2026-27 Graduate Courses

Fall 2026

PHILOSOP 9653: Proseminar
Instructor: Robert DiSalle
This seminar offers a general orientation to some of the ideas and debates that have shaped contemporary philosophy. We approach this by careful reading and serious discussion of some central texts in the modern analytic tradition. Emphasis will be placed on critical engagement with philosophical works through papers, seminar presentations, and open discussion. Rather than attempting a complete survey, the course will focus on some of the problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language that have broadly influenced discipline. Authors to be studied will include Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Schlick, Stebbing, Carnap, Quine, Kripke, Putnam, as well as contemporary responses to their work. 

PHILOSOP 9420F: Data, Decisions, and Dilemmas: The Ethics of Machine Learning (Area: MPL)
Instructor: Alice Huang
In this course, we will think about ethical and social questions that arise with our increasing reliance on machine learning in various aspects of our decisions. We look at questions such as: What does it mean for an algorithm to be fair? What are the risks involved in relying on machine predictions without being able to explain how these predictions came about? What are the ethical concerns unique to using data about people, and what can we do to ensure that their privacy is protected while promoting transparency? This will be an interdisciplinary course, and we will engage with literature not just in philosophy but also computer science and statistics. 

PHILOSOP 9225/ PHILOSOP 4310F: Scientific realism (Area: Sci)
Instructor: Wayne Myrvold
Scientific realism is, roughly, the position that the theoretical posits of science should be taken literally, even if they seem to refer to things that are not directly observable, and that acceptance of a scientific theory involves acceptance of these posits as really existing. It is contrasted with various forms of anti-realism, including an instrumentalist view according to which a scientific theory should be taken to be no more than a systematic way of relating observable phenomena. Discussions about scientific realism, pro and con, have occupied a major part of philosophy of science during the past 50 years, and the discussion continues. This course is an introduction to those discussions. Readings will include some of the influential contributions to these discussions. 

PHILOSOP 9137: Ethics in Twelve Arguments (Area: MPL)
Instructor: Anthony Skelton
Ethics or moral philosophy is the study of theories of right and wrong, good and bad, and their application to practical moral issues (e.g., treatment of the global poor and racial injustice). Moral philosophers make progress by advancing, refining, and raising objections to arguments. This course will focus on identifying, analysing, and evaluating 12 influential argumentative contributions made to ethics during roughly the last fifty-five years, including Judith Jarvis Thomson on abortion, Thomas Nagel on war and massacre, Peter Singer on global poverty, Bernard Williams on consequentialism and integrity, John Taurek on moral aggregation, J. L. Mackie on moral objectivism, Susan Wolf on moral sainthood, Derek Parfit on well-being, Charles Mills on race and justice, Philippa Foot on the doctrine of double effect, Gwen Bradford on achievement, and Alyssa Izatt and Kimberley Brownlee on the injustices of girlism. 

PHILOSOP 9400/ PHILOSOP 4210F: Philosophy of Language (Area: M&L)
Instructor: Robert Stainton
An introductory survey of theories of linguistic meaning, drawing principally on classic articles in Analytic philosophy of language which have served as a foundation. Topics will include: reference, truth conditions and possible worlds; assertions and other speech acts; speakers’ reference; conversational implicature; metaphor; indexicals and demonstratives; pragmatic determinants of what is said. Authors may include: J.L. Austin, Emma Borg, Robyn Carston, Donald Davidson, Keith Donnellan, H. Paul Grice, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, John Searle, Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson, and Catherine Wearing. The main objectives are to fine-tune students’ skills as linguists and philosophers, and to introduce key concepts, positions and arguments in semantics/pragmatics. The focus, as noted, will be on philosophical foundations. 

 

Winter 2026

PHILOSOP 9408: The Puzzle of Consciousness (Area: M&L)
Instructor: David Bourget
To be announced

PHILOSOP 9900: Prospectus
Instructor: Eric Desjardins
PhD students in philosophy are required to produce a prospectus summarizing their doctoral dissertation project. They must defend the prospectus in an oral examination held by their Prospectus Committee. This prospectus must present a clear, coherent, and promising research plan. The primary aim of the Prospectus Course is to support PhD students in developing this research plan, including drafting a clear and coherent prospectus. In this course we will discuss model prospectuses, research methods, and writing strategies. The primary focus, however, will be on student presentations and peer-led discussion of drafts of parts of the prospectus and of the prospectus as a whole. Accordingly, each member of the course must be prepared to present and share their research in a way that is intelligible to a broad philosophical audience and attend class prepared to comment constructively on the work of their peers. The instructor of this course will facilitate and support the development of the prospectus and ensure that students remain accountable to deadlines. In addition, the Prospectus Course is designed to both aid with professionalization and to make students more consciously aware of methodological issues in philosophy. The course is graded on a pass/fail basis. Regular attendance, participation in in-class activities, and successful and timely completion of assignments will suffice for a pass. Students enrolled in this course must have a supervisor by the time the course starts, and it is highly desirable that they have completed all other degree requirements by the time the course begins. It is expected that students will meet regularly with their supervisor(s) while taking the course.

PHILOSOP 9008: Kant's First Critique (Area: Hist)
Instructor: Robert DiSalle
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was the culmination of several strands in the tradition of early modern philosophy. But it was also a decisive turn away from the tradition in fundamental respects. Kant compared his “Critical” turn to the Copernican revolution in astronomy: Copernicus had showed that some motions we observe in the heavens are actually motions of ourselves, the observer; Kant argued that metaphysical principles we ascribe to the world are actually features of our own cognition. Kant’s “Critical philosophy” had a profound effect on the development, not only of metaphysics and epistemology, but also psychology, logic, mathematics, and the sciences. In this course we will consider the fundamental ideas and arguments of the Critique, beginning with some of the pre-Critical writings that embody Kant’s engagement with previous philosophers and the gradual transition toward his mature view. We will emphasize his chang-ing views on the relation between reason and experience, the character of a priori knowledge, and the nature and purpose of metaphysics.

PHILOSOP 9050/ THEOCRIT 9670/ PHILOSOP 4530: Feminist Continental Philosophy (Area: Fem)
Instructor: Helen Fielding
Feminist continental philosophy comes out of the European philosophical tradition which it both draws upon and critiques. Philosophers and theorists in this interdisciplinary approach investigate not only the structures that shape lived experience and the ways we encounter worlds and others; they also critically question those transcendental structures that support appearances. These structures, such as heteronormativity, racialization, colonialism, patriarchy and normativity, do not generally come into appearance in themselves, even as they shape the relations between people, world and environment that do. Intersecting with analytic feminist, Black feminist, critical phenomenological as well as critical race theory, feminist continental philosophers draw on the methodological tools of the continental tradition (for example, the work of Foucault, Derrida and Merleau-Ponty) which they subvert in their interdisciplinary approaches. We will be reading works marked as classics of the tradition, for example from Simone de Beauvoir, as well as works that might not specifically be called feminist, such as from Hannah Arendt. Previous courses in feminist theory/philosophy are not required.

PHILOSOP 9505: Love, Intimacy, and Interpersonal Relationships (Area: Fem, MPL)
Instructor: Jasmine Gunkel
What is love and what does it demand of us? What is intimacy and how does it shape our lives and persons? Why do our interpersonal relationships matter so deeply to us? How can we act well in these relationships, and what can philosophy reveal about the ways in which we can act poorly? How might novel technologies change how we understand love, intimacy, and relationships? In this course, we’ll survey such questions and try to develop new answers to some of them. We’ll begin our explorations by looking at longstanding debates about the nature of love and friendship. We’ll then turn to emerging topics in the philosophy of interpersonal relationships, such as intimacy, abuse, parasocial relationships, stalking, online dating, polyamory, AI companions, and related topics of student interest.

PHILOSOP 9506: Locke and Hume on Property (Area: Hist, MPL)
Instructor: Dennis Klimchuk
The most basic philosophical question about rights in private property is whether they are natural or conventional. Locke is commonly treated as the most important defender of the former view and Hume of the latter. We will look at their accounts carefully and ask whether the contrast between them is quite that simple. Our focus will be on the primary sources, but we will also read some classic and important recent scholarship on Locke and Hume.

PHILOSOP 9209: Empiricism and the Philosophy of Science (Area: Sci)
Instructor: Chris Smeenk
How should we characterize the structure and content of physical theories? How do theories represent the world and connect to it through experiments and observations? Many philosophers of science have analyzed scientific theories using mathematical logic, following the logical positivists. This seminar considers recent work in philosophy of physics that takes a different starting point: how theories are actually applied, and the mathematical tools (approximation methods, perturbative techniques, scaling arguments, iterative refinement) used in those applications. This shift in focus, from formal logical structure to the practices of approximation, measurement, and scale-dependent modeling, reveals aspects of theory struc- ture that earlier accounts ignored. First, we will consider an account of the content of theories that takes theory-mediated measurement as a guiding idea, in place of other conceptions (such as coordinative definitions a la Reichenbach). This raises a threat of circularity: the measurement of theoretical quantities presupposes the very theory that measurement is meant to test. How can measurements provide evidence for a theory if they already assume its correctness? This apparent circularity can be resolved through an iterative, eliminative methodology, exemplified in historical cases. In the second half of the seminar, we consider how this picture of theory structure and content relates to the framework of effective field theories (EFTs), which has transformed how physicists understand the scope and validity of physical theories. The EFT perspective suggests that theories are valid within limited domains, rather than providing complete descriptions of possible worlds. We will explore the implications of the EFT view for understanding measurement, the realism debate, and the structure of physical knowledge. The seminar will not presume extensive background in physics.