2025-2026

Introduction to Heidegger.  An introduction to the most important elements of Heidegger's philosophy, including: his account of the distinctness of human existence, his basic ontological theory, his account of Western modernity, his philosophy of art, and his relation to other philosophers, especially to Nietzsche. R. Pippin (Mon.-Wed. 3:00 - 4:20 PM, Room TBD) 

Milton and Hobbes. This course will examine two of the most important works to come out of the English civil wars: Thomas Hobbes's "Leviathan" (1651) and John Milton's "Paradise Lost" (1667, 1674). Both works deal, in radically different ways, with fundamental questions about the nature of human life and human politics. Throughout, we will contextualize each of these works with other texts written by Hobbes, Milton, and their contemporaries, as well as recent work by historians of philosophy, political theorists, and literary critics.  Instructor consent is required for all students to register. T. Harrison (Mon. 9:30 AM - 12:20 PM, Walker 403)

Thinking and Being (revisited).  I. Kimhi (Tue. 2:00 - 4:50 PM, Foster 505)

35000 Winckelmann: Enlightenment Art Historian and Philosopher. This course aims to look at Winckelmann not just as a passionate advocate of antiquity but as a “philosophical historian of ancient art”, as his American translator put it in 1849. In particular, the question of a developmental history with history-transcending high points remains of pressing interest: art historians today tend to pluralism, but remain normative in what art they consider worthy of attention. An examination of Winckelmann’s unique mix of personal and historical criteria of flourishing (beauty, pleasure, happiness), of book learning and visual imagination, is thus worthwhile on any account, not because we want to be as subjective as he is, but because we should be aware of what role our subjectivity, our hopes and fears, play in history. Accordingly, texts from the programmatic Gedanken (1755) and antiquarian writings to the monumental History of Ancient Art (1764, and an even longer posthumous version, 1776) will be examined, as will his analyses of beauty, of the representation of gender, of symbol and concept in art. A. Pop (Thur. 2:00-4:50 PM, Foster 505)

Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics. A close reading of the Eudemian Ethics, with comparisons to the Nicomachean Ethics.  One question will be Aristotle's conceptions of eudaimonia.  Instructor consent is required for all students to register.  J. Lear 

Language, Calculation, Technology. The seminar will be devoted to the dependency, sameness and difference of the forms of activity and knowledge/understanding associated, respectively, with language, techne and technology. Readings include: Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Wittgenstein.  Instructor consent is required for undergraduates to register.  I. Kimhi

Moral Meaning in the novels of Henry James.  The seminar will consist in a close reading of two of Henry James’s great last novels, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. The novels are widely regarded as the finest examples of English literary prose, composed in James’s distinctive (and “difficult”) late style. But the novels also require intense attention to a wide range of philosophical issues. These issues arise in James’s attempt to portray human experiences of one’s own mindedness and judgements as well as experiences of others in a social context James understands as historically distinctive: the decline of authoritative European moral conventions and the adequacy of the new conventions arising in American capitalism and consumerism. (What does “decline” mean in such a context and what could count as adequacy or inadequacy?) Many of the emerging issues involve both psychological and moral dimensions: how should we understand why someone would “change his mind’ about fundamental matters of principles? What is self-deceit and why is it so prominent in the novels? How is self-deceit different from willful self-blindness and self-opacity? What counts as genuine self-knowledge? What is the relation between intelligence and virtue? What could require self-renunciation in the service of some ideal? Throughout, we shall be concerned with how the treatment of such issues in the novels could be considered a “philosophic” treatment if in literary form rather than traditional philosophical analysis. Thursdays, 1-3:50pm, permission of the instructor required to register. R. Pippin 

Chance. Chance is philosophical puzzle in the form of undeserved good and bad luck, a mathematical challenge in the form of probability and risk, a motor of history in the form of contingency, and an economic necessity in the form of the stock market and insurance. This seminar will examine the many ways in which past and present thinkers have grappled with meaning of chance in all of these realms, including ideas about social justice, determinism and randomness, historical causation, risk, speculation, and opportunity. Instructor consent is required for all students to register.  L. Daston

Ancient Greek Aesthetics. The concept of beauty (kallos) figures prominently in Ancient Greek philosophy, a place where metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and poetics come together and through which philosophers think about the possibility of harmoniousness in our being-in-relation to others. In this seminar we will begin by reading some important passages from Plato‚Äôs dialogues (e.g., from Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium) before turning to two subsequent philosophers who were influenced by him, Aristotle and Plotinus. We will consider ideas about the relation of beauty to goodness and order, to appearance and intelligibility, and to the spectator‚Äôs reactions of wonder, pleasure, admiration, and sense of kinship. Inevitably we will spend a fair amount of time discussing their theories of poetry, but will also talk about the role of beauty in ethics and natural philosophy.  G. Richardson Lear

Heidegger and the Gods (I): Philosophy and Theology. This seminar marks the beginning of a triad – (II) Philosophy and Poetry, (III) Philosophy and Politics – which confronts Heidegger’s thinking with particular attention to the question of what significance it attaches to the gods and to the divine after the “death of God” – from the early encounter with Christian theology; to the expectation of the “last God as beginning”; to the conception of the “fourfold” of heaven and earth, mortals and divinities; to the saying “Only a God can save us.” At the center will be Heidegger’s appeal to Hölderlin’s poetry; the consequences for philosophy and politics will form the vanishing point.  H. Meier

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus. In this seminar we will examine the last play of Sophocles, the latest surviving masterpiece of 5th century BCE Attic tragedy. The seminar will undertake a close literary and philological analysis of one of the most remarkable of all Greek tragedies. This play of Sophocles looks back in his old age upon his own career, upon the development of Greek tragedy, and upon the critical situation of the city of Athens; it raises important and perplexing issues of crime, pollution, responsibility, guilt, self-understanding, salvation, gender, ethics, politics, suffering, the body, and old age, to name only a few. While the poetic text, in its many dimensions, including staging, will offer more than adequate material for classroom analysis and discussion, attention will also be directed to exploring the reception of this play. PQ: Graduate students: reading knowledge of ancient Greek or instructor’s consent. Undergraduate students: reading knowledge of ancient Greek and instructor’s consent. G. Most 

From Parmenides to Wittgenstein.  Elisabeth Anscombe gave this title to a volume of her collected philosophical essays. She ends the introduction with the claim: “Whitehead’s remark about Plato might, somehow narrowly, be applied to his great predecessor: Subsequent philosophy is footnotes on Parmenides.” I shall offer a reading that differs from Anscombe’s of the thesis expressed by her title and her remark on philosophy and its history. Wednesdays, 12:30-3:20pm, permission of the instructor required to register. I. Kimhi 

Comparative Social Theory. This class is designed for Committee on Social Thought Students to bring more social science into the Committee and particularly the Fundamentals Exam. Hopefully it will also be interesting to other PhD students in the social sciences, particularly political science, economics and sociology. I want to do this in a way that intersects as much as possible with other core topics of the Committee, in particular political thought and philosophy. To do this I will structure the course around the topic of “the emergence of complex society” (a misnomer as we shall see) or perhaps “state formation” or “political centralization.” Loosely, I want to discuss research that has examined how human society evolves over time and how and why it becomes more “complex” or “centralized.” This is a topic that has attracted attention from all types of social scientists, philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. I will pair empirical and secondary work with philosophical or political theory texts. Thursdays, 9:30-12:20pm, permission of the instructor required to register. J. Robinson

Critical Theory - Past and Present. In this course, we will study the works of the major theorists of what came to be called the "Frankfurt School". We start with Horkheimer's original program for an interdisciplinary study of the contradictions of modern societies, combining essential insights of German idealism with (a revised form of) historical materialism, and continue with thinkers like Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin. Habermas transformed critical theory in important ways, which we will discuss. Furthermore, we study the works of N. Fraser, S. Benhabib, A. Honneth and others to understand the plurality of the new directions critical theory took and takes. Tuesdays, 3:30-6:20 permission of the instructor required to register. R. Forst.

Approaches to the History of Political Thought. This course will examine some of the most influential recent statements of method in the history of political thought, alongside work by the same authors that may (or may not) put those methods or approaches into practice. We will read works by Quentin Skinner, Reinhart Koselleck, J.GA. Pocock, Leo Strauss, Sheldon Wolin, Michel Foucault, and David Scott among others, with some emphasis on writings about Hobbes and questions of sovereignty and the state. J. Pitts.

Heidegger's Interpretation of Aristotle. The main text for the course will be Heidegger's 1924 lecture course "Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy." Attention will also be paid to his 1926 course, "Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy" and his 1921-22 course, "Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle," and his early essays on Aristotle's concept of nature. R. Pippin.

Euripides Medea. An in-depth philological, literary, and psychological investigation of one of Euripides' most popular and most disturbing tragedies. We will consider also some examples of the ancient and modern reception of the play. G. Most.

On Intensity: Kleist. Although one of the masterful storytellers and playwrights in world literature, Kleist is not a regular point of reference in English-language criticism. In fact, he is little read. In this seminar, we will consider his masterful novellas: The Marquise von O, The Earthquake in Chile, Michael Kohlhass, and The Duel. We will also study his comic response to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex entitled The Broken Jug. Consultation of his letters will afford us a closer look at his personality. Kleist's essays are no less powerful than his plays and novellas and we will devote a session to his pieces on the Marionette Theater, on Caspar David Friedrich's painting The Monk at the Sea, and to his reflection On the Gradual Formation of Thought. D. Wellbery.

Disenchantment and Modernity. Ever since the sociologist Max Weber coined the phrase "disenchantment of the world" to describe the essential difference between modern societies and all others, it has become a catchword shared by both the champions and critics of modernity. It has served as a historical narrative, a sociological diagnosis, and an elegiac lament in social theory, history, literature, philosophy, and even science. This seminar explores the origins, meanings, and validity of the thesis that citizens of modern societies inhabit a disenchanted world by analyzing the uses to which prominent thinkers have put it. At stake is not only a particular vision of modernity but the concept of modernity itself. L. Daston.