Courses

• CAS PH 251: Medical Ethics
  Examination of a number of value problems arising within the context of medicine and health care. Particular ethical problems of euthanasia, abortion, human experimentation, reproduction, and allocation of scarce resources; critiques of contemporary medicine as an institution.
• CAS PH 253: Social Philosophy
  A survey of philosophical and sociological analyses of modern Western society, including Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and a number of contemporary writers.
• CAS PH 254: Political Philosophy
  Types of political theory, their key concepts and underlying assumptions; paradoxes in the modern idea of freedom; the concept of property; scientific progress and the understanding of the politics.
• CAS PH 350: History of Ethics
  A critical and comparative examination of the ideas of representative moral philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche.
• CAS PH 360: Symbolic Logic
  Study of methods characteristic of modern deductive logic including use of truth tables, Boolean normal forms, models, and indirect and conditional proofs within the theory of truth-functions and quantifiers.
• CAS PH 401: Senior Independent Work
  Individual tutorial instruction and directed research at distinction level.
• CAS PH 402: Senior Independent Work
  Individual tutorial instruction and directed research at distinction level.
• CAS PH 403: Plato I
  (Knowledge of Greek is helpful but not required. Familiarity with Greek philosophy is helpful.) A close reading of the Symposium.
• CAS PH 405: Aristotle I
  A careful study of the philosophy of Aristotle conducted primarily through a close reading of several of his major works.
• CAS PH 406: Aristotle II
  A close reading of Aristotle's writings on practical philosophy (i.e., the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics) and of his philosophy of art in the Poetics, focusing on the nature of human happiness and the good life, the question of the best form of political government, and the function of art for life.
• CAS PH 409: Maimonides
  A study of major aspects of the thought of Maimonides. Primary focus on the Guide of the Perplexed, with attention to its modern reception in works by Baruch Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, Leo Strauss, and others. Also offered as CAS RN 420.
• CAS PH 410: Continental Rationalism
  A critical study of major texts of seventeenth-century philosophy.
• CAS PH 411: British Empiricism
  A critical study of major texts of British Empiricists, with emphasis on Locke and Hume.
• CAS PH 412: Philosophy of the Enlightenment
  A critical examination of that family of philosophical and political movements that called itself "the Enlightenment." Students analyze key texts by Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Jefferson, Madison, Kant, and Hegel.
• CAS PH 413: Kant
  An in-depth reading of several of Kant's works.
• CAS PH 415: Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
  Study of the important themes in the philosophy of Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
• CAS PH 418: Marx and Marxism
  Philosophical foundation of Marxism and its development. Critical study of Marx's writings stressing questions of philosophy, political economy, science, and history. Emphasis on Marx's theory of relation of praxis to conciousness. Later (including contemporary) Marxists and critics.
• CAS PH 419: Nietzsche
  Reading and discussion of some of Nietzsche's major works and their influence on twentieth-century thought. Discussions go back to Hegel and forward to Heidegger.
• CAS PH 420: Contemporary Philosophy
  A survey of the main developments in recent philosophy in both the analytical and continental traditions, emphasizing the interrelations of the two. Philosophers covered include Frege, Moore, Russell, and Wittgenstein, as well as Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.
• CAS PH 422: Analytic Philosophy
  Focus on the work of Q. V. Quine.

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