Philosophy

Survey of some of the central problems, key figures, and great works in both traditional and contemporary philosophy. Topics and texts will vary with instructor and semester.

Survey of some of the central problems, key figures, and great works in both traditional and contemporary philosophy. Topics and texts will vary with instructor and semester.

Survey of some of the central problems, key figures, and great works in both traditional and contemporary philosophy. Topics and texts will vary with instructor and semester.

Corequisites: PHIL V2111 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Exposition and analysis of the positions of the major philosophers from the pre-Socratics through Augustine. This course has unrestricted enrollment.

Is there an essential difference between women and men? How do questions about race conflict or overlap with those about gender? Is there a normal way of being queer? Introduction to philosophy and feminism through a critical discussion of these and other questions using historical and contemporary texts, art, and public lectures. Focus includes essentialism, difference, identity, knowledge, objectivity, and queerness.

This course will survey a number of topics at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, embodied cognition, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and the language of thought.

This course will survey a number of topics at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, embodied cognition, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and the language of thought.

This course gives students an introduction to various topics in the Philosophy of Language.

Corequisites: PHILV3413 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Advanced introduction to classical sentential and predicate logic. No previous acquaintance with logic is required; nonetheless a willingness to master technicalities and to work at a certain level of abstraction is desirable.

Philosophical problems within science and about the nature of scientific knowledge in the 17th-20th centuries. Sample problems: causation and scientific explanation; induction and real kinds; verification and falsification; models, analogies and simulations; the historical origins of the modern sciences; scientific revolutions; reductionism and supervenience; differences between physics, biology and the social sciences; the nature of life; cultural evolution; human nature; philosophical issues in cosmology.

Corequisites: PHIL V3611 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Systematic treatment of some major topics in metaphysics (e.g. modality, causation, identity through time, particulars and universals). Readings from contemporary authors.

This course will focus on one topic at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, modularity, mental representation, probabilistic inference, the language of thought, and the computational theory of mind.

Prerequisites: one course in philosophy. Corequisites: PHIL V3711 Required Discussion Section (0 points). This course is mainly an introduction to three influential approaches to normative ethics: utilitarianism, deontological views, and virtue ethics. We also consider the ethics of care, and selected topics in meta-ethics.

Six major concepts of political philosophy including authority, rights, equality, justice, liberty and democracy are examined in three different ways. First the conceptual issues are analyzed through contemporary essays on these topics by authors like Peters, Hart, Williams, Berlin, Rawls and Schumpeter. Second the classical sources on these topics are discussed through readings from Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Marx, Plato, Mill and Rousseau. Third some attention is paid to relevant contexts of application of these concepts in political society, including such political movements as anarchism, international human rights, conservative, liberal, and Marxist economic policies as well as competing models of democracy.

Required of senior majors, but also open to junior majors, and junior and senior concentrators who have taken at least four philosophy courses. This exploration will typically involve writing a substantial research paper. Capped at 20 students with preference to philosophy majors.

Required of senior majors, but also open to junior majors, and junior and senior concentrators who have taken at least four philosophy courses. This exploration will typically involve writing a substantial research paper. Capped at 20 students with preference to philosophy majors.

Required of senior majors, but also open to junior majors, and junior and senior concentrators who have taken at least four philosophy courses. This exploration will typically involve writing a substantial research paper. Capped at 20 students with preference to philosophy majors.

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Intensive study of a philosophical issue or topic, or of a philosopher, group of philosophers, or philosophical school or movement. Open only to Barnard senior philosophy majors.

Intensive study of a particular topic in Moral Psychology.

This class covers classic readings in contemporary philosophy, selections from historical authors that bear on today’s debates, and influential recent contributions in a range of subfields such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of cognitive science.

The MA Research Seminar supports the research projects of MA students in Philosophy.
Participants practice key methods in philosophy and deepen their knowledge of classic and
contemporary contributions to the field. The seminar is suitable for everyone who is aiming to
write a research paper. Seminar participants receive detailed input throughout the semester.
Students can take the class at any stage during their studies for the MA. The class is graded Pass/
Fail.
 

Offered in both semesters, the weekly seminar is for incoming PhD students (required) and for MA students of the first year (required) and second year (optional).  MA students can take the class at any stage during their studies for the MA. The class is graded Pass/Fail.  Every two weeks, the seminar will be co-led by the instructor and an invited member of the department who will select a reading for discussion, historical or contemporary, from their area of expertise. Students will submit responses to the readings. The alternate weeks will be divided into an hour for the PhD cohort and an hour for the MA students. Here, research skills in reading, writing, and conversing will be developed through a range of intellectual exercises.

Counterfactuals play a key role in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, decision theory, game theory, artificial
intelligence, and many other related fields. Our goal for this course is to cover foundational work on
counterfactuals (with some attention paid to indicative conditionals as well). Though our reading list has
a historical component, its primary purpose is to familiarize students with contemporary state of play. We
will focus on distinctions and applications that have become an essential part of the working philosopher’s
toolkit.

Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In
this seminar, we will see that they are not. Whether a physical theory is deterministic—whether
it fixes a unique future given the present—can depend on one’s stance on axioms of set theory
about which there is intractable disagreement. This is not a quirk of exotic toy models. It reaches
into the heat equation, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and general relativity. The
seminar builds from the ground up. We begin with the philosophy of determinism: what it
means, why it matters, and how it has traditionally been formalized. We then develop enough set
theory and descriptive set theory to state the key results precisely. In the second half, we work
through the sensitivity results in detail, showing how the content of fundamental physical
theories shifts with the set-theoretic background. We conclude by asking what this means for
debates about mathematical pluralism, scientific realism, and the boundary between mathematics
and physics.

No prior knowledge of set theory or mathematical physics is assumed. The seminar is open to
graduate students in philosophy and, with permission, to advanced graduate students in
mathematics, physics, and related fields.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

This course offers an advanced exploration of a theme, tradition, or figure in 19th-century philosophy. Depending on the semester, the course may be organized around one central figure/text, or around a theme or tradition (for example, post-Kantian German idealism, 19th-century social and political philosophy, 19th-century philosophy of religion.)

This proposed seminar is an investigation into the network of relations between three things:  (I) the nature of a domain of entities, including their properties and relations; (II) the capacity to have mental states about them; and (III) the capacity to know and to make reasonable judgements about them. 

As a subpart of this investigation, as a special case at one level up: we are sometimes concerned with the network of relations between: (I’) the nature of a domain of entities consisting of, or involving, intentional contents themselves, their properties and relations;  (II’) the capacity of have mental states about them; and (III’) the capacity to know and make reasonable judgements about them.

This course will focus on topics in political philosophy.