martin Pickavé, Jennifer Nagel, and Marleen Rozemond
Time: Mon 6–9 PM
Description: This four-session course provides MA students with professional advice. The topics will be Pedagogy, Writing Philosophy, Graduate Studies in the Overall Structure of the University, and Philosophical Research. The seminar is a required course for all MA students, including those in the Philosophy of Science stream, and is graded on a CR/NCR (credit/non-credit) basis.
RLG1002F Philosophy of Religion Gateway
Instructor: Robert Gibbs
Time: Wed 3–5 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: This gateway course introduces students to the philosophy of religion, exploring the constitution of the field. Taking as its base line the Protestant philosophical tradition as it emerges from Kant, the course moves forward to 19th- and 20th-century philosophy, sideways to explore other traditions of philosophy and religion, and even backward to medieval Christian theology. The two terms (philosophy, religion) will be placed in a complex dialogue. More, the conversation between different traditions will itself be interrogated—as that conversation need not presuppose a common canon of reason. We will engage a variety of ways of studying philosophical texts: heremeneutical, conceptual, phenomenological. By its conclusion, students should be better able to locate their research within the field and imagine their own ways of teaching an undergraduate course.
Winter 2024 Graduate Courses
COL5081S Benjamin’s Arcades Project
Instructor: Rebecca Comay
Time: Thurs 1–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS 20th Century
Description: This course will be devoted to a close reading of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished and posthumously published montage of fragments, quotations, and aphorisms on the urban culture of Second Empire Paris—“capital of the nineteenth century.” Both the birthplace of consumer capitalism and the site of numerous failed revolutions, nineteenth-century Paris crystallized for Benjamin (writing during the rise of European fascism) the numerous ambiguities of modernity itself. Many of these ambiguities were registered in disorienting new experiences of space and time. While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of nineteenth-century visual, literary, and architectural culture—fashion, photography, advertising, lighting, furniture, railways, exhibitions, department stores, catacombs, museums, and the like—we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, and politics today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with readings from Baudelaire, Blanqui, Fourier, Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud, as well as contemporary critical theorists.
HPS3010S Social Epistemology
Instructor: Joseph Berkovitz
Time: Tue 10 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Traditionally, epistemology has dealt with the ways in which an individual acquires knowledge through perception and reasoning. However, in recent years it has become apparent that the traditional discussions of knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular, fail to capture important aspects of the social dimension of knowledge. We acquire most of our beliefs from the testimony of others, including experts, and from social institutions that are in charge of the generation of knowledge. The relatively recent branch of philosophy that deals with the social dimensions of knowledge is called social epistemology. It has developed through dialogue with the history of science, sociology of scientific knowledge, anthropology, and philosophy of science. The course will provide an introduction to social epistemology, in general, and social epistemology of science, in particular. It will deal with various aspects of the nature of knowledge from this new perspective, including issues such as the development of scientific knowledge, ‘knowledge that’ (something true) vs. ‘knowledge how,’ the influence of social and cultural factors on scientific methodology, scientific rationality and scientific knowledge, scientific realism vs. social constructivism, distributive cognition, holism vs. methodological individualism, trust, expertise, consensus, distributive epistemic injustice, and feminist epistemology.
JGC1855S Critical Theory: The French-German Connection
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
Time: Wed 3–5 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS 20th Century
(Note: Please have the course instructor sign your Add Course form before submitting to the Director of Graduate Studies)
Description: This course examines central theoretical issues in critical theory, with particular attention to the role that the so-called Frankfurt School and its affiliates—such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno—and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, difference, and alterity.
MST3346S Medieval Islamic Philosophy Updated Course Description (Jan 4, 2024)
Instructor: Deborah Black
Time: Wed 2–4 PM
Breadth Requirement: GEO/HIS Medieval
Description: This course is an introduction to the major figures and themes in classical Islamic philosophy (falsafah) from the 9th to the 12th centuries CE, with a focus on the works of Al-Fārābī, Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), as well as other less well-known figures from the classical period. We will consider a range of philosophical problems in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, as well as topics in ethics and political philosophy. Some consideration will also be given to the views of the Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite schools of theology (kalām), the rival intellectual tradition to philosophy within the medieval Islamic world.
PHL1111S PhD Proseminar: Seminar in Value Theory (required for and limited to first-year Philosophy PhD students)
Instructor: Sophia Moreau
Time: Thu 9 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: We live most of our lives within social, political, and legal institutions that are significantly unjust, and among people many of whom (including ourselves!) often fail to do what is morally required of them. What implications do these injustices and moral failures have for our moral obligations? When do they make a difference to what we are required to do, and what sort of difference do they make? Could we ever have an “objectionable obligation,” an obligation that is genuine and morally binding but yet about which its bearer has a moral complaint; and if so, what difference might such a complaint make to the moral obligation (other than negating it)? In this seminar, we will be looking at several bodies of philosophical literature that bear on these questions. We will consider some of the literature on “taking up the slack”—that is, on what we are obliged to do when others (sometimes individuals, sometimes states) do not do their fair share. Are we obliged to do only what we would have to do under conditions of full compliance, or must we do more? We will also look at some of the recent literature on role obligations—that is, obligations whose scope and normative force often appear to be determined at least in part by the roles we occupy within various social and political institutions (for instance, the roles of police officer, nurse, or parent). Role obligations raise a number of special problems when we focus on the injustice of the institutions that appear to generate them. How could they have genuine normative force if they are the products of such unjust institutions? If someone has a complaint about standing under such an obligation, what might the nature of the complaint be, and how might the complaint affect the content or scope of the obligation? Finally, we will look at some recent writing on contractualism to explore the nature of moral “complaints” and to consider whether and how it might make sense to conceptualize a complaint about an obligation and its effect on that obligation.
PHL2007S Seminar in Aristotle: De Anima
Instructor: Jessica Gelber
Time: Wed 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS Ancient
Description: This seminar will be a study of Aristotle’s de Anima. We will read this rich treatise from the beginning, pairing our readings of the primary text with both recent and classic scholarship on a wide range of philosophical and interpretive issues. Our aim will be to identify what problems Aristotle thinks arise for anyone trying to understand the nature of the soul, for which his discussions of his predecessors’ theories of the soul (in Book I) will be our guide, and to understand how his own theory is supposed to resolve those problems. We will also look at Aristotle’s biological investigation of psychic capacities in works such as Parva Naturalia, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals for help in illuminating some of the obscure claims found in DA.
PHL2013S Topics in Chinese Philosophy: Knowledge and Skepticism in Classical Chinese Thought – CANCELLED
PHL2018S Topics in South Asian Philosophy: Sanskrit Philosophy
Instructor: Elisa Freschi
Time: Fri 12:30 – 3:00 PM
Breadth Requirement: GEO/HIS South Asian Philosophy
Description: This class will introduce students to Sanskrit philosophy through the entrance door of one of its most influential schools, Mīmāṃsā. This school developed several deontic theories, ranging from the primacy of duty to the idea that enjoined actions are only fulfilled if the addressee thinks of them as advantageous for their own purposes. During the class we will look at some case studies, from the role of contrasting commands about the destiny of a widow (should she burn herself on the sacrificial pyre of her deceased husband?) to the role of ritual results in one’s performance of sacrifices. This will enable us to discuss the nature of duty, the way commands influence people, and the autonomy of human action.
PHL2063S Kant’s Ethics
Instructor: Sergio Tenenbaum and Owen Ware
Time: Thu 12:30–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values/HIS 18th Century (depending on topic of final essay)
Description: Kant’s practical philosophy has provided influential answers to central questions in normative ethics and the theory of practical reason (and perhaps slightly less influential answers to questions in applied ethics, such as the morality of haircuts and nail trimmings, and the comparative disvalue of alcohol abuse and gluttony). Kant’s views about moral motivation, the relation between freedom and rationality, the nature and content of the moral law, the value of human beings, the value of autonomy, and the relation between morality and rationality have been at the forefront of contemporary debates. However, contemporary ethicists will often ignore large parts of Kant’s practical philosophy (especially its metaphysical commitments) and pick and choose the items they find most attractive. Meanwhile, Kant himself seems to have thought that his practical philosophy (and his critical philosophy more generally) formed a systematic whole, whose parts could not be so easily sold separately. In this course, we will aim for a historically accurate understanding of Kant’s practical philosophy, while also assessing the relevance of his work for contemporary ethics.
PHL2137S Philosophy of Action: Decisions
Instructor: Sara Aronowitz and Paul Bloom
Time: Tue 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES/MLL
Description: This course is a joint seminar in philosophy and psychology, open to graduate students from any discipline related to cognitive science. We’ll discuss how approaches from multiple disciplines bear on contemporary debates about decision-making. Topics will include: How do we determine what decisions to make? What does psychology have to say about the rationality of decision making? How do we make sense of so-called “transformative experiences”? And it is possible to deliberately act against what we take to be our best interests—that is, can we be perverse actors?
PHL 2145S Bioethics: Autonomy and Consent in Medicine
Instructor: Andrew Franklin-Hall
Time: Tue 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: Informed consent is a cornerstone of contemporary medical ethics. In this course, we will examine the nature of consent, some of the varieties of consent (actual, hypothetical, retrospective, and prospective), the notion of competence to give consent, and the sorts of things that might undermine consent (e.g., coercion, manipulation, duress, etc.). Our readings will include some of the modern classics in the field (e.g., Faden and Beauchamp’s History and Theory of Informed Consent, Buchanan and Brock’s Deciding for Others), as well as a selection of the most recent literature on the topic.
PHL2151S Aesthetics: Beyond the Beautiful and the Sublime
Instructor: Mark Kingwell
Time: Mon 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: Aesthetics has traditionally been locked into a presumed relationship with the idea of beauty, such that even more expansive views allowing for the sublime (Burke, Kant) are still determined by a logic of the beautiful. In this seminar we will explore the prospects for a more expansive array of aesthetic qualities, including the uncanny (Freud et seq.), the abject (Kristeva), the weird and the eerie (Mark Fisher), the zany, the cute, and the interesting (Sianne Ngai), or the simply bad.
PHL2171S Philosophy of Mind: Perceptions—Relations, Contents, and Skills
Instructor: Sonia Sedivy
Time: Wed 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: How restrictive should theories of perception be about what we perceive and how we do so? We will examine three ways that this core question is debated today. The first is the debate over which properties we perceive. Do we perceive only so-called low-level properties such as colours and contours? Or do we perceive high-level properties such as being a pine tree or a painting? The second is the stand-off between relational and content theories of perception. Content theories argue that perceptual experiences represent the world as being some way. Relational theories deny that perceptual experiences have contents and argue that they are constituted by basic relations to external objects. The third issue we will explore is whether there is specifically perceptual learning or skill.
PHL2193S Topics in Analytic Philosophy: Relativized Metaphysical Modality
Instructor: Benjamin Hellie and Jessica Wilson
Time: Wed 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Since the early 1960s, in the analytic tradition, developments in metaphysics and modal logic have been closely intertwined. Logical analyses of ‘it is necessarily the case that’—especially in its ‘iterated‘ uses, in interaction with naming, and in interaction with quantification—have constrained, and also been constrained by, metaphysical theories of a diversity of phenomena: fundamental natural law; individual essential properties; the character of existence. On the whole, the literature has been ‘problematizing’ and inconclusive: the phenomena are widely seen to require tradeoffs, with simplicity and power of logical analysis apparently trading off against intuitive plausibility of metaphysical theory. The general conflict is this: logic is much simpler and stronger if necessities, essences, and existence are all noncontingent; but metaphysical intuition strongly suggests that sometimes, necessity, essence, and existence depend on contingent aspects of actuality.
Around a decade ago, the ‘relativized metaphysical modality’ (RMM) program proposed a way forward, by disambiguating the noncontingency required by logic from the contingency required by metaphysics. RMM repurposes a ‘two-dimensional’ apparatus, initially put to work in epistemology, to metaphysical ends: the logically requisite noncontingency is grasped by considering possibilities ‘as counterfactual’, while the metaphysically requisite contingency is grasped instead by considering possibilities ‘as actual’. This disambiguation releases the long-standing tension between logic and metaphysics, thereby clearing the logjam accumulated over many decades.
This seminar will divide roughly into thirds. A first component will address historical background and standing literature. A second will lay out technicalities from the traditional modal logic, and its two-dimensional development. And a third will investigate problems and prospects in the RMM program.
PHL2199S Seminar in the Philosophy of Science: Bayesian Philosophy of Science
Instructor: Franz Huber
Time: Mon 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This Seminar in philosophy of science will approach topics in the field from a Bayesian point of view. We will work with Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann, Bayesian Philosophy of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Find the link to the library’s e-book.
One way to think of the philosophy of science is as epistemology and metaphysics of science. Bayesian philosophy of science is philosophy of science from a probabilistic point of view, where probabilities are interpreted in terms of degrees of belief. Topics in Bayesian philosophy of science include confirmation and induction, scientific realism, learning conditionals, the problem of old evidence, causation, explanation, inter-theoretic reduction, simplicity, scientific objectivity, statistical inference, as well as model selection and idealization. Special attention will be paid to the foundations and philosophy of probability, the representation of conditional probabilistic independence in so-called Bayesian nets, as well as the relation of conditional probabilistic independence and Bayesian nets to so-called causal nets (with and without structural equations).
PHL2223S MA Proseminar II: Knowledge Attribution and Knowledge Itself (required for generalist Philosophy MAs and open to Philosophy of Science MAs)
Instructor: Jennifer Nagel
Time: Tue 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Humans and certain other animals have some remarkable natural abilities to track what others do and do not know, abilities that inform a wide range of their competitive and cooperative behavior. Within epistemology, pre-theoretical instincts about particular cases of knowledge are used as a source of evidence for and against theories of knowledge itself. However, naturally occurring patterns of epistemic intuition are sometimes strange, even paradoxical. This course examines the natural foundations of knowledge attribution, the evidential value of epistemic intuitions, and the question of what exactly these intuitive judgments can tell us about knowledge itself. Authors to be read include Peter Carruthers, Keith DeRose, John Heritage, Cecilia Heyes, Akio Kamio, Laurie Santos, Rebecca Saxe, Michael Tomasello, Brian Weatherson, and Timothy Williamson.
PHL 3000Y PhD Professional Development Seminar
Instructor: Donald Ainslie
Time: Mon 6–9 PM (Fall 2023 and Winter 2024)
Description: The aim of this course is to prepare students entering the job market for careers as professional philosophers. Students will present and receive feedback on work from their dissertations, and receive training on preparing dossier materials, creating a website, and interviewing. This course is CR/NCR and is required for those who wish to use the departmental placement services.
Summer 2024 Graduate Courses (May/June)
PHL2057H Causation, Mind and World: The Philosophy of Mary Shepherd
Instructor: Jonathan Cottrell
Time: Mon and Wed 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS 18th Century/HIS 19th Century (depending on topic of final essay)
Description: Mary Shepherd (1777–1847) is a brilliant, unjustly-neglected philosopher active in the early nineteenth century. She developed an original, systematic philosophy that combines a novel metaphysics of causation and the external world with a nonsceptical epistemology, in opposition to the idealism of George Berkeley and the scepticism of David Hume. Shepherd’s philosophy was highly regarded in her day but fell into obscurity after her death. Today, it’s a treasure trove of ideas for philosophers exploring alternatives to Humeanism in metaphysics. This course will focus on her two main philosophical works, An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect (1824) and Essays on the Perception of an External Universe (1827). We’ll explore Shepherd’s central claims and arguments with a view to both their historical significance and their applicability in contemporary philosophy. We’ll also read selections by some of the philosophers whom Shepherd ably criticized, including Berkeley, Hume, and Thomas Brown, an early nineteenth-century Humean.
PHL2132H Seminar in Ethics
Instructor: Phil Clark
Time: Tue and Thu 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: The course will certainly fall in the category of metaethics, but one of the central questions is what metaethics really is. Is metaethics the metaphysics of ethics? We will explore an alternative conception of metaethics, on which many of the central problems belong to epistemology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of action, and especially the study of inquiry. We will look at expressivism, neo-expressivism, robust realism, and a view I am calling genericist naturalism, and we will consider the place of pragmatism in the theoretical landscape. Likely suspects include Simon Blackburn, John McDowell, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Dorit Bar-On, Anton Ford, Huw Price, Jamie Dreier, Andy Egan, Connie Rosati, Christine Tiefensee, and Michael Ridge.
MA Concentration Philosophy of Science—program requirement course listings (Fall 2023 & Winter 2024)
FALL 2023
HPS 3004F Philosophy of Medicine
Instructor: Brian Baigrie
Time: Tue 2–4 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This seminar course provides a graduate level introduction to the philosophy of medicine, a fast-growing philosophical field. We will explore both classic and cutting-edge work. In line with the orientation of the field, we will examine metaphysical/conceptual and epistemic questions in medicine and medical research rather than the kinds of questions traditionally asked in the field of bioethics. Also following the contemporary focus of philosophy of medicine, most of the readings are situated in the philosophy of science. Topics explored will include: varieties of medicine (mainstream, alternative) and their critics; the concepts and nature of health, disease, and illness; disease kinds and classification; the philosophy of psychiatry; biomedical science and medical explanation; the methodology of clinical research and epidemiology; the epistemology of evidence-based medicine; clinical reasoning; and values and the social epistemology of medicine. While most readings follow an ‘analytic’ approach to philosophy of medicine, some follow a more ‘continental’ approach.
Classes will consist in a discussion of the course readings with an introduction to the topics provided by the instructor. Links to all required readings will be provided.
HPS4011F Cognitive Technologies: Philosophical Issues and Debates – CANCELLED
HPS4110F Medicine, Science, and Mobility in the Mediterranean World
Instructor: Lucia Dacome
Time: Tue 10 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: This course is an elective for students in the MA (Philosophy of Science stream) but does not meet program requirements for other Philosophy MA and PhD students
Description: The Mediterranean world has historically been characterized as a fluid and permeable space of both human and non-human movement across Africa, Asia, and Europe. This course examines the role of Mediterranean interactions in the histories of science and medicine, focusing on the premodern period. It explores processes of production of medical and scientific knowledge in the premodern Mediterranean world. We will address topics such as the relationship between medicine, science, and religion; slavery and medicine; the management of epidemics and public health; the movement of specimens and curiosities; travel and scientific exchange; bodies and identities; and the making of human diversity. We will also critically reflect on the category of mobility, engaging in questions related to how movement participated in processes of knowledge production in the sciences and medicine and, conversely, how scientific, and medical pursuits encouraged mobility.
HPS4300F The Historian’s Craft: Sources, Methods, and Approaches
Instructor: Nikolai Krementsov
Time: Thu 12–2 PM
Breadth Requirement: This course is an elective for students in the MA (Philosophy of Science stream) but does not meet program requirements for other Philosophy MA and PhD students
Description: This graduate seminar offers an introduction to the principles of research in the history of science, medicine, and technology (HSMT). Through a close examination of classic texts and recent publications in the field, it focuses on sources, methods, and approaches in the practice of HSMT. We will explore the major genres—history of ideas, individuals, institutions, disciplines, and networks—as well as the main modes of analysis—intellectual, social, and cultural—employed in the field. The seminar will emphasize the development of skills essential to the profession—good writing, attentive reading, analytical thinking, concise presentation, academic debate, and historiographic and methodological knowledge. Each week, we will examine in depth a particular genre or level of analysis based on assigned readings and book presentations, focusing on the whats, whys, and hows of historical research and writing.
PHL2101F Seminar in Metaphysics: Modality, Time, and the Self
Instructor: Michael Caie
Time: Tue 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This seminar will survey a cluster of related topics in the metaphysics of modality, time, and the self, as well as related issues in epistemology, language, and mind concerning our thought and talk about each of these subject matters. We’re all naturally inclined to regard other selves as equally real as ourselves: there’s no sense in which you are more real than your best friend. But what about other times, such as the far future or distant past, when compared with the present time? What about other possibilities, such as those where you never discovered philosophy, when compared with the ways things actually are? We’ll introduce some central debates about each of modality, time, and the self. We’ll then devote the seminar to exploring the multifarious connections between these topics. Does adopting a certain view about one of the topics create pressure to adopt an analogous view about the others? Our focus throughout will be on contemporary work.
PHL2115F Topics in Epistemology: The Self and Normativity
Instructor: David Barnett and Brendan de Kenessey
Time: Wed 9 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES/Values, depending on final paper topic
Description: This is a seminar on topics in ethics and epistemology related to the self. A punchy version of our overarching question is how who we are affects who we ought to be. Less punchily but more accurately: How do the attitudes one already has, and how one relates to those attitudes, affect what attitudes one ought to have, or actions one ought to do? In epistemology: How does what you already believe affect what you ought to believe? In ethics: How does what you value or intend affect what you ought to value, intend, or do? We will also be interested in the relation one must bear to one’s attitudes to count as ‘owning’ them as one’s own.
PHL2117F Social Formal Epistemology
Instructor: Jonathan Weisberg
Time: Mon 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES/MLL
Description: This course introduces various topics and techniques used in formal approaches to social epistemology. We’ll begin with a primer on the Bayesian approach to individual epistemology, then survey a variety of topics in social epistemology, for example, learning from the opinions of others, group agency, wisdom of the crowds, the epistemic value of diversity, epistemic network models, and misinformation and polarization.
PHL2171F Philosophy of Mind: New Books in Philosophy of Mind
Instructor: Nathan Charlow and Imogen Dickie
Time: Thu 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: Course description coming soon.
PHL2172F Seminar in Philosophy of Mind: The Structure of Consciousness
Instructor: Andrew Lee
Time: Wed 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: This seminar will examine a variety of philosophical questions about the structure of consciousness. These include: How do the structures of conscious experiences relate to the structures of their physical correlates? Do experiences have parts? Does consciousness come in degrees? What are dimensions of consciousness? Are experiences continuous or discrete? How are quality-spaces structured? What are global states of consciousness? What does the state-space of experiences look like? Readings will focus on recent work in analytic philosophy.
PHL2198F Advanced Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
Instructor: Michael Miller
Time: Wed 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This course offers an advanced introduction to several contemporary topics in the general philosophy of science. Topics to be considered may include inductive inference, confirmation, models and theories, scientific representation, approximation and idealization, realism and empiricism, reduction and emergence, explanation, causation, and experimentation.
WINTER 2024
HPS2003S History of Biology
Instructor: Marga Vicedo
Time: Thu 2-4 PM
Breadth Requirement: This course is an elective for students in the MA (Philosophy of Science stream) but does not meet program requirements for other Philosophy MA and PhD students
Description: This course provides an overview of selected major developments in the history of the life sciences, mainly in evolution and genetics in the late 19th and 20th centuries. It also examines key historiographical questions in the history of science. Each week we will focus on one historical event and also on one historiographical issue in the history of science, but we will strive to connect them to earlier events and debates. The readings include primary sources, secondary sources, and historiographical discussions. We will learn to interpret primary texts and use secondary literature in developing historical arguments.
HPS3010S Social Epistemology
Instructor: Joseph Berkovitz
Time: Tue 10 AM–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Traditionally, epistemology has dealt with the ways in which an individual acquires knowledge through perception and reasoning. However, in recent years it has become apparent that the traditional discussions of knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular, fail to capture important aspects of the social dimension of knowledge. We acquire most of our beliefs from the testimony of others, including experts, and from social institutions that are in charge of the generation of knowledge. The relatively recent branch of philosophy that deals with the social dimensions of knowledge is called social epistemology. It has developed through dialogue with the history of science, sociology of scientific knowledge, anthropology, and philosophy of science. The course will provide an introduction to social epistemology, in general, and social epistemology of science, in particular. It will deal with various aspects of the nature of knowledge from this new perspective, including issues such as the development of scientific knowledge, ‘knowledge that’ (something true) vs. ‘knowledge how,’ the influence of social and cultural factors on scientific methodology, scientific rationality and scientific knowledge, scientific realism vs. social constructivism, distributive cognition, holism vs. methodological individualism, trust, expertise, consensus, distributive epistemic injustice, and feminist epistemology.
HPS4020S Postcolonialism and the Global Turn in Science and Technology Studies
Instructor: Adrien Zakar
Time: Mon 2–4 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This seminar introduces graduate students to the role of postcolonial theory in generating a “global turn” in histories of science and the multidisciplinary field of science & technology studies (STS). We will analyze and discuss the key critiques of historical and social studies of science by postcolonial scholars, debate the theoretical and methodological significance of ideas like “global perspectives,” the “Global South,” and “non-Western science” in STS. To evaluate the impact of these ideas on the field, we will review recently published case studies applying postcolonial approaches to histories of science, technology, and medicine. Students will also have the opportunity to compare these approaches with the related but distinct concepts of decoloniality emerging from Indigenous studies, and to consider how postcolonial STS can inform their own ongoing research.
HPS4040S Computing and Information from Babbage to AI
Instructor: Chen-Pang Yeang
Time: Tue 10–12 PM
Breadth Requirement: This course is an elective for students in the MA (Philosophy of Science stream) but does not meet program requirements for other Philosophy MA and PhD students
Description: In this course, we examine the history of modern computing and information technology and science from the calculating engines during the Industrial Revolution to today’s artificial intelligence. We concentrate on their technical developments, political, institutional, and cultural contexts, and societal implications. We review the central scholarly works and selected primary sources on the subject.
PHL2223S MA Proseminar II: Knowledge Attribution and Knowledge Itself (required for generalist Philosophy MAs and open to Philosophy of Science MAs)
Instructor: Jennifer Nagel
Time: Tue 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Humans and certain other animals have some remarkable natural abilities to track what others do and do not know, abilities that inform a wide range of their competitive and cooperative behavior. Within epistemology, pre-theoretical instincts about particular cases of knowledge are used as a source of evidence for and against theories of knowledge itself. However, naturally occurring patterns of epistemic intuition are sometimes strange, even paradoxical. This course examines the natural foundations of knowledge attribution, the evidential value of epistemic intuitions, and the question of what exactly these intuitive judgments can tell us about knowledge itself. Authors to be read include Peter Carruthers, Keith DeRose, John Heritage, Cecilia Heyes, Akio Kamio, Laurie Santos, Rebecca Saxe, Michael Tomasello, Brian Weatherson, and Timothy Williamson.
PHL2137S Philosophy of Action: Decisions
Instructor: Sara Aronowitz and Paul Bloom
Time: Tue 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES/MLL
Description: This course is a joint seminar in philosophy and psychology, open to graduate students from any discipline related to cognitive science. We’ll discuss how approaches from multiple disciplines bear on contemporary debates about decision-making. Topics will include: How do we determine what decisions to make? What does psychology have to say about the rationality of decision making? How do we make sense of so-called “transformative experiences”? And it is possible to deliberately act against what we take to be our best interests—that is, can we be perverse actors?
PHL 2145S Bioethics: Autonomy and Consent in Medicine
Instructor: Andrew Franklin-Hall
Time: Tue 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: Values
Description: Informed consent is a cornerstone of contemporary medical ethics. In this course, we will examine the nature of consent, some of the varieties of consent (actual, hypothetical, retrospective, and prospective), the notion of competence to give consent, and the sorts of things that might undermine consent (e.g., coercion, manipulation, duress, etc.). Our readings will include some of the modern classics in the field (e.g., Faden and Beauchamp’s History and Theory of Informed Consent, Buchanan and Brock’s Deciding for Others), as well as a selection of the most recent literature on the topic.
PHL2171S Philosophy of Mind: Perceptions—Relations, Contents, and Skills
Instructor: Sonia Sedivy
Time: Wed 12–3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: How restrictive should theories of perception be about what we perceive and how we do so? We will examine three ways that this core question is debated today. The first is the debate over which properties we perceive. Do we perceive only so-called low-level properties such as colours and contours? Or do we perceive high-level properties such as being a pine tree or a painting? The second is the stand-off between relational and content theories of perception. Content theories argue that perceptual experiences represent the world as being some way. Relational theories deny that perceptual experiences have contents and argue that they are constituted by basic relations to external objects. The third issue we will explore is whether there is specifically perceptual learning or skill.
PHL2193S Topics in Analytic Philosophy: Relativized Metaphysical Modality
Instructor: Benjamin Hellie and Jessica Wilson
Time: Wed 3–6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Since the early 1960s, in the analytic tradition, developments in metaphysics and modal logic have been closely intertwined. Logical analyses of ‘it is necessarily the case that’—especially in its ‘iterated‘ uses, in interaction with naming, and in interaction with quantification—have constrained, and also been constrained by, metaphysical theories of a diversity of phenomena: fundamental natural law; individual essential properties; the character of existence. On the whole, the literature has been ‘problematizing’ and inconclusive: the phenomena are widely seen to require tradeoffs, with simplicity and power of logical analysis apparently trading off against intuitive plausibility of metaphysical theory. The general conflict is this: logic is much simpler and stronger if necessities, essences, and existence are all noncontingent; but metaphysical intuition strongly suggests that sometimes, necessity, essence, and existence depend on contingent aspects of actuality.
Around a decade ago, the ‘relativized metaphysical modality’ (RMM) program proposed a way forward, by disambiguating the noncontingency required by logic from the contingency required by metaphysics. RMM repurposes a ‘two-dimensional’ apparatus, initially put to work in epistemology, to metaphysical ends: the logically requisite noncontingency is grasped by considering possibilities ‘as counterfactual’, while the metaphysically requisite contingency is grasped instead by considering possibilities ‘as actual’. This disambiguation releases the long-standing tension between logic and metaphysics, thereby clearing the logjam accumulated over many decades.
This seminar will divide roughly into thirds. A first component will address historical background and standing literature. A second will lay out technicalities from the traditional modal logic, and its two-dimensional development. And a third will investigate problems and prospects in the RMM program.
PHL2199S Seminar in the Philosophy of Science: Bayesian Philosophy of Science
Instructor: Franz Huber
Time: Mon 6–9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: This Seminar in philosophy of science will approach topics in the field from a Bayesian point of view. We will work with Jan Sprenger and Stephan Hartmann, Bayesian Philosophy of Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Find the link to the library’s e-book.
One way to think of the philosophy of science is as epistemology and metaphysics of science. Bayesian philosophy of science is philosophy of science from a probabilistic point of view, where probabilities are interpreted in terms of degrees of belief. Topics in Bayesian philosophy of science include confirmation and induction, scientific realism, learning conditionals, the problem of old evidence, causation, explanation, inter-theoretic reduction, simplicity, scientific objectivity, statistical inference, as well as model selection and idealization. Special attention will be paid to the foundations and philosophy of probability, the representation of conditional probabilistic independence in so-called Bayesian nets, as well as the relation of conditional probabilistic independence and Bayesian nets to so-called causal nets (with and without structural equations).