Graduate Seminars

PHIL 5143/001 Symbolic Logic II
TR 1:30-2:45pm, CRN: 41558
Priselac

The aim of this course is to equip you with tools to engage with formalisms in any philosophy you encounter. To do that, the primary focus of this course is thinking about formal systems rather than mastering the use of some particular formal system or other. Part of thinking about formal systems is by way of metalogic, which is the traditional focus of a course like this. While we will cover some of the most important and famous metalogical results for traditional propositional and predicate logic systems, we will also think about formal systems by carefully navigating what they do and don’t do; what they attempt to represent and what they abstract over. To help us in doing so we will examine various was of extending and modifying traditional systems to address limitations in their ability to represent reasoning.

PHIL 5333/001 Rationalism
M 3:00-6:00pm, CRN: 39472
Cook

This course covers the philosophical works of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz—the continental rationalists. Our primary goal will be to cover topics that contemporary philosophers and historians of philosophy find of particular interest. Texts: Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II; Malebranche, Philosophical Selections; Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader; Leibniz, Leibniz: Philosophical Essays.

PHIL 5533/001 Philosophy of Language
TR 1:30-2:45pm, CRN: 41585
Montminy

This course will explore central issues in the philosophy of language. Our main focus will be on meaning and reference: What is meaning? What makes it the case that our words mean what they do? How is meaning related to reference? We will also examine issues in pragmatics such as speech acts, context sensitivity and metaphor. Throughout the semester we will attend to connections between the philosophy of language and other areas of philosophy such as ethics, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. 

PHIL 5713/001 Survey of Social and Political Philosophy
T 3:00-6:00pm, CRN: 41548
Trachtenberg

This course will survey important theories in the history of western social and political philosophy. The course will begin by considering ancient theories (Plato and Aristotle), move on to modern social contract theories and the foundations of liberalism (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Constant, and Mill), and conclude with the late 20th century debate over liberalism (Rawls and critics such as Nozick, Walzer, Sandel, Okin and Mills). In addition to reading and analyzing primary texts, students will gain experience in conducting bibliographic research in the secondary literature. The main work for the course will be an APA style conference paper (3000 words max.) on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor. In addition, for most classes students will submit a paraphrase of an assigned passage from the primary text for that day.

PHIL 6523/001 Seminar in Epistemology
Meeting time: R 3:00-6:00pm, CRN: 41559
Riggs

This course will focus intensively on some aspect of social epistemology.

PHIL 6793/001 Seminar in Social and Political Philosophy
W 3:00-6:00pm, CRN: 41546
Sankowski

Freedom, Responsibility, and Progress-Beyond Sustainable Development to Contested Education

In this course we address what might be regarded as some of the most basic questions in social and political philosophy. What is it for a society, whether a more local domain (e.g., the US) or a more broadly demarcated grouping (e.g., “humanity”, or global society) to improve, to progress, to “develop”? What are the implications of our attitudes about progress or development for freedom and responsibility? Our primary questions are about the overall value of a set of societal arrangements. Of course we can no longer assume, if we ever did, that very general human progress is inevitable. Also, we cannot assume that over a shorter, more foreseeable time frame, or in a limited domain, there will be overall improvement. Not only are the facts out there not known to be clearly indicative of an improvement overall. More fundamentally, we do not readily know with assurance what progress would consist in. More particularly, we do not know what “democracy” is, its proper guiding function, nor how politics and “markets” should be arranged. All that’s always up for revised evaluation, as part of our seeming individual or group freedom (and indeed our responsibility). There are both ethical and socially and politically normative issues here, and epistemological issues (perhaps in the sense of “social epistemology”). Philosophy and the social sciences are both part of our inquiry in this course, as are extra-academic activities aiming at pragmatic interventions in social processes. Some philosophizing social scientists have proposed the advance of freedom (and accompanying responsibility) as the key to progressive change. Others have focused much more on measurable indicators, such as “economic growth” or specifically, increasing gross domestic product, as keys to progress. Others advocate the centrality of societal advances in scientific and technological learning or innovation. Others have advocated religious or quasi-religious commitments or re-orientations (or conservation) as keys to societal improvement. Very different in terms of stance, some influential primarily secular politically, economically, and culturally pragmatic statements have advocated “sustainable development” as a framework for evaluation and decision-making concerning progress. Certainly environmental issues and distributive justice issues (both central to “sustainable development”) must be fundamental in pragmatic and global-scope advocacy for progress. However, the orientation of this course will probably be that none of these ideas (even “sustainable development”, an attractive option) is fully acceptable. While the ideas mentioned (and others) are worth respectful consideration and evaluation, the argument of this course will (probably) be that what is needed is a much deeper examination than is currently available of freedom, responsibility, and the educational processes of society. Among much else, we need a deeper and more far-ranging pragmatically oriented account of education (including reference to, but going beyond “academic freedom” in “higher education”). Such an account will inevitably be highly controversial. Among much else, concepts and societal practices invoking “freedom and responsibility” (individual and group) will need major re-adjustments in order to grasp what needs revision in our framework of thought and action about desirable “progressive” societal directions. Each student will be expected to do a seminar-type presentation, depending on available time. There will be an emphasis on class discussion. There will be an essay-type midterm and an essay-type final, and a paper on a topic agreed to by the student and professor.

ADDED NOTE: Students from other disciplines outside philosophy, depending on their interests and background, are welcome to consider taking the course. It is a good idea for such students to discuss this with the professor before enrolling. The course might also be described as a class about (philosophical) normative political economy and cultural studies. Politics, economics, and culture are closely inter-related. Such an inquiry is necessarily philosophically interdisciplinary. It requires, among other features, drawing on and critiquing social sciences, “cultural studies” in the humanities, and some “professional studies” (such as education, law, business, public administration, urban planning, engineering, technology, possibly medicine, journalism, etc.) Such a course will necessarily take account of globalization, a major aspect of contemporary ethics, politics, economics, and culture. For some philosophy students, this course may seem to expand or re-draw the boundaries of the discipline; and to some extent it does. But in other respects, the course area is conservative, even “reactionary” in re-incorporating philosophical terrain once taken seriously by the likes of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey (ESPECIALLY JOHN DEWEY), and others, among the usual canonical suspects. Readings for the course remain to be selected. These might include work by Amartya Sen, Cass Sunstein, Jason Stanley, and others.

PHIL 5333/001 Studies in Ancient Philosophy 
R 7:00-10:00pm, CRN: 35556 
Huismann

This course will be an advanced survey of Aristotle. We will address Aristotle’s seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, broadly construed (so as to include e.g. aspects of his natural philosophy and philosophy of mind). 

PHIL 5343/001 Early Chinese Philosophy 
R 7:00-10:00pm, CRN: 38356 
Olberding 

This course will survey Chinese philosophy from the pre-Qin era, typically considered a period of unmatched philosophical flourishing in China. The course will focus in particular on a cluster of distinctive features of philosophy in this period, including: the moral importance of prosaic social practices; the problems death poses for human well being; and how exemplars in multiple traditions are characterized and understood. We will read primary texts in translation – including the Analects, Mengzi, Mozi, Zhuangzi, and Xunzi – as well as a selection of contemporary secondary literature. Student coursework will consist primarily of essay exams and a research paper.

PHIL 5543/001 Philosophy of Mind 
T 3:00-6:00pm, CRN: 38360 
Priselac 
Note: Slashlisted with PHIL 4543 

This course will engage some of the core questions in contemporary philosophy of mind. What is a mind? How similar are minds and computers? Could a computer be or have a mind? These are all questions we will focus on in the first portion of the course. Having delved into the nature of the mind, we will then consider questions about how the mind fits in and relates to the world it inhabits. How are thoughts directed at the world? What determines the content of a thought? How can minds be causally efficacious? What is the nature of perceptual content?

PHIL 6203/001 Seminar in Ethics 
W 3:00-6:00pm, CRN: 38361 
Snow

This course will offer an overview of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics.  We will begin by reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, then continue with Rosalind Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics (1999). The next major book we will read is Daniel C. Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (2009). We will conclude with Virtuous Emotions (2018) by Kristjan Kristjansson.  In this way, the course will provide a comprehensive overview of much of the major work in the field.  Attention will be paid to topics of special interest, e.g., virtue development, the selfcenteredness objection, the problem of virtue ethical right action, the unity of the virtues, and the relation of virtue ethics to empirical psychology. 

PHIL 6393/001 Seminar in History of Philosophy 
M 3:00-6:00pm CRN: 38362 
Huismann 

This course will be a seminar on topics in Aristotle’s natural philosophy and ontology. We will focus on issues that lie at the intersection of these disciplines, including the causal role of both substantial and nonsubstantial individuals, what luck and chance are, the metaphysics of change, and Aristotle’s conception of causal powers.

5333/001 Studies in Modern Philosophy
R, 3:00-6:00pm, CRN-39472
Priselac

Intellectual developments in the seventeenth century have had sweeping influence on science, society, and philosophy. Early modern empiricism in particular has had a lasting and powerful effect on the way that human beings understand the world, ourselves, and our relation to other people. This course will focus on surveying and comparing the views of early modern empiricists, such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume across a wide range of questions. We'll consider empiricist answers to questions about the nature of mind, matter, human agency, causation, personal identity, idealism, and skepticism. 

5833/900 Gender, Values, and Education
W, 4:25-7:05pm, CRN-39423

6383/001 Seminar in Chinese Philosophy
T, 3:00-6:00pm, CRN-39473
Olberding

In this seminar, we will look at several prominent philosophical problems and priorities in early Confucian philosophy that are not well represented in western lineage philosophy. These will include, e.g., family, ritual training, moral charisma, and funerary practice. Our goals will be to assay these subjects, as well as to address the metaphilosophical issues they expose. The course will thus include a comparative component, seeking to assay what Confucian philosophies offer and when or whether these function to expose lacunae in western lineage philosophy. In much contemporary scholarship, Confucian (and other “non-western”) philosophies are viewed as potentially “contributing” to existing philosophical problems developed in western-lineage canonical sources. Our approach will be to look beyond this truncated task and ask instead how Confucian philosophy might change the philosophical problems themselves.

6473/900 Seminar in Philosophy of Religion
T, 7:00-10:00pm, CRN-39466
Judisch

6593/001 Seminar in Contemporary Philosophy
W, 3:00-6:00pm, CRN-39465
Ellis

5143/001 Symbolic Logic II
MW, 1:30-2:45, CRN – 35560
Priselac

An advanced course in symbolic logic. This course presumes PHIL 4133 or equivalent experience. The aim of this course is to provide tools useful for understanding and formulating philosophical arguments that draw on formal tools. We will study first order logic before going on to briefly discuss meta logical results for first order logic. From there we will expand our formal horizons by looking towards other kinds of logic that pop up in philosophical discourse, such as modal logic. Our goal throughout the course will be to appreciate logic as a formal tool and the various ways in which it can succeed or fail to achieve the ends to which it is put.

5333/001 Studies in Modern Philosophy
M, 3:00 – 6:00, CRN - 35556
Cook

This course covers the philosophical works of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz—the continental rationalists. Our primary goal will be to cover topics that contemporary philosophers and historians of philosophy find of particular interest. Texts: Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II; Malebranche, Philosophical Selections; Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader; Leibniz, Leibniz: Philosophical Essays.

6023/001 Seminar in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
W, 3:00-6:00, CRN – 36102
Irvin

The purpose of this course is to familiarize you with the scope and limits of formal logics and computations. We will investigate fundamental properties of predicate logic, including the soundness and completeness of syntactic methods (such as natural deduction proofs) for determining the validity of arguments (i.e. for determining that arguments are truth-preserving). We will look into various other meta-theorems that show important limitations on the expressive power of formal logics. For example, we will study the Godel Incompleteness Theorem, which shows the inability of any logic to compute all the truths about the natural numbers.

6513/001 Seminar in Metaphysics
T, 3:00-6:00, CRN – 36138
Zagzebski

The title of this seminar is “The 2 Greatest Ideas.” They are (1) the idea that the human mind can grasp the universe, and (2) the idea that the human mind can grasp itself. I propose that these are the most important ideas in human history, and I will tell a story about the history of these two ideas and how their relationship eventually changed, leading to a battle for dominance between them that has not been resolved. I believe that the first great idea is responsible for the birth of philosophy, the great religions, mathematics, science, and a way of understanding morality that focuses on human beings as an important kind of being. The second great idea is responsible for the idea of subjectivity and a different way of understanding human dignity and the ground of authority, as well as a different way of looking at the boundary of the human mind, the function of science, and the methodology of philosophy. We will explore examples of the two ideas as well as the interplay of these ideas in art, literature, and the perceived conflict between science and religion. The course will be based on my 2018 Soochow Lectures (in progress), which is my current book project.

6523/900 Seminar in Epistemology
W, 7:00-10:00, CRN – 35555
Smart

Subjective epistemic rationality depends on what “makes sense” from your epistemic perspective. We’ll start by considering how subjective it is reasonable, or even possible, to take such evaluations of rationality to be. We'll then look at two areas of conflict between first and higher-order attitudes, in which questions of subjective rationality plays a particularly significant role. One concerns the question of whether or not one can be rationally epistemically akratic—e.g. both rationally believe p and rationally believe one oughtn’t believe p? The other is a more famous problem--what is the rational response to disagreement? We'll investigate this question in part by considering what light recent work on epistemic humility might shed on it (and on interlevel conflicts more generally).

PHIL 4523-5523/001 Epistemology
M, 3:00-6:00 Riggs

In this course, we will investigate fundamental evaluative questions about how human beings come to view the world in particular ways. Epistemology is often glossed as the “theory of knowledge,” but this is artificially limiting. It assumes that all the important evaluative questions about how human beings come to view the world have to do with what we know, which they don’t. It also tends to narrow the discussion to finding the correct account or definition of some phrase like “S knows that p.” While interesting, there are many issues, even about knowledge, that do not reduce to providing such an account. I hope to cover some of this broader territory in this class. The upside of this is, I hope, a more interesting class that gives you a better feel for the richness of what can be explored under the rubric “epistemology.” My hope is to make clear how all these different elements are united by a common concern to understand how best to represent the world we find ourselves in.

PHIL 5533/001 Philosophy of Language
W, 3:00-6:00 Montminy                              

This course will explore central issues in the philosophy of language. Our main focus will be on meaning and reference: What is meaning? What makes it the case that our words mean what they do? How is meaning related to reference? We will also examine issues in pragmatics such as speech acts, context sensitivity and metaphor. Throughout the semester we will attend to connections between the philosophy of language and other areas of philosophy such as ethics, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

PHIL 5713/001 Survey of Social and Political Philosophy
R, 3:00-6:00 Trachtenberg  

This course will survey important theories in the history of social and political philosophy.  The course will begin by considering ancient theories (Plato and Aristotle), move on to modern social contract theories and the foundations of liberalism (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Constant, and Mill), and conclude with the late 20th century debate over liberalism (Rawls and critics such as Nozick, Walzer, Sandel, Okin and Mills).  In addition to reading and analyzing primary texts, students will gain experience in conducting bibliographic research in the secondary literature.

The main work for the course will be an APA style conference paper (3000 words max.) on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor. In addition, for most classes students will submit a paraphrase of an assigned passage from the primary text for that day.

PHIL 5900 Proseminar: Introduction to Philosophy as a Profession
M, 7:00-8:30

In this course, philosophy faculty members, OU staff members and advanced graduate students take turns introducing themselves to the new students and explaining the details of our program and the intricacies of the discipline of professional philosophy.

Current syllabus is here (docx).

PHIL 6383/001 Seminar in Chinese Philosophy
T, 3:00-6:00 Olberding            

In this seminar, we will look at several prominent philosophical problems and priorities in early Confucian philosophy that are not well represented in western lineage philosophy.  These will include, e.g., family, ritual training, moral charisma, and funerary practice.  Our goals will be to assay these subjects, as well as to address the metaphilosophical issues they expose.  The course will thus include a comparative component, seeking to assay what Confucian philosophies offer and when or whether these function to expose lacunae in western lineage philosophy.  In much contemporary scholarship, Confucian (and other “non-western”) philosophies are viewed as potentially “contributing” to existing philosophical problems developed in western-lineage canonical sources.  Our approach will be to look beyond this truncated task and ask instead how Confucian philosophy might change the philosophical problems themselves.

PHIL 6393/900 Seminar in History of Philosophy
W, 7:00-10:00 Cook

The heart of the seminar will be a close reading of Descartes’s Meditations. We will often go through the Meditations sentence by sentence, asking such questions as “Why does Descartes go into that?” and “Why does Descartes put it that way?” Behind my approach is the conviction that Descartes is extremely careful in the Meditations and generally has a reason for saying exactly what he says. Though what Descartes says in the Latin or in the French translation of the Meditations that he approved will sometimes come up, mostly we will just go with the English translation. (In short, no knowledge of Latin or French required.) I am requiring only Vol. II of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, but I recommend Vol.’s I and III as well.

PHIL 6393/901 Seminar in History of Philosophy
T, 7:00-10:00 Benson

PHIL 5473/001 Philosophy of Religion
W, 3:00-6:00 Zagzebski

This course is a survey of topics in contemporary philosophy of religion. Topics include: (1) new arguments for the existence of God; (2) the divine attributes, including omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, and the attribute I call omnisubjectivity; (3) the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human freedom; (4) issues in religious epistemology, including Reformed Epistemology and its detractors, religious virtue epistemology, and religious authority; and (5) the existence of hell, and the problem of evil.

PHIL 5623/001 Philosophy of Social Sciences
MW, 7:00 – 8:30 Ellis

This course is concerned with the philosophical issues at the heart of the social sciences. We will start with some foundational questions: are social sciences directed primarily at predictive (causal) or interpretive theories? Is the basic unit of analysis the individual or the group? Can social science be objective? We will then delve into some methodological issues: what sorts of models/accounts are appropriate for social sciences? How should those models/accounts be evaluated? What are the ethical obligations of social scientists? Time permitting, we will also consider social science as a tool for philosophers (in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, etc.). The precise issues covered will depend, in large part, on student interest.

PHIL 5313/001 Studies in Ancient Philosophy
MW, 1:30-2:45 Green

This course is meant to provide students with an in-depth introduction to the philosophy of Plato. It is impossible to treat the entire Platonic corpus with the attention it deserves in a single class; indeed, this is difficult to do even with only one dialogue. Instead, we will focus on one topic, and let that topic guide us through a number of Plato’s works. The topic will be ‘The Soul and Immortality in Plato’. We will investigate what model (or models) of the soul Plato endorses throughout the corpus, and what ramifications this has for his view(s) on immortality. This will require us to touch on Plato’s treatment of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, so there should be something of interest to just about anyone. We will read excerpts from many of Plato’s works: Apology, Charmides, Laches, Meno, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Symposium, Republic, Philebus, Timaeus, Laws, and likely others. This will also allow us to ask questions about Plato’s philosophical development and the unity or disunity of his views across works. We will incorporate secondary literature on the topic when possible, but our primary task will be to grapple with Plato’s writings on their own terms. Best of all, this class will prepare you for the Ancient Greek MA/PhD Qualifying Exam, not to mention provide you with the minimum understanding of Plato that is required of any self-respecting professional philosopher.

PHIL 5970/900 Introduction to Human Flourishing
T, 6:00-9:00 Snow

This is a graduate course intended for local high school teachers. Enrollment is limited to 10. In this course, we will read work on human flourishing from psychology, theology, and philosophy. From psychology, we will read Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being; from theology, Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World; and from philosophy, either Daniel C. Russell, Happiness for Humans or Kristján Kristjánsson, Aristotelian Character Education. The idea of the course is to provide high school teachers with an overview of work on human flourishing from various disciplinary perspectives.

PHIL 6203/001 Seminar in Ethics
T, 3:00-6:00 Montminy

This seminar will explore recent developments in the philosophical literature on moral responsibility. Here are some of the questions we will (likely) discuss:

1. Does moral responsibility require the ability to do otherwise?
2. What is the relationship between blameworthiness (praiseworthiness) and negative (positive) reactive attitudes?
3. Does moral responsibility for an action require that one be the source of that action?
4. Is moral responsibility an essentially historical concept?
5. How should we understand the condition of control on moral responsibility?
6. What is the epistemic condition on moral responsibility?
7. What is good or bad moral luck with respect to moral responsibility?
8. Should blameworthiness (praiseworthiness) be understood in terms of bad (good) quality of will?
9. Are agents to blame for their implicit biases?

PHIL 6393/001 Seminar in History of Philosophy
TR, 7:00-8:30 Green

This seminar focuses on Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics. Though less studied than the more-popular Nicomachean Ethics, the EE marks an important stage in Aristotle’s philosophical development, and in recent years has begun to get the attention it deserves. Our aim is to understand the EE as best we can, both in terms of its philosophical content and its relationship to the rest of the Aristotelian corpus. Though the bulk of our time will be spent reading the EE itself, we will also devote significant attention to secondarily literature on the work. We will also occasionally read other works of Aristotle for comparison, including the NE. Substantively, our main exegetical question will be ‘What is the EE’s view of human nature and its relationship to human happiness? How plausible is this view?’ This course will also address methodological issues involved in work in the history of philosophy. But this does not mean that the course is only of historical interest. Given the prevalence of neo-Aristotelian views in contemporary philosophy, this course should be valuable for non-historians as well, especially those interested in virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

PHIL 6613/001 Seminar in Philosophy of Science
M, 3:00-6:00 Demarest

This class will cover special topics in philosophy of science including: 1) causation and its relation to special and general relativity and quantum mechanics, 2) the Humean picture of properties, laws of nature, counterfactuals, causation, and the arrow of time, and 3) interpretations of quantum mechanics, especially in higher-dimensional space

PHIL 5333/001 Studies in Modern Philosophy
M, 3:00-6:00 Priselac

Intellectual developments in the seventeenth century have had sweeping influence on science, society, and philosophy. Early modern empiricism in particular has had a lasting and powerful effect on the way that human beings understand the world, ourselves, and our relation to other people. This course will focus on surveying and comparing the views of early modern empiricists, such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume across a wide range of questions. We'll consider empiricist answers to questions about the nature of mind, matter, human agency, causation, personal identity, idealism, and skepticism.

PHIL 5343/001 Early Chinese Philosophy
TR, 1:30-2:45 Olberding

This course will survey Chinese philosophy from the pre-Qin era, typically considered a period of unmatched philosophical flourishing in China. The course will focus in particular on a cluster of distinctive features of philosophy in this period, including: the moral importance of etiquette and manners; the problems death poses for human well being; and how exemplars in multiple traditions are characterized and understood. We will read primary texts in translation – including the Analects, Mengzi, Mozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Laozi – as well as a selection of contemporary secondary literature.

PHIL 5513/001 Metaphysics
W, 3:00-6:00 Montminy

This course is a survey of some of the big questions in metaphysics: What is causation? What is time? What is an object? Who are we? Is free will compatible with determinism? We will also examine puzzling phenomena such as grounding, vagueness and social construction.

PHIL 5543/900 Philosophy of Mind
R, 7:00-10:00 Montminy

This course concerns the many facets of the mind-body problem: What is a mind? What is thinking? What is consciousness? What is the relationship between the mind and the body, and how do they causally interact? We will examine the most influential answers to these questions, and the main criticisms they have received.

PHIL 6203/900 Seminar in Ethics
M, 7:00-10:00 Sankowski

This class is about the ethics of economic development. The course will venture into examining certain questions and positions in normative ethics but also related subjects in normative social and political philosophy. The course is about defining and justifying what “economic development” ought to consist in. However, examining topics in economic development will require consideration of the implications of economics for many aspects of culture. The topic of economic development overlaps with issues in environmental ethics and politics. Students from other disciplines outside philosophy, depending on their interests and background, are welcome to consider taking the course. It is a good idea for such students to discuss this with the professor before enrolling. The course might also be described as a class about (philosophical) normative political economy. Politics and economics are closely related. Such an inquiry is necessarily interdisciplinary. It requires, among other features, drawing on and critiquing social sciences, “cultural studies” in the humanities, and “professional studies” (such as law, business, public administration, urban planning, engineering, technology, possibly medicine, journalism, etc.) Such a course will necessarily take much account of globalization, a major aspect of contemporary ethics, politics, and economics. For some philosophy students, this course may seem to aim to expand the boundaries of the discipline; and to some extent it does. But in other respects, the course area is conservative, even “reactionary” in re-incorporating terrain once taken seriously by the likes of Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, and some others among the usual suspects.

Readings for the course remain to be selected, but examples might include various papers and chapters, perhaps parts of Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice; Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual, Joseph Stiglitz and Bruce Greenwald, Creating a Learning Society.

Each student will be expected to do a seminar-type presentation, depending on available time. There will be an emphasis on class discussion. There will be a midterm and a final, and a paper on a topic agreed to by the student and professor.

PHIL 6473/001 Seminar in Philosophy of Religion
T, 3:00-6:00 Judisch

In this seminar we will explore the topic of authority and autonomy in religious belief. We will begin with the ideas of authority and autonomy as used in moral and political philosophy, and will investigate their application to the domain of belief, with particular application to moral and religious beliefs. This part of the course will be structured around my Wilde Lectures on epistemic authority. I then hope to move beyond the lectures by looking at different conceptions of authority in religious communities, particularly in the Christian churches.

PHIL 6793/001 Seminar in Social and Political Philosophy
R, 3:00-6:00 Trachtenberg

This seminar will explore what it means to take a naturalistic approach in political philosophy. We will begin by studying the biological program of “Niche Construction Theory” (NCT), which focuses on the ways organisms modify their surroundings to make them more habitable for themselves, and how that process has implications for the evolution of their species. We will then consider human niche construction, and the distinctive role culture plays for Homo sapiens. Readings in this part of the course will be drawn from Biology and Anthropology. We will then read works by authors in the standard tradition of Western social and political philosophy, including Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche, paying particular attention to their presentation of ideas related to niche construction. Throughout the semester we will consider whether (and how) the philosophical works we read suggest normative conclusions that might be supported by the more descriptive ideas associated with NCT. I will present an interpretation of Aristotle’s theory as a model of this pattern of justification. And I will also present some of my own research on the idea of habitability as a political norm.

Specific readings will be announced at the beginning of the semester; they will be available from standard editions of the primary authors, or in electronic versions through the OU Library. Written work will include in-class presentations of readings during the semester, and a research paper reflecting the student’s own interests relevant to the topic.

PHIL 5143/001 Symbolic Logic II
TR, 1:30-2:45 Hawthorne

The purpose of this course is to familiarize you with the scope and limits of formal logics and computations. We will investigate fundamental properties of predicate logic, including the soundness and completeness of syntactic methods (such as natural deduction proofs) for determining the validity of arguments (i.e. for determining that arguments are truth-preserving). We will look into various other meta-theorems that show important limitations on the expressive power of formal logics. For example, we will study the Godel Incompleteness Theorem, which shows the inability of any logic to compute all the truths about the natural numbers.

PHIL 5333/001 Rationalists
W, 3:00-6:00 Cook

This course covers the philosophical works of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz—the continental rationalists. Our primary goal will be to cover topics that contemporary philosophers and historians of philosophy find of particular interest. Texts: Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II; Malebranche, Philosophical Selections; Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader; Leibniz, Leibniz: Philosophical Essays.

PHIL 5523/900 Epistemology
MW, 6:30-8:00 Riggs

In this course, we will investigate fundamental evaluative questions about how human beings come to represent the world in particular ways. Epistemology is often glossed as the “theory of knowledge,” but this is artificially limiting. It assumes that all the important evaluative questions about how human beings come to view the world have to do with what we know, which they don’t. It also tends to narrow the discussion to finding the correct account or definition of some phrase like “S knows that p.” While that project is interesting, there are many issues, even about knowledge, that do not reduce to providing such an account. We will be covering some of this broader territory in this class. My hope is to make clear how all these different elements are united by a common concern to understand how best to represent the world we find ourselves in.

PHIL 6023/001 Seminar in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
T, 3:00-6:00 Irvin

In this seminar, we will think about the ontology of art, with a special focus on metaphysically relevant social processes, particularly as they have emerged in contemporary art. Most discussion of socially constructed objects in metaphysics focuses on examples like money, games and human races, whose (alleged) existence and nature depends chiefly on large-scale conventions and patterns of behavior. But many of the facts that shape a contemporary artwork are small-scale, local and highly subject to change from one case to the next: they involve specific actions and communications by the artist, often in institutional contexts. Contemporary artworks thus offer a kind of case study that metaphysics has not previously taken up to any great extent. We will read a number of recent philosophical contributions to the philosophy of art, as well as some works written by art scholars. We will also read some chapters of my forthcoming book that will be hot off the press (i.e., I will force myself to complete them by assigning them as reading for this seminar).

This seminar will count toward the metaphysics distribution requirement. No prior knowledge about art, philosophy of art, or metaphysics will be assumed.

PHIL 6593/900 Seminar in Contemporary Philosophy
TR, 6:30-8:00 Ellis

We will be looking at the emerging psychological picture of human beings as bias having script guided, ‘boundedly rational’ agents from the perspective of formal theories of rationality (e.g., decision theory, game theory). Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, one of the key texts will be Cristina Bicchierri’s The Grammar of Society; other papers will be on D2L.

PHIL 5533/001 Philosophy of Language
R, 3:00-6:00 Montminy

This course will explore central issues in the philosophy of language. Our main focus will be on meaning and reference: What is meaning? What makes it the case that our words mean what they do? How is meaning related to reference? We will also examine issues in pragmatics such as speech acts, context sensitivity and metaphor. Throughout the semester we will attend to connections between the philosophy of language and other areas of philosophy, especially metaphysics and the philosophy of mind.

PHIL 5613-900 Philosophy of Science
W, 7:00-10:00 Hawthorne

The Philosophy of Science is not just a pastime for philosophers. All scientists have views about the nature of what they study:  about the ontology of their theories (i.e. about what their theories say the world is like), and about the epistemology of their disciplines (i.e. about what counts as evidence and about the logic by which evidence may come to support theoretical claims). To the extent that scientists think critically about such issues, they are engaged in the philosophy of science. Indeed, historically, many of the most influential philosophers of science have themselves been leading scientists.

Central philosophical issues in the Philosophy of Science include:

• What is science, and what does it mean to be "scientific"?
• What is the appropriate logic of evidential support, and to what extent may belief in the truth of scientific theories become warranted or justified?
• What is a “scientific explanation” – what makes an explanation “scientific”?
• What is causation and what role does it play in the sciences?
• What is it to be a law of nature, and how do statements of laws differ from other kinds of statements?
• In what sense (if any) are the “higher-level sciences” (e.g. biology, psychology, etc.) reducible to “lower-level”, more fundamental sciences (e.g. chemistry, and ultimately micro-physics)?
• Issues in particular sciences, such as: what's the nature of space, time, and the rest of reality according to our current best physical theories (relativity theory and quantum theory)?

Although we can't possibly cover all of these topics in detail in a single course, we’ll touch briefly on most of them, and we’ll spend a good deal of time on some. Our main focus will be on two issues: (1) the epistemology of the sciences, especially nature of evidential support; (2) what relativity theory and quantum theory imply about the nature of physical reality. Time permitting, we may also discuss some issues in evolutionary biology.

PHIL 5313/900 Studies in Ancient Phil
T, 7:00-10:00 Benson

The aim of this course is to introduce advanced undergraduates and graduate students to Aristotle’s philosophical works.  The enormity and diversity of Aristotle’s works make it impossible - even in a survey course - to survey them all.  Accordingly, we will focus our attention on the following works:  Topics, Categories, Posterior Analytics, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, and Nicomachean Ethics.  (Even so, we will only read parts of the works.)  These works represent all stages of Aristotle’s philosophical development. They also represent Aristotle’s methodology, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics.

The course will not presuppose any previous exposure to Aristotle or ancient philosophy in general, although, students who have been exposed to either will find the course somewhat less difficult.  The requirements for the course will likely be two short textual studies or one long seminar paper, and numerous outlines of the required texts.

PHIL 6383-001 Seminar in Chinese Philosophy
W, 3:00-6:00 Olberding

Early Confucianism is, in many respects, motivated by the conviction that our conduct in even the most prosaic, everyday contexts has significant moral import.  The early Confucians, for example, conceive being well-mannered as a potent, essential feature of being morally exemplary.  In the seminar, we will undertake study of a cluster of themes evident in this early Confucian sensibility.  We will discuss mannerly virtues, as well as vices associated with failing in politeness.  We will also entertain the deeper structures and moral pedagogy undergirding a system of morality in which it is not choice or decision, but habituation, emulation, and deference to established forms that most inform moral conduct.  The seminar will, on the whole, be an exploration of forms of moral goodness in which the banal largely prevails – that is, of the early Confucian’s privileging of what might seem to western interlocutors as the unexceptional, undramatic, and ordinary, as well as the tradition’s heroicizing of those who well manage just this.  In addition to reading early Confucian sources, we will also at least briefly touch on early Chinese critics of the Confucian program.

PHIL 6393-001 Seminar in the History of Philosophy
M, 3:00-6:00 Priselac

This seminar will focus on Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature. We will approach the Treatise by emphasizing the role that Hume’s positive account of cognitive psychology—his theory of ideas—plays in underwriting some of his most famous and influential claims. At the very least we will be considering Hume’s account of our cognition of substances and causation. Beyond those topics the course will follow the interest of the instructor and students. Anything from the three books of the Treatise, including its moral and meta-ethical views, is on the table

PHIL 6523/001 Seminar in Epistemology
T, 3:00-6:00 Riggs

This course will be an in-depth consideration of readings in some specific topic within contemporary epistemology. The precise topic has not yet to be determined. Possibilities include topics in social epistemology, virtue epistemology, or wisdom, among others. Interested parties should feel free to contract Professor Riggs at wriggs@ou.edu. The requirements for the course will include in-class presentations and a term paper.