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Fall 2024 Graduate Course Descriptions

Listed below are the Philosophy courses being offered at Purdue University in Spring 2024. The courses are listed by their five-digit course number and course title, followed by a brief description. The tables below each description also include information on the course type (e.g., lectures = ‘LEC’), the enrolment limit of the course, the day(s)/time of the course or each section of it, the classroom in which the course will be taught, and the instructor(s) for the course. Courses that include a recitation section are marked in the tables below as type ‘LEC/REC.’ Details of the recitation sections are not listed. The type ‘DIST’ indicates a fully asynchronous, online course. ‘Grad’ indicates that a graduate student 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’).

Have questions about philosophy graduate courses? You can contact our Grad Coordinator, Vickie Sanders, via email at sanders@purdue.edu, or by phone at 765-494-4275.

500 LEVEL COURSES

51400 20th Century Analytical Philosophy

A detailed study of the origins and development of contemporary philosophical analysis, and how it was pursued in movements such as logical atomism, logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, and others. Readings will cover a selection of the writings of Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Ryle, Austin, and others.

54000 Studies in Social and Political Philosophy

(c/l POL 65100) This seminar asks: what norms and virtues should govern our political conversations in diverse societies? How should we comport ourselves when we disagree with our co-citizens? How should we respond when others evince incivility, ignorance, hatred, motivated reasoning, and closed-mindedness? What responsibilities do we have to listen to our political opponents and respect norms of conversation ourselves? And what happens to our political lives and institutions when failures on these fronts are widespread? We will explore these and related questions by reading contemporary works in political theory, philosophy, legal theory, and classics in the history of ideas.

55100 Philosophy of the Natural Sciences

The aim of this course is to investigate confirmation and theory choice in the natural sciences.  Topics include how to choose between two scientific theories that fit the data equally well, how to measure the degree to which one statement or fact either confirms a theory or favors it over some other theory, how to understand simplicity and its role in theory choice, and how to understand the role that epistemic probability plays in scientific reasoning and philosophical theories about scientific reasoning.  For those students especially interested in epistemology, this course will overlap what is known nowadays as formal epistemology.

58000 Laws and Causes

Laws and causes are the springs and principles of the universe. We’ll examine them from both a historical and a contemporary perspective with a focus on issues in metaphysics and philosophy of science. The course will begin with a discussion of the origin of the concept of a law of nature, and then treat modern analyses of laws and the place of laws in the social sciences. We’ll also consider the proper analysis of causation and its place in a world of laws, including the question of whether fundamental physical laws make any appeal to causation. The course will finish with a discussion of various puzzles associated with causes, including problems about causation in the legal system. Two papers, a class presentation, and an analytical bibliography will be assigned.

600 LEVEL COURSES

62400 Seminar in Ethics

We will meet by Zoom or Boilercast (link will be sent to you prior to meeting) on some Fridays. We should be prepared for possible changes required by the University for meetings, including going on-line only.

 “An intensive study of some persistent problems of ethics, metaethics, and theory of action such as: intrinsic goods, ends and means…. Emphasis will be on contemporary discussions. Variable subject matter.”

 This seminar will focus on contemporary debates regarding the ethics of advocacy and controversies regarding: (a) justifications of moral advocacy (b) criteria used to warrant obligations (c) types of foundations (realist, nonrealist) and (d) applications in fields as far flung as artificial intelligence and genocide studies (e.g., contemporary ethnic, racial, religious, gender). Kant, Marx, Dewey, Rorty and Deleuze read against one another and Harris.

 This seminar may be especially useful for graduate students considering ethics exams and majors, social movement studies and publishing book reviews.

Want to know what else we offer? Check out the Master Course List