This course covers a range of philosophic problems centering on issues of personhood and rational agency. Readings are drawn from both classic and contemporary sources and address such topics as freedom of the will, personal identity, knowledge of the self, weakness of will and self-deception.

This course is a study of a number of philosophical and political questions related to gender and with the relation between these two types of questions. The course will be concerned first, with some metaphysical issues concerning gender: What is gender? Are gender terms purely natural categories or are they to some extent socially constructed? Second, with epistemological issues that relate to gender difference: Do women, for example, see the world differently from men? What kind of implications does this have for scientific and philosophical knowledge?

What is beauty, where can we find and why does it matter? Is there aesthetic value in "ugliness"? How does beauty relate to art? What is art? Can videogames or food be art? How do aesthetic, artistic and beauty standards arise? How does aesthetics relate to ethics? Can art be immoral? Can we disagree on matters of taste? In this course students explore these and other questions concerning the nature and value of aesthetic value.

This course surveys some of the fundamental philosophical questions that arise from cinema as an art form. What is a film? What does it have in common with, and how does it differ from, other arts, such as theater or photography? What challenges does cinema pose to the traditional understanding of art? Other topics covered may include: the problem of identifying authorship in film; reasons and nature of our emotional engagement with movies; puzzles concerning film narration; the relation between film and society. At the end of the course students collaborate to make a film.

Philosophers have long regarded language as the essential intermediary between thought and the world. Accordingly, this course studies philosophically important theories about language and more general philosophical conclusions drawn from considerations about language. Central topics concern meaning, reference, inference, existence, and truth. In addition to discursive language, some attention is devoted to systems of notation and of pictorial representation.

Epistemology, otherwise known as the theory of knowledge, addresses issues about the nature of knowledge, justification, and truth, issues that arise from questions such as "How do you know?" and "Can you be sure?" It has been an especially lively area of philosophy in English in recent decades; many currents in the humanities appeal to epistemological notions - such currents as post-modernism, relativism, social constructionism, feminism, and situated knowing. This course answers both developments.

European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled to make sense of ordinary perceptual experience in light of the emerging mathematical physics that culminated in Newton. This new physics presented a picture of the world according to which things in space and time are not as they appear to the senses, and thus overturned the Aristotelian world-view endorsed by the Church since the Middle Ages. The philosophical issues of this period concern the nature of knowledge of the world and how it is acquired.

This seminar examines the metaphysical and epistemological theories of the British Empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through close readings of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Berkeley's The Principles of Human Knowledge, and Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature. It considers such issues as realism, idealism and skepticism, the nature and scope of scientific knowledge, the nature of the self and self-knowledge, and personal identity.

This course introduces students to philosophy from Latin America -- broadly construed to include Indigenous philosophy -- and to Latinx philosophy in the United States.

This course is a moderately comprehensive and systematic treatment of Aristotle, including method, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and politics. It considers Aristotle's criticism of Plato's theory of forms and his own views about what is real, the relation of form and matter, the nature of the soul, the highest human good, and the relation of the individual and the community.