April 29, 2022 How Machiavelli can help us understand the bourgeois nature of fascism, and how anti-fascism must empower the proletariat

Fall 2024 Writers have spilled rivers of ink over the term “ideology.” This steady flow has become a deluge of mediocre tomes from uninquisitive minds...

Fall 2024 The twentieth century saw massive changes in sociopolitical organization, technology, and social mores. In this course, students will examine with different philosophical perspectives on these shifts, and engage with topics such as the relationship between the State and civil society, the limits of the law in constraining the State, the way that new technological developments shape our relation to the world, and how we should act in a world that had lost faith in God.

Summer 2024 We will investigate and seriously consider how and why we should live as morally responsible members of an ecological community. Students will explore philosophical responses to questions such as: What makes something natural? What value is there to non-human entities? What obligations do we have to each other regarding the environment? Students will investigate social scientific responses to questions such as: How should wilderness be preserved? How should we respond to climate change? How should water resources be allocated? Students will build connections between and reconcile philosophical and social scientific approaches to issues of environmental concern.

Spring 2024, Spring 2025 Survey of influential 19th century philosophers, including Hegel, Marx, J. S. Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Their views on the individual and society, and human nature.

Summer 2023 Suppose it was entirely up to you to decide what is right or wrong, what is valuable and what is not. Suppose it was entirely up to you in the sense that there were no other standards or guidelines to tell you how to go about making these decisions. That would be a huge and perhaps scary task. Is it even possible to make decisions in a world where there are no objective norms and values to fall back on? A group of philosophers, the existentialists, thought that our actual task in this world is not so different. On their account, at least when it comes to what is most valuable and the fundamental norms of one's own life, it is entirely up to each one of us to make that decision for ourselves. This course is an introduction to various theories and expressions of 19th- and 20th-century existentialism and its phenomenological method. We will read authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Fanon. We will also analyze some existentialist literature.