See below for our list of graduate seminars for the 2024-25 academic year!
Fall 2024:
Jay Drydyk
PHIL 5000 – The Capability Approach
Which inequalities matter for social and global justice? Twenty years ago, the policy world and the philosophical world assumed these were inequalities of income and wealth. The capability approach blew up this complacent assumption by reviving the Aristotelian argument that money is not intrinsically valuable, only a means to human well-being and flourishing. What should concern us is that people are unequally free to live well. Around this basic concept the capability approach developed methodologies for measuring unequal capabilities for living well. The main philosophical benefit is that poverty can be understood as a shortfall of freedom. This seminar will focus first on central concepts and methods of the capability approach as developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, and others. Then implications will be considered, e.g. for social justice, global justice, disability, health, and non-human life. Some assignments will examine what capability concepts and methods can add to research on topics of special interest to the students.
Gabriele Contessa
PHIL 5500 – Trust
What is trust? What does it take to trust someone? What does it mean for someone to be trustworthy? Is it possible to trust things as well as people? What is the function of trust? Are there different sorts of trust? Is trust always a good thing? These are some of the questions that we are going to discuss in this seminar, which will explore the way in which the notion of trust is approached in different branches of contemporary analytic philosophy from ethics and social philosophy to epistemology.
Josh Redstone
PHIL 5200 – Philosophy of Social Robotics: Theory, Fact, and Fiction
Social robots are human-like artifacts that are, according to social robotics pioneer Cynthia Breazeal, “socially intelligent in a human-like way.” Familiar examples from science fiction – for instance Star Trek’s Mr. Data or R2-D2 and C-3PO from Star Wars – anticipate the social robots that have appeared on the scene in recent decades, such as Breazeal’s Kizmet, ATR’s/Hiroshi Ishiguro Labs’s Geminoid series, Hanson Robotics’s Sophia, Engineered Arts’s Ameca, and Aldebaran’s Pepper, to name a few. These examples – together with the prospect of developing even more advanced social robots – present new opportunities and challenges to roboticists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers alike. In this seminar, we will engage with philosophical questions raised by social robots. Will we ever be capable of creating robots that are truly socially intelligent in a human-like way? If so, ought we do so? What roles can social robots play in society, and what roles ought they play? Can social robots serve as experimental vehicles for learning more about robotics, and about ourselves? Can theoretical or imaginary robots also serve as conceptual vehicles for better understanding humanity? Is the so-called “robot revolution” on the horizon, or merely a pipe dream?
Vida Panitch
PHIL 5350 – Basic Income and Distributive Justice
The topic of an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) has recently become one of interest in both the public and political forum, even more so as governments scrambled to respond to rising unemployment during the pandemic. Yet philosophers have been debating the merits of a UBI for decades now, as part of a larger inquiry into the demands of distributive justice. We will be exploring these arguments and evaluating whether the weight of the reasons that have been supplied for a UBI could indeed ground a social policy likely to achieve the considerable goals its proponents endorse. We will explore varied and often competing arguments for a UBI, including those from egalitarian, libertarian, communitarian, feminist, labour, and climate change theorists, and look at basic income experiments both past and present with a special focus on the unintended health related benefits these experiments produced.
Myrto Mylopoulos
PHIL 5701 – Fall 2024 Colloquium
Students attend each talk in the departmental colloquium series, preparing by doing mandatory background readings, and submit in writing a critical analysis of some aspect of the presentation.
Dave Matheson
PHIL 5850 – Proseminar (MA students) – Philosophical Naturalism
As a philosophical movement, naturalism eschews the nonphysical and emphasizes scientifically respectable methods of inquiry. The objective of this seminar is to familiarize you with the roots and guises of contemporary naturalism and with its presence in three main areas of philosophy—the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Particular topics to be discussed include the historical origins of contemporary naturalism, its ontological and methodological commitments, the causal closure of the physical domain, varieties of physicalism about the mental, whether a naturalized epistemology vitiates traditional epistemology’s reliance on intuition and the a priori, naturalist challenges to metaethical realism, and the implications of naturalism for the perennial question of life’s meaning.
Winter 2025:
Iva Apostolova
PHIL 5000 – Issues in Philosophy of Memory
The main objective of the course is to give a historical as well as topical overview of the rapidly gaining popularity field of philosophy of memory. Philosophy of memory is intimately linked to philosophy of mind, and more specifically, the personal identity debate. The seminar will combine two elements: a historical and a topical one. For the first part, we will look into the classical theories of memory of Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Thomas Reid, as well as some contemporary theories of memory as developed by Bertrand Russell, and Henri Bergson. The topics that will be explored in the seminar range from memory and meaning construction, memory and self, memory and time, to memory and morality, and memory and society.
Andy Brook
PHIL 5200 – Seminar in Philosophy of Mind or Cognition
The seminar will focus on one or two central, difficult topics in the philosophy of mind or cognition such as consciousness, free will, or intentionality, or a major theorist such as Daniel Dennett. Students will be consulted before the final selection of topics.
Kyla Bruff
PHIL 5350 – The Politics of German Idealism
This course will explore the political philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling. Key political texts from these thinkers will be read in relation to the changing German political context from 1770-1850. We will explore the development of each thinker’s perspectives on right, the law, citizenship, revolution, religion, and the relationship between the state and the community. We will critically investigate how the law and the state relate to the realization of human freedom, asking: in which political configuration did the classical German philosophers think we would be most free? How did they think we would get there?
Myrto Mylopoulos
PHIL 5751 – Winter 2025 Colloquium
Students attend each talk in the departmental colloquium series, preparing by doing mandatory background readings, and submit in writing a critical analysis of some aspect of the presentation.
Gordon Davis
PHIL 5900 – Research Seminar (MA students)
Mandatory seminar course for all first-year MA students. The primary objective of this seminar is to develop topics for theses or research essays. Students will consult with potential supervisors during this process.