Last updated December 10, 2025.
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.
*NOTE* MA and PhD students in the Department of Philosophy cannot count an undergraduate course towards their degree.
Undergraduate Courses
Undergraduate Lectures
PHIL S2201 History of Philosophy II: Aquinas to Kant
A. Hejduk
Session A May 27-July 3, 2025
TR 9:00AM-12:10PM; 716 Philosophy Hall
PHIL UN2101 is not a prerequisite for this course. Exposition and analysis of central philosophical problems as discussed by innovative thinkers from Aquinas through Kant. Authors include figures like Descartes, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Spinoza, Anne Conway, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Émilie du Châtelet, and Kant.
PHIL S3411 Introduction to Symbolic Logic
S. Rachavelpula
Session B July 7-August 15, 2025
TR 9:00AM-12:10PM; 716 Philosophy Hall
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 S3551 Philosophy of Science
Y. Jeong
Session B July 7-August 15, 2025
TR 1:00PM-4:10PM; 716 Philosophy Hall
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 S3601 Metaphysics
N. Betz-Richman
Session A May 27-July 3, 2025
MW 1:00PM-4:10PM; 716 Philosophy Hall
This course will survey topics in contemporary metaphysics. We will focus on material objects, time, modality, causation, properties, and natural kinds. We will begin by considering what objects there are in general (ontology) and what to say about certain puzzling entities (such as holes). Then we will turn to debates about material objects and puzzles about composite objects and the notion of parthood. Next is the issue of how material objects persist over time and survive change in their parts. We shall consider two important views on persistence. We then turn to two issues related to persistence: personal identity over time, and puzzles about time travel. This will lead us into the next part of the course on modality and causation, which concerns the notions of possibility, necessity, laws of nature, and causation. We will consider different views about 'possible worlds'. We will then consider the nature of laws and causation and then turn to the problem of free will. We will look at debates in the metaphysics of properties between realists and nominalists about properties. Then we'll consider causal powers, dispositions, and natural kinds. The section will conclude with problems about the metaphysics of socially constructed kinds such as race or gender.
PHIL S3701 Ethics
T. Pajaczkowska-Russell
Session A May 27-July 3, 2025
TR 1:00PM-4:10PM; 716 Philosophy Hall
Prerequisites: One philosophy course 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.
PHIL S3751 Political Philosophy
J. Hamilton
Session B July 7-August 15, 2025
MW 1:00PM-4:10PM; 716 Philosophy Hall
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.