The Fall 2023 semester marks a decade of teaching undergraduate philosophy courses, under a variety of different course headings. Below are a few descriptions of the courses I’ve taught.

Seminars

Art, Morality, Politics

Writing-intensive capstone seminar on the interrelationship between the domains of art, morality and politics, with a focus on the themes of nationalism and racism in the shaping of these categories of judgement. Texts include selections from Kant, Hegel, Fanon, Benjamin, Arendt, Rancière and others.

Rethinking Citizenship

Writing-intensive capstone seminar on the concept of citizenship as it is understood through issues of difference and diversity. Course includes discussion of contemporary immigration debates, colonialism, and the legacy of slavery in the United States.

Issues of Life and Death

Writing-intensive capstone seminar addressing philosophical issues related to death and dying, with particular emphasis on bioethical issues, including euthanasia, medical advance-directives, and issues of healthcare allocation.

Electives

Reason, Experience, Morality at the Dawn of Modernity: Early Modern Philosophy

Upper-level elective surveying figures in the Early Modern tradition, including Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume and Reid. Course includes material on historical social and political context and some material focused on political philosophy from the time period.

Theories of Human Nature

Upper-level course on historical theories of the human beings, including questions of rationality, Otherness, and scientific conceptions of humanity. Course includes materials from the Ancient to Contemporary periods.

Kierkegaard

Elective course on the “founder of existentialism,” covering as survey of the author’s pseudonymous works as well as his religious discourses. 20th-century interpreters read include Benjamin Fondane, Cornel West and Ada Jaarsma.

Aesthetics

Elective introducing students to philosophical reflections on art and aesthetic beauty. Assigned materials present students with a broad overview of the history of Western aesthetic thought, as well as a “problems”-focused discussion of various topics at the intersection of aesthetics and political and ethical thinking (including discussions of ethics and art, radical/liberatory art, art and race/sex, and other themes).

Core and Introductory-level Courses

Introduction to Philosophy

Introductory-level course surveying a history of Western philosophy, including figures from the Ancient, Medieval, Modern and Contemporary periods. Course also introduces students into some of the major branches of contemporary philosophical reflection, including metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, philosophy of human nature and political philosophy.

Ethics

Introductory-level course covers theories of normative ethics, selections on topics in meta-ethics and themes in applied ethics. (Note that this course has also been taught as a normative ethics-only survey.)

Philosophy of Human Nature

Freshman course on the history of philosophical conceptions of human nature. Includes selections from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir and others.