23 courses with the subject PHIL GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
PHIL GU4080PLATO3.00
The course offers an advanced introduction to key themes in Plato’s philosophy. It is open to undergraduate and graduate students and does not presuppose prior study of Plato. At the end of the semester, students will have the tools and preparation to think independently and critically about Plato’s philosophy. Beyond the study of Plato, the course teaches students crucial skills in the history of philosophy, such as the careful reconstruction of arguments, attention to concepts that may not be familiar today, critical discussion of philosophical proposals that were formulated in a foreign language and conceptual scheme, and an awareness of the range of different modes of inquiry and philosophical writing. The class covers three texts that, according to standard relative chronology of Plato’s dialogues, are considered “early”—the Protagoras—“middle”—the Phaedo—and “late”—the Sophist. We focus on themes where Plato’s arguments and proposals have lasting influence: virtue, the soul, perception, pleasure and pain, the Forms, being and becoming, and truth and falsity. The Protagoras introduces themes that we pursue throughout the semester. What is the soul? How does one become a good person? What is the role of pleasure and pain in a well-lived human life? In the Protagoras, Socrates advances a famous proposal, the so-called unity of the virtues: for someone to have one virtue such as justice or courage, she needs to have all the virtues. The question of how one becomes a good person involves a key distinction in Plato’s metaphysics between being and becoming. Presumably, we can only become good, but we can never be good. The Phaedo examines four arguments for the soul’s immortality. None of these arguments is presented as conclusive. And yet, Socrates trusts that the soul is immortal and this commitment informs his stance toward his own death. This theme is personal for Socrates, who is awaiting his death penalty. But it involves perennial questions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. What is the relation between body and soul? Are perception, pleasure, and pain bodily? Is our own mind the cause of our actions? What, if anything, is the role of mind—nous—in the cosmos? And what is the role of the famous “Forms”? Plato’s Sophist belongs to a group of late dialogues that explore, fine-tune, and problematize Plato’s earlier proposals, specifically with respect to the Forms, the notions of being and not-being, and the distinction between true and false statements. The interlocutors set out to define sophistry, using a definitional method that Plato develops in several late dialogues. This method is the ancestor of a powerful but contested scientific tool: the division of things into kinds. Finally, we use the Sophist to ask general questions about Plato’s dialogues. Why does Plato write dialogues, rather than treatises? What is philosophically distinctive about his method?
The course offers a high-level survey of central themes in Aristotle's ethics: happiness, motivation, agency, excellence, deliberation, pleasure, responses to relativism, and the nature of ethics. Spring 2026: PHIL GU4089 Course Number Section/Call Number Times/Location Instructor Points Enrollment PHIL 4089 001/13804 T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 616 Martin Luther King Building Katja Vogt 3 35/40
Various paradoxes, from many areas, including mathematics, physics, epistemology, decision theory and ethics, will be analyzed. The goal is to find what such paradoxes imply about our ways of thinking, and what lessons can be derived. Students will have a choice to focus in their papers on areas they are interested in.
Basic set-theoretic operations and constructions. The axiom of choice. Infinitary arithmetic, ordinal and cardinal. Russell’s paradox, Cantor’s paradoxes, and other set-theoretic paradoxes. The continuum hypothesis. Axiomatic set theory. Other topics as time permits.
PHIL GU4451History of Philosophy: From De Morgan to Frege3
The roots of logic may be traced to Aristotle, who systematized and codified the subject in a way that was not significantly surpassed for over two millennia. As we know it today, however, logic stems largely from certain advancements that took place in the mid-ninteenth century, when the subject developed into a rigorous discipline whose exemplar was the exact method of proof used in mathematics. Tha aim of this course is to provie a critical reconstruction of such advancements along with an assessment of their philosophical significance.
PHIL GU4491William James's Principles of Psychology3
The primary goal of this course is to give sufficiently advanced students an opportunity to read through, in its entirety, one of the most influential works in the history of psychology. Although James conceived his two-volume work as an exhaustive scientific account of the mind, its approach is vastly different from contemporary psychology--which, since his time, has generated many subfields and methodologies, and benefitted from advances in related fields, such as computer science, linguistics, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience, to name just a few. Apart from subsequent developments within the mind sciences, another major difference between James's pioneering work and current scientific work is that it is explicitly governed by some concerns that currently belong more to philosophy than to science. These include James's focus on the phenomenological dimensions of mind that are open to direct introspection, which are no longer regarded as reliable indicators of mental reality, and his interest in the ethical significance of his findings. Being a pragmatist, he could not help but regard a correct account of the mind as providing a basis for improvement of human life, and right action.
This course addresses the fabulously rich range of issues about the nature of perception, including: perceptual mental representation and its content; computational explanation; justifying beliefs; knowledge and thought about perception; and perception of music. Perception is an interdisciplinary subject par excellence. Readings will be drawn from philosophy and psychology, aesthetics, and artificial intelligence
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
Careful reading and translation of a major philosophical text in ancient Greek to be chosen by the course participants in consultation with the instructor. Special attention is to be paid to the linguistic and conceptual problems of translating ancient Greek philosophical texts. Prerequisite: equivalent of at least two years of study of ancient Greek at university level
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
A study of what it meant for the Muslim world to open up itself to Greek philosophy and to create the tradition of philosophical thinking known as Falsafa (from the Greek philosophia). The relation between theology (kalam) and philosophy, as well works of major authors of the classical period (9th to the late 12th century), will be studied.
PHIL GU4763Feminist, Social and Political Philosophy of Language3.00
This course explores different ways in which social and political settings affect our language – what we can do with our words and what our words mean – as well as ways in which our language affects our social and political setting – the effects of people saying things, or saying things using certain words, or words with specific meanings. Topics and texts may vary with instructor and semester
Prerequisites: PHIL UN3411 or 4801 Prerequisites: PHIL UN3411 or 4801 This course is designed as an introduction to lattices and Boolean algebras. In the first part of the course, we study partial orders and view lattices both as partial orders and as algebraic structures. We study some basic constructions involving sublattices, products of lattices, and homomorphic images of lattices. In the second part of the course, we study Boolean algebras, with an aim to proving several representation theorems: first, a representation theorem for finite Boolean algebras, and toward the end of the course, the famous Stone Representation Theorem. We end the course with a look at the connection between classical mereology (or the theory of parthood) and complete Boolean algebras
Open to undergraduates with previous work in the history of philosophy and to graduate students. Focuses either on an important topic in the history of early modern philosophy (e.g. skepticism, causation, mind, body) or on the philosophy of a major figure in the period (e.g. Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Gassendi, Conway)
In this course, we will read primary sources drawn from philosophers representing the Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, Vaiśeṣika, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Buddhist, Jain, and Cārvāka traditions ranging from approximately the sixth century BCE up to the fifteenth century. We will analyze arguments defending some of the central commitments of these traditions together with challenges mounted by competing schools of thought. This will offer a sense of the dynamic, dialectical, and dialogical nature of the intellectual landscape of Classical Sanskrit Philosophy and provide an introduction to some of the issues that mattered most to these philosophers. Topics will include the existence and nature of the self, the relation between consciousness and matter, fundamental ontology, external world realism vs. idealism, and the existence of a creator God. We will also inquire into the basic dichotomy of identity and difference, which in turn drives debates between monistic and pluralistic worldviews. The semester will conclude by considering disputes over whether there are definitive answers to these sorts of questions at all
