printer friendly pagePHIL 111: Aristotle and Contemporary Ethics (PHIL 211)
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, focusing on virtue, happiness, pleasure, practical reasoning, and particularism. Sources include the Eudemian Ethics, contemporary philosophers who have taken many of these topics up again, and contemporary material such as that by Anscombe, Foot, Hursthouse, Korsgaard, and McDowell.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
PHIL 113: Hellenistic Philosophy (PHIL 213)
Epicureans, skeptics, and stoics on epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and psychology.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
PHIL 116: Aquinas (PHIL 216)
The focus will be on Thomas Aquinas' metaphysics. Works include Summa contra Gentiles, and Summa Theologiae, as well as some smaller pieces.
PHIL 118: British Empiricism, 1660s-1730s
Focus is on the big three British Empiricists and their developments of thought based on the foundational role that they give to sensory perception or experience as the source of knowledge. Topics may include the theory of ideas, idealism, personal identity, human agency, moral motivation, causation, and induction. Readings predominantly from Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
PHIL 118A: Origins of Empiricism: Gassendi, Locke, and Berkeley (PHIL 218A)
Particular light is shed on both the strengths and weaknesses of empiricism by studying it as it first arose during the 17th century revolution in philosophy and the sciences initiated by Descartes. Three philosophers of that period helped to advance empiricism: Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), John Locke (1632-1704), and George Berkeley (1685-1753). A brief introduction to Descartes is followed by Gassendi's reaction to Descartes and his influence on Locke; Locke's theory of ideas, mind, language, reality, and natural philosophy expounded in his An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Fourth Edition, 1689); and Berkeley's later reaction to Locke.
PHIL 119: Rationalists (PHIL 219)
Developments in 17th-century continental philosophy. Descartes's views on mind, necessity, and knowledge. Spinoza and Leibniz emphazing their own doctrines and their criticism of their predecessors. Prerequisite: 102.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
PHIL 120A: The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (PHIL 220A)
Correspondence on metaphysics, theology, and science.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
PHIL 122: Hume (PHIL 222)
(Formerly 120/220; graduate students enroll in 222.) Hume's theoretical philosophy, in particular, skepticism and naturalism, the theory of ideas and belief, space and time, causation and necessity, induction and laws of nature, miracles, a priori reasoning, the external world, and the identity of the self.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
PHIL 124: Topics in Early Modern Philosophy
Philosophical views of the highly influential rationalist philosophers Benedict (or Baruch) Spinoza (1632-1677) and G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716). Topics to be treated include: the nature of God and the question of his providential care for human beings, the concept of substance and its extension, the ontological relation of finite beings to God, the mental and its relation to the corporeal, and the nature of human freedom.
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum
PHIL 127B: Kant's Anthropology and Philosophy of History (PHIL 227B)
Kant's conception of anthropology or human nature, based on his philosophy of history, which influenced and anticipated 18th- and 19th-century philosophers of history such as Herder, Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Texts include
Idea for a Universal History, Conjectural Beginning of Human History, and
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Topics include: Kant's pragmatic approach to the study of human nature; the difficulty of human self knowledge; the role of regulative and teleological principles in studying human history; and Kant's theory of race.
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