Fall 2025 Electives

PHIL 304: Early Modern Philosophy

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of the early modern period, spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will focus on what has been called the “mind-body problem” and the “problem of bodies,” drawing special attention to the contributions of early modern women. These problems are, in question form: What is a mind? What is a body? (How do we know what either is?) If they’re different, how could minds and bodies interact with one another? And how do bodies even interact with other bodies in the first place?

We’ll begin with selections from René Descartes and his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth to raise the mind-body problem, followed by responses from Ann Conway and Margaret Cavendish. In the second half of the course, we’ll shift to the problem of bodies through the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, with supplementary selections from Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton.

PHIL 316: Philosophy and Psychology

This course examines the exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. This includes ways in which philosophy has contributed to and critiqued the field of psychology and practice of therapy, as well as how empirical psychological research investigates claims made in the field of philosophy.

PHIL 329: Bioethics:

Moral issues arising in health care delivery, including social policy as well as clinical problems

PHIL 336: Liberalism:

This semester we will be talking about political theories of liberalism or, in other words, what politics looks like if we start from the assumption that human beings are naturally free.  Our conversations will be framed around some of the basic questions that arise in liberalism: How can political authority be legitimate if we are born free from such authority? What limits on authority are necessary, given our freedom? What can political communities legitimately ask of their individual members, and what can individual members legitimately ask of their political communities? How valuable, and how dangerous, is individuality?  

PHIL 338: Enlightenment & Revolution:

According to Aristotle, the primary theme of ancient pre-Socratic philosophy was the discovery and discussion of Nature.  Subsequently, a set of questions emerged regarding the relationship between Nature and political things.  Specifically, Plato portrays Socrates as inquiring into whether political things are natural and, if so, to what extent.  Similarly, Socrates raises the question of whether the laws, and even justice itself, have their roots in something other than mere convention.  Classical political philosophy suggests that the laws must be “according to nature,” and especially according to the nature of man, if they are to be good.  This course explores the modern responses to the classical explanations of law and nature, particularly the modern discussion of natural right and convention. 

Phil 396: Topics in Theory of Knowledge: Memory

What does it mean to remember? What are the varieties of recollection and oblivion? How are both memory and forgetting important to our lives, both individually and collectively? How should we relate to our past? We will explore these questions through some classic and contemporary philosophical and scientific texts, as well as through depictions of extreme memory and amnesia in both fact and fiction.