Courses

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

• CAS PH 624: Wittgenstein
  An intensive (line by line) study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
• CAS PH 626: Phenomenology
  Undergraduate Prerequisites: First Year Writing Seminar (e.g., WR 100 or WR 120) - Rigorous examination of foundations of philosophical phenomenology in Husserl and others. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Oral and/or Signed Communication, Writing-Intensive Course, Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings.
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  • Oral and/or Signed Communication
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • Writing-Intensive Course
• CAS 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.
• CAS PH 633: Symbolic Logic
  A survey of the concepts and principles of symbolic logic: valid and invalid arguments, logical relations of statements and their basis in structural features of statements, analysis of the logical structure of complex statements of ordinary discourse, and the use of a symbolic language to display logical structure and to facilitate methods for assessing the logical structure of arguments. We cover the analysis of reasoning with truth-functions. Effective Spring 2018, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Quantitative Reasoning I, Critical Thinking.
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  • Critical Thinking
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • Quantitative Reasoning I
• CAS 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?
• CAS PH 642: Philosophy and Feminism
  Undergraduate prerequisites: two courses in philosophy or consent of instructor. - An advanced survey course of historical and contemporary philosophical approaches to feminism. Topics include: methodology, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, black feminist thought, decolonial feminism, global feminism, philosophy of gender, and queer and trans philosophy.
• CAS 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.
• CAS 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.
• CAS PH 646: Philosophy of Religion
  Critical investigation of the limits of human knowledge and the theoretical and practical demands for meaning attached to notions of God, providence, immortality, and other metaphysical conditions of human thriving, from Plato to modern philosophies of religion. Effective Spring 2022 this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Social Inquiry I, Critical Thinking.
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  • Critical Thinking
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • Social Inquiry I
• CAS 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.
• CAS 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.
• CAS PH 654: Community, Liberty, and Morality
  Challenges to liberalism's belief in the primacy of individual freedom and in governmental neutrality regarding individuals, interests, as offered by conservatism (Burke, Scruton), communitarianism (MacIntyre), feminism (Gilligan), and advocates of a "liberal" theory of the public good (Glaston).
• CAS PH 660: Epistemology
  An examination of some of the central questions concerning the nature, scope, sources, and structure of knowledge.
• CAS 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 2018, 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
• CAS PH 662: Foundations of Mathematics
  Graduate Prerequisites: (GRSPH661) or consent of instructor. - Axiomatic set theory as a foundation for, and field of, mathematics: Axiom of Choice, the Continuum Hypothesis, and consistency results.
• CAS 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).
• CAS PH 665: Philosophy of Cognitive Science
  We'll read important scientific work in evolutionary theory, psychology, etc. about human cognition. We'll then explore its philosophical implications. For example, we'll use research in cognitive science to think about whether humans are irremediably tribal and sectarian. Scientific Inquiry I and Social Inquiry I are both prerequisites for this course. Effective Fall 2020, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Scientific Inquiry II, Critical Thinking.
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  • Critical Thinking
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • Scientific Inquiry II
• CAS PH 668: Philosophical Problems of Logic and Mathematics
  Selected traditional metaphysical and epistemological problems in the light of modern logic and various studies in the foundations of mathematics, including the nature of axiomatic method, completeness in logic and mathematics, and the nature of mathematical truth.
• CAS PH 670: Philosophy of Physics
  An introductory survey of fascinating problems in contemporary philosophy of physics. The basic ideas and main features of physical theories, which touch upon nature at its most fundamental level and interact most crucially with philosophy in general, are outlined, so that students will have a road map of the central problems in the field. Throughout, the driving theme is the entanglement of a radical revision in our conceptualization of the world (which is forced upon us by the changes in the physical picture of the world due to major developments in modern physics) with central philosophical. Effective Fall 2022, this course fulfills a single unit in each of the following BU Hub areas: Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings, Scientific Inquiry I, Critical Thinking.
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  • Critical Thinking
  • Philosophical Inquiry and Life's Meanings
  • Scientific Inquiry I
• CAS PH 672: Philosophy of Biology
  Conceptual problems in biology; unity or pluralism of science; hierarchy theory; biological explanation; evolutionary theory, teleology and causality, statistical explanation; the species problem; mind and the brain; and language in animals and humans.