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How should human beings interact with the natural world? Do we have moral obligations toward living parts of nature? Non-living parts? And what do we owe to other human beings, including future generations, with respect to the environment? In this course, we will tackle ethical questions that confront us in our dealings with the natural world, looking at subjects such as: climate change, conservation, environmental justice, economic approaches to the environment, access to and control over natural resources, pollution, technology, and environmental activism. We will frame our inquiry with leading ethical theories and divide our approach to these topics by ecosystem, dedicating time to each unique environment and its specific nuances: aquatic, land, and aerospace.

As ethicists, we ask how to act rightly, develop moral understanding, respect others, cultivate virtues, and live flourishing lives. In this class, we ask these ethical questions from a feminist perspective, taking into account how gender-based oppression threatens our ability to act, understand, and live well. We examine feminist criticisms of the very concepts - contracts, rights, justice - through which central ethical questions have traditionally been asked. And we explore alternative moral frameworks, including care- and dependency-based reasoning, lesbian separatism, and the cultivation of resistant moral emotions.

Are there distinctively feminist ways of thinking and theorizing? What does feminist theory contribute to our understanding of life's deepest questions concerning personal identity, human action, objective knowledge, and ethical reasoning? In this course, we cover some of analytic feminist philosophy's most transformative contributions to each of the major philosophical subdisciplines, from metaphysics and epistemology to political philosophy and aesthetics. Because feminist theorists often position themselves as reacting to oversights and missteps in mainstream, male-dominated analytic philosophy, students will cultivate a productive and charitable yet critical perspective on many traditional philosophical debates. And they will develop their own understanding of what it means to think like a feminist, historically and today.

In this course we'll survey some of the central topics in metaphysics. Here are some of the questions that we're likely to look at. Do things that exist now have some special status over things that existed in the past or will exist in the future? Can distinct objects be in exactly the same place at exactly the same time? What are you (a material object?, an immaterial soul?), and what kinds of changes can you undergo without ceasing to exist? Is the idea of someone traveling through time to the distant past or far future somehow incoherent? In virtue of what are some propositions necessarily true or necessarily false, whereas others are merely contingently true or contingently false? Throughout the sciences certain propositions are described as laws of nature, but what makes a proposition a law of nature? Is the existence of free will compatible with the results of our best scientific theories (which purport to show that our world is governed by deterministic laws of nature)? Finally, can all facts be explained? What about facts like that our universe is conducive to life, or that there is something rather than nothing? Our focus throughout will be on contemporary work. No prior familiarity with metaphysics will be presupposed. Undergrad Prerequisites: PHIL 80 and at least one other PHIL course numbered over 99 (both courses taken prior to this term.)

The study of conceptual questions about language as a focus of contemporary philosophy for its inherent interest and because philosophers see questions about language as behind perennial questions in other areas of philosophy including epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and ethics. Key concepts and debates about the notions of meaning, truth, reference, and language use, with relations to psycholinguistics and formal semantics. Readings from philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Grice, and Kripke. Prerequisites: 80 and background in logic.

Grads enroll in PHIL 281A. By uttering the words 'the cat is on the mat', you can get me to believe that the cat is on the mat. By writing a letter of reference that says my handwriting is outstanding, you can tell someone that I'm no good at philosophy. And with a sentence, the Queen can make you a Knight. In this course, we will explore the conditions that make these remarkable capacities possible, survey a number of theories that aim to explain them, and explore their significance for questions that are important across philosophy. Prerequisite: PHIL 80.

This course builds on the material of 181A/281A, focusing on debates and developments in the pragmatics of conversation, the semantics/pragmatics distinction, the contextuality of meaning, the nature of truth and its connection to meaning, and the workings of particular linguistic constructions of special philosophical relevance. Students who have not taken 181A/281A should seek the instructor's advice as to whether they have sufficient background.

Grads enroll in 281C. What do slurs mean, and how do they cause harm? How is language gendered, and how gendered should it be? Do governments owe speakers of minority languages special consideration? How about speakers of different dialects? This course will survey recent philosophical work on questions like these, sometimes with a broad eye towards language as a social practice, sometimes with a focus on the mechanics of a particular piece of language.

tba