This course will begin with a description of the motion of particles and introduce Newton’s dynamical laws and a number of important force laws. We will apply these laws to a wide range of problems to gain a better understanding of the laws and to demonstrate the generality of the framework. The important concepts of work, mechanical energy, and linear and angular momentum will be introduced and the unifying idea of conservation laws will be discussed. Additional topics may include, the study of mechanical waves, fluid mechanics and rotational dynamics.

The senior honors seminar supports the first half of senior thesis work in philosophy. It will provide a hands-on introduction to philosophical research. During the course of the semester, students will fine-tune and develop their initial thesis proposals into detailed thesis plans, and then draft significant chunks of their eventual theses. This will be accomplished through close reading and discussion of central texts, structured writing, and the eventual sharing of student drafts.

Independent reading course. Reading in an area selected by the student and approved in advance by a member of the Department.

Admission with consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

(Offered as PHIL 464 and ENST 464) Is our planet overpopulated? And if so, how many of us should live on it? Population raises tricky questions that are both empirical and broadly philosophical: How should we weigh the well-being of future individuals against the lives of those currently living? Should we aim for a future population whose average or whose total level of well-being is maximized—or should we apply some other standard? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think of human life as, on balance, a positive thing?

The topics change from year to year. Some of the most interesting and most characteristic work in recent philosophy has been concerned with the problem of skepticism and the external world, i.e., roughly, the problem of how you know that your whole life isn't merely a dream. We will critically examine various responses to this problem and, possibly, consider some related issues such as relativism and moral skepticism. There will be readings from authors such as Wittgenstein, Moore, and Austin, and philosophers working today such as Dretske and Putnam.

An examination of the central metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason, including both the historical significance of Kant's work and its implications for contemporary philosophy.

Requisite: Phil 218 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Vogel.

A consideration of some basic questions about the nature and scope of our knowledge. What is knowledge? Does knowledge have a structure? What is perception? Can we really know anything at all about the world?

Requisite: One course in PHIL or consent of the instructor. Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Assistant Professor Leydon-Hardy.

(Offered as BLST 195[D] and PHIL 334) During the middle decades of the twentieth century, existentialism dominated the European philosophical and literary scene. Prominent theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty put the experience of history, alienation, and the body at the center of philosophical and literary life. It should be no surprise, then, that existentialism appealed to so many Afro-Caribbean and African-American thinkers of the same period and after.

(Offered as SWAG 260 and PHIL 260) The course will introduce concepts that feminists and queer theorists have developed in continental philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism. It will further explore feminist philosophies of sexual difference developed primarily in the French feminist tradition. We will address the role of the lived body in feminist and intersectional theories of gender, sexuality, and identity; the relation between self and other; the situatedness of subjectivity; and the meaning of sexual difference.

States are made up of collections of individuals. And yet states have powers that no individuals have. They collect taxes, put us in jail, draft us into the army, tell us what we can and cannot own, etc. In general, states compel us to do things in the name of a ‘common good,’ even when that good conflicts with what we would individually prefer to do. In this course, an introduction to key concepts in Western political philosophy, we seek to understand what, if anything, could justify states in having this power over us.