Philosophy Graduate Courses: Fall 2025

PHIL 6000 – Graduate Research Proseminar – Dr. Seamus O’Neill (TR 10:30-11:45) Required for all incoming graduate students

This is a course about getting your life together. The aspect of your life that we’re primarily focusing on, however, (though not to the exclusion of others) is your professional life, which, for you, is now ‘being a graduate student.’ Whether you have realised this yet or not, essentially, this means ‘being a writer.’ This seminar is primarily designed to introduce Master’s and Doctoral students to the process of writing an M.A. thesis or doctoral dissertation, and to prepare them to produce and disseminate scholarly research in philosophy. This is not a lecture course, but rather, it is a ‘workshop’: students and the instructor will work as a team to 1) help each other workshop their ideas, 2) plan and structure their research projects, 3) report on their findings and progress, 4) edit and peer-edit their writing, and 5) learn important skills and methods to conduct graduate and professional research in philosophy. The seminar is student-run, with facilitation from the instructor. Students will also be introduced to various professional topics, which will help to prepare them for further graduate work and/or the academic job market. Time will also be spent discussing and practicing concrete time-management and productivity strategies to help you spend more of your time doing the things that are important to you in your life.

This course is intended to encourage students to ‘hit the ground running’ with their theses or dissertations, both in terms of their philosophical content and in terms of the methods and strategies for researching and writing a scholarly thesis or dissertation.

The texts on writing and professionalization have been selected according to the various topics covered in the course. These topics will include: selection of sources and bibliographical composition, building a literature database, conducting library research, planning and managing a long-term research project, draft writing, editing, writing strategies, writing for conferences and publication, C.V. composition, and plagiarism and academic integrity.

 

PHIL 6015 – Theory of Knowledge – Dr. Jay Foster (MW 3:30-4:45)

Science, broadly conceived, is now the standard of knowledge; to know something is knw it scientifically. Science is now the basis and model for knowledge not only in natural sciences (chemistry, biology and physics) but also the human sciences (economics, sociology and anthropology). Moreover, science-based decision-making is now accepted to be the ideal, even if it is not the norm, in the formation of government and corporate policy.

But what is it that makes the sciences a rational way of knowing, if anything? For much of the twentieth century, philosophers of science held that if science were rational then it must be logical, logic being the very essence of reason. Philosophers agreed that there must be a logic of scientific discovery, though they disagreed about how that logic of discovery might be best characterized. Some argued that scientific claims must be inductively verified by appropriate sense data. Others replied that verifying the truth of a claim in science was impossible in principle (for several reasons), and so they argued that the falsification of claims was the best that might be achieved. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he placed less of an emphasis on the logic of scientific discovery and more of an emphasis on the history of scientific

discovery. Kuhn claimed that science involves non-rational (non-logical) changes of belief which he initially called “paradigm shifts.” This new emphasis precipitated what at least one philosopher has called a “crisis of rationality.”

This course explores how a new understanding of science has emerged in recent philosophy of science from the crisis precipitated by Kuhn. That new understanding treats scientific knowledge as an outcome of material practices (broadly conceived) rather than as a particular form of philosophical ratiocination. The material practice of scienceis taken to encompass apparatus and experimental setups, the laboratories in which the sciences are conducted as well as the journals and  professional associations that constitute scientific communities.

 

PHIL 6055 – Dr. Suma Rajiva (MW 2:00-3:15)

The seminar: we are focusing on Kant's third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. We'll be looking at its overall place in Kants system, esp in relation to his moral philosophy. And of course a big focus will be the first half of the Critique of Judgment, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment with its accounts of beauty, sublimity, and art. We'll also take a quick look at Kants philosophy of biology in the second half of the Critique of Judgment.

 

PHIL 6056 – Dr. Shannon Hoff (TR 3:30-4:45)

Phenomenology and the Body

We are bodies. What does it mean to be a body? What are bodies like and what can they do? We will treat this question phenomenologically, pursuing its relevance also for issues of gender and disability. Bodies are the site of conversion between external contact and internal experience. Bodies are not inert but do things; their being is to be entangled with things, spaces, and others. The body is always surpassing itself and, conversely, absorbing what is outside of it. It is through bodies that we enact our thoughts and our sense of who we are in relation to the way the world is, and that we “have” reality at all. It is through bodies that we engage with others, and as bodies we are looked at and evaluated by others, which insinuates itself into their development. We will pursue these leads and others in this class. The reading list is yet to be determined, but could include selections from figures such as Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Husserl, Fanon, Deleuze/Guattari, and theorists in contemporary trans, queer, and disability studies.