2025-2026

Introduction to Heidegger.  R. Pippin 

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 (Tu-Thu, Foster 505)

Thinking and Being (revisited).  I. Kimhi

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, Foster 305)

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.  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 in Colonus. Instructor consent is required for all students to register. G. Most