Fall 2022 PHIL Courses

Below are the Philosophy courses being offered at Purdue University in Fall 2022. The courses are listed by their five-digit course number and course title. Underneath the course number and title is information on specific sections being taught in Fall 2022, including the modality (e.g., lectures = ‘LEC’), the enrolment limit of the class, the day(s)/time the class is being taught, the classroom, and the last name of the instructor. Courses that include a recitation section are marked as ‘LEC/REC.’ Details of the recitation sections are not listed. The type ‘DIST’ indicates a fully asynchronous, online course. ‘New Faculty’ indicates that one of our new faculty hires will be the instructor of record. PHIL courses that are cross-listed with other courses are marked as such (e.g., ‘c/l DEPT 10000’). Where multiple sections of a course are being offered, each section is listed separately with the specific instructor's course description where applicable.

Jump to: 100 Level Courses 200 Level Courses 300 Level Courses 400 Level Courses 500 Level Courses 600 Level Courses MA Courses

100 Level Courses

11000 - The Big Questions: Introduction to Philosophy

The basic problems and types of philosophy, with special emphasis on the problems of knowledge and the nature of reality.

1. LEC/REC (225): TR, 5:30-6:20pm, CL50 224, Kelly
2. LEC (35): TR, 9:00-10:15am, BRNG 1230, New Faculty
3. LEC (35): MWF, 3:30-4:20pm, BRNG 1268, New Faculty
4. DIST (100): fully asynchronous online, De Araujo

Description of Dr. Kelly's section (#1 above): There are two main goals of this course. The first is to introduce students to the Western philosophical tradition, its defining themes, and the way those have been developed by major historical and contemporary figures. Such themes include religion (does God exist? is belief in God rational?); perception and its relations to knowledge, reality, and the external world (could we tell if we were living in a computer simulation? what is reality made of?); the nature of personal identity and the self (what makes me, me, now and throughout the course of my life? is there an afterlife, and will I be there?); free will (do the laws of physics determine everything that happens, or do I choose my own pathway through life?); morality (are right and wrong objective, or relative, or what?); and the connection between minds and bodies (does the brain produce consciousness? could a computer become self-aware?).

The second goal is to provide students with the tools to refine their thinking, evaluate evidence, articulate their own views, and assess the arguments of others. In a world increasingly beset by fake news, algorithm-driven polarization, and general misinformation, these critical reasoning skills are more crucial than ever. This course will give students many opportunities to hone them on Big Picture topics, too, sharpening their wits on Great Ideas and thinking systematically about Meaning of Life type questions. Together all of this will help students do the most important thing: TurboCharge their own Bullshit Detector.

11100 - Introduction to Ethics

A study of the nature of moral value and obligation. Topics such as the following will be considered: different conceptions of the good life and standards of right conduct; the relation of nonmoral and moral goodness; determinism, free will, and the problem of moral responsibility; the political and social dimensions of ethics; the principles and methods of moral judgment. Readings will be drawn both from contemporary sources and from the works of such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Butler, Hume, Kant, and J. S. Mill.

1. LEC/REC (225): TR, 4:30-5:20pm, UC 114, Frank
2. LEC (35): TR, 12:00-1:15pm, BRNG 1230, New Faculty

Description of Dr. Frank's section (#1 above): Why be moral? Is it to your advantage to be moral? Are you moral if you help a poor person grudgingly, from duty? What if that poor person requests a dollar and Bill Gates cruises by having lost his wallet and needs a dollar to get to the bank to transfer millions for Africa relief work—to whom do you give the dollar, assuming you have only one dollar to give? Asking and pondering such questions requires no prerequisites, just a curious mind, like yours. We will read and discuss the thoughts of great moral philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche, as we struggle to answer the aforementioned questions. We’ll also do some political philosophy in this course.

The course will proceed by lecture and discussion, and two (2) in-class essay examinations will determine the grade.

11400 - Global Moral Issues

LEC/REC (150): TR, 9:30-10:20am, WTHR 172, Davis

The aim of this course is to provide a general introduction to the field of global ethics. This actually involves three introductions at once: one to the methods of philosophy in general, a second to ethics as a subfield of philosophy, and a third to a sample of ethical issues that are specifically global. We’ll begin by discussing the nature of arguments, which are the basic methodology of philosophy. We’ll then examine the nature of ethical claims and the scope of ethical obligation, before studying a range of ethical theories. Finally, we’ll consider what we owe to distant strangers from different cultures, the ethical value of patriotism, and the ethics of climate change.

15000 - Principles of Logic

LEC (40): TR, 4:30-5:45pm, BRNG 1268, Tulodziecki

[Note: This course fulfills UCC quantitative reasoning/math requirements.] This course is an introduction to the basic concepts and methods of modern logic, with emphasis on the construction and appraisal of complex patterns of reasoning. Some of the things expected will be the recognition and reconstruction of arguments in ordinary language, the symbolization of propositions and arguments from English into logical notation, the testing of arguments for validity, and understanding and constructing proofs. You will be expected to know the notation and the techniques of propositional and predicate logic. Put less formally, you will learn what it means for a claim to follow from others, and to recognize and construct good arguments of your own.

200 Level Courses

20600 - Philosophy of Religion

LEC (35): MWF, 9:30-10:20am, BRNG 1268, Draper

A central tenet of many religions is that God exists. The goal of this course is to investigate whether there are any good arguments for or against God's existence. Each argument will be clearly and carefully stated and rigorously evaluated. Both traditional arguments for God's existence (e.g., ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, design arguments, moral arguments, and arguments from miracles) and non-traditional arguments for God's existence will be examined. The best arguments against God's existence, including the argument from suffering and the argument from divine hiddenness, will also be discussed, and multiple concepts of God will be considered when evaluating these arguments.

20700 - Ethics for Technology, Engineering, And Design

LEC/REC (75): TR, 10:30-11:20am, WTHR 320, Davis

This course focuses on a specific form of professional ethics, which addresses the obligations of engineers and designers in industries and environments that are increasingly international and cross-cultural. The goal of the course is to apply a general conceptual framework to the specific facts of new and unique situations, including those arising from the global context of modern engineering. The course first covers what this ethical framework is, and then provides practice in applying it to concrete cases. The readings, case studies, and exercises will culminate in a detailed ethical case study that will be presented both orally and in writing.

20800 - Ethics of Data Science

LEC (125): TR, 1:30-2:45pm, WALC 2087, Messina

As applications of data science permeate more aspects of our lives, new and important ethical issues are arising. However, especially because we’re entering uncharted territory, reasoning clearly about the ethical implications of data science isn’t easy. This course provides students with the tools for doing so, including a conceptual framework for ethical reasoning in professional settings, as well as a procedure for case-study analysis that allows students to practice employing this conceptual framework. Together, these components help prepare students to be ethical professionals and responsible global citizens.

21900 - Philosophy and the Meaning of Life

LEC (35): TR, 3:00-4:15pm, BRNG 1230, New Faculty

A survey of both the philosophical and more literary writings of the existentialist movement. Readings will be chosen from among the following writers: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Marcel, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, Jaspers, de Beauvoir, Ortega, and Merleau-Ponty.

22100 - Introduction to Philosophy of Science

LEC (35): TR, 3:00-4:15pm, BRNG 1268, Tulodziecki

An introduction to the scope and methods of science and to theories of its historical development. Topics may include scientific revolutions, theories of scientific method, the nature of scientific discovery, explanation, and the role of values in scientific change.

23000 - Religions of the East (c/l REL 23000)

LEC (35): TR, 12:00-1:15pm, BRNG 1268, Purpura

A study of the history, teachings, and present institutions of the religions of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. This will include Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, and Zoroastrianism.

23100 - Religions of the West (c/l REL 23100)

LEC (35): MWF, 10:30-11:20am, BRNG 1230, Ryba

The purpose of this course is to provide a systematic survey of those religions variously described, in the West, as ‘Western Religions’ or ‘Religions of the West.’ Immediately, a problem arises because the adjective, ‘Western,’ is questionable. The descriptions ‘Western’ or ‘of the West’ have been understood as designating a problematic geo-cultural location—but also a homogeneous style of religious thought because of their common origins as Abrahamic monotheisms. Contemporary scholars of religion, and indigenous believers, often contest this claimed homogeneity and have pointed to the incredible complexity and fluidity of these traditions, characteristics which resist simplistic classification. Well aware of the challenges such descriptions present, we, in this course, will engage in a comparative study of the systems of belief and thought traditionally termed ‘Religions of the West’ by Western scholars of religions. This will be accomplished through a series of readings on these religious systems’ histories, philosophies, and scriptures (in their classical periods).

24000 - Social and Political Philosophy

LEC (35): TR, 9:00-10:15am, BRNG 1268, Parrish

This Fall, PHIL 24000 will be a service learning course and the topic will be, "Economic Inequality - Root Causes and Lasting Consequences". In this course, students will become cognizant of the increasingly widening wealth gap in the United States, and will investigate the underlying causes of this social and economic inequality through foundational texts as well as contemporary case studies. Issues of access (in)equality - of education, of health care, of judicial and electoral representation, etc., will be analyzed. As a service-learning course, a required component is off-site participation with a community organization. Students will develop and enhance the necessary skills for the service-learning component of this course, so that they may maximally apply their intellectual work with community engagement.

27000 - Biomedical Ethics

LEC/REC (225): TR, 12:30-1:20pm, WTHR 200, Parrish

An examination of the moral problems raised by developments in medicine and the biomedical sciences. Topics include abortion, reproductive technologies, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, experiments involving human subjects, and health care delivery.

27500 - Philosophy of Art

LEC (20): TR, 1:30-2:45pm, BRNG 1248, Cover

An introductory philosophy course with a particular target and a certain focus. The target is art, of course. “Art History” and “Art Appreciation” are the names of some other courses – differing from ours in focus that we’ll find ourselves getting clearer about, almost without trying. (So if you had any interest in art history or art appreciation, you won’t come away empty-handed.) But the shared target, i.e. art – what is that? Some folks in the business – some philosophers, some connoisseurs, some well-heeled scholars, some self-appointed art-critics – reckon art to include epic poetry and dance and a garden-variety broom that you can buy at the hardware store. On that way of thinking, the target swells to become so liberally vast and wide as to be…, well, pretty much anything you please. In that case, hitting the target becomes so easy that sane philosophers will tell you the philosophy quickly becomes maximally difficult. That’s no good!

…No good, especially for an introductory course. Philosophy itself is hard enough. So we will run the course like this: we’ll learn some philosophy (and some art history and some art appreciation) by narrowing our target to questions about the nature, function and value of art, with particular emphasis on visual art. (You can swap ‘graphic’ for ‘visual’ without any risk. Think paintings, for example – though of course an old etching or engraving would surely count; if sculpture is in the game, architecture probably won’t be.) We’ll look at some, or rather at pictures of some, along the way. But mostly, we will be slowing down to ask important and difficult-enough questions that arise when thinking carefully together about what’s going on with these wonderful objects – with this landscape painting or this portrait or even this depiction (on canvas, say, not from a camera) of something that…cannot be seen.

300 Level Courses

30100 - History of Ancient Philosophy

LEC (35): TR, 10:30-11:45am, BRNG 1268, Frank

This is a first course in the history of philosophy in antiquity, covering a period of almost a thousand years. The course divides into three main parts. We begin at the beginning (where else?) when philosophy emerged from non-philosophical modes of thought in the 6th century BCE. We will trace the intellectual paths blazed by the first philosophers, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. Thanks to them, we became skeptical about the nature, even the reality and value, of the world around us, no longer confident that what we perceive maps on to what there really is, and that what seems good to us really has value. With such skepticism in the air we turn to the giants of philosophy in antiquity, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who, each in his own way, attempts to respond to the fear that knowledge about the sensible world is unattainable and that the reality of a realm of values is a vain imagining. Finally, we will spend some time on philosophy after Aristotle, a very rich intellectual period that saw the rise of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism–competing schools of philosophy, indeed ways of life. The post-Aristotelian philosophical movements developed through discussions and disagreements with each other, but they will be presented here as a set of intelligent responses to Aristotle and his views about the nature of human well-being.

The course will proceed by lecture and discussion, and two (2) in-class essay examinations will determine the grade.

30200 - History of Medieval Philosophy

LEC (35): TR, 4:30-5:45pm, BRNG 1230, Lavender

A survey of the main trends and figures of medieval philosophy, with an emphasis on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Readings (in English translation) may include Augustine, Boethius, Avicenna, Anselm, Abelard, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham and Suarez.

30300 - History of Modern Philosophy

LEC (35): TR, 1:30-2:45pm, BRNG 1268, Jacovides

Philosophy flourished in the early modern period (for us, between 1633 and 1783). We shall examine the central doctrines of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Our central epistemic topics will be the problem of skepticism, whether we have any innate ideas, and how we can know anything about the outside world. Our central metaphysical topics will include the nature of minds, the nature of bodies, and the relation between them. We shall also consider how these philosophers attempted to fit God into their newly scientific worldviews. Three papers will be assigned, along with a requirement to write a question or comment on the reading for most classes.

30400 - 19th Cenutry Philosophy

LEC (35): MWF, 11:30am-12:20pm, BRNG 1268, Mariña

This course will be an examination of philosophical movements in 19th century European and American philosophy, especially as represented by seminal figures such as Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and William James. Movements covered will be: a) Post-Kantian Idealism in the context of the response to Kant’s Copernican Revolution in Philosophy (Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel), b) Existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche), and c) Pragmatism (William James).

35000 - Philosophy and Probability

LEC (35): MWF, 10:30-11:20am, BRNG 1268, Draper

The aim of this course is to use mathematical probability to explicate the concept of (supporting) evidence or "confirmation" and then use that explication to address a variety of foundational problems in the philosophy of science. Topics include:

1. the rules of mathematical probability;
2. the concept of epistemic probability and theories of intrinsic probability;
3. the "relevance theory" of confirmation;
4. the structure of scientific reasoning;
5. the raven paradox: why do positive instances confirm different universal generalizations to such different degrees?
6. the asymmetry question: why does strong or conclusive evidence against a scientific theory seem so much easier to come by than strong or conclusive evidence for it?
7. what's wrong with statistical significance testing?
8. the problem of simplicity: what is simplicity and why are simpler theories not just easier to use, but more likely to be true?
9. Goodman's paradox and the new riddle of induction: how can one theory be more likely to be true than all competing theories even though that theory fits the data no better or even worse than some of those competing theories?
10. Hume's problem of induction: is it possible to justify induction?

400 Level Courses

40300 - Moral Psychology and Climate Change

LEC (20): TR, 3:00-4:15pm, BRNG 1248, Kelly

There’s an old saying that if you want to change the world, you need to know which levers to pull. In this course, we’ll consider some of those levers, especially those that lie within ourselves. We’ll use research in the interdisciplinary field of moral psychology to explore the philosophic and ethical facets of climate change, and aim for a better understanding of what exactly it is about the climate crisis that makes it so difficult for us to grasp and effectively act on.

We’ll first look at state of the art research on the character of human moral psychology, drawing from philosophers, psychologists, biologists, economists, and anthropologists. We’ll pay particularly close attention to the psychology of cooperation, and the central roles that culture, social norms, and informal institutions play in shaping both individual and group behavior. We’ll also look at how the threats produced by climate change engage our minds, and more alarmingly, fail to engage them. It appears that the climate crisis is a "perfect storm", almost custom designed to elude the grasp of our intuitive moral psychology. We will examine in more detail how key features of the climate crisis lie behind various of our cognitive blind spots, fail to push our emotional buttons or get a grip on our motivational apparatus, and give rise to particularly difficult forms of collective action problems. Finally, we’ll consider some ideas for how to get around these obstacles, especially ideas attempting to leverage emerging research on human moral psychology and nudge us and our institutions towards effective social change.

43200 - Theory of Knowledge

LEC (35): TR, 10:30-11:45am, BRNG 1230, Bergmann

This course will focus, for the most part, on three problems concerning knowledge and rationality.

• Problem 1 - Skepticism: It seems that our knowledge of the physical world around us is mediated by our sense experiences and our memories. But isn’t it possible (even if unlikely) for our sense experiences and (apparent) memories to be exactly as they are even though there is no physical world and even though we have existed for only five minutes? Can we somehow rule out these possibilities? If not, why just assume that what our senses and memories incline us to believe is the truth? This is the challenge of the skeptic. Her answer to the question “What do we know about the world around us?” is “Little or nothing”. How shall we (is there a we?) respond to this sort of skeptical worry?
• Problem 2 - Foundationalism vs. Coherentism: Suppose we do have rational beliefs. Initially, it seems that a belief can’t be rational unless the person holding it has a reason for it. But it seems the reason for it must itself be something the person rationally believes. So she must have a reason for that reason (if rationality requires having a reason). However, she can’t go on giving reasons forever. Eventually she must stop giving reasons or she must come back to some reason she has already used before (thereby reasoning in a circle). Thus, either it is appropriate to reason in a circle (a coherentist option) or else some of our beliefs are rational despite the fact that we don’t have reasons for them (a foundationalist option). Which of these two options is most plausible?
• Problem 3 - Internalism vs. Externalism: Suppose that some of our beliefs can be rational despite the fact that we don’t infer them from other beliefs. Still, they must have something or other going for them if they are to be rational. But now consider this question: can my beliefs be rational (due to the fact that they have something or other going for them) if I have no idea what it is that they have going for them? (This is the externalist option.) Or are they rational only if I’m aware of what it is they have going for them? (This is the internalist option.)

43500 - Philosophy of Mind

LEC (35): MWF, 12:30-1:20pm, BRNG 1268, New Faculty

An examination of some central issues in the philosophy of mind. Attention is given to such topics as the knowledge of other minds, the relation between mind and body, the nature of persons, and the analysis of certain relevant concepts such as action, emotion, and perception. Readings are selected primarily from the writings of contemporary philosophers.

46500 - Philosophy of Language

LEC (20): TR, 12:00-1:15pm, BRNG 1248, New Faculty

An examination of some of the central issues in the philosophy of language, such as meaning, reference, truth, propositions, and speech acts.

500 Level Courses

51000 - Phenomenology

LEC (10): M, 2:30-5:20pm, BRNG 1248, Mariña

This course offers a careful examination of central texts in phenomenology, with special attention to hermeneutics. Our main concern in this course will be to examine the insights of phenomenology in relation to questions of the constitution of consciousness, temporality, understanding, interpretation, their relation to the life project, and how they define our Being with others. As such, a central aim of the course is the examination of interpretation in relation to ethical concerns. Readings from Husserl will include chunks from Ideas and other essays, as well as the entirety of the Cartesian Meditations. Heidegger’s Being and Time, and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness will be examined in relation to both Husserl’s foundations and the issues delineated above. Comparison of the development of these issues by these three thinkers will be a fundamental goal.

The class requires a significant amount of reading of the primary texts. These are difficult, but as we move along we will be doing close textual analysis of key passages that will help you to uncover the fundamental ideas behind each text.

52500 - Studies in Metaphysics

LEC (10): TR, 9:00-10:15am, BRNG 1248, Cover

A straight-ahead meat-and-potatoes course in metaphysics and how to do it. If we permitted Aristotle’s famous text to be our guide (his Metaphysics had as its title a word he’d never encountered), we would think hard about the nature of unchanging things and their first causes. This won’t be a history course, nor will we start by agreeing that metaphysics is the study of “being qua being”. But here are two respects in which our course will have something in common with that venerable old project: (i) it will try to say something about being (while appreciating that there is no such thing), and (ii) it will try to land on necessary truths about what there is and the nature of what there is. Full stop, pretty much. The first of those is some (i) meta-metaphysics, which is a little more than half the serving of that “how to do it” portion of our meat and potatoes. The second of those can range as widely as the whole wide world – and in a way even more widely still: it’s not as if one wasn’t doing metaphysics when one carefully thought one’s way to the conclusion “So, it turns out that there are no properties (after all) that you and I share”, or to the conclusion that there are no bearers of properties (not really), but just properties; meanwhile Spinoza was obviously wrong, since the whole wide world – of what’s actual – is in a pretty obvious sense less than what’s possible. (There are novels, for crying out loud [i.e. pieces of literature which, though false, aren’t necessarily false.) So the second and larger main helping (ii) will try to land on necessary truths about properties, and about the nature of so-called particulars, but also about the nature of necessity and contingency (modality) itself. At least those four, in this course. All from our armchairs, of course – with perhaps a tiny exam, probably less reading than you expect, certainly a middling amount of writing, and hopefully lots of in-class participation.

54000 - Social Ontology of Institutions

LEC (10): W, 8:30-11:20am, BRNG 7119, Yeomans

This course will have two parts. The first half of the course will be an introduction to the contemporary field of social ontology, which is the study of the being, relations, and properties of the social world. This half will include readings on debates about demarcating the social from the non-social, the question of whether the individual person is social or non-social, and the question of the relation between social-ontological, social-causal, and social-functional properties. The second half of the course will take up a particular topic, namely the social ontology of firms (enterprises). Firms are the basic productive entities of economic activity, and we will have readings from philosophy, sociology, and economics. Though there is a long history to social ontology, our readings will be drawn from the contemporary debate.

600 Level Courses

62400 - Seminar in Ethics: Kant's Moral and Political Philosophy

LEC (10): M, 11:30am-2:20pm, BRNG 1248, Kain and Messina

In this graduate seminar, we will study Immanuel Kant’s major writings on moral and political philosophy. Our historical and systematic approach to these texts will raise questions about the relationship between freedom and morality, the nature of ethical inquiry, the ethics of autonomy, the status of political obligation, the permissibility of political resistance, and institutional questions surrounding the rule of law and global justice. Readings include Kant's Groundwork, Critique of Practical Reason, Metaphysics of Morals; his essays on practical philosophy (especially those touching on enlightenment, perpetual peace, and methodology in ethics); selections from his lectures on ethics and natural right; and the relevant secondary literature.

68300 - Studies in Continental Rationalism

LEC (10): TR, 10:30-11:45am, BRNG 1248, Jacovides

According to Hegel, “If one begins to philosophize, then one must first be a Spinozist.” We’ll begin to philosophize by studying Spinoza’s greatest work, the Ethics. We’ll figure out whether he was a God-intoxicated man or the founder of a system of philosophical atheism. We’ll see how his metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind, and political philosophy fit together. Two papers, a class presentation, and an analytical bibliography will be assigned.

M.A. in Philosophy for International Students Courses

56100 - Reading Philosophy: Skills and Strategies

LEC (7): TR, 10:30-11:45am, BRNG 7119, Dillmann

Academic philosophy demands both the ability to read large amounts of texts fluently, carefully, and closely. Furthermore, the abstract nature of philosophical discourse places a large cognitive demand upon readers. This course prepares non-native English speakers philosophy students for these intensive reading demands. The course has three major learning areas: the language skills that students need to read fluently (i.e., the efficient processing of language for general comprehension of meaning); reading strategies that students can use to improve comprehension and learning; and communication about readings, as the close reading of texts is essential to communicating one's ideas both orally and in writing.

Students are also supported in their regular philosophy courses. This course is linked to one or more 500+ level philosophy seminars that students in this course are enrolled in. Reading materials, writing activities, and projects for the course are designed to complement tasks and projects required in the linked philosophy seminar.

57100 - Writing to Learn

LEC (7): TR, 1:30-2:45pm, BRNG 7119, Dillmann

Writing on a higher academic level can be especially challenging for non-native English-writers. Thus, this course aims to develop students’ graduate-level skillsets in philosophical practices in an English language environment to help them gain confidence and become productive members of the philosophical community. Students will learn writing processes that will aid their ability to effectively compose in English, including developing a thesis statement, outlining, drafting, formatting, and editing. As all four chief skillsets in second-language proficiency development work in tandem and enhance each other, the course will rely on writing, reading, speaking, listening, and presenting work for learning and further developing these advanced language skills.

Students are also supported in their regular philosophy courses. This course is linked to one or more 500+ level philosophy seminars that students in this course are enrolled in. Reading materials, writing activities, and projects for the course are designed to complement tasks and projects required in the linked philosophy seminar.