This course is an introduction to philosophy.  We will survey the fundamental areas of philosophy including the following: philosophy of religion, ethics, freedom of the will, personal identity, and philosophy of mind.  Our focus will be on arguments, their analysis and evaluation. Our approach will also be a historical one. We will begin with Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, then we will consider medieval philosophy, Anselm. Turning out attention to modern philosophy we will examine Descartes and Kant. We will discuss nineteenth century philosophy in Marx and Nietzsche. An examination of twentieth and twenty first century philosophy will round out the course—Heidegger, Foucault, Quine, Nelson Goodman, and others.

In this course, students will be introduced to philosophy (i.e., “love of wisdom”) through the medium of the philosophy of religion. No prior familiarity with philosophy, religion, or the philosophy of religion will be assumed. Such a staging ground offers multiple angles of philosophical analysis: epistemology, ontology/metaphysics, ethics, logic, and so on. Students will encounter the following questions (and many more): Does God/do gods exist? Is it even possible to comprehend divine entities with our all-too-human concepts? How does God/do gods engage in revelation (if at all)? What does it mean to believe in God/gods? Drawing from different religious traditions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, will enable students to investigate and interrogate the aforementioned questions from a variety of standpoints. Students should expect to purchase a textbook containing key readings (Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, 3rd edition, edited by Kelly James Clark); however, all other texts will be made available to students at no cost.

This course takes a historical and cross-cultural approach to philosophy, which aims at presenting philosophy as a global activity and pursuit of knowledge that is reflected in human history in every corner of the world. Unlike most courses on the “Introduction to Philosophy”, which typically begin with early Greek philosophy, the pre-Socratics followed by the classical period of Socrates and Plato, the first part of this course seeks to challenge ancient Greece as the “only” birthplace of philosophy. Although we will be concerned with the Western tradition of philosophy in this course, we will also consider the rich philosophical thought of non-Western traditions, such as Indian, Chinese, and Islamic philosophies. The aim of the first part of the course is to encourage a cross-cultural conversation among global philosophies. Although the second part of this course will be more centered on the Western canon of philosophy, I am hoping that the cross-cultural perspective gained from the first part of course, will serve as a foundation for fostering dialogues between philosophical traditions developed at different locations and stages of our human history. In this part of the course, beginning from early Medieval thought, I aim to take my students on a journey through early and late modern philosophy, where we will consider enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophy, and engage with the critical insights gained from major philosophical traditions such as German Idealism, Marxism and Feminist philosophy. Classes will consist of lecture, discussion, and group work. Assessment will be through class participation, reading responses, a paper proposal and a final paper.

This 8-week, 100% online, course will introduce you to philosophic wonder, thought, and thinking. We’ll read, think, question, discuss, and write about persistent philosophical questions, such as those about life's meaning, good and evil, the existence of God, the reality of reality, liberty, personhood, and the philosophic life itself. The main aim of the course is for you to grow and flourish as a philosophical thinker, questioner, human being.

Required weekly work includes readings, written discussion posts, and reading quizzes. Additional required coursework includes short journal/response writings and a final exam. Coursework is due at the end of each week, at midnight on Sunday nights. You must have reliable Internet access, but no other special equipment is required.

In this class, students will be introduced to philosophy as a practice of rational and critical enquiry. Through our reading of philosophical texts, we will raise and address fundamental questions such as: What is justice? What is the good life? What defines human beings? What is the meaning of human life? What makes something right or wrong? Does power shape who we are, or how we conceive of the good and of truth? What is our place in the world and our relationship to other beings?

We will read major authors from the Western traditions, as well as thinkers who are in some ways critiques of this tradition and thinkers situated in the Eastern and Native American tradition. Reading and discussion will constitute the living core of the class.

In this class we will get to know central concepts and basic concepts pre-Socratics to 20th-century thinkers, through a study of the thought of its prominent representatives: Plato, Aristotle, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The class will focus on questions and issues from the fields of metaphysics and the theory of cognition such as: the nature of truth; the nature of reason; the conditions for knowing; different perceptions of the self; the relationship between object and subject; The distinction between body and mind, human freedom, and other central questions. We will follow the way of the development of the ideas and their incarnations company by the texts.

Assessment will be through class participation, reading responses, and papers. Students should come away from this course with a general understanding of the core ideas philosophy engage with, skills for reading and evaluating philosophical texts and the ability to formulate a philosophical argument of their own.

This class aims to provide you with resource and help to write a polished academic essay that argues your position on a specific topic in a clear and proper manner. For this purpose, by and large, we will focus on two different but complementary aspects throughout the semester: 1) reasoning and critical thinking, and 2) basics for essay writing.

Regarding the first aspect, we may raise a question: how do we tell the difference between reasonable arguments and not? It seems that we have a basic understanding of good reasoning and arguments that make more sense than others. However, sometimes we struggle with explaining the conditions of good reasoning and applying them to our writing and communication. How can we work on more reasonable and persuasive communication while making less logical errors? In this class, we will discuss some rules that serve good reasoning and proper use of logical tools, thereby making our initial and tacit understanding more explicit.

The second aspect relates to the more technical dimension for your communication in your college life (and hopefully, even out of school). We will study and discuss some basic rules, styles, and ethical issues that you need to keep in mind.

For achieving these two goals, we will work on three different aspects: 1) having basic knowledge in logic, reasoning, and critical thinking, 2) reading argumentative essays by others and analyzing them, and 3) writing your argumentative essays. Even though no prerequisites are necessary, students’ concentration and active participation is expected in this class.

In what we say is true about the world, reasoning plays the most crucial role. For example, the bodies of knowledge that we as members of the university produce, value, and utilize depend for the most part on our ability to reason. In the evolution of philosophical thought in different philosophical traditions, there has been a recognition of what constitutes good reasoning and poor reasoning. This recognition evolved over millennia into a body of knowledge that we will undertake to study in this course. This undertaking will aid us, minimally in not repeating similar mistakes when we argue for a position in our respective domains and therefore be in a position to construct strong arguments. But is that where we should stop? Why should we value truth? This course also hopes to open a philosophical investigation into the conception of critical thinking as merely the acquisition of a skill set. We will explore alternatives offered by different philosophical views and traditions and think together about how critical thinking may contribute to enriching our lives.

This course begins by exploring argumentation, rhetoric, and various tools of critical thinking. It then proceeds to study effective reasoning in detail—from validity and logical fallacies to deduction and Mill’s theory of induction. From there, we trace out in a semi-historical way how modern theories of reasoning and argumentation—primarily as developed in European thought and culture over the last few hundred years—have produced a valuable tool kit for effective thinking.  

 After two weeks on scientific reasoning and the Enlightenment’s reckoning with freedom, we will transition into exploring the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and others, interspersed with some representative attention to the methods and limitations of logic and reason therein. The course concludes by exploring the strengths and weaknesses of postmodern philosophy; discussing the difficulty of conveying philosophical ideas within today’s media; and finally underlining how argumentation is a way of knowing that helps us decide what we believe through the testing of claims, and as such can help us achieve the goals of a democratic society by cultivating the skills of critical thinking, reflective judgment, and active participation—all vital to the formation and maintenance of a robust public sphere. 

 One insight that will emerge over the course of these lectures is that there is no one tool for thinking. Experience by itself begets chaos in the absence of pattern recognition, memory, association, and some form of reasoning. Reason by itself is sterile absent some practically reliable bases from which to draw our inferences, explanations, and generalizations. Intuition by itself offers no decision procedure. Invention by itself is dangerously speculative. The magic is in the mix. 

 Because this course is a broad and rapid survey of vast and complex matters, it will not answer all (or even most) of the questions that will occur to you along the way about the mind, our sensory apparatus, belief, knowledge, reasoning, and logic, much less about mathematics, science, philosophy, ethics, and all the other great systematic ventures of the mind. It will, however, deal with some of the important ones and provide references to works where many of the others can be explored. It is a starting point, not a destination. 

Most intellectual endeavors involve argumentation. From short letters to the editor to complex philosophical essays, from simple everyday discussions to sophisticated legal debates, arguments are constantly invoked to support or criticize points of view. The purpose of this course is to help you learn how to analyze, critique, and construct arguments. We will learn the mechanics of arguments through reading classic and contemporary philosophical texts. You will be evaluated through short and long writing assignments, and, if necessary, in-class quizzes.

The purpose of this course is to help students develop the skills to make arguments, refute arguments, and differentiate good arguments from bad arguments. The first half of the course will be devoted to learning the linguistic and conceptual skills necessary for recognizing, analyzing, and critically evaluating arguments. In doing so, students should learn how to identify poorly constructed arguments while honing the skills necessary to construct strong arguments of their own. The second half of the course will put these skills to practice by applying them to various contemporary moral and political issues. The goal is that students leave this course able to formulate and defend their own autonomous opinions on these and many other issues in a way that utilizes effective reasoning and critical thinking skills. Grades will be primarily determined by quizzes and argumentative essays.

In this course we will develop skills in argumentation, critical thinking, and reasoning. The first part of the course will cover how to analyze and assess arguments by studying the elements of argumentation: deduction, induction, validity, soundness, and more. The second part of the course will focus on applying what we learned in the first part to an assortment of texts and other media. We will critically engage with materials from a variety of topics and traditions.

The argumentative and analytical skills gained in this class will be highly useful for students in their future classes and beyond.

In Logic, Reasoning, and Critical Thinking you will learn about the tools you need to make and defend strong arguments and about those you need to analyze the arguments of others. By focusing on the components of strong arguments as well as some of the common fallacious methods of argumentation, this course will help you improve your own argumentative skills, especially in writing, and your skills in critical thinking. The first half of this course will help you develop the techniques required for making and analyzing arguments, while the second half of the course will give you experience in analyzing arguments in action. Although topics for the class are varied, you can expect to discuss current topics such as politics, law, social issues, and more.

How can you tell if an argument makes sense? What separates a good argument from a bad one? In this online course, students will learn the skills necessary to construct, analyze, and critically assess arguments.  Beginning with the basic principles of reason and logic, students will acquire the abilities necessary to extract arguments from philosophical texts, evaluate the strength of these arguments, and craft written responses to them.  We will also be analyzing classic philosophical texts that have profoundly influenced the structure and development of Western civilization.  

Required text:
Critical Thinking, An Introduction to the Basic Skills (7th Edition), by William Hughes, Jonathan Lavery, Katheryn Doran (Broadview Press). ( ISBN-13: 978-1554811977 ISBN-10: 155481197X)

Most intellectual endeavors involve argumentation. From short letters to the editor to complex philosophical essays, from every day discussions to legal debates, argues are constantly created and invoked to support or criticize points of view. The purpose of the course is to help you learn how to analyze, critique, and construct arguments.

The course material is organized into two sections. In the first section, we will do an introductory survey of important logical concepts and tools that are needed for analyzing arguments. The second section is an in-depth examination of philosophical essays on the philosophy of food.

Required texts:

1. Strunk and White, Elements of Style 
2. Morrow and Weston, A Workbook for Arguments
3. Handouts and Essays posted on Canvas

Early modern philosophy is typically defined as the European philosophical tradition spanning from René Descartes to Immanuel Kant. This period is defined in part by the emergence of experimental and mathematical sciences developed in part by figures such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon and Newton. These scientific discoveries implied a revolutionary overturning of religious orthodoxy throughout Europe, which in turn called for philosophical reflection: What of old religious beliefs can be maintained in the face of the successes of the natural sciences? Is there such a thing as a soul? How is the concept of a soul related to personal identity? Is knowledge possible, and if so, what are its limitations? What is the ultimate nature of reality? Does God exist? Do I exist? These questions were raised and addressed by a series of philosophers we will examine in this course: Montaigne, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Princess Elisabeth, Amo, Spinoza, Leibniz, du Châtelet, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Throughout our readings we will address questions related to epistemology (the study of knowledge), metaphysics (the study of ultimate reality), and philosophy of mind. While one of the goals of the course will be to respect the historical circumstances of the authors in question, another aim is to show that the concerns of this period of philosophers remains relevant today.

The only required text is Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins (eds.), Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources (third edition), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2019, ISBN-13: 978-1624668050. It is important to have the third edition. All other readings will be made available on Canvas.

In the seventeenth century, René Descartes, the founding figure of modern philosophy (a period in the history of philosophy running from the 1600s to the beginning of the twentieth century), initiated a revolutionary reorientation of Western philosophy by centering intellectual attention on the individual human subject as a knowing being.  Descartes’s work launched a series of discussions about how we know what we claim to know about the fundamental nature of reality, discussions that continue up through the present.  This course will focus on issues pertaining to epistemology (i.e., that part of philosophy concerned with constructing a theory of knowledge) and ontology (i.e., that part of philosophy concerned with constructing a theory of being) in the modern period, starting with Descartes and concluding with Immanuel Kant (late eighteenth century).  In particular, we will occupy ourselves with an exploration of, first, the distinction between the two basic epistemological orientations in modern philosophy, namely, rationalism and empiricism (as well as Kant’s attempted overcoming of these opposed orientations), and, second, the ontological alternatives between monism and dualism, nominalism and metaphysical realism, and materialism and idealism.  Additionally, a series of other related questions and problems will be explored, such as:  the relation between mind and body, the essence of personal identity, the existence of human freedom, the role of science as a means of access to reality, and various conceptions of truth.  The authors from this period we will read are:  Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Arnauld, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Boyle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

This 100% online course is an introduction to the ancient Greek beginnings of philosophy in the western tradition. We’ll read the ancient Greek philosophers themselves—several Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Stoics—and engage their fundamental questions and concerns, which today can still touch and interest every person. These questions include: What are nature and reality? What is a good life? What are being, becoming, and change? What are reason, language, truth, and knowing? What are love and friendship? What is education? And, what is philosophy itself?

Required weekly work includes readings, written discussion posts, and reading quizzes. Additional required semester work includes a midterm exam and a final exam. Coursework is due at the end of each week, at midnight on Sunday nights. You must have reliable Internet access, but no other special equipment is required.

This class will introduce students to Buddhist philosophy in India by adopting both historical and conceptual approaches. It will emphasize the diversity within the Buddhist tradition to showcase the disagreements existing between individual authors. Some of the questions we will address include: what is nirvana, the goal of Buddhist philosophy? What view of existence (samsara) does Buddhism propound? How do we know, and how do we know that we know, according to Buddhist philosophers? How can we describe reality? How are we supposed to act in the world? The class will map out different areas of Buddhist philosophy: ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and soteriology. We will read primary texts from the Pāli canon, Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, Candrakīrti, Kamalaśīla, and Śāntideva. Thus the goal will be for students to get an overall, but nonetheless philosophical perspective on the Buddhist tradition. No prior knowledge is expected; only charitable and critical thinking is. Hence the class, like any other philosophy class, will emphasize training in critical thinking, close reading of texts, and writing skills.

In this course students will encounter the principles of existentialism. The (existential) encounter will bring us to question ourselves: our own conception of reality (what we deem real), the world (we live in) and life (we live). An examination of some of the seminal texts and their authors (including key aspects of their personal and political history) will introduce us to the main themes of this movement. A thorough reading of their work (exegesis), scrupulous discussion (interpretation) of those texts and unreserved participation in these discussions (authenticity) will confront us with ourselves and each other — through both the experience of existentialist thought and the thinking of the existentialist experience. Existentialist thought is not understood without the existentialist experience. The course aims at being an event (Ereignis).

As a philosophical school existentialism has re-appropriated so-called real-life issues: Birth as a naked given (thrownness), Life as an indisputable matter of overwhelming “fact” (facticity) and Death as the lifelong haunting of nothingness, the relentless imminence of Despair (Angst) as an unyielding looming Threat (finitude) to everyday existence. These are the general themes that motivate existentialist thinking. They will be addressed directly through the examination of more specific questions: the im/possibility of freedom, the un/reality of im/mortality, the condition of in/authenticity, individuality & community, truth & subjectivity, being & nothingness, existence & essence, suicide & absurdity, boredom & anxiety, temporality & eternity, faith & reason, among many other questions.

Some of the authors we will consult are Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Buber, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry & Wilhelm Reich.

There are no prerequisites for this course. The only requirements essential to the course are genuine interest – in the literal sense of the word “inter-esse” – in the exploration of texts and their authors, and the willingness to engage in (self-)critical — individual & collective — self-reflection. In addition to offering stimulation for intellectual development and personal enrichment through the philological treatment of texts, the course will prepare students to participate in other courses in philosophy and the humanities at large. The course is illuminating to people from all walks of life and thus enlightening also to other academic disciplines.

The history of science appears to indicate that the best scientific theories of an era are prone to be replaced by a new theory. In astronomy, for example, an earth-centered model of the universe was later replaced by a sun-centered model, and in physics, Newton's absolute account of motion was later replaced by Einstein's relativistic account. Based on this evidence, one might even claim that science cannot provide us a true account of nature, because what history seems to indicate is that any scientific truth today could become a falsehood tomorrow. But perhaps this isn’t the correct lesson to draw from the historical evidence. Perhaps there is a way that we can save the truth and objectivity that is typically associated with science from the apparently negative lessons of history.

In this class we will examine different philosophical answers to this question, and also discuss the ways in which the history of science has influenced philosophical accounts of what scientific practice involves. Our survey of the history of science will begin with the Copernican and Newtonian Revolutions of the Seventeenth Century and end with the theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics that were developed in the Twentieth Century. These revolutionary moments in the physical sciences will serve as the basis for our examination of the nature of scientific practice, and also guide our study of some philosophical debates surrounding the notions of scientific explanation, truth, and objectivity.

There are two texts to purchase for this course. 

[1] Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science (2nd or 3rd editions) By Richard Dewitt (Wiley-Blackwell 2010 or 2018; ISBN: 1405195630 (2nd Ed) or ISBN: 1119118891 (3rd Ed))

[2] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (4th ed.) By Thomas Kuhn (U of Chicago Press, 2012; ISBN: 0226458121)

This course explores Epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the study and theory of knowledge. Is knowledge simply a justified true belief, or is there more to it than that? When is it reasonable to claim that we know something rather than that we simply believe it to be true? Can we know things that we do not experience directly? When all is said and done, can I ever be certain that I’m not simply a brain in a vat? Or that what I see is really what I see and not a clever illusion?

In this course we will explore a wide variety of topics in epistemology and hopefully come to a better understanding of what we know, what we don’t know, and what it means to make knowledge claims at all.

‘Philosophy’ literally means love of wisdom.  Thus the nature and status of knowledge itself is of fundamental importance to philosophers.  We will begin with the skeptical claim that we can know almost nothing at all.  We will then turn to the problematic traditional analysis of knowledge as justified true belief.  After discussing a famous refutation of this account and assessing new ones, we will inquire into the nature of justified belief.  When does a true belief constitute knowledge?  When it is based upon firm foundations?  When it coheres with my other true beliefs?  When it is caused in a reliable way?  We will question whether philosophy itself can give us any specific insight into the nature of knowledge.  And finally, with the time remaining, we’ll take up more current issues in epistemology.  Texts furnished as pdfs. Grade based primarily on two or three essays.

One great thing about the human mind is its ability to draw inferences.  Better still is to do this well.  In this course, you will learn two new languages developed to clarify the notion of logical entailment, which will help you understand the nature of valid inference.  The course is good preparation for further work in logic or mathematics, but you can also take the tools you will acquire into any academic or professional discipline that requires clarity of thought.  No prerequisites.  Grades based on quizzes, homework, and exams.  Text: Bergmann, Moor, and Nelson, The Logic Book 6/e (McGraw-Hill).  Consider renting the book.  It’s one of the best available, but the most recent addition has a significant number of typos and is quite expensive.

Ethical theory (also called “moral philosophy”) concerns the nature of the human good and right action, human excellence, what makes a human life worthwhile, what we owe to each other (and perhaps to God), the structure of practical reasoning, and the basis of moral evaluation.  We will examine select highlights from the Western tradition of theorizing about such issues, from early reflections in ancient Athens to the 20^th century European post-war discussion.  We will open with perhaps the most influential work of ethical theory in history, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.  Aristotle developed a theory of ethics as a branch of the “political” (i.e., civic) life, centered on the practice of moral and intellectual virtue, and aiming at a condition of human flourishing known as “eudaimonia” in Greek (happiness, well-being). Next, we will examine the grand medieval synthesis of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology in the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas – the ethical theory that has more than any other underwritten traditional ethics in the West.  We will see how the ancient-medieval ethical paradigm focused on the fulfillment of human nature through the achievement of the virtues.  Since the 18^th century, however, this traditional ethical focus has been continually challenged by modern rationalism.  We will study arguably the high point of early modern ethical theory, the ethical constructivism of Immanuel Kant.  Kant attempts to show how determinate universal moral requirements can be generated from an analysis of the form of one’s own rational agency.  Finally, we will conclude with contemporary French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who makes a revolutionary attempt to reestablish ethics on the basis of phenomenology rather than metaphysics, and thereby establish ethics as “first philosophy” (i.e., the most fundamental of the subfields of philosophy).  For Levinas, the metaphysical and subject-centered approach of a philosopher like Kant ignores the central role that the concrete, lived experience of the encounter with the face of the other plays in the rise of ethical concern as such.  Levinas thus tries to introduce a more authentic ethical perspective into Western philosophy through a phenomenology of this encounter.

Required Texts (Available in UNM Bookstore, except where noted): 1.  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Terence Irwin, Third Edition (Hackett); 2.  St. Thomas Aquinas, Select Questions of the Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundae Partis [Available for free at www.newadvent.org] 3.  Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. James W. Ellington (Hackett), 4.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, Tr. Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne).

Assignments: Grades will be based upon attendance and participation, two short analytical-critical essays, and a writing-intensive take-home final essay exam.

This course explores some of the main issues in environmental ethics.  We will be looking at our relation with non-human nature and evaluating the underlying values of this relationship including aesthetic, intrinsic, utilitarian, ecological, and personal value. We explore how these values and an understanding of ecology shape our discussion of environmental issues such as climate change, our treatment of animals, species extinction, ecological restoration, and wilderness.

Historically, the primary concern of philosophy of religion (also called “natural theology”) has been what we can know about God through reason alone, without appeal to faith or revelation.  The central focus of natural theology has, of course, been on the nature and existence of God.  Secondarily, philosophy of religion has considered issues adjacent to this central focus, such as the nature of discourse about God (what sort of meaning it has), God’s relation to the world (revelation, miracles, divine providence, the ultimate destination of things), and humanity’s relation to God (religious experience, faith, prayer, and devotional practices).  We will examine select highlights from the Western tradition of theorizing about such issues, from the anti-theistic challenge in the so-called “Enlightenment” period of the 18^th century (where traditional natural theology for the first time came under radical attack) to the most recent, up-to-date defenses of theism.  We will open with perhaps the most influential critique of theism in history, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.   Hume developed a rhetorically persuasive line of attack against the natural theology of his time, which drew upon the empiricism that was then becoming popular in intellectual circles.  This critique would come to have a massive impact on Western culture that persists to this day.  By the mid-twentieth century, the latter-day Humean empiricists who had come to dominate the mainstream of Western philosophy largely considered theism to be a dead issue.  However, the last several decades have seen a dramatic revival of the tradition of natural theology.  This revival has recently received an excellent expression in Edward Feser’s attempt to revitalize the tradition of “classical theism,” and provide new sophisticated reconstructions of classical theistic arguments.  “Classical theism” is the philosophical understanding of God that prevailed in ancient Greek philosophy and classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It emphasizes rational arguments that lead to a conception of God as absolutely transcendent of all beings, absolutely necessary in existence, absolutely simple in essence, and the ultimate ground of all things.  It can be argued that such a conception of God is radically distinct from the early modern conception of God that was the target of Hume and the anti-theist tradition following him.  Feser reconstructs, develops, and refines arguments for the existence of God from Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz.  We will examine each of these in detail, and discuss whether they have the power to overcome the force of Hume’s critique of theism.  A major part of that critique, however, was the challenge popularly known as the problem of evil: how can an all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God allow evil to exist in the world?  We will explore the dimensions of this problem through another superb contemporary study in the classical theist tradition, Brian Davies’ The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil.   Finally, we will conclude with the introduction of a contrasting, but equally vibrant, contemporary tradition of philosophizing about religion, the phenomenological approach represented by Jean-Luc Marion.  Phenomenology seeks to describe first-person experience without prejudicing that description by ideological (including supposedly scientific) assumptions.  It has been argued that this approach is capable of illuminating humankind’s religious experience in a way that has often been suppressed by the ideological commitments of post-“Enlightenment” modern culture.  From this phenomenological perspective, Marion advances an unabashed defense of his own Catholic outlook on the relationship of faith and reason.

Required Texts (Available in UNM Bookstore, except where noted): 1.  David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Second Edition (Hackett); 2.  Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius); 3.  Brian Davies, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (Continuum); 4.  Jean-Luc Marion, Believing in Order to See (Fordham).

Assignments: Grades will be based upon attendance and participation, two short analytical-critical essays, and a writing-intensive take-home final essay exam.

Are you trying to make sense of our contemporary political situation? For example, what makes a “conservative” conservative, a “liberal” liberal,  a “Marxist” Marxist, a “totalitarian” totalizing, a "state" a state?  Or how may we human beings best live together, given our human nature, needs, interdependence, and individuality? Or whether the contemporary it matters if democracy is in peril? If so, modern social and political philosophy may be helpful.

PHIL 372 aims for students to gain understanding of modern, continental European and American political philosophy and social thought, beginning with Hobbes and continuing through Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Tocqueville, The Federalist, Marx, Nietzsche, Arendt, Fanon, Rawls, and recent socio-political thinkers such as Baudrillard, Agamben, and Zizek. The course also aims to give us insight into the political structures, institutions, rights, duties, and forces that underly and influence our contemporary American and global political situation. We will study and discuss such questions as: What is the ’social contract’ under which we live?  What is the ‘state' and its responsibilities to its members? What are rights? Is inequality unjust--or necessary--in human society? Are force and violence ever justified? What is terror? What is socio-political estrangement? What is, and should be, education? How does technology influence human society?

Course requirements include: class attendance and participation, textbook purchase, thoughtful reading of assigned texts, short discussion posts/response papers, occasional quizzes, and a final exam.

In this course, we will explore the blurring of the distinction between reality and unreality, fantasy and truth, and fact and fiction in Latin American Thought focusing primarily on the fantastic short stories of Jorge Luis Borges as well as his non-fiction essays. Additionally, we will examine the philosophical revolt against positivism by Mexican thinkers on the cusp of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This course will also discuss Latin American Liberation Theology and its critique of North American and European Philosophy.

The primary goal of this class is to complete a careful reading of key parts of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (commonly referred to as the First Critique) and examine the so-called critical project that Kant sets out in this work. In the course of our examination, we’ll pay special attention to Kant’s attempt to respond to problems stemming from Humean skepticism and his attempt to accommodate key elements of Newtonian physics. As time permits, we will also refer to Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) to get some handle on why he chose to change, add, and delete portions of the first (1781) edition Critique before the second (1787) edition appeared in print.

Situated at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the next towering giant of the history of philosophy after Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel has had an enormous impact on the past two centuries of philosophical reflection in the Continental European tradition (more recently, he has even begun to attract enthusiastic attention and interest from certain contemporary Anglo-American Analytic philosophers too). Hegel’s thought is a key condition of possibility for such subsequent developments as existentialism, Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and deconstruction. His revolutionary notion of “dialectics” and unprecedented manner of historicizing philosophical frameworks previously treated as ahistorical radically transform philosophy’s very conception of itself and its place in the world, with this transformation continuing to affect philosophy and other disciplines up through the present day. This seminar will focus on Hegel’s first major work: the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.

Introduction to formal structures, mathematical logic and philosophical meta-logic in a philosophical and historical context. We will pursue the implications of twentieth-century formal thought for longstanding questions of philosophy by means of an interplay of formal proof, informal argument, and digressive elucidation. After an introduction to set theory, we will discuss transfinite sets and the nature of infinity, formal paradoxes and model theory, computability theory and Turing machines, and the foundations of the concepts of number and of other mathematical objects, concluding with a proof sketch of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Throughout, we’ll learn the most important results and methods of philosophical and mathematical logic in the twentieth century, with a view to their application to contemporary philosophical problems and questions.  Because we will pursue these questions of application and foundation, this is not simply a course in the “philosophy of mathematics” in the usual sense, but just as much an exploration of the philosophical significance of formal results, in dialogue with texts and arguments by twentieth-century and contemporary philosophers such as Frege, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Priest, and Badiou.  We will explore these results rigorously but with a minimum of unnecessary detail and complication.  No specialized mathematical knowledge beyond high school mathematics is required.

Course requirements: Regular attendance, four question sets, and take-home final examination or final paper.

What makes Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche so influential, controversial, and important?  Why did Heidegger think that Nietzsche was “a name for an age of the world”—indeed, for our late-modern, “atomic” age of technology?  Why did Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche so profoundly shape a whole generation of continental philosophers, from Foucault and Derrida to Deleuze, Irigaray, and Baudrillard?  (And who did many analytic Nietzscheans reject Heidegger’s reading out of hand, thereby seeking to downplay the importance of such topics as will to power, eternal recurrence, and Nazism?)  In this course we will seek to come to terms with Heidegger’s complex and sustained hermeneutic “alter-cation [Aus-einander-setzung]” with Nietzsche.  Our main goal will be to understand why Heidegger eventually concludes both that Nietzsche is “the most important philosopher since Hegel,” “the last metaphysician,” and “the highest fulfillment of Western nihilism,” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, also that Nietzsche is one “the most futural ones,” an enduringly important thinker who (along with the poet Hölderlin and the painter Van Gogh) helps inaugurate a more meaningful postmodern “other beginning” beyond the nihilistic metaphysical epochs of Western ontotheology.  In order to understand the deeply ambivalent (or “Janus-faced”) role Nietzsche plays in Heidegger’s mature thought, we will read Heidegger’s most important works on Nietzsche, seeking to understand why Heidegger comes to think that Nietzsche is both the nihilistic ontotheologist of technological enframing and one of the most crucial thinkers who can help us transition historically into a more meaningful postmodernity.  Beginning with Heidegger’s very first engagement with Nietzsche (in 1907), we will proceed through many of the most important lectures and essays in which Heidegger articulates, develops, and transforms his pivotal reading of Nietzsche.  We will thereby seek to understand this philosophical gigantomachia and begin to come to terms with its complex and important legacy, from the perspective of which it might even be said that “Nietzsche versus Heidegger” is a name for the deepest and most divide not just in contemporary philosophy but in our world at large.  

Required texts:  Heidegger, Nietzsche, vols. 1-4; Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track; Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?; Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. 

This course will explore various themes in Indian metaphysics, taking the Nyāyasūtra, the foundational text of the Hindu philosophical tradition that is chiefly devoted to metaphysics and epistemology, as the point of departure. Topics to be covered include: the self, the relation of mind and body, consciousness, the existence of God, and the reality of the external world. The primarily soteriological framework of metaphysical investigation in Indian philosophy (i.e., the idea of liberation from rebirth) will also be discussed.

Main requirement: a final paper.

In an enigmatic fragment probably written around 480 BC, Parmenides declares the sameness of thinking and being, or of the totality of what can be thought with the totality of what is.  This claim of in-principle identity between what there is and what thinking can grasp later receives a decisive and programmatic formulation in Aristotle’s development of the idea of the capacity for reasoning (dunamis meta logou) as the distinctive capacity of the human animal as such, one which (for Aristotle) decisively marks its distinction and separation from the rest of the natural world.   Subsequently, this claim of identity and its association with rational capacity resonate through the history of Western philosophy, playing an important role in projects such as those of early-modern rationalism as well as both transcendental and “absolute” Idealism.  

The aim of this seminar will be to open a critical inquiry into the basis and meaning of the claim of the identity of thinking and being and the idea of rational capacity associated with it, under contemporary philosophical, political, and ethical conditions.   We will read and discuss portions of three recent texts of “analytic” philosophy that repeat and articulate this claim (John McDowell’s Mind and World (1994), Sebastian Rödl’s Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (2018) and Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being (2018)), alongside the ancient texts by Parmenides, Plato (in particular the Sophist), and Aristotle (Metaphysics, books 4 (Γ) and 9 (Θ) and De Anima, book 3), that first articulate the idea of a distinctive capacity for rational thinking associated with the self-conscious human subject in its capacity for mastery of language or logos.   In the last part of the seminar, we will attempt to subject this idea and the anthropological privilege it promotes to critical scrutiny by means of a renewed attention to the problem of the relationship of language to life as it appears in the wake of the twentieth-century “linguistic turn.”  In particular, we shall consider how both considerations associated with the later Wittgenstein and twentieth-century formal and metalogical results provide grounds for contesting the ancient claim of the identity of thinking and being, and thereby provide grounds for challenging the philosophical entitlement it has offered for the claim of the human animal to dominance over the earth. 

Course requirements: Weekly 1-2 pp. ungraded response papers, midterm paper, and final paper.

In this seminar, we will focus on the questions, “What are moral mistakes and why do we make them?” These questions have implications for individual moral mistakes and collective ones, such as climate crisis denial. We will investigate the answers to these questions from the perspectives of three philosophical traditions: the Aristotelian tradition, which understands ignorance in terms of what we blame (or excuse) people for, the critical race and gender traditions that focus on collective ignorance, and the early Buddhist Abhidharma tradition that understands moral ignorance as the main obstacle to moral and spiritual liberation. This class will be discussion-oriented and will require weekly writing.

What is the relationship between philosophy and literature?  How should we understand the border between these two domains?  In order to answer those questions rigorously, we would first need to know both:  What is “philosophy”? and:  What is “literature”?  Hasn’t “philosophy” been understood, since Plato, as that discipline (or meta-discipline) responsible for asking questions of the form, “What is X?” — including not only “What is literature?” but also “What is philosophy?”?  If so, then wouldn’t it be a kind of philosophical apostasy to imagine that literature could illuminate philosophy about itself?  Is it obvious, however, that the question “What is philosophy?” can be answered from entirely within philosophy?  If not, if addressing this “purest” of philosophical questions actually requires stepping outside or beyond philosophy, would not “literature” be one of the names for this outside?  And what form would the answer take?  Would it be literary?  Or philosophical?  Or, would it not rather be — in some yet to be clarified sense — both?  Of course, those philosophers who like to imagine philosophy as a science rather than an art will tend to envision the domains of philosophy and literature as dichotomous categories or complementary sets (sharing no intersection).  Such philosophers may admit that literature can be philosophically interesting, but they will also suspect that a work which attempts to be both philosophy and literature is likely to succeed at neither.  Any yet, didn’t the first philosopher to exclude the poets from his philosophical realm do so while writing in the literary form of a dialogue?  Plato was not himself blind to the paradoxes entailed by his literary-philosophical exclusion of literary philosophy.  It is, rather, as if Plato realized that literature could only be banished from philosophy by a literary philosophy, a philosophy which implicitly undermines the very exclusion which helps define it by establishing its borders (and thereby also opening them to policing, crossing, undermining, and so on).  As if externalizing this struggle, the recent history of philosophy — from Kierkegaard to Derrida and Irigaray and beyond — is full of important philosophical works written in a seemingly “literary” style (whatever that might be, or not be), coexisting unhappily alongside the persistent suspicion that literary philosophy remains hopelessly (or permanently) dilettante, if not simply oxymoronic.  In order to question this philosophical prejudice from the side of philosophy (but without thereby taking philosophy’s side), to explore it by seeking to understand one of its most powerful (and undeniably dangerous) answers, our course will focus on the self-described greatest work of the most influential philosopher between Hegel and Heidegger, namely Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche self-consciously situates his own “greatest” work, ­Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  A Book for All and None, at the intersection of the philosophical and the literary, and thereby calls this border profoundly into question — and with it the entire post-Platonic philosophical (or metaphysical) order it both presupposes and reinforces.  Our simple yet ambitious goal will be to learn to read this book, a book which seeks to teach its (real or true) readers how to read it (by requiring us to learn what Nietzsche calls “the art of slow reading”).  This will be our way of seeking to understand (both from within and without) what it can mean to think philosophy and literature together (as well as, perhaps, what dangerous explosions such a collision may cause).

Course Requirements:  This course will require a significant amount of surprisingly dense and difficult reading, and so is intended for careful, diligent, and ambitious students capable of grappling creatively and open-mindedly with a famously challenging and influential text.  To facilitate your understanding of this work, attendance is required.  (If I conclude that class attendance needs to be enforced, that will be done with brief in-class quizzes on the assigned reading.  These may be made up only in the cases of medical or other emergencies.)  Final course grades will be based on any such quizzes (for a maximum of 10%) and (much more significantly) on two carefully composed and highly polished papers (for undergraduates) or one final research paper (for graduate students).

Learning goal:  To learn to practice what Nietzsche seeks to teach us as “the art of slow reading.”  Indeed, the basic learning goal of this course is as simple to state as it may prove difficult to achieve, namely:  To help you learn to understand—that is, read, appreciate, and critique—Nietzsche’s deeply challenging and profoundly influential philosophico-literary work.

Required text:  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, W. Kaufmann, ed. (NY:  Penguin).  The German original, Also sprach Zarathustra, is also recommended, and will be ordered for the class.

Introduction to formal structures, mathematical logic and philosophical meta-logic in a philosophical and historical context. We will pursue the implications of twentieth-century formal thought for longstanding questions of philosophy by means of an interplay of formal proof, informal argument, and digressive elucidation. After an introduction to set theory, we will discuss transfinite sets and the nature of infinity, formal paradoxes and model theory, computability theory and Turing machines, and the foundations of the concepts of number and of other mathematical objects, concluding with a proof sketch of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. Throughout, we’ll learn the most important results and methods of philosophical and mathematical logic in the twentieth century, with a view to their application to contemporary philosophical problems and questions.  Because we will pursue these questions of application and foundation, this is not simply a course in the “philosophy of mathematics” in the usual sense, but just as much an exploration of the philosophical significance of formal results, in dialogue with texts and arguments by twentieth-century and contemporary philosophers such as Frege, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Priest, and Badiou.  We will explore these results rigorously but with a minimum of unnecessary detail and complication.  No specialized mathematical knowledge beyond high school mathematics is required.

Course requirements: Regular attendance, four question sets, and take-home final examination or final paper.

The primary goal of this class is to complete a careful reading of key parts of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (commonly referred to as the First Critique) and examine the so-called critical project that Kant sets out in this work. In the course of our examination, we’ll pay special attention to Kant’s attempt to respond to problems stemming from Humean skepticism and his attempt to accommodate key elements of Newtonian physics. As time permits, we will also refer to Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) to get some handle on why he chose to change, add, and delete portions of the first (1781) edition Critique before the second (1787) edition appeared in print.

Situated at the beginning of the nineteenth century as the next towering giant of the history of philosophy after Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel has had an enormous impact on the past two centuries of philosophical reflection in the Continental European tradition (more recently, he has even begun to attract enthusiastic attention and interest from certain contemporary Anglo-American Analytic philosophers too). Hegel’s thought is a key condition of possibility for such subsequent developments as existentialism, Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and deconstruction. His revolutionary notion of “dialectics” and unprecedented manner of historicizing philosophical frameworks previously treated as ahistorical radically transform philosophy’s very conception of itself and its place in the world, with this transformation continuing to affect philosophy and other disciplines up through the present day. This seminar will focus on Hegel’s first major work: the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.

What makes Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche so influential, controversial, and important?  Why did Heidegger think that Nietzsche was “a name for an age of the world”—indeed, for our late-modern, “atomic” age of technology?  Why did Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche so profoundly shape a whole generation of continental philosophers, from Foucault and Derrida to Deleuze, Irigaray, and Baudrillard?  (And who did many analytic Nietzscheans reject Heidegger’s reading out of hand, thereby seeking to downplay the importance of such topics as will to power, eternal recurrence, and Nazism?)  In this course we will seek to come to terms with Heidegger’s complex and sustained hermeneutic “alter-cation [Aus-einander-setzung]” with Nietzsche.  Our main goal will be to understand why Heidegger eventually concludes both that Nietzsche is “the most important philosopher since Hegel,” “the last metaphysician,” and “the highest fulfillment of Western nihilism,” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, also that Nietzsche is one “the most futural ones,” an enduringly important thinker who (along with the poet Hölderlin and the painter Van Gogh) helps inaugurate a more meaningful postmodern “other beginning” beyond the nihilistic metaphysical epochs of Western ontotheology.  In order to understand the deeply ambivalent (or “Janus-faced”) role Nietzsche plays in Heidegger’s mature thought, we will read Heidegger’s most important works on Nietzsche, seeking to understand why Heidegger comes to think that Nietzsche is both the nihilistic ontotheologist of technological enframing and one of the most crucial thinkers who can help us transition historically into a more meaningful postmodernity.  Beginning with Heidegger’s very first engagement with Nietzsche (in 1907), we will proceed through many of the most important lectures and essays in which Heidegger articulates, develops, and transforms his pivotal reading of Nietzsche.  We will thereby seek to understand this philosophical gigantomachia and begin to come to terms with its complex and important legacy, from the perspective of which it might even be said that “Nietzsche versus Heidegger” is a name for the deepest and most divide not just in contemporary philosophy but in our world at large.  

Required texts:  Heidegger, Nietzsche, vols. 1-4; Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track; Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?; Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity.

This course will explore various themes in Indian metaphysics, taking the Nyāyasūtra, the foundational text of the Hindu philosophical tradition that is chiefly devoted to metaphysics and epistemology, as the point of departure. Topics to be covered include: the self, the relation of mind and body, consciousness, the existence of God, and the reality of the external world. The primarily soteriological framework of metaphysical investigation in Indian philosophy (i.e., the idea of liberation from rebirth) will also be discussed.

Main requirement: a final paper.

In an enigmatic fragment probably written around 480 BC, Parmenides declares the sameness of thinking and being, or of the totality of what can be thought with the totality of what is.  This claim of in-principle identity between what there is and what thinking can grasp later receives a decisive and programmatic formulation in Aristotle’s development of the idea of the capacity for reasoning (dunamis meta logou) as the distinctive capacity of the human animal as such, one which (for Aristotle) decisively marks its distinction and separation from the rest of the natural world.   Subsequently, this claim of identity and its association with rational capacity resonate through the history of Western philosophy, playing an important role in projects such as those of early-modern rationalism as well as both transcendental and “absolute” Idealism.  

The aim of this seminar will be to open a critical inquiry into the basis and meaning of the claim of the identity of thinking and being and the idea of rational capacity associated with it, under contemporary philosophical, political, and ethical conditions.   We will read and discuss portions of three recent texts of “analytic” philosophy that repeat and articulate this claim (John McDowell’s Mind and World (1994), Sebastian Rödl’s Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (2018) and Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being (2018)), alongside the ancient texts by Parmenides, Plato (in particular the Sophist), and Aristotle (Metaphysics, books 4 (Γ) and 9 (Θ) and De Anima, book 3), that first articulate the idea of a distinctive capacity for rational thinking associated with the self-conscious human subject in its capacity for mastery of language or logos.   In the last part of the seminar, we will attempt to subject this idea and the anthropological privilege it promotes to critical scrutiny by means of a renewed attention to the problem of the relationship of language to life as it appears in the wake of the twentieth-century “linguistic turn.”  In particular, we shall consider how both considerations associated with the later Wittgenstein and twentieth-century formal and metalogical results provide grounds for contesting the ancient claim of the identity of thinking and being, and thereby provide grounds for challenging the philosophical entitlement it has offered for the claim of the human animal to dominance over the earth.

Course requirements: Weekly 1-2 pp. ungraded response papers, midterm paper, and final paper.

In this seminar, we will focus on the questions, “What are moral mistakes and why do we make them?” These questions have implications for individual moral mistakes and collective ones, such as climate crisis denial. We will investigate the answers to these questions from the perspectives of three philosophical traditions: the Aristotelian tradition, which understands ignorance in terms of what we blame (or excuse) people for, the critical race and gender traditions that focus on collective ignorance, and the early Buddhist Abhidharma tradition that understands moral ignorance as the main obstacle to moral and spiritual liberation. This class will be discussion-oriented and will require weekly writing.

What is the relationship between philosophy and literature?  How should we understand the border between these two domains?  In order to answer those questions rigorously, we would first need to know both:  What is “philosophy”? and:  What is “literature”?  Hasn’t “philosophy” been understood, since Plato, as that discipline (or meta-discipline) responsible for asking questions of the form, “What is X?” — including not only “What is literature?” but also “What is philosophy?”?  If so, then wouldn’t it be a kind of philosophical apostasy to imagine that literature could illuminate philosophy about itself?  Is it obvious, however, that the question “What is philosophy?” can be answered from entirely within philosophy?  If not, if addressing this “purest” of philosophical questions actually requires stepping outside or beyond philosophy, would not “literature” be one of the names for this outside?  And what form would the answer take?  Would it be literary?  Or philosophical?  Or, would it not rather be — in some yet to be clarified sense — both?  Of course, those philosophers who like to imagine philosophy as a science rather than an art will tend to envision the domains of philosophy and literature as dichotomous categories or complementary sets (sharing no intersection).  Such philosophers may admit that literature can be philosophically interesting, but they will also suspect that a work which attempts to be both philosophy and literature is likely to succeed at neither.  Any yet, didn’t the first philosopher to exclude the poets from his philosophical realm do so while writing in the literary form of a dialogue?  Plato was not himself blind to the paradoxes entailed by his literary-philosophical exclusion of literary philosophy.  It is, rather, as if Plato realized that literature could only be banished from philosophy by a literary philosophy, a philosophy which implicitly undermines the very exclusion which helps define it by establishing its borders (and thereby also opening them to policing, crossing, undermining, and so on).  As if externalizing this struggle, the recent history of philosophy — from Kierkegaard to Derrida and Irigaray and beyond — is full of important philosophical works written in a seemingly “literary” style (whatever that might be, or not be), coexisting unhappily alongside the persistent suspicion that literary philosophy remains hopelessly (or permanently) dilettante, if not simply oxymoronic.  In order to question this philosophical prejudice from the side of philosophy (but without thereby taking philosophy’s side), to explore it by seeking to understand one of its most powerful (and undeniably dangerous) answers, our course will focus on the self-described greatest work of the most influential philosopher between Hegel and Heidegger, namely Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche self-consciously situates his own “greatest” work, ­Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  A Book for All and None, at the intersection of the philosophical and the literary, and thereby calls this border profoundly into question — and with it the entire post-Platonic philosophical (or metaphysical) order it both presupposes and reinforces.  Our simple yet ambitious goal will be to learn to read this book, a book which seeks to teach its (real or true) readers how to read it (by requiring us to learn what Nietzsche calls “the art of slow reading”).  This will be our way of seeking to understand (both from within and without) what it can mean to think philosophy and literature together (as well as, perhaps, what dangerous explosions such a collision may cause).

Course Requirements:  This course will require a significant amount of surprisingly dense and difficult reading, and so is intended for careful, diligent, and ambitious students capable of grappling creatively and open-mindedly with a famously challenging and influential text.  To facilitate your understanding of this work, attendance is required.  (If I conclude that class attendance needs to be enforced, that will be done with brief in-class quizzes on the assigned reading.  These may be made up only in the cases of medical or other emergencies.)  Final course grades will be based on any such quizzes (for a maximum of 10%) and (much more significantly) on two carefully composed and highly polished papers (for undergraduates) or one final research paper (for graduate students).

Learning goal:  To learn to practice what Nietzsche seeks to teach us as “the art of slow reading.”  Indeed, the basic learning goal of this course is as simple to state as it may prove difficult to achieve, namely:  To help you learn to understand—that is, read, appreciate, and critique—Nietzsche’s deeply challenging and profoundly influential philosophico-literary work.

Required text:  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, W. Kaufmann, ed. (NY:  Penguin).  The German original, Also sprach Zarathustra, is also recommended, and will be ordered for the class.