Instructor: C. Mercer

Is there an essential difference between women and men? How do questions about race conflict or overlap with those about gender? Is there a “normal” way of being “queer”? Introduction to philosophy and feminism through a critical discussion of these and other questions using historical and contemporary texts, art, and public lectures. Focus includes essentialism, difference, identity, knowledge, objectivity, and queerness.

This is an introductory course in the Philosophy of Art. We will consider questions including (but not limited to) the following: What is art? Should we try to define art? What is Taste? What are the conditions for aesthetic judgment? What is an aesthetic experience? We shall also consider the topics of “public art,” “fakes and forgeries,” “art and technology” and the philosophical implications of speaking of an “artworld.” This course has restricted enrollment (85), no exams, and no required discussion section.

Instructor: J. Helzner

Prerequisites: One philosophy course or permission of the instructor. Philosophical problems within science and about the nature of scientific knowledge in the 17th-20th centuries. Sample problems: space, time, and motion; causes and forces; scientific explanation; theory, law, and hypothesis; induction; verification and falsification; models and analogies; scientific realism; scientific revolutions.

The course will examine the foundations of modern drama and stage representation by analyzing Luigi Pirandello’s plays and theoretical works in close comparison with the major authors and drama theorists of XIX century, including Bertolt Brecht, August Strindberg, and Jean Genet.

Instructor: T. Wilke

Instructor: M. El-Ghobashy

Comparative analysis of regime types, political development and political decay, nation-state building, and the role of political groups in the Middle East and North Africa. Global Core.

Instructor: C. Harwood

A survey of postwar Czech fiction and drama. Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original.

To understand the current geopolitical competition between liberal democratic states and other global forces, we will try to integrate the insights from the realist logic of struggle for domination and security,the logic of power, with the logic of political development and modernization, the logic of progress. Historical and contemporary themes will include the origins of the modern states system, the rise of nationalism and democratization, the management of the global market economy, decolonization, human rights activism, changing norms for the use of force, and multiple paths to modernity. Prerequisite: Students should have taken (or be simultaneously taking) POLS V1601, Introduction to International Politics, or have the permission of the instructor.

Instructor: M. Dosemeci

This course will examine the global history of radical democracy from the French Revolution to the present. Our task is to trace the various attempts to practice democracy that lie outside of the liberal representative model. Spanning the political spectrum, we will investigate everything from democratic armies and factories, anarchist pirate utopias, to claims by many Germans that Nazi Germany “felt more democratic” than its predecessor the Weimar Republic. What sense are we to make of these exceptions to liberal representative democracy? We will ask what these radical ways of organizing and instituting society offer us and question why and how the liberal model has come to hegemonize our conception of democracy today

Instructor: P. Ferguson

Given that both the novel and sociology of products of and responses to modern society, this seminar will explore interconnections between the two. We shall read sociological texts and novels against each other to ascertain where and how each connects to the other and where they part.