PHI

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

The emergence of Western philosophy in ancient Greece during the age of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

A survey of our most important ethical notions and of the philosophers who were most important in shaping them.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An introduction to philosophy through an examination of influential views of what it is to be human. Topics include the relations among people, machines, and animals; the role of culture in shaping people; and the question of whether there is a distinctively human good.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

This course aims to provide perspectives both critical and celebratory regarding Asian philosophy, Asian practices, and Asian media representations. Beginning with Edward Said’s classic Orientalism and focusing primarily on East Asian philosophy and religion, students will explore the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation through the lenses of primary sources, movement practices, and contemporary film and literature.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An introduction to Western culture through the study of tragic drama, Plato’s dramatic dialogues, and philosophical reflections on tragedy. The focus is on the possibilities and limitations of human action. Topics include the relations of individual to city, mortal to divine, and male to female; and the roles of knowledge and desire in human conduct. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Toni Morrison are included.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An examination of major 19th- and 20th-century European philosophical and literary texts by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Fanon. Topics include “the death of God,” alienation, freedom and commitment, ethics and politics when “everything is permitted,” and the interaction of self and other(s) in the definition of individual and social identities.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Close readings of four or five major philosophers from the modern period (e.g., Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Kant). Issues and supplementary readings may vary each semester.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Systematic analyses of ordinary arguments, followed by a study of formal languages that are used to represent arguments symbolically.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

A critical introduction to major Asian philosophical systems, including Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Particular attention is given to core themes in traditional texts and later commentaries pertaining to metaphysical questions about the nature of reality, epistemological questions about the sources of knowledge, ethical questions about virtuous conduct and the good life, and aesthetic questions about art and beauty.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Topics include philosophic conceptions of experience, nature, self, and truth in classical Buddhist schools of India, Tibet, China, and Japan.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

What is gender? What is power? What tools do we have for understanding and addressing gender injustice? This course employs philosophical, feminist, and queer theory to address these and related questions.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Examines how philosophical ideas about beauty, ancient and modern, continue to inspire fresh debates about artistic, moral, and political life. Key questions include: Is there a single universal standard of beauty, or are all such standards “relative”? Must good art always be beautiful? Why do disagreements about standards of beauty so often become fiercely political? Examples are drawn from the arts and from students’ personal experiences.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

A critical examination of the category and idea of race. The course addresses historical, philosophical, ideological, institutional, ethical, and psychological components of race, focusing on the ways race mobilizes systems of domination, including racism and white supremacy. Relationships between race and ethnicity, race and gender, race and class, and other intersections are explored.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Investigates today’s dramatically escalating codependence between humans and technology. How do “smart” technologies affect our moral, spiritual, and political experiences? What roles do such technologies play in the evolving ecology of a planet that is a hybrid of human and nonhuman things? Can machines become conscious? Might machines achieve personhood? Readings from earlier modern and more recent philosophical and science fiction writers.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

Examines influential theories about spiritual and religious belief and experience in multiple world traditions. Key questions include: Can spirituality flourish apart from religion? Are scientific and religious beliefs compatible? Can the universe exhibit intelligent design without God? Does human evolution “hard-wire” us to need something like religion? Is there a single “true” religion? Readings from modern, medieval, Western, and non-Western sources.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An examination of the deep relationships-metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual-between human beings and all other nonhuman species and ecosystems in the natural world. Key questions include: What does it mean, metaphysically, to say that humans are (or are not) “part of nature”? Do humans have duties towards nonhuman species? Do any nonhuman species have rights? When do ecological philosophies become politically controversial? Readings from selected contemporary and traditional philosophers a

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

A historical examination of philosophical thought on the structure and meaning of time. Readings emphasize the centrality of time to continental thought, but other approaches are also discussed. Key questions include: What is the relation between subjective and objective temporality, and how are we to conceive of each? Is there anything more to time than our experience of it?

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Is there such a thing as objectivity, journalistic or otherwise? How do accounts of reality in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities differ, and is any account more objective than the others? How do narratives tell the truth, and how do they lie? What might people mean by the term “truth,” anyway? Course readings are interdisciplinary; the course style is philosophical.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Explores what the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might have meant when he wrote that “all of philosophy may be found in the plays of Shakespeare.” The focus is on a close study of selected works, together with commentary by such thinkers as Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, Cavell, and Critchley. Plays include Hamlet, Richard II, Coriolanus, As You Like It, Measure for Measure, The Tempest, and King Lear. PREREQ: THP2205 Or PHI1515 Or PHI2110

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

A critical study of the Enlightenment approach to ethics and politics in the natural rights and social contract theories. Topics include tensions between the individual and the state, liberty and equality, and reason and passion in the theory and practice of the great democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. Readings include Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Burke, and the Federalists.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

A study of thinkers who challenged accepted notions of reason and selfhood and, in doing so, helped shape the intellectual life of our present century. Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are some of the thinkers studied.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

Neo-Confucian Synthesis of the Song Dynasty

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Seminar investigates the ethical and political implications of attempts to realize freedom and equality through non-violent action. Engaged thinkers who bridge the gap between theory and practice include Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Angela Davis and Judith Butler.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Approaches music (represented in various world music traditions) as a form of experience that raises deeper questions about the metaphysics and evolution of human cognition, emotion, rhythm, sociality, and imagination. Readings draw on the literatures of philosophy of music and philosophy of mind, but also on recent discussions of embodied cognition and meaning in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

The remaining two courses must be chosen from the following courses:

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

What is education? What is its nature? Its value? How can it help, and how can it harm? Students read and debate the answers to these questions offered by Plato, Aristotle, and Rousseau, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Maria Montessori, Paulo Freire, and others, and critically analyze the positions and policies of contemporary educational policymakers and activists.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Explores the development of phenomenology through selections from the major works of phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The focus is on how strict adherence to phenomenological description leads one beyond the secluded Cartesian ego to accounts of consciousness that take ego and world to be coeval. PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2060 Or PHI2110

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An exploration of central issues in 20th-century European philosophy. The focus is on the challenges to traditional humanism posed by the successes of modern science and technology; the fragmentation of social and political life; and the decentering of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistics, and literary modernism. Texts include works by Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas, and Derrida. PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

A study of how philosophical themes have been developed in recent fiction and an examination of the relationship between philosophy and literary criticism.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

An investigation of classical, modern, and contemporary theories of desire and sexuality, with an emphasis on the relationship between familial and other social institutions and on the formation of individual identities. Readings include works by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Foucault, and contemporary feminist and queer theorists.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An investigation of philosophical accounts of the nature of mind, including issues like: What does it mean to have a mind? How are mind and body related? Could animals or machines have minds? How are accounts of the mind important for our understanding of freedom, immortality, human nature, and religion?

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

School of Continuing Education (Summer/Winter sessions):

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

A forum for second-semester juniors with two distinct aims: (1) to facilitate the formulation of (a) a senior thesis prospectus, (b) an outline, (c) a bibliography, and (d) a schedule for the composition, during the senior year, of a satisfying 40-page senior thesis; and (2) to introduce the mainstreams of contemporary thought and interpretation in philosophy. Senior thesis topics need not deal with the topic of the junior seminar.

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An intensive study of the major texts, emphasizing their role in defining the work of Western philosophy, with special attention to the interaction of drama with argumentation in the dialogue form. PREREQ: PHI1515

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

This seminar stages an encounter between the two thinkers: Martin Heidegger, one of the most powerful and controversial philosophers of the 20th century, and Hannah Arendt, arguably its greatest political thinker. Among the central questions studied: individual authenticity vs. being in the world with others; resoluteness and political death vs. the promise of birth; and the relation between philosophic reflection and political action. PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

Intensive study of primary texts by major late 20th century thinkers, focusing on relation of subjectivity to language, history and politics. PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

An examination of what it means to be aware of oneself and one’s world. Questions discussed will include the following: Is a unified self necessary for experience? What constitutes our sense of self? How does our social existence influence the character of consciousness? What is it like to be conscious? When we are conscious of something, what exactly is it we are conscious of?

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Kant is the thinker who has, more than any other, shaped the discussion of intellectual issues over the past two centuries. The semester is devoted to a close study of Kant’s critical philosophy of scientific knowledge, human morality, and judgment in art and the life sciences. PREREQ: PHI2110

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

This ‘single figure’ seminar will focus on two figures: Kant and Hegel. Readings will touch on all of Kant’s and Hegel’s major concerns, but the emphasis will be on their respective conceptions of nature and reason. The seminar will attend to similarities between the two thinkers but also work through Hegel’s reasons for rejecting much of Kant’s view. PREREQ: PHI1515 Or PHI2110 Or PHI3212

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

4

Credits (max)

4

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

At least two additional philosophy courses* 8 credits (minimum 4 credits must be upper level) *Strongly recommended courses include:

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Source

www.purchase.edu

Subject

PHI

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

Continues the writing workshop format of PHI 4890 (required in the fall semester), and focuses on the development of oral presentation skills. Students present aspects of their ongoing work to each other, culminating in a public presentation to philosophy majors and faculty at the annual Assessment Day in the late spring. Required of philosophy majors in the second semester of their senior projects. PREREQ: PHI4890

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

2

Credits (max)

2

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu

For first-semester seniors who are developing their senior theses. Designed to give students the invaluable experience of presenting ongoing work to a critical and supportive public of peers. School of Natural and Social Sciences Degree programs in the School of Natural and Social Sciences give students an appreciation for the complex relationships that exist among scientific systems of inquiry (economic, mathematical, physical, political, psychological, and social). Students learn to think independently, communicate effectively, do serious research, and use community resources. Our faculty members encourage learning by doing in both the lab and the field. This hands-on philosophy culminates in the senior year, when

Subject

PHI

Credits (min)

2

Credits (max)

2

Credit unit

Credits

Type

course

Edition

Catalog 2026-27

Catalog

Catalog 2026-27

Source

www.purchase.edu