Fall 2026 Courses

Last updated April 16th, 2026

All course offerings can be confirmed on the Directory of Classes and are subject to change. Please check this page and the Directory of Classes for updates. Past course offerings can be found in the "Courses" dropdown menu.

*NOTES*

—MA and PhD students in the Department of Philosophy cannot count an undergraduate course towards their degree.

—All students must receive the instructor's permission to register for individual supervised research/independent study and quodlibetal study sections.

Undergraduate Lectures

FYSB BC1001 Barnard First-Year Seminar
T. Carman
MW 10:10am-11:25am; Location TBD

PHIL UN1001 Introduction to Philosophy
Survey of some of the central problems, key figures, and great works in both traditional and contemporary philosophy. Topics and texts will vary with instructor and semester.
Section 001
D. Ding
MW 10:10am-11:25am; Location TBD
Section 002
D. Ding
MW 11:40am-12:55am; Location TBD 
Section 003
F. Russell
TR 2:40pm-3:55pm; Location TBD

PHIL UN1101 Methods of Philosophic Thought
A. Bilgrami
TR 10:10am-11:25am; Location TBD

PHIL UN2101 History of Philosophy I
W. Mann
MW 8:40am-9:55am; Location TBD
Corequisites: PHIL V2111 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Exposition and analysis of the positions of the major philosophers from the pre-Socratics through Augustine. This course has unrestricted enrollment.

PHIL UN2110 Philosophy and Feminism
D. Ding
MW 4:10pm-5:25pm; Location TBD
Is there an essential difference between women and men? How do questions about race conflict or overlap with those about gender? Is there a normal way of being queer? Introduction to philosophy and feminism through a critical discussion of these and other questions using historical and contemporary texts, art, and public lectures. Focus includes essentialism, difference, identity, knowledge, objectivity, and queerness.

PHIL UN2685 Introduction to Philosophy of Language
K. Lewis
TR 11:40am-12:55pm; Location TBD 
This course gives students an introduction to various topics in the Philosophy of Language.

PHIL UN3601 Metaphysics
A. Varzi
TR 1:10pm-2:25pm; Location TBD
Corequisites: PHIL V3611 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Systematic treatment of some major topics in metaphysics (e.g. modality, causation, identity through time, particulars and universals). Readings from contemporary authors.

PHIL UN3411 Symbolic Logic
T. Lando
MW 10:10am-11:25am; Location TBD
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.

PHIL UN3551 Philosophy of Science 
D. Albert
MW 1:10pm-2:25pm; Location TBD
Philosophical problems within science and about the nature of scientific knowledge in the 17th-20th centuries. Sample problems: causation and scientific explanation; induction and real kinds; verification and falsification; models, analogies and simulations; the historical origins of the modern sciences; scientific revolutions; reductionism and supervenience; differences between physics, biology and the social sciences; the nature of life; cultural evolution; human nature; philosophical issues in cosmology.

PHIL UN3751 Political Philosophy
A. Honneth
MW 2:40-3:55pm; Location TBD
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

PHIL UN3701 Ethics
J. Clarke-Doane
MW 6:10-7:25pm; Location TBD
Prerequisites: one course in philosophy. Corequisites: PHIL V3711 Required Discussion Section (0 points). This course is mainly an introduction to three influential approaches to normative ethics: utilitarianism, deontological views, and virtue ethics. We also consider the ethics of care, and selected topics in meta-ethics.

Majors Seminar

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.

PHIL UN3912 Section 001
TBD
K. Lewis
TH 2:10pm-4:00pm; Location TBD
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

PHIL UN3912 Section 002
Perception
C. Peacocke
F 2:10pm-4:00pm; Location TBD
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.

PHIL UN3912 Section 003
Feminist Philosophy
B. Waked
R 10:10am - 12:00pm; Location TBD
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.

******************************************

PHIL BC4050 Senior Seminar
Topic TBA
T. Carman
F 10:10am-12:00pm; Location TBD
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.

4000-Level Seminars

4000-level courses are open to advanced undergraduate students and graduate students.

PHIL GU4137 Non-Classical Logics 
A. Varzi
W 2:10pm-4:00pm; Location TBD

PHIL GU4570 Personal Identity 
C. Rovane
W 12:10pm-2:00pm; Location TBD

PHIL GU4675 The Direction of Time
D. Albert
M 6:10pm-8:00pm; Location TBD
A survey of the various attempts to reconcile the macroscopic directionality of time with the time-reversibility of the fundamental laws of physics. The second law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, statistical mechanics, cosmological problems, the problems of memory, the possibility of multiple time direction.

PHIL GU4717 Topics in Moral Psychology
F. Russell
W 4:10pm-6:00pm; Location TBD
Intensive study of a particular topic in Moral Psychology.

PHIL GU4561 Probability and Decision Theory
T. Lando
MW 4:10pm-5:25pm; Location TBD
Examines interpretations and applications of the calculus of probability including applications as a measure of degree of belief, degree of confirmation, relative frequency, a theoretical property of systems, and other notions of objective probability or chance. Attention to epistimological questions such as Hume's problem of induction, Goodman's problem of projectibility, and the paradox of confirmation.

Graduate Lectures

PHIL GR5415 Symbolic Logic
T. Lando
MW 10:10am-11:25am; Location TBD
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. Note: Due to significant overlap, students may receive credit for only one of the following three courses: PHIL UN3411, UN3415, GR5415.

Graduate Seminars

PHIL GR6050 Methods and Problems: Theoretical Philosophy
M. Fusco
TH 12:10pm-2:00pm; Location TBD   
This class covers classic readings in contemporary philosophy, selections from historical authors that bear on today’s debates, and influential recent contributions in a range of subfields such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of cognitive science.

PHIL GR6101 Proseminar for PhD and MA Students
L. Goehr
T 6:10pm-8:00pm; Location TBD
Offered in both semesters, the weekly seminar is for incoming PhD students (required) and for MA students of the first year (required) and second year (optional).  MA students can take the class at any stage during their studies for the MA. The class is graded Pass/Fail.  Every two weeks, the seminar will be co-led by the instructor and an invited member of the department who will select a reading for discussion, historical or contemporary, from their area of expertise. Students will submit responses to the readings. The alternate weeks will be divided into an hour for the PhD cohort and an hour for the MA students. Here, research skills in reading, writing, and conversing will be developed through a range of intellectual exercises.

PHIL GR6554 Reverse Physics: Set Theory, Determinism, and the Foundations of Science
J. Clarke-Doane
TH 6:10pm-8:00pm; Location TBD
Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In this seminar, we will see that they are not. Whether a physical theory is deterministic—whether it fixes a unique future given the present—can depend on one’s stance on axioms of set theory about which there is intractable disagreement. This is not a quirk of exotic toy models. It reaches into the heat equation, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and general relativity. The seminar builds from the ground up. We begin with the philosophy of determinism: what it means, why it matters, and how it has traditionally been formalized. We then develop enough set
theory and descriptive set theory to state the key results precisely. In the second half, we work through the sensitivity results in detail, showing how the content of fundamental physical theories shifts with the set-theoretic background. We conclude by asking what this means for debates about mathematical pluralism, scientific realism, and the boundary between mathematics and physics.

No prior knowledge of set theory or mathematical physics is assumed. The seminar is open to graduate students in philosophy and, with permission, to advanced graduate students in mathematics, physics, and related fields.

PHIL GR6552 Counterfactuals
M. Fusco
T 2:10pm-4:00pm; Location TBD
Counterfactuals play a key role in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, decision theory, game theory, artificial intelligence, and many other related fields. Our goal for this course is to cover foundational work on counterfactuals (with some attention paid to indicative conditionals as well). Though our reading list has a historical component, its primary purpose is to familiarize students with contemporary state of play. We will focus on distinctions and applications that have become an essential part of the working philosopher’s toolkit.

PHIL GR9985 Proposal Preparation Seminar
K. Vojt
F 10:10am-12:00pm; Location TBD

PHIL GR9750 Topics in Political Philosophy 
A. Honneth
W 6:10pm-8:00pm; Location TBD   
This course will focus on topics in political philosophy.

PHIL GR9552 Understanding, Epistemology, and Metaphysics
C. Peacocke
TH 2:10pm-4:00pm; Location TBD
This proposed seminar is an investigation into the network of relations between three things:  (I) the nature of a domain of entities, including their properties and relations; (II) the capacity to have mental states about them; and (III) the capacity to know and to make reasonable judgements about them.

As a subpart of this investigation, as a special case at one level up: we are sometimes concerned with the network of relations between: (I’) the nature of a domain of entities consisting of, or involving, intentional contents themselves, their properties and relations;  (II’) the capacity of have mental states about them; and (III’) the capacity to know and make reasonable judgements about them.

PHIL GR9265 Topics in 19th Century Philosophy
C. Bowman
T 12:10pm-2:00pm; Location TBD
This course offers an advanced exploration of a theme, tradition, or figure in 19th-century philosophy. Depending on the semester, the course may be organized around one central figure/text, or around a theme or tradition (for example, post-Kantian German idealism, 19th-century social and political philosophy, 19th-century philosophy of religion.)