/College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Philosophy

Courses

Spring 2027 Courses

This introduction to philosophy is a lecture-based course focused on canonical texts and contemporary readings on self and identity. We will consider why it matters that we are able to distinguish between who ‘we’ are and who is ‘not like us.’  Topics include self-identification and existentialism, the recognition of social political groups, the development of personal values, and leading an ethical life in the age of AI. We will ask and begin to answer the following questions: Who am I? How do I count? Where do I belong? 

What is a person? Throughout the history of Western philosophy, many answers have been given to this question—answers that sometimes cohere with one another and sometimes are entirely at odds. However, it is possible to identify a tendency in many of these answers whereby the concept of the “person” is built around an opposition to “non-persons” (e.g., animals, machines, fungi, minerals, and other beings). In short, conceptions of the person have often relied on the construction of an “other.”

In this course, we will examine the tensions between persons and their others. To this end, we will consider two bodies of literature in parallel. On the one hand, we will study some of the main conceptualizations of the person in Western philosophy. On the other hand, we will address contemporary literature on these “others” with the aim of calling into question some of the presuppositions underlying historical philosophical accounts of the person.


This class is an introduction to some of the foundational texts of Western philosophy, beginning with the dialogues of Plato that tell the story of Socrates, then moving on to the Ethics of Aristotle, and culminating in the Meditations of the great Roman Emperor and Stoic, Marcus Aurelius. The students will acquire a grounding in Western philosophy through reading carefully through these works. This class will begin for the students what is hoped to be a lifelong interaction with these great thinkers and with philosophy as a discipline and way of life, learning along the way lessons in careful reading and critical thinking.

This course explores the philosophical foundations of psychology by critically examining five familiar distinctions: mind/body, conscious/unconscious, reason/emotion, self/other, and normal/abnormal. Through readings from classical, modern, and contemporary thinkers, including Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Brentano, Skinner, Freud, Jung, Merleau-Ponty, and Canguilhem, we will investigate the assumptions underlying different approaches to psychology. The course centers on three questions: What does psychology study? How can we understand our own experiences and those of others? And how can we explain our thoughts, feelings, and behavior? Through close reading, classroom discussion, and philosophical writing, students will learn to critically examine familiar assumptions about the mind and develop their own philosophical arguments.

This course is an exploration of the theory and practice of ethics and moral reasoning. What makes something ethical or unethical, moral or immoral? In the first half of the course we study the major theories and problems of ethics, such as utilitarianism, Kant’s categorical imperative, care ethics, ethical relativism, egoism, and classical conceptions of the good and virtue. In the second half of the course we engage in discussions of contemporary ethical and moral issues including hunger, war, climate change, immigration, the beginning and end of life, and gender identity.

This course will examine two different questions from two different angles. The first question is the following: Why do a lot of good ideas lead to a lot of bad outcomes? The second question is how to avoid such outcomes. The core idea of this class is that both questions can be seen in a much clearer light when we try to understand the complexity of the problems we’re addressing and the assumptions built in to the solutions we initially propose. How, in other words, do we come up with solutions that don’t negatively effect other things we care about? How, additionally, do we learn to set aside our assumptions of what a good solution is in the first place? Students can expect in this course to learn more about the material history built into our assumptions of "the good life" as well as how the  complexity of our global world requires us to modify the way we make decisions. 

An introduction to philosophy through the study of ethics, morality, and how we form, justify, and evaluate moral judgments.

This course investigates three foundational models of political organization: the polis, the social contract, and the modern state. Through an examination of the philosophical and political questions that shaped their emergence, we will trace the historical development of each paradigm. Particular attention will be given to the ways these frameworks understand political community and to the complex relationship between power, authority, and violence that continues to shape political life. The course also considers feminist critiques of the Western philosophical tradition, especially its privileging of violence, and explores alternative conceptions of community and collective action as bases for political engagement.

A historical introduction to philosophy through an analysis of political theories, theories of action, and styles of political life. Main themes include the relation of the individual to the state, the scope of social responsibility, and the nature of human freedom.

This course introduces the skills of reading, evaluating, and constructing arguments. We begin with the question Plato's dialogues keep asking: what is the difference between reasoning well and merely persuading? From there, we will learn the core tools of argument analysis: identifying premises and conclusions, uncovering hidden assumptions, testing validity, weighing evidence, and recognizing common fallacies. We will also examine how language, framing, and shared assumptions shape what counts as "reasonable" in the first place. Throughout the semester, students will apply these skills to real arguments from politics, media, and everyday life. No prior background in philosophy is required.

This course offers an introduction to logical and critical reasoning through a combination of readings and practical exercises. First, we focus on some influential accounts of knowledge acquisition from modern philosophers. Thus, we will examine the contrast between rationalism and empiricism concerning the sources and limits of knowledge. Second, we examine the basics of formal and informal reasoning. Some of the topics for this part of the course will be the construction of arguments from premises to conclusions, deductive and inductive reasoning, and fallacies. Third, we examine the basics of critiquing scientific reasoning. Throughout the course, we will discuss texts from Descartes, Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, Popper, and Kuhn.  

Thinking is natural, but that does not mean it is easy! Nor does it mean that we cannot get better at it. Using both historical and problem-based approaches, this course develops students’ understanding of reasoning and improves thinking skills. We specifically focus on the foundations of the scientific method in inductive logic, and we explore questions in information theory, probabilities, as well as computing, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and evolution. In later units, we inquire into moral reasoning and its philosophical basis. The work of the course consists of asynchronous interactions, reading, writing, online discussion, individual and collaborative projects.


Thinking is natural, but that does not mean it is easy! Nor does it mean that we cannot get better at it. Using both historical and problem-based approaches, this course develops students’ understanding of reasoning and improves thinking skills. We specifically focus on the foundations of the scientific method in inductive logic, and we explore questions in information theory, probabilities, as well as computing, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and evolution. In later units, we inquire into moral reasoning and its philosophical basis. The work of the course consists of asynchronous interactions, reading, writing, online discussion, individual and collaborative projects.

Does technology have the power to shape our thoughts, values, and actions? What if the tools we use are also using us, transforming how we pay attention, what counts as knowledge, and even what it means to be human? This course introduces students to critical questions about technology's place in our lives and explores how philosophers have understood its power to frame our experience of the world. Through historical and contemporary readings, students will investigate how inventions from the clock and the typewriter to artificial intelligence operate in the background of everyday life and what they reveal about our increasingly automated present.

We all apply specialized knowledge and tools to solve practical problems. Engineers do it in a special way using particular kinds of technical knowledge, imagination, and tools to address society’s problems. This course, accessible to non-engineering majors, is an introduction to what makes engineering similar to and different from other problem-solving. Students discuss social and humanistic contexts of engineering, and its implications for human identity and experience. In most classes students read and discuss articles and/or carry out exercises. Students must do a final project in which they work in teams.  

This course will consider modernism as a philosophical problem. The basic premise is this: when art emancipated itself from ritual, became autonomous and self-critical, it both attained its concept - i.e., became "art" in the highest sense of the word - and set itself on the path of its perpetual self-undermining. We will read philosophical texts from Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel through Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to help motivate discussions of musical and visual (mostly painting) art that exemplifies this problematic dialectic of freedom. Composers we may discuss in depth or in passing: Beethoven, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Webern, Cage, Feldman; artists: David, Manet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Munch, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Pollock, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Guston. While this course does not assume any expertise in philosophy, music, and/or painting, students should come with a willingness to explore this rich and challenging material and be prepared to puzzle over the interesting ways these elements may converge. 

The modern period roughly coincides with the Scientific Revolution’s rethinking of the natural world, the Enlightenment’s challenges to state and church authority, and the advent of capitalism and colonial imperialism. Modern philosophers debate the issues resulting from these changes often in dialogue with each other. This course will model this dialogue, focusing especially on questions relating to human knowledge and the nature of the human mind. We will ask: Can we attain certainty? Is any of our knowledge innate, or is it all acquired through experience? How far can our knowledge be extended? What principles govern the mind’s operations? Particular attention will be given to the questions concerning our knowledge of cause and effect. While we will focus primarily on the ideas of Descartes and Hume, we will also consider contributions by Locke, Kant, African philosopher Anton Amo and by important women philosophers of the period. Furthermore, we will occasionally compare specific arguments to seemingly similar thoughts from other philosophical traditions. The course format will be combined lecture and discussion.

What makes imagination politically powerful? Imagination is often associated with fantasy, utopia, and escape from reality. Yet twentieth-century political philosophy increasingly understood imagination as a form of power: a collective capacity to challenge what appears natural or inevitable, contest established meanings, and bring new political possibilities into view. This course explores radical political imagination in twentieth-century thought as both a break with the given and a collective power to transform social reality. Moving from fantasy, utopia, and resistance to social imaginaries, embodied perception, and recognition, we will examine how twentieth-century thinkers turned imagination into a key concept for rethinking the relationship between subjectivity, power, and social reality, as well as the possibilities for transforming them. (Readings may include Bloch, Benjamin, Marcuse, Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Castoriadis, and Butler.)

Our technological world exists because coal mines in England got too wet. How and why is the bigger question. We will explore how humans built the modern world with fossil fuels and built the digital world with semiconductors. We will then explore how this radically reshaped who we are, what we are, what we value, and what we believe. 

How should social cooperation be structured? What is the proper domain of the state? Our political philosophies articulate the core concerns and criteria around which we organize society. When groups of people are absent from the development of those theories, they may be materially and epistemically disadvantaged. Thus, this course in political philosophy analyzes traditional theories of justice to identify what – and who - is included and excluded and assess work by anti-oppression theorists that seeks to rectify those exclusions.

The first half of the course will evaluate distributive and recognitional theories of justice, including works by John Rawls, Susan Okin, Iris Marion Young, Charles Mills, and Nancy Fraser. The second half of the course will focus on leading political theories of care –  identifying how care’s exclusion has shaped social understandings of fairness, justice, and freedom.  During our regularly scheduled class times, students will participate in two guest seminars with prominent and emerging scholars of care, who will be visiting Stony Brook through the Care Lab. 

An intensive study of the methods and principles of the philosophical analysis of literature and the relations between literature and philosophy. Primary texts are selected to demonstrate the precise nature of the relationship.

Studying Plato can be a quest to discover the questions that philosophers have been trying to answer for centuries. This semester’s Junior Seminar requires detailed reading and discussion of two fascinating Platonic dialogues. We will attempt to put ourselves in the place of young Socrates in the Protagoras contending with the most famous sophists of his day and then in the place of the older Socrates in the Meno querying a younger Greek citizen who believes Socrates can teach him to succeed. Both dialogues prompt us to wrestle with two conflicting ideas: that Socrates is a philosophical saint and genius or that on these two occasions he may be simply contentious. They show us Plato at the height of his dramatic powers, and they teach us, among other things, to question ourselves as we pursue education and philosophy. Over the course of the semester, each student will be expected to give an in-class presentation and do weekly quizzes and two exams. 

We will conduct a close reading of Plato's Republic and Timaeus.