Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• GRS PH 618: 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 consciousness. Later (including contemporary) Marxists and critics.
• GRS PH 619: Nietzsche
  A study of Nietzsche's philosophy, focusing on one or more of his works.
• GRS PH 622: Analytic Philosophy
  A survey of the basic works of twentieth-century analytical philosophy.
• GRS PH 624: Wittgenstein
  An intensive (line by line) study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
• GRS PH 626: Phenomenology
  Rigorous examination of the foundations of philosophical phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger.
• GRS PH 627: Heidegger and Existential Philosophy
  A study of the main topics of Heidegger's philosophy against the background of his interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology, Kant's transcendental philosophy, and ancient Greek philosophy, with an emphasis on the concepts of being, time, and truth.
• GRS PH 633: 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.
• GRS PH 636: Gender, Race, and Science
  Examines issues in feminist philosophy, philosophy of race, and philosophy of science. Is "race" a genuine scientific category or a social construct? How have views about gender and race changed? Why are there still so few women and minority scientists?
• GRS PH 640: Metaphysics
  A survey of basic questions in contemporary metaphysics that may include reality, time, change, free will, personal identity, and causation.
• GRS PH 643: Philosophy of Mind
  The topic is sentience, embodiment, and the brain. The aim is to develop a "neurophenomenological" approach to consciousness and embodied experience in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.
• GRS PH 645: The Philosophy of Love
  What is love? What different forms does it take (e.g. parental love, romantic love)? Is love non- rational or are there reasons of love? We aim to answer these and other philosophical questions by focusing on contemporary philosophical writings on love.
• GRS PH 647: Asian Philosophy
  Topic for Spring 2005: Buddhist Philosophy. Major issues, personalities, and texts in the Buddhist philosophical tradition, including early Buddhist scriptures, intellectual developments in classical India, China, Japan, and Tibet, and the encounter with modernity in Asia and the West.
• GRS PH 651: Contemporary Ethical Theory
  An examination of contemporary English and American moral theories. Topic for Fall 2019: The Color Line and the Problem of Reparations.
• GRS PH 652: Ethics of Health Care
  Medicine and health care offer a unique opportunity to explore the nature of humanity and the world and to ask fundamental questions concerning the nature of birth, life, and death, and what it is to be a person. Readings from both classical and contemporary writings in ethics, medicine, law, and public health policy.
• GRS PH 656: Topics in Philosophy and Religion
  Topic for Fall 2019: Wisdom and Transformation. A study of the relationship between wisdom and moral transformation in several different philosophical and religions, from ancient Greece to the modern day, including an encounter with the classical traditions of India and China. This course is designed to run side by side with the Institute for Philosophy and Religion's fall lecture series.
• GRS PH 657: Action, Interpretation, and Narrative
  What is the relationship between understanding behavior and understanding texts? What is the role of narrative in interpretation? Using philosophical reflections on narrative from Plato to MacIntyre, the course studies philosophy and tragedy as two perhaps antithetical traditions of interpretation.
• GRS PH 660: Epistemology
  An examination of some of the central questions concerning the nature, scope, sources, and structure of knowledge.
• GRS PH 661: Mathematical Logic
  The investigation of logical reasoning with mathematical methods. The syntax and semantics of sentential logic and quantificational logic. The unifying Godel Completeness Theorem, and models of theories. A look at the Godel Incompleteness Theorem and its ramifications. Effective Fall 2019, this course fulfills a single unit in the following BU Hub area: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings.
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  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
• GRS PH 662: Foundations of Mathematics
  Axiomatic set theory as a foundation for, and field of, mathematics: Axiom of Choice, the Continuum Hypothesis, and consistency results.
• GRS PH 663: Philosophy of Language
  The most representative problem areas in contemporary philosophy of language are discussed, criticized, and put into a new perspective. They include Frege's sense-reference theory, quantification and anaphora, theory of truth, the semantics of intentional and epistemic concepts, strategic aspects of language use, identification and individuation, metaphor, demonstratives and indexical, discourse and dialogue theory, and selected language disturbances (dyslexia, autism).

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