This course will cover the history of Western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the twentieth century. Figures to be covered include: Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Pierce, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. We will focus on questions of metaphysics (What is being? Is there a God? Is the will free?) and epistemology (What is it “to know” something? Is it possible to be certain about anything? What can science explain?).

Assignments: will include two 1000-1500 word analytical-critical essays, periodic short-answer quizzes, and a two hour final exam with short-answer and essay components. No early finals. Attendance is mandatory for all students. Strict rules of classroom decorum will be enforced (e.g., no texting in class).

Required text: Steven M. Cahn, Classics of Western Philosophy, 7th edition (Hackett, 2006).

This course will sample several of the great works in the western philosophical tradition. We will read selections from Plato, Anselm, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Peirce, and Heidegger. We will end the course with a recent book by two contemporary philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly. This course will help you to begin to develop an understanding of the tradition, and help you to develop skill at close reading and constructive engagement with challenging texts through critical writing. By encouraging your thoughtful engagement with the world, the course seeks to help you develop a philosophical habit of mind. Assignments include regular short quizzes, two short papers, and a comprehensive final exam.

Required texts: Descartes’ Meditations, Emerson’s Essays: First and Second Series, Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking, and Hubert Dreyfus’s & Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining. Additional readings will be available in a course packet.

In one sense, philosophy is thinking hard about life. In this section of Introduction to Philosophy, you'll learn how and be asked to 'do' philosophy. You'll think hard, question, discuss, read, and write about persistent philosophical questions, including questions about life's meaning, death, the existence of God, science, personhood, emotions, justice, art, terrorism, money, and technology.

Requirements: class attendance, 4-5 hours of reading/writing each week, participation in discussion, brief written in-class reflections, exams (midterm and final), and one or two (3-5) page papers.

Required text: Twenty Questions: An Introduction, 7th Edition (Bowie, Michaels, Solomon, eds.)

This introduction to philosophy will be primarily author oriented, proceeding historically and sampling a few of the great works in both Indian Buddhist (40%) and European (60%) philosophy. The investigation into these two traditions will allow us to consider an interesting range of approaches to enduring philosophical questions, including: What is the purpose or meaning of life? What are the ultimate foundations of reality and knowledge? What is the difference between truth and delusion? Can humans escape suffering? What is freedom and what is it's relationship to philosophy? What is justice? This course is designed to provide an introduction to two distinct philosophical lineages either in preparation to take higher level classes in these areas or, for those not specializing in philosophy, an open introduction to some potentially unfamiliar and hopefully exciting philosophical material. The purpose of the course is to encourage thoughtful engagement with philosophical ideas; this will involve close reading, in‑class discussion, and imaginative written argumentation. This course will therefore require you to read, understand, and respond to a variety of challenging texts, excerpts and commentaries that will be made available as a course pack. The majority of your grade will come from two short papers and a longer final paper; however, there will also be numerous easy but unscheduled in‑class pop quizzes that will contribute to your final grade.

Can we know that God exists? If God exists, then why is there evil in the world? What is the relation between mind and body? Since I am not able to see your thoughts, how do I know that you have a mind? Can science explain consciousness? Can a computer be a mind? What kind of thing is a person? How am I the same person that ‘I’ was in my childhood? (I don’t look or behave like that child.) Does free will exist? Is it compatible with a scientific view of the world? Are there any grounds for morality? We’ll take this kind of topical approach to some of the most difficult and interesting questions in philosophy.

Required text: Perry and Bratman, eds., Introduction to Philosophy, 5th ed.

This course will sample several of the great works in the western philosophical tradition. We will read selections from Plato, Anselm, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Peirce, and Heidegger. We will end the course with a recent book by two contemporary philosophers, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly. This course will help you to begin to develop an understanding of the tradition, and help you to develop skill at clcose reading and constructive engagement with challenging texts through critical writing. By encouraging your thoughtful engagement with the world, the course seeks to help you develop a philosophical habit of mind. Assignments include regular short quizzes, two short papers, and a comprehensive final exam.

Required texts: Descartes’ Meditations, Emerson’s Essays: First and Second Series, Heidegger’s Discourse on Thinking, and Hubert Dreyfus’s & Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining. Additional readings will be available in a course packet.

This on-line course is designed to introduce students to some of the major issues of philosophy through reading a variety of texts selected from diverse periods and places in the history of philosophical thought. Questions concerning the nature of reality, the possibility and nature of human knowledge, and ethics will be included. In addition to providing a basic familiarity with the practice of philosophy, a fundamental aim of the course is to improve each student’s ability to think critically and to make rational judgments. In order to achieve this end, students will critically engage with the philosophical texts we will be reading, as well as with each other, in weekly on-line discussions. There will also be periodic paper assignments to give students the opportunity to critically assess the view of the various authors we will read. We will not only be reading philosophy in this course, we will also be doing philosophy!

In this course, we will survey several problems that continue to motivate philosophical discussion and philosophical worry. Such problems will include: the problem of evil, the nature of the human soul, the existence of God, the extent of moral responsibility, the possibility and extent of human knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, what it means to lead a good life. The goal of this course is to illuminate fruitful ways of engaging with these philosophical problems, which means we'll wrestle with hard questions that rarely offer neat and tidy solutions. Be prepared to READ, REFLECT, and WRITE throughout the semester. On average, you should expect to dedicate roughly 4-5 hours each week to complete the required assignments for this course.

The course is dedicated to analyzing, evaluating, and constructing arguments. In the first half of the course the students will be introduced to basic concepts and critical tools necessary for these endeavors. We shall also learn to distinguish between different modes and forms of argumentation that pertain to different spheres of our intellectual experience. In the second half of the semester we shall concentrate on the realm of the moral reasoning. Students will be given opportunity to master the skills acquired in the first half of the semester vis-à-vis an array of burning issues in applied ethics: legalization of drugs, legitimacy of torture, moral status of abortion, and animal rights.

Required texts: William Hughes, Jonathan Lavery, & Katheryn Doran, Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills (6th Edition). Readings for the second part of the course will be available on the WebCT.

Grading: 1) Midterm exam – 20%; 2) Five (out of seven) short quizzes – 20%; 3) Three argumentative essays – 20% each. 4) Participation in the discussions in class may increase or decrease the final grade up to 20%.

This course is geared toward your development of the skills of identifying, comprehending, assessing or evaluating, and composing arguments. It also aims to reinforce these skills, which will be covered in roughly the first half of the course, by applying them to some influential ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophical writings, which we will read in the second part of the semester. These analyses in particular, and critical-thinking abilities in general, will be of use in the future not only in your academics, but also in your lives day to day.

Required texts: Hughes, Lavery, & Doran, Critical Thinking (6th Ed.); Lewis Vaughn, Writing Philosophy; UNM Course Reader (less than $20). The two books will be available in the campus bookstore; the reader will be available at the copy center in Dane Smith Hall after the sixth week of the semester.

Grading: A midterm, two short papers (2-4 pages), one longer paper (5-7 pages), class attendance and participation.

This course will focus on developing the skills necessary to critically analyze arguments. In the first half of the course, working from Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills, students will be introduced to the logical and linguistic tools and concepts necessary to analyze and construct philosophical arguments. In the second half of the course we will apply these skills to texts in philosophy, both historical and contemporary. We will first spend time on issues in the philosophy of religion, e.g. Can the existence of God be proven? We will look at texts by authors including David Hume, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Blaise Pascal and Bertrand Russell. We will then move on to the question of “What is the Good Life?”, looking at texts by Plato, Epictetus, Augustine, Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Nozick.

Required texts:
1) William Hughes, Jonathan Lavery, & Katheryn Doran, Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills (6th Edition).
2) Charles Guignon, ed. The Good Life.
3) Writing Philosophy: A Student’s Guide to Writing Philosophy Essays, by Lewis Vaughn

In the first component of this course, students will learn how to recognize, construct, and evaluate arguments. Students will learn how to differentiate between various forms of argumentation and recognize qualities of both strong and weak arguments. For the second component of the course, we will apply the critical reasoning skills learned in the first component to texts in the history of philosophy.

Grading: Three short to mid‑length papers, response papers, and attendance/participation.

Required text: Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills, edited by Hughes, Lavery, and Doran (2010, 6th ed.).

In this course students will learn how to think critically about who–and what–we are. We will learn about language, logic, meaning, truth, argumentation, and strategies for assessing arguments. We will then bring these issues to bear on some texts in the philosophy of embodiment. We will think about and attempt to answer several questions: Am I the same thing as my body, or is my body something different than me? In what sense am I 'in' my body or is my body ‘in’ the world? What does the body have to do with language, freedom, space and time, death, emotional life, nature, sexuality, everyday experience, responsibility, the limits of possible experience, and other philosophical topics and problems? Why do we understand our bodies in the way that we do and how might we come to understand bodies differently? What are the metaphysical assumptions, sociopolitical conditions, and/or scientific discoveries that might lead us to engage in such rethinking? We will address these questions while considering argumentative selections from the works of rationalists (Descartes and Spinoza), pragmatists (James and Dewey), the Kyoto School (Nishida and Nishitani), phenomenologists (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), feminists (Young and Grosz), and a contemporary neuroscientist (Damasio).

Grading: is based on two quizzes, three papers, and class attendance.

Required texts:
1. Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills, edited by Hughes, Lavery, and Doran (2010, 6th ed.).
2. Course reader, available at the UNM Copy Shop (located in Dane Smith Hall, Room 124).
3. Writing Philosophy: A Student’s Guide to Writing Philosophy Essays, by Lewis Vaughn (2005).

In this section of Reasoning and Critical Thinking, students will learn a method by which they can analyze and assess arguments. Students will be introduced to a number of concepts that are indispensable to the study of reasoning, concepts such as induction, deduction, validity, soundness, inductive strength, and cogency. Over the final seven weeks of the semester, students will study and discuss some arguments found in the work of four important thinkers, namely, Jefferson, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Bentham. This text-based study will provide the oppurtunity to assess these arguments by using the newly acquired method and conceptual tools.

Grades: will be based on three papers (50%), a midterm (25%), ten quizzes (10%), and participation/attendance (15%).

Required text: The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning about Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims (3rd edition) by Lewis Vaughn (Oxford University Press, 2010; ISBN 978-0-19-537792-7).

Most intellectual endeavors involve argumentation. From short letters to the editor to complex philosophical essays, from simple everyday discussions to sophisticated legal debates, arguments are constantly invoked to support or criticize points of view. The purpose of this course is to help you learn how to analyze, critique, and construct arguments.
The course material is organized into two main parts. The first part is an introductory survey of important logical concepts and tools that are needed for analyzing arguments. The second part is an in-depth examination of a few philosophical essays focused on a small set of closely related questions on cloning and genetic engineering. Although no background in philosophy or logic is presupposed, this course requires a moderate degree of linguistic sophistication and a strong commitment to rational inquiry.

Required texts: Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 4th edition., Weston, A Rulebook for Arguments, 4th edition.

From letters to the editor to philosophical essays and from everyday discussion to sophisticated legal debates, arguments are constantly invoked to support or criticize points of view. The purpose of this course is to help students learn how to analyze, critique, and construct arguments. (An argument is a piece of reasoning, not a quarrel or a fight.) In addition to a textbook, we will be looking at supplemental readings, websites and films on a variety of issues. Our main purpose in looking at the supplementary material is to practice applying critical thinking skills to a variety of controversial issues. Developing critical thinking skills is an essential part of your overall intellectual health, which is important not just in college, but in life in general. In this course you will develop your abilities to do the following: read carefully, analyze arguments, think critically about difficult ideas in politics, science, ethics, philosophy and other areas, recognize and use deductive and inductive argument forms, recognize and avoid the use of fallacies, compose your own arguments in argumentative essays, and agree or disagree with others in a rational and civil manner.

The purpose of this course is to help students learn how to analyze, critique, and construct arguments incontext, in other words, how to read and write argumentative essays.

This course is an introductory survey of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. We shall study the writings of the Presocratics—for example, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, and then the writers after Socrates: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoic Marcus Aurelius. Our goal is to acquire a basic understanding of philosophical problems and solutions proposed by the most important Greek and Roman thinkers and to improve our writing and thinking about them. Class time will be devoted to discussion of the assigned readings. Evaluation is based primarily on two in-class examinations (30% each), and a final (40%).

Philosophy begins with the ancient Greeks and there is no better introduction to philosophy than to study their thought and writing. We will consider the Greek development of rational, reflective thought from earlier, mythological and religious origins. We will take up some of the questions that most interested the first philosophers: What is the nature of being and how is it related to change and becoming? How do we know what we know and what are the limits of human knowledge and understanding? What is it to live a good life and how can we be happy? As we pursue these interrelated questions, we will be focusing in particular on the question of what most defines us as human beings: the nature of the human self, soul, or mind.

In the seventeenth century, René Descartes, the founding figure of modern philosophy (a period in the history of philosophy running from the 1600s to the beginning of the twentieth century), initiated a revolutionary reorientation of Western philosophy by centering intellectual attention on the individual human subject as a knowing being. Descartes’ work launched a series of discussions about how we know what we claim to know about the fundamental nature of reality, discussions that continue up through the present. This course will focus on issues pertaining to epistemology (i.e., that part of philosophy concerned with constructing a theory of knowledge) and ontology (i.e., that part of philosophy concerned with constructing a theory of being) in the modern period, starting with Descartes and concluding with Immanuel Kant (late eighteenth century). In particular, we will occupy ourselves with an exploration of, first, the distinction between the two basic epistemological orientations in modern philosophy, namely, rationalism and empiricism (as well as Kant’s attempted resolution of these opposed orientations), and, second, the ontological alternatives between monism and dualism, nominalism and metaphysical realism, and materialism and idealism. Additionally, a series of other related questions and problems will be explored, such as: the relation between mind and body, the essence of personal identity, the role of science as a means of access to reality, and various conceptions of truth.

The authors from this period we will read are: Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Arnauld, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Boyle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

‘Philosophy’ literally means love of wisdom. Thus the nature and status of knowledge itself is of fundamental importance to philosophers. We will begin with the skeptical claim that we can know almost nothing at all. We will then turn to the problematic traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief. After discussing a famous refutation of this account and assessing new ones, we will inquire into the nature of justification. When does a true belief constitute knowledge? When it is based upon firm foundations? When it coheres with my other true beliefs? When it is caused in a reliable way? Finally, with the time remaining, we’ll explore related questions about knowledge, such as the value of knowledge, the ethics of belief, and whether what counts as knowledge is relative to subjects or their communities.

Required text: Sosa, Kim, et al. eds., Epistemology: An Anthology, 2/e (Wiley-Blackwell).

Prerequisite: Phil 202.

Metaphysics is the part of philosophy most closely related to empirical science. In fact, there is no clear dividing line between science and metaphysics. Scientific theory inevitably becomes metaphysical at its edges. This is because metaphysics deals with the most basic questions regarding what exists, or what is real. Contemporary philosopher E.J. Lowe has said that while science tells us what is actual, metaphysics tells us what is possible. Another way of seeing the project of metaphysics was articulated by the twentieth-century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars: we are trying to reconcile “the scientific image” (what science tells us about reality) with “the manifest image” (what common sense and our own personal experience tell us about reality). In other words, we are trying to figure out how things, in the most general sense of the term, hang together, in the most general sense of the term. This will be a rigorous course on analytic metaphysics, requiring a considerable amount of difficult reading. (This is not to say it won't be interesting! However, students are forewarned that it will not be easy, and you won’t be able to bluff your way through by writing vague nonsense.) We will read papers on such central metaphysical topics as existence; identity; modalities and possible worlds; universals, properties, and kinds; objects and their persistence through time; the nature of persons and selves; causation; emergence, reduction, and supervenience; realism and anti-realism.

Required text: The new edition of Metaphysics: An Anthology, edited by Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa (Wiley Publishing).

Prerequisite: 101 or 201 or 202.

Recommended prerequisite: Phil. 202 (Early Modern Philosophy from Descartes through Kant) or its equivalent.

What are freedom, rights, authority? What is a modern state? A modern citizen? What are liberalism and its alternatives? What is power—public, individual, economic, intellectual, technological—in political society? These questions will guide our course and introduction to modern social and political thinking of continental Europe and America. We’ll begin with classic modern thinkers: Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Tocqueville, Nietzsche. We’ll continue with later modern and contemporary thinkers, such as Weber, Strauss, Heidegger, Arendt, Rawls, Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, Agamben. Expect to spend at least 2-3 hours per class on reading assignments. Requirements: class attendance, completion of assigned reading, pop-quizzes, exams (midterm and final), and one or two (5-7) page papers.

Prerequisites: either PHIL 101 or PHIL 202 or PHIL 371 or permission of the instructor.

Philosophy of Law presents readings, theories, and concepts which aid in understanding the problematic nature of law, the possible sources of its authority, and its role in society. We will question the diverse theoretical justifications and explanations for our legal rules, systems, and practices. Thinking along with classical and contemporary philosophers and jurists, we will ponder the relationships between law, authority, society, and morality.

Required text: the Course will have a professor compiled Reader.

Goals: To philosophically engage these and other questions about the Law: What is the Law? From whence did this concept come? What gives law its authority? What is the Rule of Law? What are the social purposes of law? What are the social consequences of law? Is morally acceptable content a precondition of legality? What is the relationship (separation) between law and morality? What should that relationship be? What justifies laws and rules? What justifies the legal system? What give judges power? When is one justified to “break the law” or the rules? What is our duty to obey/disobey law? Is law positivistic, natural, or existential? What are rights? Punishment? Legal Reasoning or Plain Insanity? What or how should the Law be? Further readings in Philosophy of Law?

Prerequisite: Phil 358.

This course is an introduction to philosophical thought in Latin American Thought from the Independence to the 21st century. We will examine some of the most significant texts produced by key representative thinkers. In this course special attention will be given to philosophical problems in social and political thinking, philosophical anthropology, value theory, identity, and the philosophy of liberation.

Prerequisite: one course in philosophy.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is widely recognized as one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, yet many of the views at the heart of his “later” work remain shrouded in confusion and controversy. Focusing on a few of the works Heidegger composed after Being and Time (1927), this seminar will seek to clarify, explain, and critique Heidegger’s views on the significance of art, poetry, and language; his understanding of metaphysics as ontotheology; his reading of Nietzsche and linked critique of technology as nihilism; his views on Plato and the future of education; the relation between his thought and politics; his famous response to Sartre and humanism—and, of course, we will address the issue of when exactly Heidegger’s “later” work begins and how best to characterize its most distinctive philosophical features. This course is good (indeed, indispensable) preparation for understanding much subsequent work in continental philosophy and the other theoretical humanities, which often take Heidegger’s insights as their own point of philosophical departure. For instance, Heidegger’s later work decisively shaped the concepts and concerns of such major continental thinkers as Agamben, Arendt, Badiou, Baudrillard, Blanchot, Cavell, Deleuze, Derrida, Dreyfus, Foucault, Gadamer, Irigaray, Lacan, Levinas, Marcuse, Rancière, Rorty, Taylor, Vattimo, and Žižek, and this remains true even where these thinkers approach Heidegger’s thought quite critically (as they all do, in their own distinctive and interesting ways). One thus needs to understand Heidegger in order to see where these thinkers are coming from, even if his is a thinking they seek (more or less successfully) to leave behind.

Course Requirements: This course will require a great deal of difficult and challenging reading. As this is a class in the art of slow reading, you will be required to do the reading ahead of time and bring the appropriate books to every class; there will be pop quizzes to test that preparedness and students who fail the first one will be dropped from the course, with no exceptions. Grades for all students will be based on quizzes, a midterm (in-class and open book), and a final paper (or, for graduate students, a research paper).

Required texts: 1). Heidegger, Pathmarks 2). Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track 3). Heidegger, Country Path Conversations 4. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education 5) Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity.

Prerequisites: Graduate standing, strong background in continental philosophy, or consent of instructor. (Course Phil 201 or 202 or 244 or 421 count as prerequisites.)

In this course we will examine the nature of the mind and its relationship to the brain and body. Is the mind the same as the brain, or are they different? How do we know about our own mental states and processes, and how do we know about the mental states and processes of others? Can we explain consciousness and selfhood in scientific terms? Could a computer or a robot actually think or be intelligent? For the first half of the course, we will consider the historical development of views of the nature of mind and its place in the world. In the second half of the course, we will turn to contemporary problems, culminating in the contemporary discussion of the "hard problem" of explaining consciousness.

Prerequisite: Phil 202.

This seminar is an in-depth examination of the archaic Greek thinkers who created new concepts of wisdom. Our primary focus will be (1) the Milesian cosmologists, especially Heraclitus, and (2) the southern Italian philosophers and mystics, including Parmenides, Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans. Some attention will be devoted to aspects of the rapidly evolving historical context and to archaic ethical and political ideas that reflect the emergence of new ideas of the self and society.

Recommended background reading: The Greeks and the Irrational, by E. R. Dodds; The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, by Marcel Detienne; The Cambridge Companion to Presocratic Philosophy; The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C., by Jeffrey M. Hurwit.

Prerequisite: 15 hours of Philosophy coursework.

This seminar concerns five American writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), and Henry David Thoreau (1817-62).

They are philosophers in various ways. Edwards, whose philosophy is grounded in Christianity, is the most systematic and logical of the five, author of works on ethics, metaphysics, and freedom. Franklin is more an Enlightenment philosophe, like his friends Denis Diderot and Voltaire, than a systematic philosopher, such as his Scottish friend David Hume. Jefferson’s contributions are as a moral and political thinker; he was the author of the American Declaration of Independence and important statements on religious freedom and slavery. Emerson and Thoreau are Romantic life-philosophers in the sense distinguished by Pierre Hadot in Philosophy as a Way of Life, but that does not mean they fail to offer theories of knowledge, language, and metaphysics.

The course will blend lectures from the book I am writing on these five philosophers with class discussion of the readings. We will spend the first half of the course on Edwards, Franklin, and Jefferson, the second half on Emerson and Thoreau.

The course requirements are: 1) reasonable class participation and attendance; 2) two papers of 7-10 pages for undergraduates and 10-15 pages for graduate students. The first of these is due the week before spring break, the second on the last day of class.

Required texts: (used copies may easily be obtained through online booksellers and some will be on sale at the UNM Bookstore, where I’ve placed an order):

A Jonathan Edwards Reader, ed. John Smith and Thomas Minkema, Yale University Press
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography, Library of America paperback classic.
The Political Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Joyce Appleby, Cambridge University Press.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Princeton University Press.
Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, ed L. Ziff., Penguin.

Prerequisites: 15 hours of Philosophy coursework.

This is the senior capstone course for the English/Philosophy major. It aims to investigate some aspect of how philosophical ideas and theories are expressed in the literary arts (including the novel, poetry, and film). This time, the theme of the course will be Existentialism and the Novel. We will follow the lead of Professor Robert Solomon, who has taught a popular and successful course at the University of Texas at Austin called “Existentialism and the Meaning of Life.” We will read Solomon’s collection of existentialist readings, which includes selections from Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kafka, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others. We will view some taped lectures from Solomon’s course. We will also read several novels and essays by Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, The Myth of Sisyphus, etc.) Each student will be required to write a term paper on some literary work with existentialist themes (writing on Camus is encouraged but not required.)

Required texts: Robert C. Solomon, Existentialism, second edition (Oxford, 2005) and the above-mentioned works of Camus.

Prerequisite: one course in Philosophy.

The focus of this course will be Kant’s philosophy of beauty, the sublime, and fine art. Special attention will be given to the relation of these phenomena to criticism (of literature and the arts) and morality. A general knowledge of Kant’s metaphysics, epistemology, and ethical theory will be presupposed. The primary text will be the recent Guyer and Matthews Cambridge University Press edition of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, translated Critique of the Power of Judgment. Access to a German edition would be helpful, though not required. Secondary sources will also be discussed, including two additional required texts: Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge UP, 1997) and Henry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge UP, 2001). The class will follow a combined lecture/ discussion format, so it will be essential to keep up with the assigned readings. Classroom participation, a 1000-1500 word analytical-critical essay, and a final seminar paper (3500-4000 words) will determine the course grade.

This seminar will provide an introduction to contemporary virtue ethics. The course will comprise a combination of two kinds of survey: a survey of the most recent virtue ethical theories (including those of Julia Driver, Thomas Hurka, Christine Swanton, Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Julia Annas, and Linda Zagzebski), and a survey of some of the current debates in virtue ethics (including: the prospects for giving a virtue account of right action; egoism; the role for empirical observation; the situationist challenge; and how, if at all, the ethical and non‑ethical virtues interrelate; and, more generally, how ethics and the rest of life fit together).

Students will submit weekly written responses of 1‑2 pages each week for which there is a reading. These responses will guide our discussion. The last weeks of the course will be reserved for student presentations of (preliminary versions of) their final papers.

Prerequisite: 15 hours in Philosophy coursework.

This seminar will provide an introduction to the Brahmanical (Hindu) system (darśana) of Sāṃkhya. It will offer an overview of the current state of the study of Sāṃkhya in conjunction with a close reading of one of the foundational texts of the tradition, the Sāṃkhyakārikā (Verses on Sāṃkhya) (SK) of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (5th c. C.E.). There will be two meetings a week: a regular seminar session in which Sāṃkhya literature will be read in translation and discussed along with relevant secondary literature, and a tutorial for Sanskrit students in which the Sanskrit text of the SK will be read together with excerpts from the commentaries. Students who do not know Sanskrit may attend just the seminar sessions and submit a final paper. All Philosophy graduate students, not just those on the Indian philosophy Ph.D. track, are welcome. The Sāṃkhyakārikā by itself serves as an excellent introduction to classical Indian philosophy. It is a complete philosophical system that includes theory of knowledge, ontology, psychology, cosmogony, and soteriology. The first meeting will be the week of Jan. 30. Prof. Taber will contact students who have enrolled in the course to arrange meeting times convenient for all and to post an initial assignment.