The 2026-27 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.
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)
Summer 2026 Graduate Courses (May-June)
PHL2003H Aristotle: Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s On Sleep
Instructors: Mike Arsenault & Jessica Gelber
Time: Tue & Thu 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS Ancient
Description: While seldom the topic of contemporary philosophical discussion (apart from contexts such as Cartesian dream skepticism), sleep was frequently investigated by philosophers in the ancient world, in a wide variety of contexts. Aristotle was no exception. His account of sleep unites various strands in his thinking, including what we would call his philosophy of biology and science and his philosophy of mind, and it provides a fascinating window into Aristotle’s thinking about such topics as consciousness, self-consciousness, the unity of the senses, and the relation of the soul to the body. For, to the extent that Aristotle has views about “consciousness,” they are views about what it is to be awake and to perceive. Inasmuch as sleep is the privation of wakefulness, the discussion of sleep in De somno is equally a discussion of its complement, being awake. Moreover, the treatment of sleep in De somno presents one of the clearest examples of Aristotle’s science of living things in action, though it also presents serious challenges for that explanatory framework, particularly Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes.
PHL2055H 18th-Century European Philosophy: Rank, Nation, Race, Sex: Social Kinds and the British Moralists
Instructors: Donald Ainslie
Time: Wed & Fri 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS 17th and 18th Century
Description: With the rise of a commercial society and a colonial empire in 18th-c. Britain, philosophers started to investigate the social categories – noble, “of the middling sort,” peasant, Scot, Briton, Black, slave, woman, man, etc. – that had previously been largely taken for granted. This course will examine some of these early interventions in social ontology. We will start with Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and David Hume’s treatment of rank in his Treatise of Human Nature and History of England. We will then consider some or all of later works on rank by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar; discussions of nationality and race in the autobiographies of Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano; and discussions of sex and gender in the writings of Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft.
2026-2027 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 2026 Graduate Courses
AMP 2000Y Collaborative Specialization in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (CSAMP) Proseminar (Restricted to student enrolled in the Collaborative Specialization in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy)
Time: Mon 4-6 PM
Description: This course intends to provide students with an introduction to the range of methodologies and topics in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy.
MST 3322HF William of Ockham
Instructor: Martin Pickavé
Time: Mon 2-4 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO Medieval
Description:William of Ockham (ca. 1287-1347) is one of the most prominent figures in medieval philosophy. He is famous as a logician and for his reductionist approach in metaphysics that earned him the label “nominalist.” But there are many other areas of philosophy to which Ockham has made interesting contributions too: epistemology, the philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics. This seminar is an introduction to and overview of Ockham’s philosophy; since that will involve some discussion of other high medieval philosophers, the course can also serve as an introduction to medieval philosophy.
RLG 2067HF Philosophical Topics in Religion: I and You
Instructor: Robert Gibbs
Time: Tues 1-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO 20th Century
Description: While Buber’s book, I and You, is one of the most prominent philosophy books from the 20th Century, it is part of an ongoing conversation in philosophy of religion. This course will explore a series of different thinkers’ accounts of the you, exploring not only the human sociality performed by saying you to someone else, but also the nature of prayer and saying you to God. There are many basic questions: Does saying you make the you present? Is the I and You symmetrical? Can the relationship performed in language survive beyond the moment of speaking? How does the I change in addressing the you?
JCO 5121HF Necropolitics
Instructor: Rebecca Comay and Victoria Wohl
Time: Thurs 5-7 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL
Description: In 2003, Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics to describe a contemporary political order oriented toward the production of death. Departing from Foucault’s concept of biopower as the management and administration of the living, necropolitics names “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” From classical antiquity, through the West’s long history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, Mbembe’s concept has never been more pressing than it is today.
This course brings together a wide array of texts and artifacts– ancient and modern, written and visual– to examine the production of “death worlds”: individual, collective, and planetary. We aim to explore both the theoretical concept of necropolitics and some of the specific cultural and historical forms it has taken, from the ancient world to the present.
Each week will juxtapose a literary and/or visual object with a theoretical text. Our discussions will draw on contemporary debates about mourning and memory, racial capitalism and slavery, settler colonialism, border regimes, carcerality, illness and disability, gender violence, genocide, ecocide, and nuclear holocaust. We welcome students from diverse disciplines and encourage them to bring their own expertise and interests to the discussion.
Texts and authors will include:
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
Glenn Coulthard, Red Skin, White Mask
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection
Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim
Jacques Derrida, Death Penalty
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Eyal Weizmann, Hollow Land
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding
Book of Lamentations
Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur
Aristotle, Politics
Aeschylus, Persians
Sophocles, Antigone
Euripides, Trojan Women and Hecuba
Homer, Iliad
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
W.G. Sebald, A Natural History of Destruction
Werner Herzog, Lessons of Darkness
Lars von Trier, Melancholia
Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham et al, No Other Land
Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege
PHL 1111HF PhD Proseminar: Hume’s Ethics and Humean Ethics
Instructor: Donald Ainslie and Philip Clark
Time: Fri 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL or HIS/GEO 18th Century
Description: According to Thomas Nagel, “contemporary ethical theory continues to be dominated by the disagreement between [the] two giants,” David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This seminar examines the moral theory of one of those giants – Hume – and how it has been put to use in contemporary ethics. We will read portions of Books 2 (“Of the Passions”) and Book 3 (“Of Morals”) of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40), and works of contemporary Humeans. Topics to be considered include: sympathy/empathy, sentimentalism, expressivism/realism, motivation, practical identity, and freedom of the will.
PHL 2089HF Seminar in 20th Century Continental Philosophy: Ontological Difference
Instructor: Tarek Dika
Time: Thurs 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES or HIS/GEO 20th Century
Description: Ontological difference is the difference between being (i.e., what it is to be a being) and beings. That the two are not identical seems reasonably clear, but the rest remains shrouded in obscurity. To what extent, if at all, is ontological difference presupposed by any possible ontology (be it phenomenological or non-phenomenological)? Furthermore, how is “being” to be interpreted here, and according to what method? Is being an empirical concept derivable from beings, or is it, in some sense, “a priori”? If so, what species of a priority does “being” enjoy? Does thought “produce” the difference between being and beings, or is it rather “determined” by it? Finally, is “being” univocal, analogical, or purely equivocal? The principal ambition of the seminar is to organize these and related problems according to a definite order and examine a variety of responses to them in the history of metaphysics (e.g., Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Hegel) as well as the phenomenological and analytic traditions (Husserl, Heidegger, Quine, et al.).
PHL 2105HF Topics in Metaphysics: How is Metaphysics Possible?
Instructors: Nick Stang
Time: Tues 6-9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES or HIS/GEO 18th Century
Description: In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant took himself to have shown that metaphysics of a certain kind is impossible for human beings. However, two hundred years later we find metaphysics flourishing in analytic philosophy. On the one hand analytic metaphysics can seem continuous with early modern rationalism, focusing on many of the same concepts (e.g. grounding, modality) and even the same doctrines (e.g. the principle of sufficient reason, substance monism). On the other hand, analytic metaphysics differs in crucial respects from its pre-Kantian forebears; it is less epistemically ambitious and is not as wedded to its a priori status. Does Kant’s critique of metaphysics apply to contemporary analytic metaphysics, or, in the words of Kant’s 1790 essay On a discovery, has it been rendered superfluous (entbehrlich)? We will examine contemporary ‘inflationary’ (e.g. Sider, Schaffer) and ‘deflationary’ (e.g. Thomasson, Hirsch) approaches to metaphysics, Kant’s own transcendental idealist explanation of the possibility of metaphysics, and problems in the very foundations of that explanation (the problem of meta-critique, noumenal affection). Readings will be drawn from contemporary metaphysics, Kant himself, and the instructor’s in-progress book manuscript, How is Metaphysics Possible? A Critique of Analytic Reason.
PHL 2117HF Formal Epistemology: Vectors for Philosophers
Instructors: Jonathan Weisberg
Time: Thurs 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Vectors are a common tool in a range of fields, from philosophy to economics to artificial intelligence. They can be used to describe a person’s beliefs, the prices in a market, the meaning of a word in a language model, and much more.
This course is an introduction to vectors aimed at philosophy students. You’ll learn how to work with vectors through a series of philosophical and philosophy-adjacent applications (e.g. Hume’s problem of induction, Marx’s theory of exploitation, and the inner workings of large language models).
You don’t need any special technical background to take this course; I’ll explain everything from the ground up without assuming anything more advanced than Grade 9 math. However, you do have to be prepared to learn some math, as well as some basic Python programming.
PHL 2142HF Seminar in Political Philosophy: Feasible Socialism
Instructor: Joseph Heath
Time: Wed 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL
Description: Many theorists who present themselves as critics of capitalism are either silent or evasive when it comes to saying what they imagine the alternatives to be. The experience of the former communist states of Eastern Europe produced widespread agreement that a centrally planned economy is not a desirable alternative. Yet the elimination of this option drastically curtails the space of possibilities, making it difficult to imagine an economic system that would actually remedy what are normally taken to be the central defects of capitalism. The central task of this seminar will be, first, to understand the constraints that structure the debate over feasible alternatives to capitalism, and second, to examine some of the more plausible socialist blueprints that have been proposed. Particular emphasis will be placed on the implications that our analysis of these blueprints will have for the normative assessment of capitalism. Although familiarity with basic principles of economics will be assumed, seminar readings will be largely non-technical and non-mathematical.
PHL 2171HF Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Representation, and Consciousness
Instructor: Andrew Lee
Time: Mon 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: This course will examine recent work in the philosophy of mind, centered around the themes of perception, representation, and consciousness. On most weeks, we will be joined by a visitor who specializes in the philosophy of mind. We will read the visitor’s work ahead of time and then discuss it with the visitor in class. The format is designed to give students a sense of current research in the field and exposure to some of the people doing it.
PHL 2172HF Seminar in Philosophy of Mind: Mental Action, Attention, and Control
Instructor: Sara Aronowitz and Jennifer Nagel
Time: Tues 9 AM – 12 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: Mental control is a topic of enduring philosophical interest, amplified in recent years by a wave of new empirical research on attention, consciousness, and metacognitive feelings such as surprise and curiosity. What does it mean to control, direct, and attend to our own thoughts, and how might mental control differ from the control of external actions? This seminar will explore recent work on the fundamental nature of these various dimensions of metacognition, by philosophers such as Peter Carruthers, Jérôme Dokic, Jessie Munton, Carlotta Pavese, and Wayne Wu.
PHL 2190HF Philosophy of Language: Foundational Issues in Philosophy of Language
Instructor: Imogen Dickie
Time: Wed 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: We will discuss a range of foundational issues in the philosophy of language, many of which are really issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. All necessary background will be picked up as we go. Topics will include –
- what it is for a sentence to ‘express’ a thought;
- the extent to which linguistic competence involves knowledge of conventions;
- the relation between conditions for communication and conditions for transmission of knowledge;
- how to develop an account of communication that recognises that many conversational contexts are not cooperative.
PHL 2196HF Topics in Philosophy of Science: Effective Theories
Instructors: Mike Miller
Time: Mon 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Quantum field theories can be understood as effective theories, that is, as theories with an explicit restriction on their domain of applicability. The mathematics of effective field theory was developed because an important class of quantum field theories must be understood in this way in order to address their problematic infinities. Perhaps surprisingly, the currently available evidence suggests that this class includes the Standard Model of particle physics, our best effort at a fundamental description of microphysical reality. In this course we will consider how the effectiveness of our best physics bears on the project of using physics as a guide for metaphysics. We will be especially concerned with questions concerning fundamentality, laws, emergence, and scale relative ontology. (Note: the course will not presuppose that students have a background in physics or mathematics.)
PHL 2222HF MA Proseminar I: Semantic Externalism
Instructor: Yonathan Fiat
Time: Tues 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES or MLL or VAL
Description: Semantic Externalism is the view that the meaning of our words, and the contents of our thoughts, are not determined entirely by what is “in our heads;” they also depend on the external world. Debates around semantic externalism have shaped large areas of analytic philosophy over the last 85 years, significantly influencing field such as metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. In this seminar, we’ll read some of the early analytic philosophy texts that lead to semantic externalism, some of the foundational texts about semantic externalism, and some examples for its influences on the different subfields of philosophy.
PHL 3000Y PhD Professional Development Seminar
Instructor: Jennifer Nagel
Time: Fall: Mon 6-9 PM (every other week) Winter: Tues 6-9 PM (every other week)
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.
PHL 3000H MA Professional Development Seminar (required for and limited to first-year Philosophy MA students)
Instructors: Gwen Bradford
Time: Wed 6-9 PM (four sessions)
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.
Winter 2027 Graduate Courses
JGC 1854HS Theories of Culture
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
Time: Wed 3-5 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO 20th Century
Description: “Theories of Culture” is a course that introduces students to critically relevant theories of culture such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, and Homi Bhabha. The course is meant to complement the strong offering across literature departments and the Centre for Comparative Literature with a course that looks at the larger theoretical underpinnings that frame theories of readings and interpretation of all sorts. How do concepts of culture and cultural production frame our understanding of the function of literature, reading, and interpretation, etc.
MST 3346HS Medieval Islamic Philosophy: Natural Philosophy in Medieval Islam
Instructor: Jon McGinnis
Time: Tue 9-11 AM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO Medieval
Description: The course explores the world through the eyes of medieval Muslim intellectuals. It considers what these thinkers had to say about such question as: what makes up our world; how big is and what is the topology of the cosmos (Is it infinitely large or only finitely large?); how old is the world (again infinite or finite?); what sort of changes or processes do the things that make up the world undergo and even are there angels and what (scientific) role, if any, do they play in the world. While all these questions (even the ones about angels) belong to the science of physics, or what is called natural philosophy, they also lead to questions in metaphysics and philosophical theology. Moreover, the various answers to these questions informed many medieval thinkers, in all three of the great Abrahamic traditions, understanding of their respective religions with their various claims about the world and God’s relation to it. Consequently, understanding how medieval Muslim thinkers understood the world helps one better appreciate not only the classical period of Islamic philosophy and science, but also a formative period of Islamic theology, which would influence both Christian and Jewish thinkers as well. Thus, whether you have interests in medieval history, theology, philosophy or science, there is something in this course for everyone.
PHL 2003HS Aristotle: Metaphysics ZH
Instructors: Stephen Menn
Time: Wed 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO Ancient
Description: This graduate seminar offers a close reading of Books Ζ and Η (7 and 8) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which are Aristotle’s most extended and thorough discussion of questions about substance [ousia]. We will try to understand Aristotle’s arguments and conclusions about substance and (where possible) the views of the philosophers he is arguing against and how they might resist his arguments, but we also want to understand Aristotle’s philosophical agenda in these books. What questions or aporiai is he posing about substance, why are these questions important for his project of “wisdom” or “first philosophy,” is he posing some of them as a means to others? Where does the concept of substance come from, why is it important for Aristotle’s project, what is the relation between 1-place substance (“X is a substance”) and 2-place substance (“X is the substance of Y”)? From perhaps 1960-2000, the dominant view in Anglophone scholarship was a criteria-and-candidates view: Aristotle wants to know what substance is because he wants to understand being, and substance is the primary sense of being (something *is* either because it is a substance or because it is somehow related to a substance); but there are several different and apparently incompatible criteria for something to be a substance, i.e. to be in the primary way, and so Aristotle examines different candidates for substance to test them against these different criteria and discover whether something can satisfy all the criteria. This criteria-and-candidates view was challenged notably by Myles Burnyeat in his Map of Metaphysics Zeta (2001), which forced a reexamination of Aristotle’s descriptions of his own project in ZH. While our main focus will be on ΖΗ, we will also situate these books within the larger project of the Metaphysics, notably the aporiai of Metaphysics B, as well as Aristotle’s descriptions of the tasks of wisdom or of first philosophy.
PHL 2051HS Seminar in 17th Century European Philosophy: Women and Dualism in Early Modern Philosophy
Instructors: Marleen Rozemond
Time: Wed 9 AM – 12 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO 17th Century
Description: Recent research has unearthed a treasure trove of wrongly neglected philosophical writings by women during the 17th and 18th century. This course will explore two interconnected lines of thought. First, it examines the question whether the natural world is entirely material or not. Descartes and others argued that it is not and defended dualism. Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway rejected dualism but also Hobbesian materialism, proposing highly distinctive views, a type of “vitalist monism”. On the other hand, others, such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, relied on dualism to defend gender equality: as all human beings have immaterial souls and rationality, women should have proper access to education. So interesting questions arise about the connections between the ontology of human beings and the rights of women. Readings will be taken from Descartes, Henry More, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell and others.
PHL 2076HS Hegel
Instructors: Alison Laywine
Time: Tues 9 AM – 12 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO 19th Century
Description: The purpose of this seminar is to explore Hegel’s engagement with ancient Greek philosophy. We know that it was extensive and informed by wide reading of lots of sources, and it plainly informs Hegel’s elaboration of his own thought. For example, we find mention in the Phenomenology of Spirit of Anaxagoras, Plato’s Parmenides –‘the greatest work of art of the ancient dialectic’ — and ‘Aristotelian philosophy’ (see the preface, §71). The very first figure of consciousness in the Phenomenology — ‘sense certainty’ — seems to retool the elaboration and testing of the idea that knowledge is perception in Plato’s Theaetetus. Moreover, stoicism and skepticism emerge as expressions of self-consciousness in the aftermath of the confrontation between master and slave. We will try to figure out which ancient Greek texts Hegel was reading, how he understood them, and how he appropriated them for the Phenomenology.
PHL 2100HS Metaphysics
Instructors: Byeong-uk Yi
Time: Tues 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: A detailed treatment of selected topics in metaphysics. Typically does not assume prior background in the area. Further details on topics selected for the current year TBA.
PHL 2117HS Formal Epistemology: Causal Decision Theory
Instructor: Franz Huber
Time: Mon 6-9 PM
Breadth Requirement: MES
Description: Decision theory studies what one should do when some more or less desirable outcome depends on one’s action, as well as the state of the world about which one is uncertain. The idea is that one’s action is under one’s control, but the state of the world is not. Uncertainty is characterized in terms of probabilities, desires are characterized in terms of utilities, and together they determine the expected utility of one’s actions.
Causal decision theory understands the dependence of the outcome on one’s action and the state of the world in a causal sense. By contrast, evidential decision theory understands this dependence solely in terms of the probabilities that characterize the agent’s uncertainty.
In the first three quarters of this course, we will study the state of the art of decision theory in both its causal and evidential versions prior to the advent of the interventionist paradigm. We will do so by discussing the following book:
Joyce, James M. (1999), The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
In the remaining quarter of this course, we will look at interventionist versions of causal decision theory, as well as criticisms thereof.
PHL 2122HS Advanced Logic
Instructor: Philip Kremer
Time: Thurs 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: It is commonly thought that the semantics for modal logic is the familiar Kripke semantics, whose loci classici are Kripke’s papers in 1959 and 1963, and which continues to dominate work in modal logic. But the Kripke semantics is preceded by algebraic semantics in the late 30s and early 40s, and the closely related topological semantics, introduced by Tarski for intuitionistic logic in 1938 and extended to modal logic by McKinsey and Tarski in 1944. Indeed, already in 1951, Rasiowa had a completeness theorem for quantified modal and intuitionistic logic in algebraic semantics, extended to topological semantics by Rasiowa and Sikorski in 1963.
This course will be a tour of the main semantic frameworks for modal logic. We will begin with Kripke semantics, and then backtrack to algebraic and topological semantics. After this we will consider neighbourhood semantics and wind up with so-called possibility semantics, originally from 1981 but further developed by Wesley Holliday and others in the last few years. We will concentrate on propositional modal logic, but will also comment on intuitionistic logic and on quantified modal and intuitionistic logic.
PHL 2132HS Seminar in Ethics: Coercion, Manipulation, and Exploitation —– CANCELLED
Instructor: Andrew Franklin-Hall
Time: Thurs 9 AM – 12 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL
Description: Concepts like coercion, manipulation, and exploitation feature prominently in moral and political theories which prize autonomy and fair-dealing. But how should we understand these ideas? For instance, does coercion always involve threats or are there also coercive offers as well? Can we understand coercion in purely descriptive terms or does it always make reference to moral concepts? Can we be coerced by our circumstances? What are the different varieties of manipulation, and when is manipulating someone wrong? Finally, what could it mean to say that a voluntary agreement is exploitative? How does exploitation relate to market transactions? Our syllabus will focus on contemporary authors including Robert Nozick, Harry Frankfurt, Alan Wertheimer, Joel Feinberg, Ruth Faden and Tom Beauchamp, Allen Wood, Hallie Liberto, Japa Pallikkathayil, Tom Dougherty, and Joe Horton.
PHL 2135HS Metaethics: Ethics and Hyperintensionality
Instructor: Nathan Howard
Time: Wed 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL
Description: Standard intensional semantics individuates content too coarsely for moral philosophy. Necessarily coextensive properties — being right and maximizing utility, say — may nonetheless differ in ways that matter for moral thought and action. This seminar examines the intersection of hyperintensionality in language and thought with core questions in ethics. Topics may include: Fregean approaches to moral content, where agents can rationally take different attitudes toward necessarily equivalent moral propositions; the thesis associated with Arpaly and Schroeder that morally worthy action requires motivation under the right concepts, individuated more finely than intensions allow; and the bearing of hyperintensionality on the open question argument and moral twin-earth scenarios.
PHL 2142HS Seminar in Political Philosophy
Instructor: Shruta Swarup
Time: Wed 6-9 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL
Description: Advanced course on selected topics in political philosophy. Further details on topics selected for current year are TBA.
PHL 2144HS Seminar in Social Philosophy: Work
Instructor: Rachel Barney
Time: Tue 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL or HIS/GEO Ancient
Description:What is work, and why does it matter? What makes skilled work (craft, technê, a métier) special and desirable? What makes some kinds of work better (more meaningful, fulfilling, less alienated, etc.) than others, and what exactly are the relevant norms here? How and when does work generate obligations? What does it mean for work to be justly rewarded, and is the distribution of work itself a matter of justice? Would Utopia be a place where there is no work, or where everybody has work of the right kind?
We will investigate these questions with an open mind and a wide frame of reference. Texts to be studied will include Hesiod’s Works and Days, quite a lot of Plato, some Aristotle, bits of Zhuangzi and Xunzi, More’s Utopia, and 19th-21st century thinkers including William Morris, Pope Leo XIII, Simone Weil, Alasdair MacIntyre, and David Graeber. We will spend a lot of time thinking about Plato’s theory of technê (art, craft, expertise) and its possible uses, as well as its rejection by Aristotle. This will not be a course on Marxist theories of ‘labour’, though some Marxist or adjacent thinkers may come up. It also will not be a course on the epistemology of skill and expertise, though some discussion of that will be relevant. Most weeks will include at least one student presentation on some empirical or artistic (eg literary) ‘case study’ of work and the philosophical questions it raises; students will be encouraged to pursue particular areas of interest in these and in written work. Depending on the topic of the term paper, the course will count for credit either in ancient philosophy or in value.
PHL 2191HS Seminar in Philosophy of Language
Instructor: Nate Charlow
Time: Tues 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: MLL
Description: Advanced course on selected topics in philosophy of language. Further details on topics selected for the current year TBA.
PHL 2223HS MA Proseminar II: Emancipation as Narrative and Anti-Narrative
Instructor: William Paris
Time: Mon 3-6 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO 20th Century or VAL
Description: This course will be structured around an antinomy: emancipation appears intelligible as both the construction of a sequence of events passing from domination to freedom and the suspension of a prior history of domination that inaugurates a new moment of freedom. The conjunction of continuity and discontinuity raises important questions concerning the necessary criteria for emancipation, the putative goal of emancipation writ large, and relationship between subjectivity and objective life. We will track the thematic of continuity and discontinuity in political thought through engagement with theories of emancipation and domination, philosophical theories of narrative, and literary selections. Readings will include works from Hegel, Marx, Kierkegarrd, Alasdair MacIntyre, Frederick Douglass, Paul Ricouer, Martha Nussbaum, Rahel Jaeggi, George Lukacs, and JM Bernstein.
PHL 3000Y PhD Professional Development Seminar
Instructor: Jennifer Nagel
Time: Fall: Mon 6-9 PM (every other week) Winter: Tues 6-9 PM (every other week)
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 2027 Graduate Courses (May-June)
PHL 2084HF Seminar in 19th Century Continental Philosophy: Evil and Theodicy in Late Romanticism: Philosophical and Literary Perspectives
Instructors: Owen Ware
Time: Tue & Thu 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: HIS/GEO 19th Century
Description: The traditional problem of evil has remained one of the most contested topics in the philosophy of religion from antiquity to the present. This seminar will examine why the problem came to acquire renewed significance during the period of late Romanticism, using Kant’s “Theodicy” essay of 1792 as a key prelude. How were traditional defences of God in the face of evil transformed by Kant’s critical philosophy? And how did this transformation impact the development of Romanticism in both the German and English traditions? A new kind poetic theodicy came from Goethe’s Faust: A Tragedy, which was formative for the literary work of both Byron and Mary Shelley. But the late Romantic engagement with the problem of evil also inspired some of the most complex metaphysical systems of the time, illustrated in works such as Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Coleridge’s Opus Maximum. Our primary texts for discussion will be:
- Kant, “Theodicy” essay
- Goethe, Faust I
- Byron’s Manfred and Cain
- Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
- Schelling’s Freedom Essay
- Coleridge’s Opus Maximum
- Wordsworth’s The Prelude
Alongside reading these works, we will also be reading my manuscript in progress, tentatively titled Visions of Tragedy: Evil and Theodicy in Late Romanticism.
Assignments: weekly journal reflections, 1 presentation, 2 essays
PHL 2131HS Ethics: Varieties of Value: Intrinsic, Extrinsic, Irreplaceable, Incommunicable
Instructor: Gwen Bradford
Time: Wed & Fri 12-3 PM
Breadth Requirement: VAL
Description: Persons, and perhaps other objects such as works of art and historical artifacts, appear to bear value that is irreplaceable – if destroyed, it can be replenished in amount, but not fully replaced. Is this sentimental attachment, incommensurable value, or something else? This seminar considers the concept of intrinsic value and new possibilities for distinctions in value. Topics include the value of historical artifacts, the value of humanity, the value of consciousness, sentimental value, and the meta-axiological structure of intrinsic value.