2025-26 Fall/Winter 400-level courses
Note about Prerequisites:
All 400-series courses have a prerequisite of at least 4.0 full credit equivalents in Philosophy. Please consult the academic calendar for information about prerequisites.
Instructions for Enrolling in 400-level seminars:
1. PHL400H1 to PHL451H1 are undergraduate-level courses. Students may sign up for these courses on ACORN.
2. Students who have not completed the prerequisite for any 400-level seminar must obtain the permission of the course instructor before enrolling in the course. Failure to do so may result in removal from the course without prior consultation.
3. To ensure sufficient spaces in 400-level seminars for students completing Philosophy specialist and major programs, only third- and fourth-year Philosophy specialists (including Bioethics and combined specialists) and fourth-year majors are permitted to register in these courses during the first round of enrolment. Once restrictions are lifted in the second round of enrolment, any students who have completed the general prerequisite of eight half-courses in Philosophy and the recommended preparation may enrol in 400-level seminars.
4. During the priority period in the first round of enrolment, students who enrol in more than the required number of 400-level courses for program completion (specialist, two; major or combined specialist, one) may be removed, without consultation, from the additional 400-level course(s).
5. Students in 400-level courses must attend the first class or contact the instructor to explain their absence. Failure to do so may result in removal from the course.
PHL400H1F LEC 0101— SEMINAR IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Jon McGinnis
Mondays 10:00-13:00
During the medieval period, three issues were considered the litmus test of orthodoxy among the Abrahamic religions. These were 1) the age of the universe, 2) the status of the human person and/or soul in the afterlife and 3) God’s knowledge of particulars. All of these topics and their philosophical articulations can be traced back in various ways to the ancient Greeks, whose views themselves strongly influenced the scientific and religious worldviews of medieval Jews, Christians and Muslims. In this course, we consider in depth two of these issues (probably 1 and 2), but I could be convinced to swap out one of these for 3). We begin with the ancient philosophical and scientific arguments surrounding the issue, which usually is drawn from Aristotle and his later Greek commentators. We then look at how two of the medieval world’s most influential thinkers, Ibn Sīnā (that is, the Latinized Avicenna) in the Islamic East and Thomas Aquinas in the Christian West, understood and responded to their classical Greek sources and earlier medieval predecessors on these issues. In the end, the course should not only give you an appreciation of two of the most charged scientific and religious issues in the ancient and medieval world as well as expose you to culturally diverse ways of thinking about our own nature and that of the world around us, but also should provide you with an opportunity to develop your critical thinking, research and writing skills.
Texts: TBD
Evaluation: TBD
PHL400H1F LEC 0201— SEMINAR IN ANCIENT/MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Peter King
Mondays 10:00-13:00
Scotus
This course will be devoted to the philosophical views of John Duns Scotus (1265?-1308), one of the most important philosophers of the Middle Ages. Here we will read a variety of selections from his lectures on theology (but their philosophical content). Some of the topics to be covered may include: the common nature and individuation; the nature of knowledge; the structure of the human mind; essence and existence; hylomorphism; the freedom of the will. Students are expected to attend each class meeting having read and being prepared to talk about the material for that meeting. This course will be run in seminar format, and so proceed by discussion. Each student will give one presentation of a text or problem to serve as a basis for collective discussion, and also write one short paper (due early on) and one longer paper (due at the end of the course).
Texts: TBD
Evaluation: The presentation, two papers, and attendance/participation will each be worth about 25% of the final mark.
PHL400H1S LEC 0201— SEMINAR IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Michael Arsenault
Mondays 10:00-13:00
Advanced discussion of the principal figures and themes in ancient and/or medieval philosophy.
Texts: TBD
Evaluation: TBD
PHL401H1F LEC0101 — SEMINAR IN HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Cheryl Misak
Tuesdays 10:00-13:00
Oxford Pragmatism: Ryle and Austin’s Debt
This course will examine the pragmatism imbedded in Oxford linguistic philosophy, specifically that of Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Oxford philosophy, post World War II, was ‘generally regarded as the most important center of philosophy in the world’; a ‘golden age’, a ‘high watermark’. It was marked by a self-styled band of revolutionaries who advanced a method, or at least a set of techniques, which they and others have labelled ordinary language philosophy, linguistic philosophy, or Oxford analytic philosophy.
Our path to seeing how classical pragmatism influenced this movement will take us through the pragmatism of C.S. Peirce (belief as habit, theory of meaning and assertion), Clarence Irving Lewis (the pragmatic a priori, web of belief, and conceptual engineering), Frank Ramsey (law and generalizations as rules with which we meet the future) and Margaret Macdonald (knowing how/knowing that and laws as inference tickets). We will also look at the nominalism or denotationalism (to use Macdonald’s word) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Vienna Circle in order to see what the pragmatists were rebelling against. And we shall examine how pragmatism and Oxford linguistic philosophy resemble and differ from Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus conception of philosophy as the study of grammar.
During the course, you will come to understand the central themes of the pragmatist tradition; gain a sense of the intellectual climate in which pragmatism emerged and then re-emerged in Oxford; understand what is distinctive about pragmatism as a movement; explore the solutions offered by pragmatist thinkers to substantive philosophical problems such as the nature of truth, belief, and generality, and appreciate the differences between various pragmatists.
Readings: All on the course website
Evaluation: Participation 20%; Exam I: 20%; Exam II: 20%; Term Paper 40%
PHL401H1F LEC0201 — SEMINAR IN HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Reza Hadisi
Wednesdays 09:00-12:00
Kant’s Critique of Judgment
This seminar offers a close reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. We will begin with his systematic reflections in the two Introductions of the book, situating the concerns of the third Critique within the broader context of his critical philosophy. The course will then be divided into two main parts, focusing on the sections on Aesthetics and Teleology. A central theme throughout will be Kant’s theory of the imagination. We will pay particular attention to how his account of aesthetic judgment engages with questions in the natural sciences, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of art.
Reading: Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis, Ind: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.
Evaluation: Assessment will be based on weekly reading responses, one in-class presentation, and a final research paper.
PHL402H1S — SEMINAR IN EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Donald Ainslie
Wednesdays 13:00-16:00
David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) is widely thought to be the most significant English-language text in the philosophical canon. He embraces there a kind of naturalism by which he investigates the mind using the same experimental methods that had had such success in the science of nature. He thus eschews appeals to the divine and instead grounds all of our fundamental attitudes and beliefs in a human nature that is continuous with animal nature. He covers a wide swath of topics in the Treatise: epistemology and metaphysics in its first Book; the theory of emotions and motivation in its second; and morality and politics in the third. Hume intends to present a unified philosophy, which he says “will acquire new force as it advances,” even if “[m]orality is a subject that interests us above all others” (T 3.1.1.1).
This seminar will be an exploration of Hume’s “system of ethics” (T 3.3.4.1, 3.3.6.1) in the Treatise. In particular, we will focus on Book 2’s account of the passions and its link to Book 3’s treatment of morals, though we will connect both to his rejection of a self-conscious subject in his discussion of personal identity in Book 1 (T 1.4.6).
Readings: David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, David F. and Mary J. Norton (eds), (Oxford: OUP, 2000).
Note that much of Hume’s corpus is available at Hume Texts Online (davidhume.org). Secondary readings will be posted on Quercus.
Evaluation: Class presentation (15%); final-paper initial proposal (5%); literature survey for final paper (10%); thesis statement and paper outline (10%); first draft of paper (10%); peer review (10%); final paper (30%); participation (10%).
PHL404H1S— SEMINAR IN EPISTEMOLOGY
Prof. David Barnett
Tuesdays 14:00-17:00
This course is centered around a single question: What are we? When we think and reason and talk to one another, what kind of things are the individual subjects who are doing the thinking and reasoning and talking? Certainly each of us is closely related to a particular human being—an animal belonging to the species homo sapiens—but many philosophers have thought it is a little too simplistic to say we just are human beings. Instead, we are just the thinking part of the human beings, namely their brains. Or else we are essentially mental entities, which are merely realized by human beings or their brains, and which are in principle separable from them. Our course will examine these and other answers to the question of what we are, paying special attention to answers emphasizing our capacity for a unified stream of consciousness.
Evaluation: TBD
Reading: TBD
PHL405H1S — SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
Prof. Jim John
Tuesdays 13:00-16:00
This course is an advanced treatment of several topics in the philosophy of perception. Issues to be addressed include (among others): illusion, hallucination, and the classical problem of perception; theories of consciousness; perceptual knowledge and the function of perceptual awareness; the metaphysics of color; appearance and reality; and philosophical problems posed by the psychology and neuroscience of perception.
Readings: Adam Pautz, Perception, Routledge, 2021 along with select articles TBD
Evaluation: TBD
PHL406H1S — SEMINAR IN METAPHYSICS
Prof. Michael Caie
Mondays 15:00-18:00
Typical problems include causality and determinism; ontological categories; mind and body; the objectivity of space and time.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL407H1F — SEMINAR IN ETHICS
Prof. Matthew Scarfone
Mondays 17:00-20:00
Metaethics & Moral Scepticism
This course serves as an advanced introduction to metaethics, with a particular focus on moral scepticism. Metaethics is the study of (first-order) ethics itself, and moral scepticism is a host of views that raise doubts about morality. In coming to understand more precisely what moral scepticism is, and what objections there are to it, we will explore foundational metaethical questions such as: is there such a thing as objective morality? if moral facts are (or purport to be) objective, are they natural, nonnatural, or supernatural? is a moral judgment a belief, a desire, or both? if morality is (or purports to be) objective, why is there so much moral disagreement? does acknowledging our evolutionary history help support or undermine objective morality? how do moral facts actually motivate us?
Reading: Answering Moral Skepticism by Shelly Kagan
Evaluation: Attendance & Participation, including 250-word Weekly Notes (20%), Discussion Leader (10%), 350-word Midterm Essay Prospectus (10%), 1750-word Midterm Essay (20%), 350-word Final Essay Prospectus (10%), 2800-word Final Essay (30%)
PHL407H1S LEC0101 — SEMINAR IN ETHICS
Prof. Allison Balin
Wednesdays 14:00-17:00
Advanced discussion of issues in moral philosophy, including issues of applied ethics.
Readings: TBD
Evaluation: TBD
PHL407H1S LEC0201 — SEMINAR IN ETHICS
Prof. Reza Hadisi
Thursdays 10:00-13:00
Particularism and Its Critics
This seminar focuses on moral particularism and its critics, especially as the debate has evolved in recent decades. Moral particularists argue that we can make well-informed moral judgments that track moral facts without relying on general moral principles. We will examine whether this view can withstand recent criticisms from defenders of moral generalism, whether it leads to moral skepticism, and whether it leaves room for action-guiding ethical theorizing.
Readings: Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch, John McDowell, Jonathan Dancy, Michael Ridge, and Sean McKeever.
Evaluation: Assessment will be based on weekly reading responses, one in-class presentation, and a final research paper.
PHL408H1F— SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Mark Kingwell
Wednesdays 13:00-16:00
This seminar will explore the contested space that lies between politics and art, using sources (mostly) from the Continental tradition of philosophy. Topics will include: activist art, propaganda, cultural hegemony, the culture industry, representation, the ontology of film, feminist and indigenous aesthetics, and the ‘emancipated spectator’. The first half of the course offers a series of theoretical explorations that address core philosophical issues in this region of political aesthetics. The second half will then consist of a linked series of ‘case studies’ through which specific aspects of the general question are addressed.
Reading: TBD
Evaluation: TBD
PHL408H1S— SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Nicholas Stang
Tuesdays 14:00-17:00
This will be an upper-level seminar on some theme or text from modern European philosophy (roughly, from Descartes to Heidegger) and/or the analytic tradition, probably centering around metaphysics. Past topics have included: logical positivism, the possibility of metaphysics, and the metaphysics of transcendental idealism.
Evaluation (tentative): participation (20%), bi-weekly reading responses (40%), final research paper (40%)
Readings: TBD
PHL410H1F — SEMINAR IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Rebecca Comay
Wednesday 13:00-16:00
READING CAPITAL TODAY
In this seminar we’ll be attempting a careful reading of Marx’s Capital and thinking about its contemporary relevance. We’ll be examining some of his core concepts — use-value/exchange-value, commodity fetishism, abstract and concrete labour, money, the working day, formal and real subsumption, absolute and relative surplus value, “primitive accumulation,” unemployment and the production of surplus populations. As we try to work through these concepts, we’ll also be looking for “points of stress” in Marx’s system – concepts that are problematic, unresolved, underdeveloped, or anachronistic. What in Capital needs to be revised, expanded, jettisoned, or updated today? We’ll be looking particularly at feminist, Black, anticolonial, indigenous, and environmentalist critiques that have taken issue with and tried to correct Marx’s seeming disregard for the role of unpaid reproductive labour in sustaining capitalist production; for his blindsiding of the racial origins of modern capitalism and the central role of plantation slavery; for his under-theorization of the ongoing history of colonial dispossession, resource extraction, and environmental devastation. And we’ll be asking whether the categories developed in Capital are sufficient to account for the vicissitudes of “late” or “neoliberal” capitalism — the new forms of exploitation and immiseration introduced by the global supply chain, the prison-industrial complex, financialization, digital labour and the platform economy, the generation of a global precariat, and the commodification of everything. Finally: is the category of revolutionary class struggle still viable today?
Readings: We’ll be focusing mainly on the first volume of Capital supplemented by selections from the other two volumes. This will be accompanied by texts by contemporary thinkers such as David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Silvia Federici, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, Glenn Coulthard, Tithi Bhattacharya, Kathi Weeks, John Bellamy Foster, and Jason Moore.
Evaluation: TBA
PHL412H1F LEC0101 — SEMINAR IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Andrew Franklin-Hall
Mondays 09:00-12:00
Social Equality
This course examines one of the major developments in political philosophy over the last twenty-five years: the idea that the heart of justice consists, not so much in reducing undeserved material inequalities, but in dismantling hierarchies and structural injustices, eliminating various forms of oppression and exclusion, securing people against domination, and generally establishing egalitarian social relationships. Readings will include work from Iris Marion Young, Elizabeth Anderson, Samuel Scheffler, Philip Pettit, and Niko Kolodny.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL412H1F LEC5101 — SEMINAR IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Shruta Swarup
Mondays 18:00-21:00
Advanced study of some topic in social or political philosophy.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL413H1F — SEMINAR IN APPLIED ETHICS
Prof. Jordan Thomson
Thursdays 18:00-21:00
This course is called “Ethics and Artificial Intelligence” not “The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence”. This reflects the fact that this is a course in both applied ethics and moral theory. It is an opportunity to familiarize yourself with contemporary debates in AI ethics while becoming acquainted with the significant background moral theorizing in which such debates are situated, coming to see how the ethics of AI is both informed by moral theory and how it might contribute to such theorizing in future. For example, when we discuss concerns about bias in algorithmic decision-making systems that are used to determine prison sentences and college admissions, we will also discuss philosophical theories of bias and punishment. Similarly, when we discuss the question as to whether AI poses an “existential threat” to humanity, we will discuss whether and why human extinction would be a bad thing.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL416H1F — SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW
Prof. David Dyzenhaus
Tuesdays 14:00-17:00
We will be focusing on just one text, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, perhaps the earliest fully articulated theory of the rule of law, understood as the legal governed interaction between law and politics in the modern legal state. Hobbes’s legal theory is also a political theory, a political philosophical account of the legal order that can make peaceful interaction between subjects (citizens) possible under the rule of a unified though complexly understood all-powerful sovereign. We will read in detail most of chapters 1 – 30 of Leviathan and some secondary literature. Any edition of Leviathan will do, but I will be using Leviathan, Hackett Classics, Edwin Curley, editor.
Evaluation will be by class participation—10%, two in class tests—20% each, one class presentation–20%, term paper due on the last day of classes—30%.
Reading: TBA
PHL418H1S — SEMINAR IN SOUTH ASIAN PHILOSOPHY
Prof. Elisa Freschi
Mondays 14:00-17:00
In this class we will focus on texts by Sanskrit philosophers (in translation) on epistemology and on the topic of other minds, as well as contemporary studies focusing on the sentience of animals. We will discuss whether other minds can exist and how would the minds of divine beings, animals, aliens… differ from ours. For their final paper, students will be encouraged to analyse a further passage of a Sanskrit text and comment on its philosophical position.
Evaluation: 2% (optional: initial survey); 24% (in-class participation); 24% (reading assignments); 18% (at least 9 weekly written assignments); 12% (at least 9 weekly peer reviews); 4% (summary of a talk); 6% (in-class presentation of a reading assignment); 12% (final paper); 2% (review of the final paper); 2% (optional: final reflection).
NB: If a student misses 4 or more classes, they will fail the class independently of the other grades.
NB: The use of ChatGPT or other AI softwares is absolutely forbidden. If students will be suspected to have use any AI tool, they will be asked to come to my office hours and discuss. Failure to do so will lead to a 0 in the relevant assignment and in the filing of an academic offence.
PHL440H1S — CLINICAL BIOETHICS
Prof. Jennifer Gibson
Wednesdays 12:00-15:00
An advanced study of topics in bioethics, taught in conjunction with clinical bioethicists associated with the health-care organization partners of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL446H1F — SEMINAR IN DECISION THEORY
Prof. Yonathan Fiat
Wednesdays 10:00-13:00
Decision Theory is a name for a family of closely related approaches to rational decision making in the presence of uncertainty. Very broadly, they suggest to think about all decisions as decisions regarding bets, and then say how to choose the best bet. In this seminar, we’ll study some of the key approached in this family. We’ll ask what is their proper interpretation, and we’ll evaluate the arguments that have been presented to support them. We’ll also discuss of the key issues in the contemporary philosophical discussion of those – for example, the debate between causal and evidential decision theory – and see how our answers to the previous questions bear on them.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL447H1s — SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHICAL LOGIC
Prof. Franz Huber
Mondays 18:00-21:00
This Seminar in Philosophical Logic will deal with the logic of counterfactuals and causation. We will begin by reviewing the possible worlds semantics for modal statements. Then we will study the so-called similarity approach to counterfactuals. Next, we will focus on the relation between causation and counterfactuals, as well as discuss what the relata of the causal relation are. Against this background we will then study the structural equations approach to causal counterfactuals that has made its way into philosophy in the last two decades. This will include a discussion of interventions in terms of which structural equations are often interpreted. It will also include a discussion of empirical results on the role that judgments of normality – in both its descriptive and evaluative form – play for judgments of (actual) causation. We will conclude by looking at an alternative approach to causation – and, if time permits, we will briefly look into topics that relate causation and probability: causal models, causal inference, and causal decision theory.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL451H1s — SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE
Prof. Imogen Dickie
Wednesdays 13:00-16:00
Advanced study of some topic in the philosophy of language.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA
PHL455H1S — SEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Prof. Sara Aronowitz
Fridays 10:00-13:00
Advanced study of some area or problem in the philosophy of science.
Reading: TBA
Evaluation: TBA