Upcoming Graduate Courses

Philosophy graduate courses: Fall 2023


Graduate Seminar (PHIL 6000)

Slot 11 with Seamus O'Neill

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, 3) plan and structure their research projects, 3) read through texts in their particular areas of research, 4) report on their findings and progress, 5) edit and peer-edit their writing, and 6) 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.


Seminar in Modern Philosophy (PHIL 6012)  

Slot 19 with Peter Trnka

Seminar on Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

This seminar will attempt to engage a collective critical commentary on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition – in its entirety with differences in intensity – such that we live up somehow to Deleuze’s own prescription in the Preface to the work that: “Commentaries in the history of philosophy should represent a kind of a slow motion, a congelation or immobilisation of the text: not only of the text to which they relate, but also of the text in which they are inserted – so much so that they have a double existence and a corresponding ideal: the pure repetition of the former text and the present text in one another” (xxii). He goes on to say that all such repetitions are monstrous. And in this local minor detail we have the whole, as it bears on the method and practice of philosophical commentary. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze engages in his own construction of the philosophical concepts of difference and repetition, in addition to, on top of, or, better still, as enabled by the philosophical commentary. En bref, the work attempts to escape the monopoly on difference held by Hegel, and the thinking of the negative and contradiction and identity, in favour of a concept of pure difference, and pure repetition. All of which serves the philosophical project of a generalized ontology and an ethico-political practice of life which may quickly be indicated, as Deleuze does, in the third paragraph of his Preface: “Repetitions repeat themselves, while the differenciator differenciates itself. The task of life is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed” (xix).


Seminar in Epistemology (PHIL 6015)  

Slot 14 with Jay Foster


Seminar in Special Topics (PHIL 6046)  

Slot 33 with Sean McGrath

The Speculative Foundations of Psychoanalysis

A reading of German Idealist authors as forerunners of 20th-century depth psychology. Authors to be studied in detail: Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Freud, and Jung. The thesis to be defended: psychoanalysis is a medicalization of a model of the soul that was first defined in German Idealism. We shall see that some of the debates that divide psychoanalytical schools, i.e., Freudian and Jungian, can only be resolved by understanding the debates that divided idealist schools in the 19th century (Schelling and Hegel, Schopenhauer and everyone, etc.).

This is a course with an above-average amount of readings. You will need to allocate at least three hours a week to complete the readings for the seminar. If this is more than you can manage, you should consider taking a different course. The Background reading is suggested to you for understanding the context of the texts we will focus on in the seminar. Every class shall feature at least one student presentation on a text. Presenters in particular should make use of these recommended texts.