Upcoming Offerings
Spring 2027
Sustainability
PHIL 5050 002 | Dr. Pedro Monque Lopez | Tuesday 2:30 – 5:15 pm
No one is against a sustainable society. Everyone pays lip service to the ideal of sustainability. But do people even agree on what sustainability is? For many, sustainability has just become a label used by companies to greenwash their practices. For others, sustainability remains the key ideal that we need to pursue in order to turn things around and achieve an ecological society. This class will look at the major theories of what sustainability is in itself—for example, those of Donella Meadows, Bryan Norton, and J. Baird Callicott. It will then look at how to apply the idea of sustainability to various human endeavors, from food to energy to human civilization as a whole.
Manufacturing Medicine: Bioethics, Power, and the Construction of Disease
PHIL 5050 001 | Dr. Toby Schonfeld | Tuesday Thursday 10:00 – 11:15 am
This course offers an advanced philosophical and ethical examination of the foundational concepts that shape modern medicine, public health, and biomedical technology. Students will investigate how definitions of health, disease, and illness are constructed, contested, and applied across historical and contemporary contexts, critically evaluating how diagnostic categories function socially, morally, and clinically. Beginning with early biomedical models and psychiatric frameworks, the course traces conceptual shifts toward modern naturalist and normativist theories of health. Students will engage with classic bioethical debates surrounding human variation, biological normativity, and the boundaries of medical authority. Thematic units will include Pregnancy and Reproductive Health (examining the medicalization of natural biological processes, fetal status, maternal autonomy, and the line between reproductive care and pathology); Mental Health and Illness (analyzing diagnostic inflation, the social construction of psychiatric categories, and ethical dilemmas surrounding agency, consent, and involuntary treatment) and Weight Management and the Body (deconstructing body size as a clinical category, the ethical implications of weight-loss interventions and pharmaceuticals, and the intersection of public health metrics with stigma). Designed for upper-level undergraduates in philosophy, bioethics, health humanities, and pre-health tracks, this course equips students with the analytical tools to interrogate who decides what counts as a disease and how those labels impact human identity, clinical practice, and justice.
The End of the World
PHIL 5050 090 | Dr. William Sherman| Monday 5:30 – 8:15 pm
Why do people so often believe they are living at the end of the world? This course examines apocalyptic thinking as a persistent and pervasive way of making sense of crisis, time, and meaning. This is a way of thinking and imagining the world that appears far beyond religion, in politics, literature, film, ecological anxiety, and technological futurism. Drawing on religious studies, literary analysis, and philosophy, students will learn to recognize and interpret apocalyptic logic in both explicitly religious and ostensibly secular contexts, from ancient scripture to contemporary culture.
Latin American Thought
PHIL 5050 091 | Dr. Jose Batista | Thursday 5:30 – 8:15 pm
Language, Culture, and Thought
PHIL 5050 003 | Dr. Elise Berman | Tuesday Thursday 1:00 – 2:15 pm
Can you think without language? Can you talk without thinking? This course delves into these questions, combining linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and digital studies. Students begin with an investigation of semiotic relativity, or how language shapes human cognition, debating the differences between human and non-human communication and cognition, including animal communication and AI. Students then investigate the effects of language in particular on thought-including specific syntactic and semantic forms. Students also examine discursive relativity, or the relationship between cognition and language in use, investigating verbal art, pragmatics and political speech, and changes in writing forms-including literacy, the internet, and interactions with AI. Scholars debate the degree to which these technological developments change, and have changed, thought patterns. Students will investigate these debates and write a final research paper.
Feminist Theory and Its Applications
PHIL 6050 090 | Dr. Emek Ergun | Tuesday 5:30 – 8:15 pm
Skull Wars: Ethics and Human Skeletons
PHIL 6050 091 | Dr. Sara Juengst | Monday 2:30 – 5:15 pm
Research on human skeletal remains has long been fraught with ethical issues, from grave-robbing cadavers for medical research to destroying Native American burial sites. Today, researchers continue to grapple with issues regarding the origins of museum skeletal collections and the bones used in medical schools and universities to teach human anatomy and osteology. Adding to these issues are the various global perspectives on the treatment and display of human remains in archaeological and museum settings. This class will explore the murky ethical waters of ethics in human remains research using case studies from the United States and around the world to understand the sensitive and complex nature of these issues.
Ethical Theory
PHIL 6110 | Dr. Gordon Hull | Wednesday 12:20 – 3:05 pm
Examination of major normative and meta theories that undergird our practical judgments about morally right actions and morally good persons, organizations, or policies.
Ethics, Security, Privacy, and Governance of Data for Social Good
PHIL 6130 | Dr. Damien Williams | Tuesday 5:30 – 8:16 pm
Ethical, privacy, and security concerns that arise in data science, with attention to the ways that governance policies and technological developments can either ameliorate or increase them.
Health Law and Ethics
PHIL 6220 | Dr. Gabriel Wright | Wednesday 5:50 – 8:15 pm
Research Ethics in the Biological and Behavioral Sciences
PHIL 6240/8240 | Dr. Lisa Rasmussen | Thursday 1:00 – 3:45 pm
Designed to identify the fundamental elements that characterize not only methodologically grounded but also morally appropriate scientific research. Class discussion and readings focus on key issues in biological and behavioral research including informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, risk-benefit assessments, mechanisms for protecting animal and human research subjects, international research, vulnerable populations, conflicts of interest and data management, publication ethics, intellectual property issues and the politics of research.