See below for our list of graduate seminars for the 2025-26 academic year. Please note that course outlines and courses crosslisted with other departments will be added on a later date.
Fall 2025:
Christine Koggel
PHIL 5350 A – Feminism: Theories, Frameworks, and Applications
The course will examine contemporary political theories, frameworks, and applications of feminism as theory and movement. Examples may include care ethics as critical political theory; feminist relational theory; feminist disability theory; anti-racist and anti-colonial feminist frameworks; epistemic injustice and feminism; intersectional feminist approaches; and challenging binaries (mind/body, reason/emotion, male/female).
Myrto Mylopoulos
PHIL 5701 A – Fall 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 A – Proseminar: 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 2026:
Josh Redstone
PHIL 5200 A – Technology and Freedom: A Critical Exploration of Jacques Ellul’s Philosophy of Technology
French Philosopher and Sociologist Jacques Ellul was concerned with technology’s impact on modern society, particularly with respect to human freedom. Ellul famously characterized technology as ‘technique,’ i.e., “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.” As Val Dusek (2006) remarks, Ellul’s characterization of technology as technique is a characterization of technology as ‘rules,’ not ‘tools.’ In this seminar we will engage in a close reading of Ellul’s monumental work, The Technological Society (1964). We will explore Ellul’s characterization of technology as technique and its impacts upon human freedom by paying close attention to the technological and societal events that influenced his thinking. At the same time, we will use Ellul’s work as a lens through which to view our relationship with technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and “Big Data” in the 21st century.
Gabriele Contessa
PHIL 5500 A – Misinformation
According to a popular narrative, we live in a world increasingly awash with information and misinformation; and ordinary people ill-equipped to distinguish between the two, which has significant negative consequences at the individual, social, and political levels. In this seminar, we will explore some of the key questions related to this narrative, which might include: What exactly is misinformation? How does it differ from disinformation? What explains the spread of misinformation? And what are the best approaches to addressing it? Is it possible to study misinformation and its spread scientifically?
Kyla Bruff
PHIL 5600 B – Schelling and Adorno on Nature in relation to the Ecological Crisis
F.W.J. Schelling and Theodor W. Adorno have both been read as ecologically important thinkers. A productive comparison of their analyses of nature in their core texts could potentially help us to better understand the irreversible, destructive, human-caused changes in nature characteristic of the Anthropocene, as well as assess the stakes and grounds of our moral response and critically examine our norms and actions in relation to the ecological crisis. In this seminar, we will read texts from Schelling and Adorno that address (a) the human being’s paradoxical place within it, (b) natural history, and (c) aesthetics. We will extract important, critical insights from these texts, entering them into a productive dialogue for understanding and responding to the ecological crisis.
Myrto Mylopoulos
PHIL 5751 B – Winter 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.
Christine Koggel
PHIL 5900 A – Research Seminar
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.