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Graduate Course Information

The current graduate course being offered are here.

Graduate Course Work in the deparment falls into three categories.

Phil 680: Departmental Seminar

The Departmental Seminar is required for all graduate students in the MA program, and for PhD students in the first two years of that program. The topic varies from year to year, but each year it involves investigating a perennial problem in philosophy, focusing on several distinct aspects of the problem that are under active investigation in the philosophical literature. The idea is that the seminar should always be on a topic aspects of which reach into every area of philosophy, so that is relevant to all grad students whatever the eventual focus of their research. One goal of the seminar is to foster a collegial atmosphere among the graduate students by making sure they all know each other and that they are working on common material and so have something to talk about. The assigned work is designed to help students develop professional skills, such as preparation and presentation of conference papers.

Recent topics: Truth; Rationality; Justification; Persons

Phil 673, 674 Graduate Courses

These graduate courses are intensive investigations of particular philosophical topics, often those close to the areas of research specialization of faculty members. The 673 courses are cross-listed with 400-level undergraduate courses, while the 674 courses are open only to graduate students, so the 674 courses are typically somewhat more specialized. Recent course titles include:

• A priori knowledge
• Life, mind and disease
• Ascribing beliefs
• Relevance, linear and intuitionistic logics
• Moral truth
• Philosophy of quantum mechanics		 • Explanation
• Empathy
• Modularity and pragmatics
• Aristotle’s philosophical psychology
• Naturalizing mental meaning
• Spinoza’s Ethics

Phil 698 Research Areas

PhD students complete two Research Areas as part of their pre-thesis work. Each of these is a one-on-one tutorial with a faculty member on some fairly specific topic in philosophy. The general intention is that each Area should take the student from having a strong graduate student-level competence on that topic to the level of being ready to begin making a professional research contribution. Often the research for the second Area serves as preparation for the student’s work on the Dissertation Prospectus.