Please see Banner/Timetable for further information about sections, times, locations, and instructors. For general descriptions of all courses see the catalog,

Lower Division Courses (100- & 200-level)

See the general descriptions in the course catalog:

Upper Division Courses (300- & 400-level)

PHIL 300: Ethics and the Novel – Dunn

Will reading good novels help make you at good person?  Is a keen sense of right and wrong a prerequisite for being a good reader?  This class will investigate the role that literature can and should play in our moral development, and it will also look at the ways that moral understanding may inform our judgments of the novels we read.  We will explore these issues in discussions of a variety of literary and philosophical texts.  These will include representative samples of various moral philosophers and novels by writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, and Nathaniel West.

PHIL 320/327: Ancient Western Philosophy – Shaw

This course will focus on ancient Greek views of rhetoric.  In the first part of the course, we will read early texts by Gorgias, Antiphon, Thucydides, and Plato.  In the second and third parts we will read the entirety of Plato’s Phaedrus and the first two books of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.  Throughout, we will focus on developing skills of philosophical analysis (including summary, argument analysis, and thematic analysis), and on metacognition concerning our process of learning those skills.  The final project will provide an opportunity to engage in independent research on some topic related to a course reading, and to present the resulting findings to the class. Honors version available as PHIL 327.

PHIL 326: 19^th & 20^th Century Philosophy – Stratmann

In this course, we will survey several influential schools of thought to emerge in 19th and 20th-century philosophy: Hegelianism, Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy.

PHIL 340/347: Ethical Theory/Honors – Gehrman

An exploration of some basic issues about morality, such as the nature of moral truth, whether any moral principles are absolute, what moral obligations we have, why we should be moral, what is good and worth striving for, and the role of virtues and ideals in the moral life. Honors version available as PHIL 347. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 345: Bioethics – Cupples

Ethical issues in health care surrounding themes of reproductive justice, suffering and quality of life, public health and health promotion, social values and concepts of health and disease, medical research, biomedical enhancement, aging, death, and dying, and environmental ethics.  Emphasis is on health disparities, social justice, and intersectionality.  Bioethics is a discussion-based course rather than a lecture, meaning regular attendance and class participation are essential to your success in this course.  Bioethics is also a writing intensive course.  This section of bioethics is cross listed in WGS.

PHIL 345: Bioethics – Feldt

Debates about healthcare in America are a stark reminder of not only the high-stakes issues at play, but also the way in which moral, legal, and social perspectives can often collide.  This is because the medical field and biological sciences, more generally, are riddled with value judgements — from the classic life and death issues of abortion and euthanasia to larger questions about access to healthcare and medical research.  Bioethics, as a form of applied ethics, engages those value judgments in a systematic fashion, and this course will provide you with the ability to not only understand the types of moral dilemmas faced within healthcare and research, but to also develop your own views about how we should handle various issues. During the course, you will engage with questions about the right to healthcare, informed consent, end of life issues, privacy and confidentiality, reproductive health, cultural sensitivity, and medical research.  This course does not presuppose previous experience with philosophy and is aimed at providing skills that would benefit those interested in careers in healthcare, research, or public policy.

PHIL 345: Bioethics – Frank

An exploration of ethical issues in medicine, the life sciences, biomedical technology, public health, and/or the environment, such as abortion, euthanasia, human experimentation, informed consent, fairness in health care delivery, and the doctor-patient relationship. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 345: Bioethics – Harper

An exploration of ethical issues in medicine, the life sciences, biomedical technology, public health, and/or the environment, such as abortion, euthanasia, human experimentation, informed consent, fairness in health care delivery, and the doctor-patient relationship. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 346: Environmental Ethics – Frank

An exploration of issues concerning the nature of the environment and the place of humanity within it. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 346/348: Environmental Ethics – Molter

This course examines our ethical obligations, as they extend beyond the present human community to include: animals, plants, fungi, microbes, ecosystems, lands, and future generations. Problems such as pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, population overshoot, mass extinction, climate change, animal rights, and environmental justice are considered from the perspectives of utilitarianism, virtue ethics, deontology, and social contract theory. Moral obligation is further considered from Feminist, Native American, and Deep Ecological perspectives. This is a writing intensive course that culminates in a research paper that fills the university’s (WC) written communication requirement. Students may choose to write on any topic in environmental ethics and are guided step-by-step through the writing process. Honors version available as PHIL 348.

PHIL 360: Philosophy of Science – Cupples

An introduction to major problems in the philosophy of science – both traditional and contemporary.  Issues include the relationship between scientific knowledge and social values; traditional problems in philosophy of science such as theory change, demarcation, explanation, confirmation, scientific realism; practice oriented problems in the philosophy of science such as standardization, measurement, and scientific modeling; as well as feminist philosophy of science and critical theory. Philosophy of science is a discussion-based course rather than a lecture, meaning regular attendance and class participation are essential to your success in this course.  This is a writing-emphasis course.  This section of philosophy of science is also cross listed in WGS.  Recommended Background: Completion of natural sciences general education requirement.

PHIL 370: Philosophy of Religion – Watson

Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy dedicated to critically examining basic religious notions and commitments. In this course we will discuss a variety of problems that have animated the philosophy of religion, including the existence and nature of God, the problem of suffering, the nature of human and divine freedom, the existence of the self, and the nature of divine revelation.

PHIL 371: Epistemology – Coffman

An introduction to central debates in the theory of knowledge and rational belief, such as the nature of knowledge, how we can come to know things, and how to distinguish reasonable from unreasonable beliefs. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 373: Philosophy of Mind – Palmer

You and I have minds. Tables and chairs arguably don’t. But what exactly is a mind? In this course, we will investigate some of the central issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. We will focus on three issues: (1) The Mind-Body Problem—What is the relationship between our minds and our brains? Is the mind the same thing as the brain or is it something different? (2) Consciousness—What does it mean to be conscious? What special puzzles does consciousness present for a physicalist view of the mind? (3) The Mind’s Scope and AI—Does the human mind extend outside our bodies? Can machines have minds and intelligence? These issues are tough; and deciding what to think about them is not obvious (at least not to me!). Hence, the aim for the class is for each of us (me included) to develop and defend answers to these questions. Given this aim, the class will be run ‘seminar-style’—emphasizing student involvement and discussion. I will encourage you, through class discussion and written work, to develop your own critical perspective on the material.

PHIL 375: Philosophy of Action – Coffman

This course will introduce you to central issues in Philosophy of Action, which focuses on the concept of intentional action and related concepts such as acting for reasons, acting freely, and acting responsibly.  We’ll focus on contemporary work that explores the following questions: What is it to act intentionally?  What is it to act for a reason?  How do acting intentionally and acting for reasons relate to each other?  What does acting freely require?  What does acting responsibly require?  How do acting freely and acting responsibly relate to each other?

PHIL 382: Philosophy of Feminism – Clausen

A philosophical exploration of feminist perspectives on issues related to gender, sex, and sexuality, labor, sexism and racism, intersectionality, colonialism, oppression, and sexual violence. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 390: Philosophical Foundations of Democracy – Schrepfer

Few political concepts are more widely endorsed in the contemporary world than ‘democracy’; and yet, there is considerable disagreement about what the term ‘democracy’ means, and what political arrangements or behaviors count as ‘democratic’. In this course, we will consider how contemporary and historical philosophers and political theorists have conceived of democracy, with an emphasis on answering the basic questions: what is democracy? How does it (or should it) work? And what (if anything) makes it good?

PHIL 392: Philosophy of Law – Schrepfer

The law raises a number of difficult philosophical questions: what is a law, exactly? What kind of obligations (if any) do laws impose on people? How does law relate to morality? What considerations should guide courts in interpreting the law? When can people be held criminally (or civilly) responsible? In this course we will consider these and related questions, and how philosophers and legal theorists, now and in the past, have tried to answer them.

PHIL 400/624: Philosophy and Film – Eldridge

This course is devoted to conceptual questions [questions about what it makes sense to say] about the nature and value of film as a medium of art. Can films present significant new truths or offer us significant new knowledge? If so, how? And about what? How is artistic success related to fictionality (pretense), entertainment value, and the formal organization of materials in a medium? How and why do (different) works of film negotiate the demands of realism (attention to things that are given), expressivity (evincing a ‘take’ on things, via style, surface, and arrangement), and spectacle? How do we engage imaginatively, emotionally, and critically with successful works of filmic art, and do the ways in which we engage with them matter to the cognitive work they may do? The readings will include both some classical film theorists (Arnheim, Bazin, Kracauer, Munsterberg) and contemporary philosophers and film scholars (Carroll, Cavell, Bordwell, Danto, Deleuze,  Rodowick, Schatz). [Coconvenes with graduate seminar]

PHIL 420/522: Kant’s Critique of Judgment – Stratmann

In this course, we will journey through Kant’s Critique of Judgment, a foundational work in 18th century German philosophy. This work focuses on two seemingly very different topics: (i) aesthetic judgment (judgments involving taste and beauty) and (ii) teleological judgment (judgments involving ends or purposes). Our journey will accordingly take us through Kant’s philosophy of art, beauty, biology, nature, and religion (among other areas). [Coconvenes with graduate seminar]

PHIL 435: Intermediate Formal Logic – Moore

Metatheory of formal logic and philosophy of logic. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 450/540: Animal Psychology in Ethics – Garthoff

In this course we explore how psychological capacities – including capacities possessed by many non-human animals – ground ethical phenomena. We begin by overviewing important animal capacities, including nutrition, behavior, perception, consciousness, thought, and reflection; in so doing we draw on work by Ned Block and Tyler Burge, perhaps the two most important figures in the philosophy of mind today. Next we use our understanding of these capacities to illuminate ethics, organizing our investigation around four topics: moral status (value-in), well-being (goodness-for), normativity (ought-to), and virtue (goodness-as). In addressing these topics we attend to both individual animals (humans included) and social interactions among animals. Along the way we read work by several of the most important ethical theorists of the past fifty years, including Philippa Foot, Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgaard, Richard Kraut, Tom Regan, and David Velleman. [Coconvenes with graduate seminar]

PHIL 450/540: Autonomy, Dignity, and Reason – Cureton

We often invoke broad ideas of reason, rationality, reasonableness, reasons, reasoning, and related concepts in commonsense and express their apparent authority through ordinary language and social practices.  Despite what many philosophers, economists, psychologists, novelists, and others claim, the reason of everyday life is far more substantive than cold logic or calculating self-interest.  This course explores these more limited conceptions of reason but focuses on the idea that our mental power of reason includes an expansive set of governing abilities, substantive motives, and substantive principles.  The unifying idea of the Sovereignty Conception of Reason is that of an autonomous person who governs herself by reason in all respects.  We will examine the Kantian roots of this theory as well as apply it to moral issues concerning generosity, coercion, deception, dignity, friendship, expressing respect, education, envy, self-development, and others. [Coconvenes with graduate seminar]

PHIL 463: Race, Science, & Medicine – Berenstain

Philosophical exploration of the role of race in the production of scientific and medical knowledge. Topics may include the history and function of scientific racism, structural racism as a cause of public health inequities, realism and anti-realism about biological race, social constructions of race, metaphysics of population genetics, theories of human evolution and migration, the continuing influence of ideologies of race and racial pseudoscience on data collection and interpretation, and the intersections of racial ideologies with issues of gender, sexuality, and disability. (General Catalog Description)

PHIL 480/573: Achievement and Significance – Palmer

The universe is incredibly vast. We humans occupy only a small speck of it, both spatially and temporally. Given this vastness, our comparatively minute existence can make our lives seem meaningless and without any real value. Against this backdrop, this seminar focuses on a cluster of issues concerning the relationship between the universe and life’s meaning. First, what is it to achieve something and can we have genuine achievements in a universe like ours? Second, in what sense, if any, do our lives have cosmic significance and is such significance required for a meaningful life? These issues are tough and deciding what to think about them is not obvious (at least not to me!). So, our aim for the class is for each of us (me included) to develop and defend answers to these questions. Given this aim, the class will be run “seminar-style”—emphasizing student involvement and discussion. I will encourage you all, through class discussion and written work, to develop your own thoughts on the material. [Coconvenes with graduate seminar]