Graduate Courses

PHIL 525 - Topics in Modern Philosophy: Kant on Nature, Beauty, Art
Huseyinzadegan, W 1:00pm-3:45pm

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PHIL 541 - Topics in 20th Century Philosophy: Altering Presence: Phenomenology in Suspense (Levinas, Derrida) (Same as CPLT 751)
Blanes-Martinez & Mendoza-De Jesus, Th 1:00pm-3:45pm

Content: This course is designed as an introduction to the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, two of the most consequential French philosophers of the 20th century. Our approach to these two thinkers will take as its guiding thread their intense dialogue with the thought of Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement that swept the philosophical world in the early 20th century. Through a careful study of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl’s most mature presentation of the phenomenological method as a form of transcendental idealism, we will equip ourselves to grasp the radical break with the philosophical tradition enacted by Levinas and Derrida. The ultimate aim of our course is to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomenological grounds of what Levinas and Derrida call “presence,” so we can better understand why alterity, difference, and the other had to emerge as the sole categories that could assist thought in the task of dislodging “presence” from its hegemonic determination of the sense of being in general.  

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PHIL 551 - Topics in Contemporary Philosophy: Blackness and Psychoanalysis (Same as AAS 585R-1)
Warren, W 2:30pm-5:30pm

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PHIL 558 - Pragmatism
Stuhr, T 1:00pm-3:45pm

Content: This graduate seminar examines critically the development, meaning, warrant, and influence of the pragmatism as set forth in the work of Charles Peirce and William James (with passing attention to the later thought of John Dewey). More specifically, the seminar examines and compares similarities and differences between Peirce’s pragmaticism, phenomenology, and semiotics and James’s pragmatism, humanism, and psychology so as to understand 1)some central issues in epistemology and metaphysics (concerning reality, experiences, language, truth, and justification), and 2) effects of early pragmatism on a wide range of later twentieth century thinkers (such as, for example, Stein, Stevens, Lewis, A. Locke, Austin, Quine, Haack, Davidson, Rorty, Putnam, Cavell, Harding, Longino, Glaude, West, Taylor, Habermas, and others) across several different philosophical traditions and orientations. Finally, in doing so, it provides resources for rethinking the history of the philosophies of the present when those philosophies and their possibilities are conceived or imagined in terms of the categories of “analytical” and “continental” philosophy.

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Texts: All texts will be available either at the course Canvas site or electronically via Emory’s Woodruff Library.

Particulars:

1. Preparation for, attendance at, and participation in all class sessions. All students must a)prepare for, b)attend, and c)participate in all class meetings. Students who do not satisfy this requirement will not pass the course. a)Preparation includes careful, reflective reading of assigned material. b)Attendance at all class sessions is required unless there is justified absence. c)Class participation includes prepared speaking that seeks to advance the learning of all members, and attentive listening that also advances the learning of all members. In addition, class participation includes active demonstration of intellectual respect and concern for all class members. Each student is expected to contribute to the creation of a shared community of inquirers that explicitly aims to fosters the intellectual well-being and growth of each and every member, a teaching and learning community that makes possible the effective, engaged, and equitable thinking, writing, speaking, and listening of all. 2. One in-class presentation of brief (2-3 pp.) critical paper, and leadership of the following discussion.

3. Final paper--on a topic centrally related to course issues, readings, and discussions, and chosen in consultation with the instructor. The topic, along with a short outline and projected bibliography must be approved by the instructor in early April, and should be submitted to, and discussed with, the instructor no later than the start of the final week in March. These papers should aim to contribute to the ongoing work of a community of scholars and thus should aim at standards and quality suitable for journal publications and conference presentations; they should be developed with the aim and expectation of submission to a professional journal at or shortly after the end of this seminar.

Final grades are based on the critical/discussion paper and seminar participation (50% of final grade) and the final paper (50% of final grade).

Methods of instruction (lectures, discussion, guest lectures, etc.):

This course is a graduate seminar. Instruction will include informal presentations and discussion

Learning outcomes (include any course-specific and GER-specific outcomes):

This course has two principal goals. First, it seeks to provide students an in-depth and nuanced understanding of the philosophies of Peirce and James, a map of the major lineages of influence on, and of, these philosophies, and a critical assessment of their philosophical strengths, weaknesses, and contemporary value. Second, in the spirit of a pragmatic realization that any unity of theory and practice in practice alone is no real unity, it seeks to nurture and help produce informed and original scholarship aimed at, and appropriate for, professional journal publication and/or professional conference presentation.

PHIL 789-1 - Topics in Philosophy: Ideology Critique
Schwarz, M 4:00pm-6:45pm

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PHIL 789-2 - Topics in Philosophy: Buddhist Philosophy
McClintock, T 1:00pm-3:45pm (Same as RLAR 737-1)

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The Buddhist tradition is celebrated for its groundbreaking and profound contributions to philosophy in domains such as metaphysics, epistemology, semiotics, and ethics. This course introduces students to these contributions through the study of key primary texts in Buddhist philosophy from the ancient through the classical and modern periods. Starting with the dialogues of the Pāli canon, we examine the Buddhist critique of an enduring self and the concomitant theories of momentariness and interdependence. We consider as well the crucial role of contemplative practices in the study of Buddhist philosophy. Systematic treatises from the Pāli and Sanskrit traditions invite us to consider the further metaphysical implications of the “no-self” doctrine, including the Madhyamaka theory of the emptiness or naturelessness of all things. Questions concerning whether emptiness further requires a form of idealism arise in our examination of treatises from the Yogācāra school, which also leads the way in elaborating a nominalist understanding of language and a sophisticated pragmatism about truth and reality. We end with reflections on the ethical implications of emptiness and interdependence, through close study of classical texts as well as modern articulations of Buddhist thought to address issues of gender and caste.

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Requirements for the course include short weekly reflection papers, one or more in-class presentations, and a final term paper. There are no prerequisites, but students without prior knowledge of Buddhism should read The Foundations of Buddhism by Rupert Gethin prior to the start of the semester.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Plato and the Platonic Tradition
Corrigan, T 10:00am-1:00pm (Same as ICIVS 770 )

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PHIL 789-4 - Topics in Philosophy: Sovereignties
Marriott & Bennington, M 1:00pm-4:00pm (Same as CPLT 751-4, FREN 780-2)

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This seminar asks: who or what is the sovereign? From the moment the sovereign appears in political philosophy its mode of appearance is both—perhaps undecidably—homogeneous and heterogeneous, both foundation and exception, both authority and decision.  The sovereign is often referred to as a kind of stilled center, or as an absolute force or value, however noble, vicious, or even criminal the form through which it appears. At other times, the sovereign also figures the purest anarchy or ecstasy.

The seminar will explore these ambiguities, paradoxes and aporias in a range of classical texts by Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant, before turning to more modern iterations and interpretations in works by Schmitt, Bataille, Agamben, and Derrida.

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PHIL 530R - 19th Century Philosophy Seminar: Friedrich Schelling 
Mitchell, T 4:00-6:45pm

Content:Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) is the German Romantic philosopher par excellence, a protean thinker who shifted the terms of his thought throughout his lengthy career. In this course we will survey some of the touchstones of his thinking: his early philosophy of nature as a rethinking of materiality, his subsequent “identity” philosophy with its focus on the Absolute, the nature/spirit relation, and the notion of “indifference,” his famed essay on human freedom and the origin of evil, his thinking of history, cosmogony, and the “unprethinkable” in Ages of the World, his artwork essay, and his late project for a “positive” philosophy.

While this seminar is intended as an introduction to Schelling’s work, some experience reading Kant, Fichte, and/or Hegel is recommended, though not required.

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PHIL 573R - Feminist Theory Seminar: Speculum 
Huffer, W 4:00-6:45pm

Content: This seminar focuses on Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) as an investigation into how Western philosophy can be redefined through a feminist critique of its constitutive exclusions. Our seminar will have three aims: First, to deepen our understanding of Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference through an intense engagement with Speculum; second, to practice literary close reading as a philosophical method; and third, to explore the philosophical canon Irigaray deconstructs with supplementary readings from Freud, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, the mystics, Kant, Hegel, and Plato. We will also consider how Irigaray’s focus on sexual difference has been taken up, critiqued,  and transformed by contemporary queer, feminist, trans, decolonial, and critical race theorists.

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PHIL 575R - Philosophical Psychology Seminar: Politics and Emotion 
Willett, W 1:00-3:45pm

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Reimagining the politics of emotion could not be more urgent. A communication revolution has given birth to new forms of political agency, but also new authoritarian practices. Globally, strivings for social justice coincide with a resurgence of racism and nativism, and conspiracy theories thrive, feeding widespread distrust of the media and scientific expertise. 

 Like political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians, philosophers need to revise inherited models of human being and set aside overly rationalist models of explanation that have justified neglecting and demeaning the politics of passions. We will explore both how emotion matters in politics and how politics shape feeling and identity by reassessing the conceptual and representational foundations of political thought, drawing on music, art, literature, and film to disclose new theoretical and practical possibilities. By exploring works and practices that offer a more encompassing view of emotion’s mobilizing force, this seminar aspires to create a space for rethinking the place of visceral feelings and affects, moods, atmospheres, energies, and vibes in collective life. 

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PHIL 700 - Research Methods, Teaching, Philosophy and Professional Development
McAfee, W 11:30am-12:45pm

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PHIL 777 - Philosophy and Pedagogy
Mitchell, TH 10:00am-11:15am

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PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: The Political Unconscious
McAfee, TH 1:00-3:45pm

Content: Taking up the “political unconscious,” this seminar focuses first on Freud’s most relevant texts and concepts and then moves into trajectories of psychoanalysis since Freud and the various ways that psychoanalytic theory has been expanded and deployed in 20^th century and contemporary social and political thought. This allows us an understanding of how political phenomena can be understood psychoanalytically to make sense of things that are otherwise completely baffling. While the unconscious itself can never be identified or rendered into a thing, a number of phenomena indicate its existence. Of these we will focus on fantasies, phobias, hauntings, and transgenerational transmission of trauma and shame, all of which have been leading to resurgences of authoritarianism. To explore these we will read texts by an array of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Vamiik Volkan, Nicolas Abraham, Donald Winnicott, and Avery Gordon.

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PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Primal Scenes: Literature & Psychoanalysis, and Political Passions (Same as CPLT 751R-1/FREN 775-1)
Marder, T 1:00-3:45pm

Content: In this course, we shall examine how the two fundamental insights of psychoanalysis (sexuality and the unconscious) put psychoanalysis into a primal relation to literature and the political.  Beginning with a close reading The Interpretation of Dreams, we will explore how Freud derives his model of the human psyche through dreams by appealing to literary language, literary figures, theatrical spaces, and events as he explains the complex operations of the dream-work. After looking at the place that Freud accords to hysteria, (and feminine sexuality) as the bedrock of the human psyche, we will consider how Freud’s writings challenge the notion of the human and open up ways of rethinking the political dimension of psychic life. Throughout the course, we will focus on how the Freudian notion of the ‘primal scene’ challenges traditional conceptions of temporality, repetition, and the status of the historical event. Throughout, we will remain attentive to the psycho-political dimension of mourning, anxiety, secrets, fantasy, magical thinking, and denial. Texts may include: Major works by Freud including The Interpretation of Dreams and the Case Histories; selected works by Lacan, Theban Plays (Sophocles), Phèdre (Racine); The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein) (Duras); Beloved (Morrison); Muriel (dir. Alain Resnais) Additional readings may include works by: Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Wilfred Bion, André Green, Shoshana Felman, Sarah Kofman, Anne Dufourmantelle, and Leo Bersani.

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PHIL 501 - Topics in Ancient Philosophy: Plato’s Ethics and Politics
Bell, T 1PM - 3:45PM

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This class focuses on one of the central, yet often overlooked, concerns of Plato’s thought—the relationship between ethics and politics. In particular, we will examine his analysis of the role that society plays in shaping individual identity and his attempt to mobilize philosophical inquiry as a means of resisting or modifying this mode of identity formation for the sake of liberating the subject. We will read a handful of dialogues, beginning with the Alcibiades and Gorgias, and concluding with the Republic. In addition to developing a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of Plato’s works, we will examine questions such as: What is the nature of the good life? What is the best form of political organization? How do political organizations enhance or diminish our ability to live well? And what role does the practice of philosophy play in determining both how we should live and how we should govern? 

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PHIL 525 - Topics in Modern Philosophy: Philosophy of Property
Hasan-Birdwell, TH 1PM - 3:45PM

Content: This course attends to ideas of property, ownership, and possession in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The chief question of the course, as many philosophers have proposed in the history of philosophy, is if the private ownership of property is a natural institution. And if so, is it essential to conceptions of selfhood, political right and membership, sovereignty, and the organization of a just society? Alongside this investigation into the early modern period, we will ask if humans are morally and ethically justifiable to own and possess natural entities in addition to land, such as water, plants (crops/food), animals, and human beings. The course will distinguish between arguments that qualify the right to property (as natural or conventional) from the issue of distribution of property rights. Although a large portion of the course will emphasize on the former, it also treats the latter within the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others. The problem of distribution will be treated towards the latter part of the course along with other considerations of gender, subjection, enslavement, and race in the early modern period. We will preface these discussions on property within readings from ancient and Roman period of philosophy, specifically that of Solon, Phaleas of Chalcedon (via Aristotle), Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. 

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Course Readings 

Solon, The Laws of Solon (selections)

Plato, Republic

Aristotle, Politics (selections)

Cicero’s de Finibus (On Moral Ends) (selections)

Cicero, De officiis (On Obligations) 

Hugo Grotius, The Free Seas

Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen (selections)

Francis Hutcheson, Systems (selections)

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

Samuel Pufendorf, On Duties of Man and Citizens According to Natural Law (selections)

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (selections) 

Mary Astell, Reflections Upon Marriage (selections)

Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Origins of Inequality

Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (selections)

Required texts or materials to be purchased:

Solon, The Laws of Solon (Classics Library) 

Aristotle, Politics (Oxford or Cambridge) 

Cicero, On Obligations (Oxford World’s Classics) 

Hugo Grotius, The Free Seas (Liberty Fund)

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Cambridge)

Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (Penguin Classics)

***all other course readings are available on Canvas***

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PHIL 531 - Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit 
Rand, T 4:15PM - 7:00PM

Content: The Phenomenology of Spirit is Hegel’s most influential work, central to his own thinking and the development of (much) philosophy after him. In it Hegel attempts to demonstrate the self-correcting movement of our thinking and thereby to set up his attempt (in later works) to show the self-grounding nature of human reason, institutions, and culture. This demonstration requires a philosophical treatment of the entirety of (what Hegel regards as) the human experience and its history. We will start at the beginning of the book and see how far we get. — Students will rotate the duty to compose session summaries, and write a seminar paper with 1-2 related preparatory exercises. No previous experience with Hegel required.

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Hegel, GWF. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. T. Pinkard. Cambridge UP 2018. ISBN
9781139050494

Note:  Students should feel free to use other translations if they prefer (for instance, if they already own one and don’t want to buy another), such as Miller’s translation (with Oxford) or the translation by Inwood slated for release in December. Reliable inexpensive German editions are available from Suhrkamp and Meiner.

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PHIL 540 - 20th Century Philosophy Seminar: Heidegger and Blackness 
Marriott and Mitchell, M 4:15PM - 7PM

Content: This course stages a number of encounters between ontological approaches to blackness and the thought of Martin Heidegger. Across seven topics, texts salient to blackness are paired with readings from Heidegger. In each case, the goal is to ask: whether blackness can be read as a question of fundamental ontology, or not; or why it is often read as involving a reversal of the usual properties of Dasein, not as a question of identity, but as a non that infinitely defers the possibility of it adding up to the roles and meanings of humanism. In a sense, these questions can be traced back to Heidegger. Throughout the seminar, we shall therefore be staging a return to Heidegger’s texts as a way of evaluating how black philosophers have engaged with them.

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Texts: 

Heidegger, Martin. Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking.   Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.

            ISBN: 978-0253002310.

________. Nature, History, State 1933–34. Ed. and trans. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. ISBN: 978-1441116178.

________. Pathmarks. Ed. and trans. William McNeill. New York: Cambridge, 1998.

            ISBN: 978-0521439688.

Warren, Calvin. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0822370871.

Plus additional texts on electronic reserves.

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Participation

Seminar presentation

Term paper (20 pgs)

PHIL 556 - Phenomenology 
Blanes-Martinez, W 4:15PM - 7PM

Content: Although phenomenology is associated primarily with the work of Edmund Husserl, it also encompasses a very long tradition extending throughout the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. Consequently, this course aims to be a historical introduction to phenomenology in two different ways: an introduction to the development of Husserl’s philosophy from the early 1900s to the late 1920s, in order to give a sense of the breadth and complexity of Husserl’s thinking; and an introduction to the historical reception of Husserl’s work in France during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, in order to present contrasting interpretations that highlight the productive ambiguity latent in the German philosopher’s texts. As a guiding thread, we will focus on what Husserl called both “the most difficult problem” of phenomenology, and one that is “rich in mystery”: the problem of temporality. We will first study Husserl’s analyses of internal-time consciousness in the famous Lectures, and then, we will follow their reception in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Michel Henry. In so doing, we will pay particular attention to the relation between temporality and alterity, to the problem of auto-affection, and to the model of subjectivity that this problem brings to light in relation to self-manifestation and to hetero-manifestation. Key to understanding this tradition, however, will also be an examination of Eugen Fink’s Kantstudien article, and his characterization of the essential task of phenomenology. But in return, we will confront these interpretations of Husserl’s early work to the genetic analyses Husserl undertakes in the 1920s, better known as the Analyses on Passive and Active Synthesis, which remained unavailable to the public until the latter half of the twentieth century. Our purpose will be to understand how Husserl’s early formal approaches to temporalization are enriched and, to a certain extent transformed by the concrete perspective of passive synthesis, which includes innovative reflections on memory, affectivity, habit and even the unconscious; but also, to articulate a possible Husserlian response to his early critics, and to assess the interest, accuracy and legitimacy of such criticism. We will finish the course by a discussion of Edith Stein’s work on empathy, to center the question of the other in tribute to a philosopher to whom perhaps we owe the Lectures.

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PHIL 558 - Pragmatism
Stuhr, W 1PM - 3:45PM

Content: This graduate seminar examines critically the development, meaning, warrant, influence, and uses of pragmatism through a primary focus on the philosophies of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. These philosophies include issues in philosophical method, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. In the final weeks, the seminar will take up thinkers in the pragmatic tradition or deeply influenced by it, including  for example:   Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Cavell, Bergson, Deleuze, A. Locke, West, Glaude, Habermas, Bernstein, Longino, Seigfried, and Sullivan.

Objectives: This course has two principal goals. First, it seeks to provide an in-depth and nuanced understanding of pragmatism, a map of the major lineages of influence on, and of, this philosophy, and a critical assessment of its philosophical strengths, weaknesses, and contemporary value. In doing this, it aims also to be resource for rethinking the philosophy and its possibilities when they are conceived or imagined in terms of the categories of “analytical” and “continental” philosophy, “ideal” or “non-ideal” theory, and “critical” or “non-critical philosophy. Second, in the spirit of a pragmatic realization that any unity of theory and practice in practice alone is no real unity, it seeks to nurture and help produce informed and original scholarship aimed at, and appropriate for, professional journal publication and/or professional conference presentation.

Format:  This course functions as a graduate seminar. Students are required to prepare for, attend, and participate in all class meetings. Typically, each class meeting will include two components separated by a brief break in the middle:  1)a presentation by the instructor and student discussion of some of the central issues in or raised by the assigned readings; 2) critical discussion facilitated by a student reflection papers on questions raised by the readings.

Texts: All readings will be available in free electronic format.  

Particulars: 

There are three requirements:
1.     Preparation for, (remote) attendance at, and participation in all class meetings.  Each student is expected to contribute to the creation of a shared community of inquirers that explicitly aims to foster the intellectual well-being and growth of each and every member, a teaching and learning community that makes possible the effective, engaged, and equitable thinking, writing, speaking, and listening of all. 
2.     Weekly Reading Reflection Paper:  These 300-word maximum papers—submitted and distributed prior to each week’s seminar meeting—should respond to three questions:  a)What is the author’s central thesis (or small number of plural theses) in the assigned reading?; b)how does the author define the most important concept (or small number of plural concepts) in the assigned reading?; and, c)what question—stated as a question—do you think it is most important and valuable for the seminar to address? 
3.     Final paper:  These papers should address a topic centrally related to course issues, readings, and discussions, and must be chosen in consultation with the instructor.  These papers must state and defend the student’s view; they should not be merely exposition or explication of other texts).  They should aspire to standards and quality suitable for, and comparable to, professional journal publication.  In this light, they should include and draw on a bibliography of at least 8 works other than assigned readings.

Students who meet course requirement 1 will receive a course grade based 30% on the reading reflection papers collectively, 30% on seminar participation and contribution, and 40% on the final paper. 

PHIL 573 - Feminist Theory Seminar 
Karera, M 1PM - 3:45PM

Content: Feminist philosophy has arguably undergone another recent mutation. Aiming to defend a new radical materialism and establish the proper theoretical standards for its speculative ethos, key philosophers in this turn are neither interested in conventional “critique” nor invested in offering more commentary on the history of philosophy. Instead, they argue, critical work must reckon with the importance of complex issues in our current times such as climate change and its effects on our intimate and physical lives. What one finds emerging with this call is a philosophical recalibration – away from disembodied transcendence – significantly informed by various developments in the cognitive and the natural sciences. And this reorientation is understood to be both “realist” and “post-humanist”, in the sense that it conceives of matter as agentic and the world as independent from the human mind. It is also amid such redirection that the question of the Anthropocene continues to be theoretically adjudicated. This course will thus aim to survey and interrogate the prevailing theoretical thrust of new materialist and speculative feminisms. As we assess the philosophical and practical grounds of their renewed materialisms, we shall pay close attention to the conditions undergirding their (re)turn to materialism as they attempt to rethink the concepts of matter, nature, life, production, and reproduction.

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Texts: 

• Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007)
• Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)
• Levy Bryant, Nick Srnicek, & Graham Harman eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011)
• Diana Coole & Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)
• Donna Harraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016
• Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020)
• Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)
• Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) – chapter 9
• Catherine Malabou, Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, ed. Tyler M. Williams (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)
• Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
• Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human. After Man. Its Overrepresentation – An Argument”, CR: The New Centennial Review, 2003 (3), 257-337

Suggested Texts

• Stacy Alaimo & Susan Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008)
• Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)

• Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brains?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008)
• Elizabeth A. Povinelli, A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)

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PHIL 525 - Topics in Modern Philosophy: Kant’s Metaphysics and Epistemology 
Huseyinzadegan, W 1:00PM-3:45 PM

Content: 

This is a graduate seminar on Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology. In this class we will practice two simultaneous analytics: we will situate Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology within the history of Western thought and engage with a number of contemporary interpretations. Guiding foci of the seminar include the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics, the problem of dualisms, the transcendental method, and the nature of pure reason. We will be reading a wide sample of Kant’s writings on metaphysics and epistemology, including the Critique of Pure Reason (a.k.a., the first Critique), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Lectures on Logic, as well as essential secondary texts on these writings.

The course will accommodate different levels of interest and background in Kant’s thought.  

Texts: 

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. The Cambridge Edition (ISBN: 978-0521657297)

Immanuel Kant. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. The Hackett Edition (ISBN: 978-0872205932) 

N.B. It is crucial that students obtain and read these translations of Kant’s works and not others. Additional texts will be posted on Canvas.

Particulars: Preparation for, Attendance at, and Thoughtful Participation in all class meetings; Weekly Discussion Questions, Seminiar Presentation/Discussion Facillitation, and a Final Project.

PHIL 571 - Political Philosophy Seminar: Philosophical Explorations of Race: From Slave Narratives to Contemporary Black Literature
Yancy, T 4:15PM-7:00 PM

Content: In this course, we will read primarily Black literature (from early "slave" narratives to the work of W. E. B. DuBois,  Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Cornel West, bell hooks, Claudia Rankine, et al) as a way of engaging philosophical questions of race and identity.

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PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Foucault (Same as CPLT 751, WGSS 754)
Huffer, Th 1:00 PM-3:45 PM

Content: This course will explore the writings of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. We will focus in particular on Foucault’s analysis of the rise of sexuality, the power of normalization, the disciplinary and biopolitical specification of bodies, and the production of deviance in the modern era. The course’s primary purpose is to provide an opportunity to read Foucault’s work in depth, rather than to examine how his work has been used by others.

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Hannah Arendt 
McAfee, M 4:15PM-7:00 PM

Content: Hannah Arendt was one of the most original and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Deeply schooled in the history of politics and philosophy, she was a penetrating observer and critic of twentieth century culture, attitudes, and failings. But she also held out hope that, even in dark times, people could create something new and illuminating.  This seminar will work through Hannah Arendt’s major concerns, from “the space of appearance” (the political) to the life of the mind (thinking, willing, judging).  We will also delve into some of her more problematic views as well as some of the vast literature surrounding her work.

Texts: 

• Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt
• Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic
• Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
• Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, eds. Berkowitz et al. (New York: Fordham, 2010).

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Power, Identity, and the Logics of Legibility (Same as WGSS 730R-1)
Sheth, W 1:00PM-3:45 PM

Content: Why are some populations more legible than others? Why do certain political subjects have an easier time being protected than others? In this course, we will explore theories of power in relation to questions of violence and vulnerability to understand how vulnerable groups are created and cemented in relation to elite and powerful populations. How does violence manifest itself institutionally? How does vulnerability become imposed through various logics and techniques: of law, of class, of race? Power, violence, vulnerability can be inflicted and challenged through technologies, understood conceptually as instruments by which to accomplish certain ends. Readings will include writings in the traditions of decolonial, Latinx, and Black feminist theories, Foucauldian and Indigenous writings on power, land and sovereignty. Authors may include Frantz Fanon, Françoise Vergès, Joy James, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Maria Lugones, Michel Foucault, Christina Sharpe, Katherine McKittrick, and Elaine Scarry among others.

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy:  (Same as CPLT 750-1, FREN 780-1)
Bennington, M 1:00PM-3:45 PM

Content: The course explores some of the ways in which an influential way of thinking about language has affected ways of thinking about literature. After investigating the main tenets of structuralist theory, as derived from Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, we shall go on to see how the internal logic of structuralism led to the rather different positions often referred to as `post-structuralism' and/or `post-modernism', and to a questioning of the position of theory itself.

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Walter Benjamin (Same as CPLT 750R-4)
Goodstein, W 4:00 PM-7:00 PM

Content: In recent years, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) has come to be celebrated as a pioneering cultural theorist, and a minor industry of translations and secondary literature has grown up around this formerly obscure figure. This class will explore his principal achievement, an unfinished archaeology of the modern known as the Arcades Project, which consists of a series of fragments posthumously assembled by others. A palimpsest of theoretical reflection, historical narration, citations, excerpts, intertextual allusions, and metaphysical speculations, Benjamin's Passagen-werk is both highly resistant to the reader and extremely open to interpretation and appropriation. At once archive and unfinished magnum opus, this text embodies the material traces of a revolutionary method of cultural inquiry even as it attests to Benjamin's tragic failure to bring his dreams to reality.

By turning a work into a project, the English title begs the question of the relationship between that failure and Benjamin's distinctive achievement. Possibly, though, the Passagen-werk is not simply unfinished but unfinishable. In attempting to discern Benjamin's legacy in the fragmentary openness of this book that is not a book, we will ask what he can teach us as interdisciplinary scholars, as readers, and as critical participants in modern culture even as we develop a critical perspective on the reception history that represents his text as a coherent point of reference. In the spirit of carrying on Benjamin's legacy, students will be encouraged to pursue creative theoretical projects, including engaging with digital media.

Texts: Benjamin: The Arcades Project Eiland and Jennings: Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Revolutionary Perversions: Literature, Sexuality, Anachrony (Same as CPLT 751R-6)
Marder, T 1:00 PM-4:00 PM, Callaway C202

Content:

In this course, we shall examine how representations of "non-normative" sexuality in several major nineteenth-century works relate to the problem of representing history in the aftermath of the French revolution. Many of the most famous canonical literary texts written in French prior to 1871 include references to impotence, lesbianism, hysteria, cross dressing, bestiality, masturbation and prostitution in the context of narratives that re-write or un-write the legacy of the French revolutions. By focusing on the literary treatment of these "perverse" forms of sexuality, we shall attempt to see how they encourage us to think differently about questions of historical transmission, language, gender, and sovereignty. Possible texts include: La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Sade), René (Chateaubriand), Ourika, Mme de Duras, Armance (Stendhal), Le Père Goriot and La Fille aux yeux d' or (Balzac), L'Education sentimentale (Flaubert), Le Secret de l'Echafaud (Villiers de L'Isle-Adam), and selections from Baudelaire's prose poems. Critical readings may include works by Freud, Marx, Benjamin, Blanchot, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Daniel Arasse, Derrida and others.

The course will be taught in English although we will focus on the works in the original French texts. Reading knowledge of French recommended but not required as (almost) all of the works are available in translation.

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 540 - 20th Century Philosophy Seminar: Deleuze: Difference and Sense
Stuhr, W 1:00PM-3:45 PM

Content: This seminar is an in-depth study of the ontological, epistemological, and political thought of Gilles Deleuze. Some course readings will be drawn from Deleuze’s work on thinkers such as Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Proust, and Foucault as well as some of Deleuze’s other writings such as What is Philosophy? (Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991) and interviews. However, the focus and great majority of seminar energy and time will be spent on two crucial works: Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition, 1968) and The Logic of Sense (Logique du sens, 1969). In addition, some attention will be paid to the ways in which these two volumes both inform, and are illuminated by, Deleuze’s collaborations with Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-OEdipe, 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux, 1980). Along the way, students will be encouraged to review and utilize some small part of the large contemporary literature that draws on Deleuze’s thought.

Objectives: This course has three principal goals. First, it seeks to develop an in-depth and nuanced understanding of the thought of Gilles Deleuze and the philosophical lineages and context of that thought. Second, it aims to provide opportunities for critical assessment of the philosophical strengths, weaknesses, and contemporary values and uses of this philosophy. Third, in the spirit of Deleuzian concept production, it seeks to nurture and help produce informed and original scholarship aimed at, and appropriate for, professional journal publication and/or professional conference presentation.

Format: This course will function as a graduate seminar. Students are required to prepare for, attend, and participate in all class meetings. Generally, each class meeting will include three components: 1)a presentation by the instructor; 2)a close textual reading/discussion/analysis of a key passage or key portions of the assigned reading for the class session; and, 3)a critical discussion facilitated by brief (2pp) student papers on issues raised by readings.

Texts: The main, required texts are Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, 1994) and The Logic of Sense (trans. Mark Lester w/ Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, 1990). All additional assigned readings will be made available electronically via the course’s Canvas site. Relevant texts (whether hard copy or e-texts) always should be brought to seminar meetings.

Particulars: Requirements include seminar participation, weekly short discussion papers on the reading, and (as the principal course requirement) a final paper (aimed at journal submission and publication) on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor.

PHIL 540 - 20th Century Philosophy Seminar: Fanon
Marriott, W 4:00PM-6:45 PM

Content:

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 550 - Contemporary Philosophy Seminar: 
Willett, M 1:00PM-3:45 PM

Content: Seminar with a focus on the emotional resonances and musical nuances of ethical, social and political forces in human and nonhuman ecosystems. We work through contemporary phenomenologies and social theories of affect, vital energy, resonance, vibrations, atmospheric mood, and what Audre Lorde called eros.

Texts: 

Texts available on Canvas or online links (very tentative)

From CW possible: Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (excerpts) or order book

Tonino Griffero, The Atmospheric “We”: Moods and Collective Feelings 978-88-6977-333-4

David George Haskell, Sounds Wild and Broken 9781984881540 or excerpts

Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic”

Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy (Kaufman, trans.) Sections 1-3 (not 4)

Renée Lorraine, "A History of Music" in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (1995)

Birgit Abels, “Meaning and Meaningfulness in Palauan omengeredakl” (2018)

Jay-Z, Decoded (2011) enhanced E-book: http://1.droppdf.com/files/u8SlQ/decoded-jay-z.pdf

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Introduction and “Joy and the Rock Rebellion” in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006)

Angela Y. Davis, “Strange Fruit” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998)

Daniel Stern, chapters from Forms of Vitality (2010)

James Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues”

LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Blues People (1948/1963) Intro and Chapter 3

Hartmut Rosa, Resonance (2019) Chapter V “Resonance and Alienation as Basic Categories”

Lee B. Brown, David Goldblatt, Theodore Gracyk, Jazz and the Philosophy of Art (2018) Chapter 4 “Jazz Singing and Taking Wing”

David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing Chapter 10 “Becoming a Bird” and “Afterward” (2005); and Thousand Mile Song Chapter 9 “Never Satisfied; Getting Through to a Humpback Whale” (2008)

J. Haidt The Pursuit of Happiness “Divinity with or without God”

Herbert Spencer “The Origin of Music” in Mind

D. Trigg “The Role of Atmosphere in Shared Emotion”

Particulars:

PHIL 551 - Topics in Contemporary Philosophy: New Materialism, Speculative Realism, and the Black Anthropocene
Karera, T 1:00PM-3:45 PM

Content:

Texts:

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PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Politics in Deconstruction
Bennington, (Same as FREN 780-2) TH 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: Taking its lead from some of Derrida's later work, this course will follow the twin threads of sovereignty and democracy through some of the great texts of political philosophy in the Western tradition.  We shall attempt to understand why both of these notions, albeit in rather different ways, pose such problems for that tradition, and give rise to all manner of complications and paradoxes, which are however (or so I shall argue) definitive of the conceptual space of the political as such.  We shall wonder why almost all political philosophies are enamored of sovereignty, while almost none has anything very good to say about democracy.  We shall consider the possibility of a non-trivial affinity among the political, the rhetorical, the literary and the animal in their constant tendency to exceed conceptual grasp, and also compare our deconstructive approach to these political questions with some other modern and postmodern theories.

Texts: Classical authors to be discussed may include Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Schmitt; more recent theorists to be considered alongside Derrida may include Agamben, Badiou, Foucault, Hardt and Negri, Lyotard, Mouffe and Rancière.

Particulars: TBA

PHIL 524 - Modern Philosophy Seminar: Beyond Dualism
Hasan-Birdwell, M 4:00PM-7:00 PM

Content: Very few philosophers today would consider themselves dualists, and few metaphysicians would endorse a strict separation between the mind and body. Despite this, we encounter issues of dualism in debates around mental health, education, gender identification, racism, body image and representation, and more. The present course seeks to reconsider the debate around dualism from its inception in the history of modern philosophy. We will reconsider the metaphysical and ethical problems of Cartesian dualism and its decisive impact on other philosophical projects in the seventeenth century.  At its heart, the course itself will contest the assertion made by many contemporary philosopher’s that modern philosophy—particularly Cartesian philosophy—is hostile to the question of embodiment. In fact, embodiment was a central topic of early modern thinkers and a topic of great debate. Given the temporal parameters of the course, we will focus on the momentous (but less often recognized) Correspondencesbetween Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes on the mind–body relation, and the ways it shaped Descartes’ later work in The Passions of the Soul (1649). This will not only provide the opportunity for a detailed analysis of a significant historical text and philosophical correspondence, but also for an examination of foundational ideas of the nature of emotions in the early modern period, especially the impact of these ideas on ethical and metaphysical debates that reached beyond the modern period. We will also ask if the transformations of the Cartesian project presented in our studies evolve beyond the version represented in the Meditations (1641).

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 525 - Topics in Modern Philosophy: Thinking With Montaigne (SAME AS FREN 780-1, CPLT 752-2)
Córdova, W 1:00PM-4:00PM

Content: Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) has emerged in recent decades as a radical contemporary in ways comparable to the rereading of Descartes in 20th-century phenomenology and French existentialism. This seminar interrogates the reasons and implications of Montaigne's contemporaneity by rereading the Essais (1580-95) in critical dialogue with seminal figures from the history of Western philosophy and theory, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Bovelles, Descartes, Pascal, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Adorno, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, and Haraway. While studying Montaigne's anachronic place in intellectual history, we will also examine related problems and modes in the visual arts and explore how the unprecedented (anti)philosophical gesture of the Essais resonates with recent posthumanist methods and questions in literature, philosophy, aesthetics, politics, and ecology. *French highly recommended; German desirable.*

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 531 - Modern 19th Century Seminar: German Hellenism: From Winckelmann to Heidegger
Mitchell, T 4:30PM-7:30 PM

Content: This course examines the German cultural appropriation of Ancient Greece in the 18^th through 20^th centuries. Topics include: Winckelmann’s instruction to imitate the “noble simplicity and calm grandeur” of the Greeks; Goethe’s rewriting of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris; Hölderlin’s thinking of cross-cultural contact and his striking translations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone; the place of Ancient Greece in Hegel’s philosophy of history and his interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone; the invention of the “Aryan” people, understood first as Indian then as Nordic, and the supposed blood relation between Germany and Ancient Greece that this provides; Nietzsche’s conception of the Dionysian, the tragic, and the Aryan; Heidegger’s 1942 lecture course on the proper and the foreign in Hölderlin with his own translation of Antigone; and finally National Socialism’s deployment of Ancient Greek aesthetic models in their sculpture, architecture, eugenics program, and ultimate downfall. 

Texts:

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PHIL 554 - Critical Theory:
McAfee, T 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: From its inception, critical theory has been entwined with psychoanalytic thought, first as a tool in understanding the failures of reason to live up to its enlightenment promise and later as a way to attempt to continue the project of enlightenment. More recently, critical theorists have returned to the sting of the negative in psychoanalytic thought as a way to make sense of sociopolitical maladies. This seminar will trace critical theory’s use of psychoanalysis, first through the first three generations of the Frankfurt School and then in contemporary critical theory, including both social theory and literary theory. We will begin by reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment alongside Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. We will then read Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle alongside early Frankfurt School’s reception—and disavowals—of the death drive. Turning to the second generation, we will read Jürgen Habermas’s seeming embrace of psychoanalysis in Knowledge and Human Interests alongside Freud’s essay on The Unconscious, and then we will see how Habermas turned away from Freud toward Kohlberg’s cognitive theory of moral development. Taking up the third generation, we will read Axel Honneth and Jessica Benjamin’s appropriation of DW Winnicott alongside works by Winnicott and Joel Whitebook. In the final weeks of the seminar, we will take up how contemporary critical theorists beyond the Frankfurt School use Lacan as well as Klein as resources for unpacking the anxieties of our current time. 

Books:

• Allen and Ruti, Critical Theory Between Klein and Lacan
• Fong, Death and Mastery
• Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Norton Library) Paperback – April 17, 1990
• Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition
• Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Available electronically: Freud’s Standard Edition and essays by Winnicott on the PEP web, shorter pieces by Habermas, Whitebook, Benjamin, Zizek, Deleuze, and others via Canvas.

Particulars: One in-depth presentation, one literature review, final seminar paper.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Critical Whiteness
Yancy, W 4:30PM-7:30 PM

Content:

Texts:

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PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Literary Theories (SAME AS FREN 780, CPLT 750)
Bennington, TH 1:00PM-3:45 PM

Content: The course explores some of the ways in which an influential way of thinking about language has affected ways of thinking about literature. After investigating the main tenets of structuralist theory, as derived from Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, we shall go on to see how the internal logic of structuralism led to the rather different positions often referred to as `post-structuralism' and/or `post-modernism', and to a questioning of the position of theory itself.

Texts:

Particulars:

PHIL 500 - Ancient Philosophy Seminar: "Truth, Justice, Love, and Power in Plato and Aristotle"
Jimenez, M 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: How is truth related to ethics and to politics? How are truth, knowledge, love, and justice relevant to happiness and the good life? Is truth important in our relations to others? And relevant for building healthy communities? What are the effects of lying, appearing, misleading, bullshitting in our private lives and politically? Does life in community (and specifically democracy) require that citizens cultivate certain epistemic attitudes? Is free speech a useful tool against tyranny? In this course we will explore the ways in which questions about truth, and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, love and justice are at the heart of ethics and politics for ancient Greek thinkers, and we will consider the value of their views from the perspective of our modern world. The goal is to understand the depth of ancient debates about truth, self, philosophy, freedom, community, and democracy and to connect them with contemporary conversations in critical epistemology.

Texts: 

- Plato. Complete Works (ed. John M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson, Hackett 1997).

- Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2 (ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton University Press 1984).

- Additional required and optional readings will be available for download through Canvas.

Particulars: Main requirements are: class preparation and participation, weekly written responses, a presentation, and a final paper.

PHIL 550 - Contemporary Philosophy Seminar
Marriott, T 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: 

The course explores some of the founding texts and contexts of ‘Black Hegelianism’. After considering works by Sartre, Fanon, Kojeve, et al, we will go on to explore how those texts have led to a new questioning of the meaning of “blackness” itself. In relation to which we will reconsider such questions as: “What is Blackness?” and “Why is the ‘is’ of Blackness always in question, or never simply present in its questioning?” It is in the context of such questions that we will then be able to ask: “What is blackness for Hegel? And why is it something that occurs by chance, as though from an encounter with something beyond the subject, something that is exorbitant and yet wholly gratuitous?”

All students are expected to make semi-formal presentations to the class, and to participate actively in discussion.

Texts: 

Bataille, The Bataille Reader (1997)
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (2008)
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (2005)
Hartman, Scenes of Seduction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1977)
Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
Marriott, Whither Fanon? (Stanford: SUP, 2018)
Wilderson, Red, White & Black (Durham: Duke, 2010)

A selection of texts on Electronic Reserve
A selection of texts not listed above will be added on the course’s Canvas site when appropriate.

Particulars: 

Final Paper: You are required to write a 12-15 pages final paper on a topic of your choice. Papers must be typed, double-spaced, in Times New Roman font, size 12, and 1” margins (Please, remember to include page numbers). All papers should include a title and your name. Your papers will be submitted electronically. They will also be returned to you electronically.

PHIL 574 - Epistemology Seminar
Sullivan/Lysaker, Th 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: The course will explore various conceptions of justification, touching upon authors working in various traditions such as analytic philosophy, critical theory, feminism, post-structuralism, and pragmatism. We also will look at what role, if any, conceptions of truth play in justification. In addition to exploring justification in the abstract, we will look at justificatory practices in more determinate settings such as artistic interpretation, case law, empirical inquiry, and moral discourse. 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 777 - Philosophy & Pedagogy
Huseyinzadegan, F 11:30AM-12:45 PM

Content: 

Texts: 

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PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Meritocracy
Stuhr, W 2:30PM-5:30 PM

Content: 

Texts: 

First, assigned readings will be drawn principally from the following books. Many of these books are available at no cost in electronic form via Emory’s Woodruff Library. Books that are not available in this way but are central course texts are available in the University Bookstore (as well as other physical and online outlets). These three books***—to purchase or otherwise obtain—are listed with ISBN numbers. Second, some additional readings, especially at the outset of the semester, are from canonical philosophical authors—e.g., Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Rousseau, Mill and Rawls— and will be provided at no cost either via the course Canvas site or through the Library. Finally, some of the readings toward the end of the course will be selected by seminar members and the expectation is that these texts will also be made available on Canvas.

Kenneth Arrow, et. al., Meritocracy and Economic Inequality
Michael Young: The Rise of the Meritocracy*** (978-1560007043)
Michael Sandel: The Tyranny of Merit*** (978-0374911010)
Robert Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of Meritocracy
Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap
Steven McNamee, The Meritocracy Myth
John Dewey, Freedom and Culture and The Public and Its Problems
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent
Deidre McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works
Thomas Piketty, The Economics of Inequality
Banerjee and Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times
Joseph Fishkin, Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity
Danielle Allen, Education and Equality*** (978-0226566344)
Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Danielle Allen, Difference without Domination
Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
Eddie Glaude, Begin Again

(The texts by Young, Sandel, and Frank will be especially crucial on the topic of merit and meritocracy; the texts by Dewey, Polanyi, Brown, and Glaude will be crucial on the topic of democracy; and the texts by Piketty, Allen, and Fishkin will have a central place in the discussion of equality)

Particulars: 

PHIL 789 -Topics in Philosophy: Violence and Vulnerability (Same as WGS 586R 1, ANT 585 7, CPLT 751 3)

Sheth, T 2:30PM-5:15 PM

Content: In this course, we will explore logics of violence and vulnerability in relation to race as the war underlying the polity, as Michel Foucault defines it. How does violence manifest itself institutionally? How does vulnerability become imposed through various logics and techniques: of law, of class, or race? Philosophers and sociologists have considered technology in its multiple dimensions: legal, political, social, and phenomenological, to name a few. Each epoch brings with it either new logistics by which technology functions for societal management. Power, violence, vulnerability can be inflicted and challenged through technologies, understood conceptually as instruments by which to accomplish certain ends. We will look beyond immediate/concrete forms of technology to understand their implicit foundations origins in sovereignty and order, and their purposes; for management, vulnerability, and resistance. 

Texts: Readings will include texts by Ida Wells, Chandan Reddy, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Elaine Scarry, and others.

Particulars: 

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Introduction to Derrida (Same as FREN 780 1, CPLT 751 4, ENG 789 3)
Bennington, Th 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: The class aims to come to a general understanding of some basic Derridean 'concepts' and an appreciation of what we might call some of the manners of deconstruction. Each session will concentrate on one or two texts, but the class as a whole will work cumulatively. Some further readings are suggested, but are not obligatory.

Texts: 

De la grammatologie: Editions de Minuit; ISBN : 2707300128

Of Grammatology: Johns Hopkins UP; ISBN: 0801858305

La voix et le phénomène: Presses Universitaires de France ; ISBN : 2130447023

Voice and Phenomenon: Northwestern UP; ISBN: 0810127652 

L’écriture et la difference: Seuil; (Points Essais) ; ISBN : 2020051826

Writing and Difference: University of Chicago Press; ISBN: 0226143295 

La dissémination: Seuil; (Points Essais); ISBN: 2020206234

Dissemination: University of Chicago Press; ISBN 0226143341

Marges de la philosophie: Editions de Minuit; ISBN : 2707300535

Margins of Philosophy : University of Chicago Press; ISBN: 0226143260

Limited Inc. :    Galilée ; ISBN 271860364 Northwestern UP ; ISBN 0810107880

Voyous: Galilée; ISBN 9782718606064

Rogues: Stanford UP; ISBN 0804749515

Particulars: 

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Plato and Platonic Tradition (Same as ICIVS 770 3, CPLT 752R 1)
Corrigan, 

Content: 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Lyotard's "Differends" (Same as FREN 780 2)
Nouvet, F 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: 

In The Differend, Jean-François Lyotard sets up a task for philosophical thought: to bear witness to the differend. But what is a “differend” and how does it signal itself? As we explore these questions, we will read some of Lyotard’s earlier writings in which a sensitivity to differends was already at work. We will then turn to his later writings and focus on:

 1) the differend  between what he calls the “affect-phrase” and articulation

 2) his reassessment of the postmodern condition in texts such as Postmodern Fables.

Texts: 

Texts may include:

Lyotard: The Differend (‎ University of Minnesota Press) (selections)

Postmodern Fables (‎ University of Minnesota Press) (selections)

Political Writings ‎ (University Of Minnesota Press) (selections)

“The Affect-phrase”

“Emma”

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (‎University Of Minnesota Press) (selections)

Particulars: The course will be taught in English. One final paper and one oral presentation.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Sacrifice and Gift (Same as RLR 700, CPLT 751, )
Robbins, M 1:00-4:00 

Content: In the tradition of the French sociology of religion of Durkheim, Mauss, and Hertz, the conceptual figures of sacrifice and gift have received remarkable immanent readings as “total social facts”. This course explores the pre-war sociological texts on sacrifice and gift with attention to their postwar French philosophical resonances in Bataille, Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy.

Texts: Readings may include Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Mauss, Sacrifice, Mauss The Gift, Derrida, Given Time, Bourdieu, "Structure and Genesis of the Religious Field," Nancy, "The Unsacrificeable."

Particulars: One class presentation and one 15-20 page paper due at end of term.

PHIL 541 - Topics in 20th Century Philosophy 
Karera, T 2:30PM-5:30 PM

Content: “The border” is a ubiquitous institution. Its global significance now determines the earth’s partition; it informs questions of belongingness and continues to renew ongoing attempts to control mobility.

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 571 - Political Philosophy Seminar: Logics of “The People” (Same as PSP 789)
McAfee, M 2:30PM-5:30 PM

Content: 

This graduate seminar will bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on contemporary political theories that are grappling with the current and often troubling phenomenon known as populism. At the heart of the debates is a question of whether the formation of a unified people is an achievement or a problem. To the extent that populism is an outgrowth of—or perhaps parasitic on—democracy where “we the people” are to rule ourselves, the problem of what “the people” means and how it is constructed (and what it abjects) is central to all democratic theory and practice. It’s a problem that shows up in debates about identity, about coalitional work, and about efforts that try to bypass governmental institutions and those that try to harness them. In other words, the problem is unavoidable. 

This seminar will draw on psychoanalysis to understand the deep anxieties that give rise to populisms’ we/they and friend/enemy distinctions. Where the discursive approach developed by Ernesto Laclau largely champions these distinctions and the left-wing populisms of Latin America that model them, many contemporary critical theorists are alarmed by their authoritarian tendencies. Laclau himself drew on Lacan to develop his concept of populist reason and he saw the need for a leader who could embody the will of the people; but he thought that so long as “the people” was constructed broadly and inclusively and represented by someone who spoke for them (or it), the result could be democratic. But this intuition has not been borne out. Other psychoanalytic approaches, beginning with Freud’s essay on group psychology and continuing through Kleinian and Lacanian theory, warn against investing so much in the ideal leader/ego ideal.

Texts: 

Carlos de la Torre, ed., Routledge Handbook of Global Populism. Routledge, 2019.

Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2007.

Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, 2017.

Jan-Werner Müller. What Is Populism? University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Jacques Rancière. Hatred of Democracy. Verso, 2006.

Nadia Urbinati. Me The People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. Harvard, 2019.

Readings by Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Bion, Fred Alford, Vamik Volkan, Chantal Mouffe, Andrew Arato, Jean Cohen, and others will be available electronically.

Particulars: Course Requirements: seminar attendance and participation; occasional presentations; final seminar paper.

PHIL 572 - Aesthetics Seminar: Reinventing Life 
Willett & Goodstein, W 2:30PM-5:30 PM

Content: In the Covid-19 pandemic, non-life called modern lives into question. In rendering “normal life” impossible, the pandemic focused attention on how lifestyles defined by consumption and oriented to individual success reinscribe social injustice and lead to mass death and planetary destruction. Yet the ultimate cultural impact remains highly uncertain, with the same developments that gave birth to BLM and hopes for more inclusive democratic processes provoking reactive waves of racist denial and authoritarian violence. This class aims to resist the call to go “back to normal” by examining a range of contemporary efforts to envision new forms of life and community. We will bring standup comedy, visual arts, music, theatre, and literature into conversation with diverse forms of political, cultural, and social theory and situate current strivings to create meaningful modern lives in longer cultural and historical trajectories. Topics may include humor, atmospheres and soundscapes of burnout and reconnection, artistic economies and avant-gardes, digitization and surveillance, megacities, and the new authoritarianism, as well as self-care and friendship, emotional catharsis, climate change and social justice, ideology and utopia, the future of the arts, and post-work society.

Texts: Hannah Gadsby, Bergson’s Laughter, Simon Critchley’s Humor, New Phenomenology on atmospheres of well-being, Jill Lepore and Kathi Weeks on the problem of work, Lydia Denworth’s Friendship, Richard Shusterman ‘s Thinking through the Body, van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, David George Haskell’s The Songs of Trees, David Pena-Guzman and Ellie Anderson’s podcast Overthink…

Particulars: Requirements: Term paper and seminar participation

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Foucault (Same as WGS 754, CPLT 751)
Huffer, W 6:00PM-9:00 PM

Content: The course aims to provide a solid foundation for assessing the many uses of Foucault, especially in contemporary queer and feminist theories. Members of the seminar will be encouraged to connect their readings in Foucault with their own intellectual projects. Note: Master and Undergraduate Students must obtain permission from Dr. Lynne Huffer prior to enrolling in this course. Please email Dr. Huffer at: lhuffer@emory.edu

Texts: 

Particulars

PHIL 789 - Topics in Modern Philosophy (Same as CPLT 750, ENG 789, WGS 730)
Bennington, TH 1:00PM-3:45PM, On-Line

Content: The course explores some of the ways in which an influential way of thinking about language has affected ways of thinking about literature. After investigating the main tenets of structuralist theory, as derived from Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, we shall go on to see how the internal logic of structuralism led to the rather different positions often referred to as `post-structuralism' and/or `post-modernism', and to a questioning of the position of theory itself.

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Modern Philosophy: On Debt 
Zambrana, TH 1:00PM-4:00 PM

Content: 

This seminar will explore the structure and strictures of debt as an economic, historical, social, political, and ecological relation. We will reflect on unpayable debt, debt cancellation, debt forgiveness, and the possibilities and limits of reparations/repair. We will also consider the relation between debt and colonialism, slavery, and capitalism (financialized, neoliberal). 

Texts: Readings will include work by Marx, Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, David Graeber, Maurizio Lazzarato, Saidiya Hartman, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, Verónica Gago and Luci Cavallero among others.

Particulars:

PHIL 525 - Topics in Modern Philosophy: Kant 
Huseyinzadegan, TH 1:00PM-3:55PM, On-Line

Content: This is a graduate seminar on Immanuel Kant’s works organized topically around the following concepts: space/time/geography/history; discursivity and categories; logic and dialectic; transcendental method; beauty and the sublime; good will and the categorical imperative; and race. We will be reading a wide sample of Kant’s writings on epistemology and metaphysics, ethics/morality, aesthetics, and politics, as well as key secondary texts on these writings. The course will accommodate different levels of interest and background in Kant’s work. Weekly seminar meetings will include: brief lecture, discussion, student presentation, and writing exercises. 

Texts: 

Particulars: 

PHIL 551 - Topics in Contemporary Philosophy: New Materialism, Speculative Realism, and the Black Anthropocene
Karera, M 1:00PM-3:55PM, On-Line<

Content: Contemporary philosophy has arguably undergone, in the last decade, another mutation. Aiming to defend a radical materialism and a proclaimed speculative realism, key actors in this shift claim to be less interested in conventional commentary on the history of philosophy and are readily inclined to re-open philosophical problems generally considered to have been settled by continental philosophers. What emerges is a philosophical reorientation informed by developments in the cognitive and the natural sciences. This orientation is understood to be both “realist” and “post-humanist”, in the sense that it conceives of matter as agentic and the world as independent from the human mind. And, it is at the center of these debates that the question of the Anthropocene is currently being philosophically adjudicated. This course will thus aim to survey and interrogate the prevailing ethos of new materialist ontology and speculative realism’s return to metaphysics, in order to assess what kind of philosophical, ethical, and political sensibilities the effects of climate change and the ongoing possibility of a “sixth extinction” have ushered in. Ultimately, the course is organized around the attempt to read Anthropocene discourses’ powerful – and perhaps even necessary – disavowal on matters pertaining to racial antagonisms and their ecological violence. Following (while assessing) claims and questions invoked by both traditions, we shall be guided by the falling questions: Can we indeed conceive of the nature of reality independently from thought and humanity? Is speculative realism a return to the dogmatism of pre-critical philosophies? Can we reconcile “speculation” with critique? If both the subject and thought are merely residual products of primary ontological movements, as Deleuze and Guattari suggested in the 70s and 80s, how are we to “speculate” on forms of subjectivity which remain “unthought” in the history of continental philosophy? Does the destruction of meaning and the nihilist welcoming of a chaotic homeless worldliness account for the beings who have never felt at home in the world? Is speculative realism’s new philosophy of relationality capable of accounting for those conditions in which the main relation is precisely “no relation”? Are there truly any structural/metaphysical invariants (like relationality)? Can speculative realism yield new ways of thinking and reading capitalism and racism?

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 558 - Pragmatism 
Stuhr, T 1:00PM-3:55PM, On-Line

Content: This graduate seminar examines critically the development, meaning, warrant, and influence and uses of pragmatism through a primary focus on the philosophies of Charles Peirce, William James, Jane Addams, and John Dewey. These philosophies include issues in philosophical method, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. Following this study, the seminar will turn to its secondary focus on some more recent thinkers in the pragmatic tradition or deeply influenced by it. These thinkers will span a wide range of issues and may include, for example, writers in analytical, phenomenological, critical theory, and feminist lineages: for example, Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, Cavell, Bergson, Deleuze, A. Locke, West, Glaude, Habermas, Bernstein, Longino, Seigfried, and Sullivan.

Objectives: This course has two principal goals. First, it seeks to provide students an in-depth and nuanced understanding of pragmatism, a map of the major lineages of influence on, and of, this philosophy, and a critical assessment of its philosophical strengths, weaknesses, and contemporary value. In doing this, it aims also to be resource for rethinking the history of philosophies of the present when those philosophies and their possibilities are conceived or imagined in terms of the categories of “analytical” and “continental” philosophy, “ideal” or “non-ideal” theory, and “critical” or “non-critical philosophy. Second, in the spirit of a pragmatic realization that any unity of theory and practice in practice alone is no real unity, it seeks to nurture and help produce informed and original scholarship aimed at, and appropriate for, professional journal publication and/or professional conference presentation.

Format: This course will function as a graduate seminar. Students are required to prepare for, (remotely) attend, and participate in all class meetings. Generally, each class meeting will include two components: 1)a presentation by the instructor, via an original paper distributed to the seminar in class, and discussion; 2) critical discussion facilitated by a brief (2-3pp.) student papers on issues raised by readings.

Texts: The main, required texts are the critical editions of the writings of Peirce, James, and Dewey, and selections from three key readings by Addams. All of this material will be available to students in electronic form. Additional readings, selected in part on the basis of student interest, also will be made available electronically. Students interested in additional readings should consult with the instructor. Students should have relevant e-texts accessible during class meetings.

Particulars: 

1)Preparation for, attendance at, and participation in all seminar meetings

2)Short critical papers drawing on assigned readings

3)A final paper of informed and original scholarship aimed at, and appropriate for, professional journal publication and/or professional conference presentation.

PHIL 789-1 - Topics in Philosophy: Feminist Theory (Same as WGS 751)
Sheth, T 1:00PM-3:55PM, On-Line

Content: Feminist thought has been articulated in many forms, from organized social activism to the oft-attempted, sometimes successful institutional reform of laws and practices, to the contestation of monolithic visions of feminism.  However, common to all of these is the need to think through and beyond institutions and structures.  The readings in this course will explore those fissures and fragmentations through various popular and lesser known texts. Selected texts will address questions of gender, race, sexuality, and agency, against the backdrop of culture, violence, religion, and the polity.

Texts: 

Particulars: 

PHIL 789-2 - Topics in Philosophy: The Politics of Emotion (Same as CPLT 751-R9)
Willett & Goodstein, W 4:00PM-7:00PM, On-Line

Content: 

Reimagining the politics of emotion could not be more urgent. A communication revolution has given birth to new forms of political agency, but also new authoritarian practices; in the midst of a pandemic, the largest-ever global movement for social justice coincides with a resurgence of racism and nativism, and conspiracy theories thrive, feeding widespread distrust of the media and scientific expertise. 

Like political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians, philosophers need to revise inherited models of human being and set aside overly rationalist models of explanation that have justified neglecting and demeaning the politics of passions and kept alive the fantasy of remaking politics itself in the name of reason. We will explore both how emotion matters in politics and how politics shape feeling and identity by reassessing the conceptual and representational foundations of political thought, drawing on music, art, literature and film to disclose new theoretical and practical possibilities. By exploring works and practices that explicitly or implicitly offer a more encompassing view of emotion’s mobilizing force, this seminar aspires to create a space for rethinking the place of feelings, moods, and atmospheres in collective life.

Texts: Caryl Churchill, Durkheim, Freud, Foucault, Kristeva, Massumi, Toni Morrison, José Carlos Mariátegui, David Graeber, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka, Daniel Stern and the “new phenomenologists”

Particulars: Grading: Class participation; weekly discussion questions and responses; one seminar paper of 12-17 pages

PHIL 789-4 - Topics in Philosophy: Sacrifice and Gift (Same as CPLT 751-R4)
Robbins, , On-Line

Content: In the tradition of the French sociology of religion of Durkheim, Mauss, and Hertz, the conceptual figures of sacrifice and gift have received remarkable immanent readings as "total social facts". This course explores the pre-war sociological texts on sacrifice and gift with attention to their postwar French philosophical resonances in Bataille, Levinas, Derrida and Nancy. Texts: Readings may include Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Mauss The Gift, Schrift, The Logic of the Gift, Weber, "Social Psychology of World Religions", Bourdieu, Logic of Practice and "Structure and Genesis of the Religious Field," Nancy, "The Unsacrificeable," and selections from Bataille, Derrida, Levinas.

Texts: 

Particulars: One class presentation and one 15-20 page paper due at end of term.

PHIL 789-6 - Topics in Philosophy:Mind, Brain & Image in Film & Fiction(Same as CPLT 751-R3)
Johnston, W 4:00PM-7:00PM, On-Line

Content: In this course we will explore some of the ways that neuroscience and the mind-brain split have figured in recent film, philosophy & prose fiction. We begin with a discussion of the cave drawings and paintings from the upper Paleolithic period (specifically in Chauvet Cave) & the claim that the human mind essentially begins with the creation of these images. (To spur discussion, we'll read a short selection from The Sapient Mind: Archaeology Meets Neuroscience.) We'll then jump to Bergson's theory of the image & brain in his book Matter and Memory, followed by excerpts from Gilles Deleuze's two cinema books, The Movement-Image & The Time-Image, where he argues that "the cinema: never stops tracing the circuits of the brain".

PHIL 500 - Ancient Philosophy Seminar: “Experience, Knowledge, Persuasion, and Power in Plato, Aristotle, and Beyond”
Jimenez, W 1:00PM-3:55PM, On-Line

Content: This course explores the ways in which epistemology and politics are inseparable for ancient Greek thinkers. The goal is to connect ancient debates about the relationship between experience, knowledge, persuasion, and power with some of the contemporary conversations about those topics in critical epistemology.

Texts: 

- Additional required readings will be available for download through the course website

Particulars:

PHIL 542 - Heidegger 1946-1976
Mitchell, T 6:00PM-8:55PM, On-Line

Content: This course is an introductory survey of Heidegger’s work from the post-war, second half of his career, loosely organized by decade, from 1946 to 1976. We begin at the end of the 1940s, with the programmatic “Letter on Humanism” (1946) and the centerpiece of his later thought, Insight Into That Which Is (1949), which introduces Heidegger’s thinking of the fourfold (Geviert), the thing, technology, and positionality (Gestell). For the 1950s, we focus on Heidegger’s views of poetic language, identity and difference, and releasement (Gelassenheit). In the 1960s, we take up the lecture “On Time and Being,” the famed Spiegel interview (posthumously published), selected sessions from his Zollikon seminars on existential psychoanalysis, his thoughts on sculpture, cybernetics, and the 1969 seminar in Le Thor, France on technology and replaceability. From the 1970s, we will consider the 1973 Zähringen seminar on phenomenology, and the 1973 text “Argument Against Requirements.” The course concludes with the Hölderlin passages Heidegger chose to be read at his funeral (1976).

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 551 - Topics in Contemporary Philosophy
Yancy, M 4:20PM-7:15PM, On-Line

Content: In this course, we will explore what race looks like from a phenomenological perspective.  Our aim is to do what has been termed a "critical phenomenology," where we both draw the limits of traditional phenomenology, and pull from the insights of phenomenology to explore such issues as race as lived, the spatial implications of race, and race as embodied.

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 570 - Ethics Seminar
Lysaker, Th 1:00PM-3:55PM, On-Line

Content: Trust and forgiveness are central to ethical life but difficult to theorize given each requires us to take steps outside established moral orders. Exploring them thus explores questions that dive to the depths of normative and meta-ethics. We will devote half the class to each phenomenon, drawing upon a wide range of texts, with a clear focus on multiple feminist texts (e.g. Baier, Govier, & Potter), which have been addressing each for the past thirty years. Other readings will include texts by Hegel, Derrida, a poem by Terrance Hayes, and still others to be determined. 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Philosophical Problems: Marx and Caribbean Marxisms (Same as HISP 740-1)
Zambrana, T 1:00PM-3:55PM, On-Line

Content: This course will serve as an introduction to Marx’s thought and its reception in the Caribbean. Readings will provide occasion to discuss the structure and contemporary relevance of basic concepts in Marx’s corpus such as alienation, capital, exploitation, originary accumulation, real and formal subsumption, class struggle, ideology, and emancipation. We will consider the reception history of these concepts in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora, exploring race/gender as the central technology in the development of and resistance to capitalism.   

Texts: We will read the work of CRL James, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, Eric Williams, Clive Thompson, Aimé Césaire, Claudia Jones, Luisa Capetillo, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, among others. 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Philosophical Problems: Blackness & Psychoanalysis (Same as WGS 585-2, CPLT 751R-7, ENG 789-5)
Warren, TH 4:20PM-7:20PM, On-Line

Content: Is blackness an irresistible fetish (caught within the matrix of perversion), the object of a destructive drive, or the inexhaustible (circular) movement of desire? How do our cultural fantasies teach us to desire blackness? Is anti-blackness an unconscious symptom, a corporeal letter written on the `body politic,' and are we resigned to `enjoy our symptom'? Does psychoanalysis offer blackness a powerful intramural hermeneutic or is it best left for the analytic session? This course will stage an encounter between blackness and psychoanalysis; ultimately considering how the encounter transforms/deforms both. We will grapple with the unconscious operations of blackness, the historical absence of blackness in psychoanalytic thought, and the usefulness of psychoanalytic reading practices for Black Studies. The course will rely heavily on Lacanian psychoanalysis (along with readings from Freud and Kristeva). 

Texts:  Readings will include theoretical texts by David Marriott, Hortense Spillers, Franz Fanon, Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks, Jared Sexton, Frank Wilderson, Slavoj Zizek, Bruce Fink, Tracy Mcnulty, Henry Krips, Adrian Johnson, Serge Leclaire, and Kaja Silverman, among others.   

Particulars: Please Note: this is not an introduction to theory. Prior knowledge of continental philosophy, theoretical humanities, and/or psychoanalysis is required for this

PHIL 789 - Philosophical Problems: Race, Class, and Injustice: Violence and Vulnerability (Same as WGS 586R)
Sheth, T 4:20PM-7:20PM, On-Line

Content: In this course, we will explore logics of violence and vulnerability in relation to race war, as Michel Foucault defines it. How does violence manifest itself institutionally? How does vulnerability become imposed through various logics and techniques: of law, of class, of race? Philosophers and sociologists have considered technology in its multiple dimensions: legal, political, social, and phenomenological, to name a few. Each epoch brings with it either new logics by which technology functions for societal management. Power, violence, vulnerability can be inflicted and challenged through technologies, understood conceptually as instruments by which to accomplish certain ends. We will look beyond immediate/concrete forms of technology to understand their implicit foundations origins in sovereignty and order, and their purposes; for management, vulnerability, and resistance. 

Texts: Readings may include Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Jasbir Puar, Ann Stoler, Judith Butler, as well as court cases and archival materials.   

Particulars:

PHIL 541 - Topics in 2oth Century Philosophy: Authenticity. The Sole Existentialist Virtue? Pro and Contra
Flynn, TH 1:00PM-4:00PM, Bowden 216

Content:

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Structures of Desire (Same as PSP 789-1)
McAfee, T 2:00PM-5:00PM, Bowden 216

Content: This seminar will take up structures of desire in works by and on Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, André Green, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Julia Kristeva. How do unconscious desires shape who we are? Are these desires our own or have they been deposited into us by the Big Other of our culture, history, and prior generations? Should they be embraced or expunged? Can they be transformed? Are we doomed to be forever wanting? To address these questions we will draw on psychoanalytic and phenomenological accounts of language, affect, and the unconscious in the formation of subjectivity.

Texts: 

Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality, The Unconscious, On Narcissism, Mourning and Melancholia

Jacques Lacan’s Desire and Its Interpretation, Seminar VI

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

André Green’s On Private Madness

Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society

Julia Kristeva’s Tales of Love, Black Sun, Powers of Horror

Supplementary readings by Nicolas Abraham, Drucilla Cornell, Shoshana Felman, Mari Ruti, Joel Whitebook, Maggie Nelson, Luce Irigaray, and possibly others, all TBD.

Particulars: Two presentations, Annotated bibliography of primary texts and current scholarship on final paper topic, Final paper (18-25 pages)

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Critical Whiteness Studies
Yancy, T 6:00PM-9:00PM, Bowden 216

Content: In this course, we will explore the structure of whiteness and specifically its meta-philosophical importance to our field. Some of the themes explored will be whiteness as the transcendental norm and its lived historicity, epistemic dimensions of whiteness (epistemology of ignorance and bad faith), whiteness as lived and embodied, which will involve thinking critically about whiteness from a critical phenomenological perspective. This raises issues regarding the racially lived space and time of whiteness and how whiteness positions/situates Black bodies and non-Black bodies of color. Critical whiteness studies within the context of philosophy is still very recent. Our project will be to better understand how whiteness is a binary structure and how best to interrogate its hegemony as both a conscious and unconscious project or historical, epistemic, institutional, and embodied normative process.   

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Decolonial Thought, Decolonial Feminisms
Zambrana, W 2:00PM-5:00PM, Bowden 216

Content: This seminar will examine key texts in Decolonial Thought and Decolonial Feminisms, specifically in the Latin American and Caribbean context. It will assess the move from the language of colonialism/decolonization to coloniality/decoloniality. We will consider race/gender/class hierarchies installed by the colonial project of capitalist modernity that continue to operate in altered material and historical conditions, that is, within contemporary colonial and post-colonial contexts. To these ends, the seminar will explore the coloniality of being, knowing, and sensing in the operation of race/gender. It will thus consider conceptions of the human, history, capital, and border.

Texts: Readings will include texts by Maria Lugones, Aníbal Quijano, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gladys Tzul Tzul, Sylvia Marcos, Leila González, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Ochy Curiel, Agustín Lao Montes, Walter Mignolo, Santiago Castro Gómez, Ramón Grosfoguel, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sayak Valencia, Achille Mbembe, Rita Segato, Verónica Gago.

Particulars: presentation, annotated bibliography on final paper topic, final research paper

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: An Aesthetic for Democracy (Same as CPLT 751-4)
Branham, M 2:00PM-5:00PM, 

Content: This course will investigate the many shifts in meaning and function comprehended by the term mimesis from the ancient to the contemporary world. As formulated by Aristotle in opposition to Plato, mimesis functioned as a way of defining the relationship of art to the world (e.g., representation, expression, simulation) that is at the same time a way of defining the human, as when Aristotle calls “man” the “most mimetic animal.” In the 20th century, with the advent of such media as film, gramophone, and typewriter suggesting new ways of modeling the mind, mimesis is repeatedly re-conceived, for example, as “the mimetic faculty” (Benjamin), as “mimetic desire” (Girard), as “economimesis” (Derrida), as “memetics” (Dawkins) or as the effect of “mirror neurons” (cognitive science); but each new conception requires a different form of discourse. Most importantly, language itself as the ultimate source of meaning in literature is subjected to new forms of analysis by the Russian Formalists and the Bakhtin Circle. In this seminar we will survey a selection of the most important conceptual shifts in the meaning of mimesis in both ancient and modern culture, beginning with a revisionist reading of Erich Auerbach's landmark study of the European canon: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Introduction to Derrida (Same as FREN 780-1)
Bennington, TH 1:00PM-4:00PM, 

Content: The class aims to come to a general understanding of some basic Derridean ‘concepts’ and an appreciation of what we might call some of the manners of deconstruction.  Each session will concentrate on one or two texts, but the class as a whole will work cumulatively.  Some further readings are suggested, but are not obligatory.

Texts: Texts to be studied will include: De la grammatologie (tr. Of Grammatology) ; La Voix et le phénomène (tr. Speech and Phenomena) ; L’écriture et la différence (tr. Writing and Difference) ; La dissémination (tr. Dissemination); Marges de la philosophie (tr. Margins of Philosophy); Limited Inc.; Voyous (tr. Rogues).

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Primal Scenes: Psychoanalysis & Literature (Same as FREN 775 1, CPLT 751 7, WGS 585 1, and PSP 789 2)
Marder, W 1:00PM-4:00PM, 

Content: In this course, we shall examine how the two fundamental insights of psychoanalysis (sexuality and the unconscious) put psychoanalysis into a primal relation to literature. Beginning with a close reading The Interpretation of Dreams, we will explore how Freud derives his model of the human psyche through dreams by appealing to literary language, literary figures, theatrical spaces and events as he explains the complex operations of the dream-work. Paying close attention to the privileged place that Freud accords to hysteria (and feminine sexuality) as the bedrock of the human psyche, we will look at how Freud's feminine figures both define and challenge the very conception of the human. Throughout the course, we will focus on Freudian conception of the `primal scene - as a way of examining how psychoanalytic theory challenges traditional conceptions of temporality, repetition, sexuality and desire, writing, mourning, cruelty, and the status of the historical event. 

Texts: Texts may include: Selections of major works by Freud (including: The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud); Case Histories); selected works by Lacan, Seminar VII on Antigone); Theban Plays (especially Antigone), Phèdre (Racine); Madame Bovary (Flaubert) Le Ravissment de Lol V. Stein (Duras); To the Lighthouse (Woolf); Marnie (dir. Alfred Hitchcock); Muriel (dir. Alain Resnais) Additional readings may include works by: Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, Hélène Cixous, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, André Green, Shoshana Felman, Sarah Kofman. This course will be taught in English. Texts originally written in French can be read either in French or in an English translation.)

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Kierkegaard and His Readers (Same as CPLT 751 3, RLR 700 5)
Robbins, W 10:00AM-1:00PM, 

Content: How do literary and religious texts pose questions within and to Continental philosophy? In this seminar, we will consider Soren Kierkegaard's phenomenology of mood, his hybrid genre of writing, and the distinctive way in which he deploys biblical texts, such as "the binding of Isaac" (Gn. 22) and the Book of Job, in developing his philosophy of existence. The "trembling" to which the narrator of Fear and Trembling refers is experienced not only by the biblical Abraham, who is in a religious relation to the absolute, and whose orders from God are sealed in secrecy, but also by Kierkegaard's narrator, himself brought to the point of inexpressibility in the face of Abraham's ordeal. In Repetition, the fictional protagonist offers an intensely personal reading of the Book of Job. The book's formulation of the problem of theodicy, the theological justification of suffering, and the example of Job's legendary patience, provide the protagonist with a means of making sense of his broken engagement. The disenchanted and ironic voice of Qoheleth may be heard in Either/Or's first-person description of aesthetic existence and Judge William's ethical diagnosis of it. A sermon appended to William's letters by an unnamed pastor friend supplements Either/Or's account. | We will attend to influential readings of Kierkegaard by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Sylviane Agacinski, and others.| 

Texts: Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton); Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton); Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton); The Wisdom Books, trans. Robert Alter (Schocken); E. A. Speiser, ed. Genesis (Anchor) and Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Ree and Chamberlain (Blackwell).

Particulars: Requirements: one term paper (15-20pp.) and one in-class presentation. 

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Platonism, Neoplatonism (Same as ICIVS 770 3, CPLT 752R 1, RLR 700 8)
Corrigan, T 10:00AM-1:00PM, 

Content:

This course will start with Plato—especially the Symposium—and then, together with frequent retrospectives upon Aristotle, and some later figures such as Alcinous—focus primarily upon reading some of Plotinus’ most influential works: On beauty; on the One and the Good; on the Soul—an early work and then three major works on the Soul; on nature, contemplation, Intellect and intellectual beauty; two later works on providence; two of Plotinus’ greatest works—on the demiurge and the Good and on freedom; a later work on the knowing hypostases; and if we have time, an ethical work on happiness that also features on the intentionality/non-intentionality problem.

Texts: 

Henry and H-R. Schwyzer, Plotini Opera, editio major, 3 vols. (Brussels, Paris, and Leiden, 1951-1973, followed by the appearance of the editio minor, 3 vols. (Oxford. 1964-1983).

We shall use the revised version of the editio minor text published with English translation by A. H. Armstrong, Plotinus, 7 vols. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1966-1988)—copies in class.

Note also:

A German edition with complete translation and notes by R. Harder, revised and with commentary supplied for treatises 22-54 by W. Theiler and R. Beutler (indices together with G. J. P. O’ Daly) (Plotins Schriften, Hamburg, 1956-1971)[see also Werner Beierwaltes, Plotin: Geist – Ideen –Freiheit, introduction and commentary, text, translation of Harder, Theiler, Beutler, (Meiner: Hamburg, 1990)]

An Italian translation by V. Cilento (Plotino: Enneadi, Bari, 1947-1949);

The complete translation of the Enneads into Spanish by Jésus Igal (Porfirio, Vida de Plotino – Plotino, Enéadas I-II, Madrid 1982; Plotino, Enéadas III-IV, Madrid 1985; Plotino, Enéadas V-VI, Madrid, 1998), with the introductions and commentary of the third volume separately completed after the death of Igal.

Brisson, Luc, Pradeau, Jean-François. Plotin Ennéades, Traités 1-6, 7-21, 22-26, 27-29, 30-37, 38-41, 42-44, 45-50, 51-54, Paris, GF, 2003-2010.

In Dutch, Rein Ferwerda (no Greek text) Enneaden. Over het leven van Plotinus en de indeling van zijn traktaten, Amsterdam, 1984.

The first part of Paul Galligas’ Modern Greek translation, initiated in 1994 in Athens, emerged in a new English edition in 2014 (The Enneads of Plotinus: A Commentary, Volume 1, Elizabeth Key Fowden and Nicolas Pilavachi (trs.), Princeton University Press)

Plotinus: The Enneads – May 16, 2019, Ed. Lloyd P. Gerson, Cambridge University Press. 

See also titles with commentary from Parmenides Press.

John M. DILLON and H. J. BLUMENTHAL, PLOTINUS Ennead IV.3–4.29:
Problems Concerning the Soul, Translation, with an Introduction, and Commentary

Gary M. GURTLER, SJ, PLOTINUS Ennead IV.4.30–45 & IV.5
(Ennead IV.1.1–2 & IV.2 in Appendix):
Problems Concerning the Soul, Translation, with an Introduction, and Commentary

Kevin CORRIGAN-John D. TURNER, PLOTINUS Ennead VI.8:
On the Voluntary and on the Free Will of the One, Translation, with an Introduction, and Commentary.

See also for reference:

1. Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism, Purdue University Press, 2004 [ISBN 1-55753-234-6]

John Dillon and Lloyd P. Gerson, Neoplatonic Philosophy. Introductory Readings, Hackett Publishing, 2004 [ISBN 0-87220-707-2].

1. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism, Hackett Publishing, 1995 [ISBN: 0-87220-287-9]

The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism, eds., Pauliina Remes and Svetlana Slaveva-Griffin, London-New York, 2014.

287. Corrigan, “Plotinus and Modern Scholarship: From Ficino to the Twenty First Century,” Plotinus’ Legacy, edited by Stephen Gersh, Cambridge, 2019, 257-287.

Particulars:

Class participation (40%): A seminar format is only productive if all members actively participate in group discussion. To this end, it is crucial that you not only read but think about the assigned material in advance of our sessions and that you come to class prepared to exchange ideas. Active participation includes not only the voicing of your ideas but careful listening—respectful attention and thoughtful responses to the comments of others.

Class participation includes three presentations. Twice during the semester you will be responsible for leading a portion of the discussion concerning an assigned reading. In your presentation, provide a concise summary of the argument of the essay(s) or chapter(s) under review (10 minutes, maximum), then guide the discussion based on a set of 3-4 questions that you have prepared in advance. Please circulate a copy of your discussion questions to the rest of the class via email. on the day before your scheduled presentation. In addition to the two reading discussions, everyone will make a formal presentation (15-20 minutes) based on the seminar project during our last class meeting.

Seminar Paper (60%): Seminar papers can focus on any topic as long as this engages some of the readings and concepts we have discussed in the course. Preliminary paper proposals of approximately 500 words are due in class in Week 8, March 6. These should include a brief analysis of a passage from one of the sources you are planning to use in your paper. During the course of the following two weeks, I will have a conversation with each of you about your proposal. A revised and expanded version of the proposal (approx. 7 pages) is due in week 11, April 3. These should provide a succinct summary of your topic, identify the full range of sources on which you are drawing, and outline the argument you are developing. The expanded proposals will then serve as the basis for your project presentation in our final class. Completed papers are to be 4,000-5,000 words in length and are due on April 27, four days after the final class. Your seminar paper should be a polished, professional piece of writing; please start on the project early enough to refine your argument and your prose.   For the final project, I do not require a massive secondary bibliography.  I prefer, always given the particular focus of your work, first, substantial engagement with primary texts or sources, and second, a substantial but necessarily limited familiarity with 3 to 8 secondary sources.  This is not intended to limit your creativity.  If your topic involves a more extensive bibliography, this is fine.  All I want is to ensure that we deal significantly with primary sources.

PHIL 599 - Thesis Research

PHIL 797 - Directed Study

PHIL 799 - Dissertation Research

GRAD 700 - Public Humanities - Reiss and Stolley
T 4:00PM-7:00PM

Content: 

What can humanities do in the world? Public humanities engages debates about the relation of humanistic inquiry to communal engagement and stimulates active, collaborative, research of broad public interest.

At the center of this course will be projects developed in collaboration with community partners in a wide range of fields (theater, archival exhibitions, community advocacy, and business & society) inside and outside the university. These projects engage students with their community partners through socially-meaningful scholarship.  In this course, students will:

• address ethical questions surrounding the role of humanistic inquiry in contemporary society;
• find connections between their disciplinary training and socially valuable applications;
• learn to advocate for humanities research and teaching in the public sphere;
• discover how their own disciplinary expectations concerning research correspond to those of other disciplines and social institutions;
• build camaraderie and intellectual networks;
• enrich Emory’s connections to Atlanta and to other area colleges and universities.

Before the course begins, students will state a preference for work on a particular project; students will ideally be assigned to a research group based on these preferences. The first weeks of the course will feature common readings on the public humanities. Subsequent seminar sessions will include opportunities for students to work on their projects during class time and to reflect on how this public-facing work relates to their own disciplinary training.  Future iterations of the seminar will be taught by faculty members from different humanities fields; each seminar will sponsor three to four projects per semester, varied in organizational type and topical focus. Each project will cultivate a set of skills applicable in a wide range of professional settings

For project descriptions and for permission to enroll, please contact Professors Reiss (breiss@emory.edu) and Stolley (kstolle@emory.edu).

PHIL 501R - Topics in Ancient Philosophy: Political Emotions in Ancient Greek Thought
Jimenez, We 1:00PM - 4:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Content: In this course we will study different views on political emotions in ancient Greek thought, with special attention to the role of love, hate, fear, confidence, anger, greed, shame, and pride in the political works of Plato and Aristotle.

The main texts will include not only the explicit discussions of these topics in Plato’s Republic and Laws, and in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Nicomachean Ethics,Eudemian Ethics and Politics, but also sections of Plato’s Gorgias, Protagoras, Symposium, and Statesman, and of Aristotle’s biological works. We will also read some selections from texts by other relevant ancient Greek authors such as Antiphon, Thucydides, Democritus, and Isocrates.

To help with our analysis we will draw upon contemporary discussions of political emotions in ancient thought. Scholars to be canvassed will include Danielle Allen, Julia Annas, Hanna Arendt, Ryan Ballot, Agnes Callard, Myisha Cherry, John Cooper, Corinne Gardner, Jon Elster, Michel Foucault, Jill Frank, Zena Hitz, Kazutaka Inamura, Rachana Kamtekar, Richard Kraut, Celine Leboeuf, Mitzi Lee, Mariska Leunissen, Audre Lorde, Martha Nussbaum, Josiah Ober, Rachel Singpurwalla, Adriel Trott, Jennifer Whiting, Josh Willburn, and Bernard Williams.

Texts: 

• Plato. Complete Works (ed. John M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson, Hackett 1997).
• Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 2 (ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton University Press 1984).
• Additional required readings will be available for download through the course website.

Particulars:

PHIL 541R - Topics in 20th Century Philosophy: Heidegger 1927-45
Mitchell, Tu 1:00PM - 4:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Content: This course is an introductory survey of Heidegger’s work from roughly the first half of his career, from Being and Time to the close of World War II. The course begins with Being and Time (1927) and other texts from the period of “fundamental ontology,” i.e., the lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929), his reflections on the difference between the animal and Dasein, 1929–30, and the essay “On the Essence of Truth” (1930). A second portion of the course then addresses Heidegger’s embrace of National Socialism in the lectures and speeches from his time as rector of the university (1933–34). We then turn to the works of his prolific middle period, with selections from Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38) and the Black Notebooks (1937–39), as well as the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The course concludes with works from the war years, the essays and lectures on Hölderlin and Nietzsche, as well as his explicit reflections on the war, “Evening Conversation in a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia” (1945). A second part of the course, Heidegger 1945–73, is planned for the future. 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 556R - Topics in Phenomenology
Susan Bredlau, Tu 6:00PM-9:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Content: 

Phenomenological philosophers argue that our understanding of ourselves and our world must be grounded in the careful description of our experience. This course will be centered around our close reading of the Introduction and Part One of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Topics to be discussed include: the phenomenological method, the intentional structure of perception, the embodied character of perception and the interpersonal character of perception.

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 700 - Research Methods, Teaching, Philosophy & Professional Development
Mitchell, Th 11:30AM - 12:45PM, Bowden Hall 216

Content: 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 777 - Philosophy And Pedagogy
Jimenez, Tu 11:00AM - 12:15PM, Room Bowden Hall 216

Content: 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Freud for the Liberal Arts (Same as PSP 789-1)
Paul, T 1:00PM-4:00PM, New Psych Building 225

Content: Freud created the theory and technique of psychoanalysis on the basis of his clinical treatment of the so-called “transference neuroses”, that is, hysteria, phobia, and obsessional neurosis.  It was not long, however, before this highly educated and well-read man turned his psychoanalytic gaze onto a wide range of human phenomena besides the neuroses.  Among the topics to which he turned his attention were such fields as art, literature, religion, anthropology, social critique, biography, everyday life, jokes, humor, creativity, and many more.   Rather than dealing with Freud’s well-known writings on clinical topics, his case studies, or is essays on aspects of psychology more generally, this course will instead focus on reading (some of) the very extensive and varied corpus of Freud’s contributions to what used to be called “applied psychoanalysis” but which may more accurately be described as “psychoanalysis and the liberal arts”.

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Black Feminist Poethics & Critical Imagination (Same as WGS 585 2, CPLT 751 6)
Warren, M 4:30PM-6:30PM, Candler Libary 125

Content: Can we imagine black existence without reason, the transparent subject, formalized schemes of knowledge, and being? What is the destructive and reconstructive potential of blackness—as contaminant, plenum, and para-ontology? Must blackness destroy mathematical formalism or perfect its operations to address the “mathematics of the unliving”? What is the function of (un)gendering in shattering time/space, displacing life/death, and reshaping scientific inquiry? How might black artistic production help us decolonize thought and confront epistemic warfare? Black Feminist Poethetics address these difficult inquiries with analytic rigor, capacious imagination, and eclectic methodologies. The seminar foregrounds black feminist poethetics’ contribution to black study and recent developments in continental philosophy. Black art, poetry, literature, and music will guide our exploration into the complexity, exorbitance, and joy of this field.

Texts: The seminar engages work from Denise Ferreira da Silva, Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Amber Musser, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Nahum Chandler, David Marriott, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, among others.

Particulars: Please note: this is not an introduction to theory. Prior knowledge of theory and/or philosophy is required.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: The Problem of Life & The Philosophy of Life (Same as ENG 789 7, PCPLT 751 5)
Goodstein, T 1:00PM-4:00PM, Candler Library 212

Content: Philosophical inquiries into the meaning of life are nothing new. But in modernity the category of life became a problem in new ways, and in the interim, the technoscientific developments that have transformed everyday life have altered our relations to life itself. In an era of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, questions about life center less on its definition, interpretation, and proper conduct than on its malleability, manipulability, reproducibility, and indeed technological producibility. This course will inquire into the philosophical but also historical and cultural significance of this transformation in the meaning of life in the Anthropocene through a genealogy that begins with Aristotle’s epoch-making de Anima. Our principal focus will be the so-called “philosophies of life” that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the question of their proximity to and distance from contemporary modes of thinking life. We will also consider philosophical, historical, and cultural readings of both the problem of life and the philosophy of life.

Texts: Reading may include Adorno, Agamben, Arendt, Bachelard, Bergson, Canguilhem, Dilthey, Esposito, Foucault, Freud, Hayles, Heidegger, James, Klages, Lukacs, Nietzsche, Plessner, Rose, Simmel, and Thacker

Particulars: Presentations and substantial original paper.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Foucault (WGS 585 3, CPLT 751 8)
Huffer, T 2:00PM-5:00PM, Candler Library 125

Content: 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Post Colonial Caribbean Thought (Same as CPLT 751)
Meighoo, W 1:00PM-4:00PM

Content: Given the complicated history of colonialism in the Caribbean, it seems a rather futile attempt to identify a “postcolonial Caribbean” as such.  Some Caribbean nations have been “postcolonial” for a century or two, others have been postcolonial for a few decades, and some territories have never been postcolonial at all.  In this graduate seminar, we will focus on Caribbean thought from the closing decades of the twentieth century to the present.  Considering the significant intellectual contributions to postcolonial theory by various Caribbean thinkers, we will address the question of whether the Caribbean itself might be approached as a postcolonial, postmodern, or even “postcreole” cultural space.

Texts: 

• Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E. Maraniss, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), ISBN 9780822318651
• Coco Fusco, English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1995), ISBN 9781565842458
• Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), ISBN 9780472066292
• Richard D.E. Burton, Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), ISBN 9780801483257
• Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the “Vulgar” Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), ISBN 9780822315957
• David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), ISBN 9780822334446

Particulars: 

• Four (4) response papers (3-4 pp. each, 40% total)
• Long essay (15-20 pp., 40%)
• Attendance and participation (20%)

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy: Augustine, Descartes, Wittgenstein on the First Person "I" (Same as HC 652-1)
Pacini, M 2:00PM-5:00PM, RARB 447

Content: 

Texts: 

Particulars:

PHIL 540R - 20^th Century Philosophy Seminar
John Stuhr, Mo 6:15pm-9:15pm

Deleuze:  Difference, Sense, Politics

This seminar is an in-depth study of the ontological, epistemological, and political thought of Gilles Deleuze.  

A) Some course readings will be drawn from Deleuze’s work on thinkers such as Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Proust, and Foucault as well as some of Deleuze’s other writings (e.g. What is Philosophy? (Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991)) and interviews.  B) However, the focus and great majority of seminar energy and time will be on two crucial works:  Difference and Repetition (Différence et répétition, 1968) and The Logic of Sense (Logique du sens, 1969).  C) In addition, some attention will be paid to the ways in which these two volumes both inform, and are illuminated by, Deleuze’s collaborations with Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 1. L'Anti-Œdipe, 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille Plateaux, 1980).  

Requirements include seminar participation and a short analytical and short critical paper for seminar discussion.  The principal course requirement is a final paper (aimed at journal submission and publication) on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor.

PHIL 540R - 20^th Century Philosophy Seminar
Thomas Flynn,Tu 2:00PM-5:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

The Dialectic and Four French Philosophers: Sartre adn Merleau-Ponty pro, Deleuze and Foucault con. 

Amoung other issues to be discussed is the comparative advantage and disadvantage of emphasis on time versus space in pursuit of philophical reflection.

Might the resolution be synthesis or the bifocal?

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy
Ralph Buchenhorst, Tu 6:00PM-9:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Trans-Modernity: Recent Latin American Social Philosophy and Cultural Criticism in the Wake of De-Colonization

Course description:

During colonization and in its aftermath, concepts and institutions that belong to the mindset of European modernity have been transferred to many non-European regions. While the colonizers considered these concept as being universal, a growing intellectual movement in Africa, India, Latin America and the Caribbean, among other regions, criticized them as representing Europe's will to hegemony. From the 1970's on, Latin American authors like Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, Hector Garcia Canclini, Eduardo Mendieta and Enrique Dussel cooperate in a critique of modernity from outside the mechanisms of European models of progress and enlightenment, a critique that has received growing attention in the US and Europe. The fact that circulating ideas and models which originated at some point from the West later return to the West in a translated and politicized form (coining the motto “writing back to the center”) thus has to be understood as an attempt to improve our understanding of central ethical and epistemological concepts in the context of globalization. The course will present the before mentioned authors and those of their texts that specifically deal with a reconceptualization of modernity from a de-colonial perspective. To appropriately achieve this goal, it preliminarily introduces and discusses the philosophical and sociological concept of modernity in a broader sense. Modernity as a sociological/philosophical concept will be the guiding focus throughout the course. Participants do not necessarily need a prior understanding of the discourse of de-colonization. We will introduce the topic by reading the basic texts that established the critical debate on modernity, subsequently attempting to discuss alternative concepts like coloniality, trans-modernity, de-growth and buen vivir.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy (Same as CPLT 751, ENG 789)
Cynthia Willett and Elizabeth Goodstein, Th 1:00PM-4:00PM, Callaway C201

Tragedy

This course seeks possible new beginnings in the tragic tradition in a world recognizing the limits of the Anthropocene. We will approach these questions by reading literature in conversation with philosophy and contemporary critical theory, starting with Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides, then exploring philosophical interpretations of tragedy (including Schiller, Hegel, and Nietzsche) before moving on to more contemporary issues. We will pay special attention to the tragic emotions and their continuing (and evolving) relevance in an age that has declared classic tragedy dead and to the emergence of unheard voices from tragedy’s origins in the choir, music and the Dionysian. Among topics: grieving, haunted landscapes and epigenetics, and possibilities for rethinking hubris and catharsis in the contemporary.

Readings may include:

Aristotle Poetics,

Beckett, Endgame

Euripides, Bacchae

Ibsen, Enemy of the People

Langer, Philosophy in a New Key

Lear, Radical Hope

Morrison, Beloved

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Sophocles, Oedipus and Antigone.

Essays by Adorno, Angela Davis, Freud, Hume, Schiller, Simmel, Kyle Whyte

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy (Same as WGSS 730)
Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Mon 2:00PM-5:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Feminisms of Color: Context, History, Politics

In this course we will conduct an introduction to and a survey of feminisms of color, paying special attention to the issues of context, history, and politics, and how feminist ideas circulate around the globe. Some philosophical guiding threads that we will consider are: Black feminisms, intersectionality and its global reach, coloniality of gender, “third world” feminisms, culture and cultural practices in U.S. and non-U.S. contexts, racialization of trans identities, gender and the prison industrial complex, and decolonial feminisms.

Texts:

(Other texts will be added based on participants’ interests)

• Alexander, Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred.
• Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
• Davis, Angela. Women, Race, and Class
• hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
• Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
• By Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge
• Khader, Serene. Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic
• Lorde, Audre. Sister, Outsider: Essays and Speeches
• Lugones, María, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions
• Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
• Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism
• Oyėwùmí, Oyèrónké, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses
• Snorton, Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
• Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy (Same as CPLT 751-2, RLR 700)
Jill Robbins, Wed 1:00-4:00PM

Content: In the tradition of the French sociology of religion of Durkheim, Mauss, and Hertz, the conceptual figures of sacrifice and gift have received remarkable immanent readings as “total social facts”. This course explores the pre-war sociological texts on sacrifice and gift with attention to their postwar French philosophical resonances in Bataille, Levinas, Derrida and Nancy.
Texts: Readings may include Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Mauss The Gift, Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Weber, Sociology of Religion, Bourdieu, "Structure and Genesis of the Religious Field," Nancy, "The Unsacrificeable," and selections from Bataille, Derrida, Levinas.
Particulars: One class presentation and one 15-20 page paper due at end of term.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy (Same as CPLT 751-3)
Srabanti Bhaumik, Wed 4:00-7:00PM

Theories of Democracy

Democracy has been at the center of both the branches of political philosophy and aesthetics as well as critical theory. The question our course will investigate is how the ideal of kratos (“power”) by the demos (“people”) shifts through various writings. What writings inform and extend our understanding of democracy as an ideal?

This course is divided into two sections. First, we will trace some established elements of democracy in classical philosophy and then learn of its translation into theories of the social contract. Some readings include selections from Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, the Declaration of Independence, John Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Hobbes, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The second portion of the course will consider how theories of democracy intersect with literature, contemporary critiques of neoliberalism, dispossession, racialized exclusion, migration, decolonization, and critical theory.

Students will be encouraged to think about how critical theories of democracy impact their own research specializations. For instance, writings on democracy become central in the nineteenth-century for Herman Melville and Walt Whitman; postcolonial intellectuals and writers also return to the theme of democracy; Latin American writers during twentieth-century dictatorships explicate the significance of losing rights; critical theorists now return to the topic frequently in essays and debates. You will be able to pursue research in your areas of interest, while drawing upon larger conceptual themes.

Finally, we will read what critical theorists are stating about democracy. Supplementary readings will include writings by Wendy Brown, Melvin Rogers, Angela Davis, Elizabeth Povinelli, Fred Lee, and Bonnie Honig.

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy (Same as ICIVS 770-2)
Kevin Corrigan, Tues 10:00AM-12:45PM

This course will chart out a path from the study of Plato and Aristotle through the birth of Neoplatonism—with Plotinus [I shall also indicate the Christian dimension of this]—and the later Neoplatonic tradition both pagan and Christian, culminating in what I take to be some final logical developments of that tradition in the thought of Nicholas of Cusa.

1. Introduction
2. Heraclitus, Parmenides
3. Socrates, Plato: Apology, Crito, Phaedo
4. Plato: Symposium, Phaedrus
5. Aristotle: Metaphysics
6. Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics
7. From Middle Platonism [Alcinous, Handbook of Platonism] to Neoplatonism: Plotinus and Porphyry [Origen]
8. Plotinus: Enneads 1 6 [1]; VI 9 [9]
9. Understanding and discursive thought: Enneads III 8 [30]; V 8 [31]; V 5 [32]
10. Creation/production; soul-body: VI 7 [38]; IV 7 [7] 8⁵
11. Porphyry: Sententiae, etc. Iamblichus, De Mysteriis
12. Gregory of Nyssa: De hominis opificio
13. Proclus: Elements of Theology, Liber de Causis
14. Dionysius: Divine Names
15. Nicholas of Cusa: De Docta Ignorantia, De Apice Mentis

Plato: Complete Works

by Plato and John M. Cooper, Hackett, 1997.

Course Booklet

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy (Same as FREN 775-1, PSP 789)
Elissa Marder, Tues 1:00PM-4:00PM

Revolutionary Perversions: Literature, Sexuality, Anachrony

In this course, we shall examine how representations of “non-normative” sexuality in several major nineteenth-century works relate to the problem of representing history in the aftermath of the French revolution.  Many of the most famous canonical literary texts written in French prior to 1871 include references to impotence, lesbianism, hysteria, cross dressing, bestiality, masturbation and prostitution in the context of narratives that re-write or un-write the legacy of the French revolution. By focusing on the literary treatment of these ‘perverse’ forms of sexuality, we shall attempt to see how they encourage us to think differently about questions of historical transmission, language, gender, and sovereignty. Possible texts include: La Philosophie dans le boudoir (Sade), René (Chateaubriand), Ourika, Mme de Duras, Armance (Stendhal), Le Père Goriot and La Fille aux yeux d’or (Balzac), L’Education sentimentale (Flaubert), “Le Secret de l’Echafaud” (Villiers de L’Isle-Adam), and selections from Baudelaire’s prose poems. Critical readings may include works by Freud, Marx, Benjamin, Blanchot, Daniel Arasse, Derrida, and others. 

PHIL 531R - Topics in 19^th Century Philosophy
Andrew Mitchell, Mo 2:00PM-5:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Fichte and Romantic Literature

This course examines the influence of the philosopher J.G. Fichte (1762–1814) on the literature of German Romanticism. We will read one of Fichte’s key statements of his philosophy, The Vocation of Man (1800), as well as his ruminations on aesthetics, before turning to the philosophical and literary work of his contemporaries: Novalis (1772–1801), Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), and Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806). For each of these authors we will read their own commentaries on Fichte before turning to their literary works. For Novalis, we will read selections from his extensive Fichte Studies and his novel Henry von Ofterdingen; for Schelgel, we will read his fragments on Fichte, his lectures on transcendental philosophy, and his novel Lucinde; for Günderrode, we will read her notes on Fichte’s Vocation as well as her plays “Magic and Destiny” and “Muhammad, the Prophet of Mecca.” In each case, our aim will be to see how Fichte’s thought is received both philosophically and literarily. Themese to be considered thus include self-reflection, performativity, the absolute, determinacy, and vocation, among others.

1. READINGS

Johann Fichte, The Science of Knowledge [1794], ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1982), 89–119. PDF.

________. “On the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy” [1794], trans. Elizabeth Rubenstein, in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism, ed. David Simpson (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1984), 74–93. PDF.

________. The Vocation of Man [1800], trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

Novalis, Fichte Studies [1795–96], ed. and trans. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2003).

________. Henry von Ofterdingen [1800], trans. Palmer Hilty (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 1990).

Friedrich Schlegel, Selected Fragments on Fichte [1798–1800], from Lucinde and the Fragments, ed. and trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1971).

________. “Introduction to the Transcendental Philosophy” [1800], in Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, ed. and trans. Jochen Schulte-Sasse et. al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 240–67. PDF

________. “Philosophical Lectures: Transcendental Philosophy” [1800], in The Early Political Writings of the German Romantics, ed. and trans. Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 143–58. PDF

________. Lucinde [1798], in Lucinde and the Fragments, ed. and trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1971), 42–140.

Karoline von Günderrode, “Selected Studies: Fichte, The Vocation of Man” [~1803], trans. Anna Ezekiel. PDF.

________. Muhammad, Prophet of Mecca [1804], in Poetic Fragments, ed. and trans. Anna Ezekiel (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016), 121–299.

________. Magic and Destiny [1805], trans. Anna Ezekiel. PDF. 

1. DETAILS

Attendance & Participation 10%

3 Short Write Ups (2 pages) 15%

In Class Presentation 25%

Final Paper (20 pages) 50%

PHIL 540R - Topics in 20^th Century Philosophy Seminar
Noelle McAfee, Tu 2:00PM-5:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

This graduate seminar will explore non-instrumental theories of the political, which take as their starting point the generative power of speech and action. Our primary focus will be the works of Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Iris Young. In the course of understanding their theories, we will draw on many who who engage or complement their ideas. The themes of the seminar are the project of political theory, the political, the public sphere, power, speech, communication and judgment.

In approaching the material at each seminar meeting, we will aim to proceed in this order: 1) understanding the context, 2) understanding the text, 3) taking up criticisms, and 4) considering new approaches and trajectories.

Course Requirements: Attendance and participation in all class meetings (25%). Exceptions granted only on a case by case basis. Come to class having read all the material and prepared to contribute to class discussion. Final seminar paper of about 5,000 words, including footnotes (75%).

Texts: Readings will be available electronically, though it could be very helpful to order Arendt’s The Human Condition, as well as her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Habermas’s Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action and also his Between Facts and Norms.

PHIL 556R - Topics in Phenomenology
Susan Bredlau, Tu 6:00PM-9:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Phenomenological philosophers argue that our understanding of ourselves and our world must be grounded in the careful description of our experience. This course will be centered around our close reading of selections from Husserl’s Ideas I and Part Two of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Topics to be discussed include: the phenomenological method, the intentional structure of perception, the embodied character of perception and the interpersonal character of perception.

PHIL 558R - Topics in Pragmatism
Michael Sullivan, Th 1:00PM-4:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

PHIL 599R - Thesis Research
Andrew Mitchell

PHIL 700 - Research Methods, Teaching, Philosophy & Professional Development
John Lysaker, Th 11:00AM - 12:15PM, Bowden Hall 216

PHIL 777 - Philosophy And Pedagogy
Andrew Mitchell, Th 11:30AM - 12:45PM, Room Bowden Hall 216

PHIL 789 - Topics in Philosophy
George Yancy, We 6:00pm-9:00PM, Bowden Hall 216

Identity and Race through African American Literature

Within this course, we will explore the intersections of identity, race, and Black-being-in-the-world through a close reading of conceptually complex and rich narrative literary texts (books, essays, autobiographies). Hence, we will explore selected works by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, and others. 

PHIL 797R- Directed Study
Andrew Mitchell