Philosophy

Critical introduction to philosophical problems, ideas and methods.

What does it mean to love, and what does it take to love well? Must true love make us “happy ever after”? Should love be exclusive? Is love between individuals or could it be communal and even political? How does love relate to gender and sex, and how might the experiences of queer, trans, and intersex people both complicate and illuminate these connections? What is gender anyway? How do we figure that out? Is it a mere coincidence that the English term ‘sex’ refers to both an activity and a system of categorization? How should we think about consent, desire, objectification, and sexualization in connection to sexual autonomy and gender equality? This course surveys philosophical questions about love, gender, and sex, and in so doing, aims to introduce students to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of social philosophy.

Love, Gender, and Sex is designed to be friendly to all students regardless of philosophy background. 

Prerequisites: PHIL UN2211 Required Discussion Section (0 points). PHIL UN2101 is not a prerequisite for this course. Exposition and analysis of the metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy of the major philosophers from Aquinas through Kant. Authors include Aquinas, Galileo, Gassendi, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. This course has unrestricted enrollment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bringing together scholars from the fields of Philosophy, Medicine, Ethics, and Religion, this course
exposes students to modes of inquiry that can help to answer central questions that are often elusive and/or
unconsidered: What constitutes a good human life? What do I need to be truly happy? How does the fact
that I will one day die impact how I should live today? This interdisciplinary course provides a rare
opportunity to consider how a wide variety of thinkers and writers have approached these questions, while
also engaging with them in a personal way within our contemporary context. Lectures will be combined
with group discussion and a weekend retreat, creating possibilities for interpersonal engagement and deep
learning.

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.

Corequisites: PHIL W3963 Required Discussion Section (0 points). What can we know? What is knowledge? What are the different kinds of knowledge? We will read classic and contemporary texts for insight into these questions.

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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.

This course will consider themes in 19th-century social and political philosophy. Central topics may include freedom, recognition, alienation, and exploitation, and the use of such concepts to critically evaluate modern social and political institutions. Figures studied may include G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Clara Zetkin, and Lily Braun.

In the first half of this course we will read the major works of Freud that make up his “metapsychology.” Metapsychology is psychoanalysis’ “speculative superstructure,” the most philosophical part of psychoanalytic theory, providing a broad theoretical “standpoint” on the mind that is both informed by and guides both empirical research and clinical practice. Freud articulated four metapsychologies (dynamic, economic, topographical, and structural).  The aim will be to read Freud somewhat as we read, for example, Aristotle’s or Kant’s or Nietzsche’s moral psychology.  What are the basic theoretical posits?  What are these claims based on?  From what perspective (first-personal or third-personal) are these claims made?  How does Freud’s picture advance our own practical self-understanding? Etc.

In the second half of the course we will read some major responses to Freud in the context of philosophical moral psychology.  So we will read some critical theorists, some engagements with psychoanalytic theory regarding gender and race, and some contemporary analytic philosophers.

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.
 

Buddhist philosophers generally agree about what doesn’t exist: an enduring, unitary, and
independent self. But there is surprisingly little consensus across Buddhist traditions about what
does exist and what it’s like. In this course, we will examine several Buddhist theories about the
nature and structure of reality and consider the epistemological and ethical implications of these
radically different pictures of the world. We will analyze and evaluate arguments from some of
the most influential Indian Buddhist philosophers from the second to the eleventh centuries,
including Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, Dignāga, Candrakīrti, Śāntarakṣita, Śāntideva, and
Ratnakīrti. Topics will include the existence and nature of the external world, the mind, and the
self; practical and epistemological implications of the Buddhist no-self principle; personal
identity; the problem of other minds; and causal determinism and moral responsibility.

This course will focus on one topic in philosophy. 

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The first third of this Seminar will introduce a framework and theory for addressing the nature of intentional content, and apply it to such classical issues as the structure of justification, the a priori, and logical inference. The remainder of the Seminar will apply the theory to develop an account of intentional content in the perception of music. I will use the resulting account to explain the significance and interest of music, musical communication, the mental representation of music, and the relation of music to other art forms, especially poetry.