2023-24
PHIL 301
Bioethics
FALL – IN PERSON
This course will explore bioethics questions bearing on the beginnings of our lives and creating new lives. Topics will include the ethics of human genetic enhancement, the value of disability, the morality of abortion, and the Nonidentity Problem and its permutations.
Readings :
All readings will be on OnQ
Assessment:
Three essays plus a potential 5% bonus for contributing to peer learning
PHIL 303
Markets and Morals
WINTER – IN PERSON
Businesses and economic systems shape our lives, politics, and society. In fact, there are few aspects of our lives that are unaffected by commerce and economic forces. Because of this, the connections and tensions between ethics and business are an important and complex area of study. This course will examine whether and how corporations, workers, and consumers can behave ethically within these systems. The course will begin by covering the major concepts and theories that shape business ethics. Then, we will spend the rest of the course looking at various issues in business ethics. These topics might include corporate moral agency, privacy in the workplace, responses to sexual harassment, and environmental responsibility.
PHIL 314
Creativity
FALL – IN PERSON
This course will be concerned with questions such as these: What is creativity? Is there a general structure to the creative process? In what sense, if any, does creativity involve freedom or agency? What role, if any, does creativity play in living well, or in moral thought or action? Is there any truth to the popular idea that mental illness is linked to creative genius? Can creativity be measured? Can it be explained? Can it be learned? Can it be taught? Could a computer program be creative?
PHIL 316
Philosophy of Art
FALL – IN PERSON
The course examines key issues in the philosophy of art and philosophical aesthetics, such as: What is art? What are aesthetic concepts and how do we apply them? What counts as a viable theory of art? Can "art" be defined"? Alongside these theoretical questions, we will consider a range of more specific issues such as: the relationship between works of "fine" art, popular art, and public art; questions concerning the aesthetics of the everyday; and the aesthetics of the natural environment.
Students can expect both shorter and longer written assignments including weekly comment sheets and essays. The objective is to develop skills of critical analysis and interpretation.
PHIL 330
Investigations in the History of Philosophy
FALL – IN PERSON
Hermeneutics has served as an important philosophical tradition with a rich corpus that continues to be engaged with today. Understood as the study of interpretation (e.g., of things like texts and art), it remains influential in many areas across the arts and humanities.
In this course, we will study and discuss some key thinkers in the history of philosophical hermeneutics including Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and others with an intent to investigate the problems that the activity of interpretation poses (e.g., does it require a “method” or whether or not interpretation is necessarily "critical"). Along the way, we will attempt to better understand what role hermeneutics played in the development of the Continental philosophical tradition, while delving into some more recent progress made in the scholarship.
PHIL 332
Comparative Classical Philosophies
WINTER – IN PERSON
This course offers a comparative study of themes in the ancient philosophical traditions of Greece, China and India, over the period from roughly the 6th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. Our reading will range over Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus; Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), and Xunzi; the Dhammapada, Kautilya, and Nagarjuna. Themes will include self and no-self, ethics, logic and paradox, mind and embodiment, and other topics.
Assessment:
3 short comparative analyses, 1 midterm paper, 1 final paper
PHIL 343
Social and Political Philosophy
FALL – IN PERSON
Deciding whether a state like Canada or the U.S. is legitimate seems to be one of the most fundamental judgments we can make about its moral standing. As both critics and supporters of particular states frequently assume, legitimate states have a right to govern their citizens, while illegitimate states lack this right. But what exactly does it mean for a state to have the right to govern, and what are the ethical implications when an unjust state loses this right? The aim of this course is to explore these questions by engaging with contemporary philosophical work on state legitimacy and resistance to injustice. Topics covered will include: The moral foundations of legitimate political authority; The political obligations of citizens in modern states; anarchist objections to political rule; The justification of civil disobedience; and the ethics of political violence, revolution, and foreign intervention.
Course assessments will include 1-2 short writing assignments, a midterm test, and a final essay.
PHIL 347
Contemporary Moral Philosophy
FALL – IN PERSON
This course familiarizes students with some of contemporary moral philosophy’s most central questions and ideas, specifically by way of examination of a topical issue that, according to John Rawls, “subjects any ethical theory to severe if not impossible tests”: what we owe future generations. Questions to be addressed include: Can we harm or benefit a person by bringing her into existence? Is it wrong to create a person whose life is well worth living, when the alternative is creating a different person whose life would go even better? Should we care more about what happens over the course of the long-term future than about what happens in the present, just because the long-term future is likely to contain very many more people? Would it be wrong to hasten human extinction? What should we do about climate change?
PHIL 348
Freedom of the Will
WINTER – IN PERSON
What is freedom? Is being free compatible with being determined by prior causes? What is the relationship, if any, between other human attributes like rationality and consciousness? We’ll explore these questions primarily with readings from contemporary philosophy, supplemented by some relevant sources from the history of philosophy as well as recent research in cognitive science.
PHIL 351
Philosophy of Mind
WINTER – IN PERSON
This course will explore various philosophical issues concerning the nature of the mind. We will address such questions as: is the mind fundamentally different from the body? Can you determine if other people have minds? Is the mind identical to the brain? Is it possible to design a mind (AI)? What role has evolution by natural selection played in the kinds of minds we have? How does the mind relate to the world? Do other animals have minds? Is the mind only 'in the head'? Or is 'mind' ultimately a scientifically inadequate term that we should abandon in favor of whatever our best neuroscience tells us?
PHIL 352
Metaphysics
FALL – IN PERSON
The special focus of this term’s material will be on the metaphysics of the human person. Does the concept “person” pick out a natural kind having a distinctive essence? Or does it just pick out a specific sort of animal? Is there such a thing as the self, which accounts for enduring personal identity, or is the self an illusion? Is there such a phenomenon as free will, or is that perhaps an illusion also? These and other metaphysical questions that have specifically to do with human life and our self-conception will be broached, largely through contemporary work in metaphysics. Among others, we will read work by Sally Haslanger, Christine Korsgaard, Paul Snowdon, Galen Strawson, and Harry Frankfurt.
Assessment:
3 short argument analyses, 1 midterm paper, 1 final paper
PHIL 362
Further Studies in Logic
FALL – IN PERSON
This course is the sequel to PHIL 260, designed to finish the thorough grounding in first-order predicate logic begun there. This class will cover what is called polyadic predicate calculus with identity, and will distinguish predicates from various operations. Don’t let the math-sounding vocabulary intimidate you.
PHIL 260 and 362 together constitute the minimal logic requirement for any self-respecting philosophy student in most philosophy departments in most countries today.
PHIL 367
Jewish Philosophy
WINTER – IN PERSON
An historical survey of key figures in Jewish thought in classical, medieval, modern, and postmodern eras. Major authors include Philo of Alexandria, Maimonides, Spinoza, Arendt, and Levinas. Topics include Jewish belief and Greco-Roman Stoicism, Jewish thought in the medieval Islamic world, the influence of Jewish philosophers on early modern European philosophy, and writing on ethical, political, and social philosophy in the twentieth century.
PHIL 373
Continental Philosophy, 1900-1960
FALL – IN PERSON
This lecture course provides an analysis of key figures and texts in continental European philosophy between 1900 and 1960. Possible figures include Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Hannah Arendt, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Possible topics include phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics.
PHIL 374
Continental Philosophy, 1960-Present
WINTER – IN PERSON
This lecture course provides an analysis of a few texts in continental European philosophy between 1960 and today. We shall study one book each by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, and Jeff Mitscherling and Paul Fairfield. Major topics will include phenomenology, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, aesthetics and artistic creation, among others. The format will be lecture with discussion.
PHIL 382
Space-Time, Matter & Reality
WNTER – IN PERSON
The development of modern physics has greatly altered our understanding of the universe we inhabit. In so doing, it has a direct impact on many long-standing philosophical issues, such as: the relationship between the observer and the observed; the nature of space, time, and matter; the nature of properties; the possibility of gaining knowledge of the mind-independent world; the nature of abstract objects; the mind-body relationship; the possibility of time travel; and more.
This course is a detailed, cross-disciplinary examination the implications of physics for these and related philosophical concerns. Questions to be addressed include: Is time real? Is the passage of time an illusion? Is time directed? What is the nature of infinity? Is the structure of space-time objective or merely a convention? Does physics reveal a mind-independent reality or do observers in some way construct reality? Is it possible to provide a complete description of reality?
While a willingness to learn some (very elementary) formal techniques is important for this course, it does not presuppose any background in math or science, just a willingness to learn. Science and math students are, of course, warmly invited.
PHIL 384
Consciousness
WINTER – IN PERSON
In these early years of the 21st-Century, consciousness has become the final frontier for science, but not so long ago 'mind talk' was strictly taboo in the sciences and the subject was thought to be anathema to academic study. Times have changed: 60 years of advances in brain recording technology, increased cooperation between cognitive scientists of different sub-disciplines, and easier access to the resulting work has led to a field of consciousness studies.
That said, consciousness is still a very hard problem, the hard problem, perhaps, and we deepen our understanding of it by integrating our new findings with insights we have already gained. In this course we will do just that by exploring, through theory and practise, some of the most important philosophies of consciousness and their connections to recent scientific consciousness research. Some of the perspectives we will be looking more closely at are Buddhism, Phenomenology, and Embodied Cognitive Science.
PHIL 390
Philosophical Practice
FALL/WINTER – IN PERSON
Note: Application Required
This is a skills course intended especially for students considering graduate study in philosophy. The fall term provides intensive training in philosophical writing. Its topic is always one of the department's core areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy or history. The winter term is a practicum: students will serve as writing tutors for the PHIL 111.
Here are some innocuous claims. Some states of affairs are better than others, in virtue of being better for persons than others. (For example, states of affairs in which we suffer less are better, other things equal, than those in which we suffer more.) We have presumptive moral reason to help bring about better states of affairs, which will sometimes be decisive. But we also have prerogatives to favour our own interests, sometimes at the expense of what is impartially best. Third, and lastly, we are subject to moral constraints, which limit what we can do in pursuit of our own, or others’, good. Again, none these claims is terribly controversial. Nevertheless, taken together, they give rise to various puzzles, and even paradoxes. Our task will be to work through some of these (in particular, their treatments in the contemporary literature), and toward a better understanding of duties, constraints, prerogatives, and permissions.
Texts/Readings: All readings will be available on OnQ.
Assessment/Fall term: Written argument reconstructions (2 total); argument reconstruction rewrites, supplemented with critiques (2 total); final essay; participation; presentation
Assessment/Winter Term: Practicum performance. Note that we will not meet weekly during the winter term; practicum hours and occasional class meetings will be scheduled around students’ other academic commitments.
Note: This course is capped at 15 students. Admission is by application: a letter of interest, a letter of recommendation from a Philosophy faculty member, and an informal transcript. Normally, successful applicants will (i) be registered in a Philosophy Major or Medial Plan and (ii) have a GPA of at least 3.0 in each of PHIL 250 and PHIL 257. Please e-mail your letter of application and informal transcript to Professor Gordon-Solmon (kg59@queensu.ca); ask your reference to do the same with their letter.
Applications received by August 10, 2022 are guaranteed consideration. After that date, applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the class is full.
2022-23
PHIL 301
Bioethics
FALL – IN PERSON
An investigation of some moral issues arising in connection with health care, including: the relationship between patient and health care provider; reproductive decision-making; euthanasia and the nature of death; and the development of health care policy.
LEARNING HOURS 120 (36L;84P).
Requirements: Prerequisite Level 3 or above.
PHIL 303
Markets and Morals
WINTER – IN PERSON
An examination of the moral principles involved in the evaluation of business institutions, practices and decisions. Sample topics include: liberty, efficiency and the free market ideal; the market and justice in distribution.
LEARNING HOURS 120 (36L;84P).
Requirements: Prerequisite Level 3 or above. Exclusion COMM 338.
PHIL 311
Philosophy of Psychology
FALL – IN PERSON
What is the nature of mind and to what extent can it be disclosed by natural-scientific methods? This course draws on the ideas of a variety of thinkers—such as Bruner, Hacking, McDowell, Midgley, Vygotsky, Wiggins, and Wittgenstein—to explore the nature of psychological explanation. We will examine the social dimensions of the human mind, addressing questions of personhood, identity, rationality, freedom and self-knowledge. We shall also consider how these issues illuminate the psychology of learning, development and education.
Texts/Reading: Bakhurst, The Formation of Reason; Midgely, Beast and Man; plus various articles and supplementary text to be determined
Prerequisite: PHIL 250/6.0 or 12.0 units in PSYC or permission of the Department.
Learning Hours: 120 (36L;84P)
Prerequisite: Level 3 or above
PHIL 316
Philosophy of Art
WINTER – IN PERSON
The course examines key issues in the philosophy of art and philosophical aesthetics, such as: What is art? What are aesthetic concepts and how do we apply them? What counts as a viable theory of art? Can "art" be defined"?
Alongside these theoretical questions, we will consider a range of examples including works of "fine" art, popular art, and public art, as well as questions concerning the aesthetics of the everyday and of the natural environment.
Texts/Readings: Course readings will be available through Queen’s Library’s E-reserves and linked to our OnQ site.
Assessment: Students can expect both shorter and longer written assignments including weekly comment sheets and essays. The objective is to develop skills of critical analysis and interpretation.
Prerequisite: Level 3 or above
Learning Hours: 120 (36L;84P)
Attendance Expected in Timetabled Slots: Yes
PHIL 318
Philosophy of Law
FALL – IN PERSON
Recent debates in the U.S and Canada have centered on concerns about Critical Race Theory and its impact on race-relations and the way history is taught within the K-12 system. This class will be an exploration of the origins of Critical Race Theory beginning with the concerns that Derrick Bell the progenitor of Critical Race Theory had about American education and the legal systems inability to rectify the crimes committed against Black people. This class will also explore how Critical Race Theory has been applied in the Canadian context to show how the law continues to subordinate racialized groups.
Assessment: Students will have an interview assignment which is 10 percent of your grade. You will have 2 social justice papers in which you will analyze a contemporary issue using analysis from class discussion. The social justice papers are 60 percent of your grade. Students will also have a final presentation that builds on the research you have completed which is 30 percent of your grade.
Learning Hours: 120 (36L;84P)
Prerequisite: Level 3 or above.
PHIL 330
Investigations in the History of Philosophy
WINTER – IN PERSON
The concept of ‘alienation’ used from the eighteenth century onwards as a diagnostic and prescriptive tool—and once the bedrock of critical social theory — has a rich philosophical history. In this class, we explore the genealogy of the concept from early uses of alienation in psychology, social contract theory, and theology to the romantic critique of modernity to existentialist, feminist, and sociological appropriations of the concept to the Hegelian-Marxist critique of industrial, capitalist society and the formalization of the alienation critique as a tool for the diagnosis of social pathologies in late modernity, amongst others. While the course will target material that has proven important to the history of philosophy, the emphasis will be on understanding the concept of alienation in both its historical development and relevance to contemporary philosophical thought.
Prerequisite: Level 3 or above
PHIL 332
Comparative Classical Philosophies
WINTER – IN PERSON
This course offers a comparative study of themes in the ancient philosophical traditions of Greece, China and India, over the period from roughly the 6th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. Our reading will range over Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus; Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), and Xunzi; the Dhammapada, Kautilya, and Nagarjuna. Themes will include self and no-self, ethics, logic and paradox, mind and embodiment, and other topics.
Texts/Readings: TBA
Assessment: 3 short comparative analyses, 1 midterm paper, 1 final paper
LEARNING HOURS 120 (36L;84P).
Requirements: Prerequisite PHIL 250 or permission of the Department.
PHIL 343
Social & Political Philosophy
WINTER – IN PERSON
What justifies the political authority of groups to govern particular geographically demarcated lands? Can the Canadian state ever be a legitimate holder of territorial rights in the context of enduring colonial injustice—if so, how, and with respect to which lands? This course will offer an introduction to contemporary philosophical theories of territorial rights and Indigenous theories of resurgence and decolonization. Our objective will be to appraise the resources and limits of territorial rights theory for understanding the obligation and process of territorial decolonization in Canada. Central topics will include: the Land Back movement, the nature of territorial political authority, cultural rights, collective self-determination, treaty politics, restitution, state reconciliation programs, Indigenous conceptions of land, and Indigenous law. The course will be evenly divided between readings in contemporary territorial rights theory in the liberal tradition and contemporary Indigenous political theory.
Texts/Readings
The majority of course readings are contemporary academic articles available online. Authors will include Patrick Wolfe, Matt James, John Rawls, A. John Simmons, Margaret Moore, Anna Stilz, David Miller, James Tully, Dale Turner, Alfred Taiaiake, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Glen Sean Coulthard, Aaron Mills, Val Napoleon, and James Sakej Youngblood Henderson.
Assessment
Expository paper, 4 pages, 20%.
Critical application assignment, 6 pages, 35%.
Final essay, 10 pages, 45%.
Requirements: Prerequisite PHIL 257 or (POLS 250 and 6.0 units in PHIL).
PHIL 352
Metaphysics
FALL – IN PERSON
The special focus of this term’s material will be on the metaphysics of the human person. Does the concept “person” pick out a natural kind having a distinctive essence? Or does it just pick out a specific sort of animal? Is there such a thing as the self, which accounts for enduring personal identity, or is the self an illusion? Is there such a phenomenon as free will, or is that perhaps an illusion also? These and other metaphysical questions that have specifically to do with human life and our self-conception will be broached, largely through contemporary work in metaphysics. Among others, we will read work by Christine Korsgaard, Paul Snowdon, Galen Strawson, and Harry Frankfurt.
Texts/Readings: All available electronically via onQ site
Assessment: 3 short argument analyses, 1 midterm paper, 1 final paper
Learning Hours: 120 (36L;84P)
Prerequisite: PHIL 250/6.0 or permission of the Department
PHIL 359
Philosophy of Language
WINTER – IN PERSON
Central issues include: the distinction between language and speech; the syntax/semantics/pragmatics trio; reference, denoting, names and descriptions; meaning, truth and verifiability; realism and anti-realism; linguistic forms of pragmatism, behaviourism, idealism, etc.
Requirements: Prerequisite PHIL 250 or permission of the Department.
PHIL 362
Further Studies in Logic
FALL – IN PERSON
The course will cover the full polyadic predicate calculus with identity and definite descriptions, otherwise known as Basic Logic for Philosophers. One focus will be on skill development in translation from (ambiguous, vague, contextual) English into (unambiguous, fully perspicuous, eternal) logical formalization, expanded to various quantifiers (universal, existential, definite) practicing the important logical and cognitive notion of scope. This skill enhances clarity, rigour, and complexity in thought. Another focus will be on skill development in various techniques of formal reasoning: syntactic derivation and semantic inference methods; model theory and invalidity proofs. This skill enhances understanding of validity and invalidity, and improves cognitive reasoning abilities through variety and reenforcement.
Requisite: Hard work and dedication. The course requires the use of a remarkable interactive computer program from UCLA available for free, which takes a bit of getting used to but is immensely beneficial. The course is exercise-based. It is not enough to be passively competent with the Language of Logic for it to enhance one’s reasoning abilities. One must be actively fluent in it. The numerous exercises teach and practice every facet and subtlety of English syntax, and the mistakes of reasoning to which humans are prone.
Requirements: Bi-weekly tests, and a final exam.
Prerequisites: Full propositional logic, including facility with translations of English and boolean operators (conjunctions, disjunctions, conditionals) and with formal manipulation of rules of inference. High marks and motivation in PHIL 260, or permission of instructor. (PHIL 260/3.0) or ELEC 270/3.0.
NOTE: Availability in timetabled slots is expected for this course.
PHIL 367
Jewish Philosophy
WINTER – IN PERSON
This course will focus on the work of philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. In particular, we will examine the relationship between Arendt’s Jewish writings and her broader political theory. We will also consider the ways in which her experience as a refugee (newcomer) and stateless person helped to shape her ideas generally. Texts that will be covered include The Jewish Writings, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Human Condition and The Life of the Mind.
LEARNING HOURS 120 (36L;84P).
Requirements: Prerequisite (6.0 units in PHIL or JWST) or permission of the Department.
Course Equivalencies: PHIL267, PHIL367
PHIL 373
Continental Philosophy 1900-1960
WINTER – IN PERSON
This lecture course provides an analysis of key figures and texts in continental European philosophy between 1900 and 1960. Possible figures include Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Hannah Arendt, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Possible topics include phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics.
LEARNING HOURS 120 (36L;84P).
Requirements: Prerequisite Level 3 or above.
PHIL 376
Philosophy & Feminism
FALL – IN PERSON
Feminism is a political movement organized in resistance to women’s oppression. Its rationale and implications are theorized as a function of the shared experiences of women in the movement, especially those who voices have been privileged. Historically and politically specific conditions shape how the category “woman” is constructed as a category of theory and practice. They also affect how diverse modes of women’s oppression are conceived, for example, in relation to such forces as “classical” patriarchy, bourgeois capitalism, white supremacy and colonialism, as well as cis- and hetero-normativity. Feminist thought has also been developed with and against the work of canonical non-feminist philosophers, liberation theorists and movement leaders. Our study of feminist theory will attend to these diverse influences.
Alongside selections from 20th century feminist theorists (e.g. Simone de Beauvoir, Catharine MacKinnon, Mary Daly, Carol Gilligan, Carole Pateman, and Judith Butler) who imagine women’s experience relatively uninflected by race, class, and colonialism, we will read analyses of oppression, resistance and resurgence shaped by attention to experiences at the intersections of gender, Indigeneity, colonialism, transphobia, and white supremacism (e.g. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Angela Davis, Sandy Stone, Patricia J. Williams, Audre Lorde, Nkiru Nzegwu and Viviane Namaste).
Skills in reading theory are emphasized, as is the capacity to think critically about philosophical assumptions and their political as well as philosophical implications. Students are supported in further developing their capacity for clear oral and written analysis, exposition, and argument. Regular attendance at lectures and participation in class discussion is expected.
Texts/Readings:
- A selection of articles and book chapters will be available through Queen’s e-reserves.
- Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought. Edited by Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadeh. Verso Books: 2020. Available from the Queen's Campus Bookstore or through the publisher’s website
Assessment:
- Classroom participation 10%
- Collaborative reading assignments 15%
- Midterm short expository essay (approx. 1500 words), 30%
- Final essay (approx. 2000 words), 45%
Learning Hours: 120 (36L; 84P)
Prerequisite: (6.0 units in PHIL or GNDS at the 200-level or above) or permission of the Department)
PHIL 382
Space-Time, Matter & Reality
FALL – IN PERSON
The development of contemporary physics has greatly altered our understanding of the universe we inhabit. In so doing, it has a direct impact on many long-standing philosophical issues, such as: the relationship between the observer and the observed; the nature of space, time, and matter; the nature of properties; the possibility of gaining knowledge of the mind-independent world; the nature of abstract objects; the mind-body relationship; the possibility of time travel; and more.
This course is a detailed, cross-disciplinary examination the implications of physics for these and related philosophical concerns. Questions to be addressed include: Is time real? Is the passage of time an illusion? Is the direction of time an illusion? What is the nature of infinity? Is the structure of space-time objective or merely a convention? Does physics reveal a mind-independent reality or do observers in some way construct reality? Is it possible to provide a complete description of reality?
While a willingness to learn some (very elementary) formal techniques is important for this course, it does not presuppose any background in math or science beyond the basic high school level. Science and math students are, however, warmly invited.
Texts/Readings:
- Nick Huggett, Space from Zeno to Einstein (Campus Bookstore)
- Peter Lewis, Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics (Campus Bookstore)
- Some additional readings (onQ)
Assessment: Two term tests; final exam
Prerequisite: Level 3 or above
Learning Hours: 120 (36L;84P)
PHIL 384
Consciousness
WINTER – IN PERSON
In these early years of the 21st-Century, consciousness has become the final frontier for science, but not so long ago 'mind talk' was strictly taboo in the sciences and the subject was thought to be anathema to academic study. Times have changed: 60 years of advances in brain recording technology, increased cooperation between cognitive scientists of different sub-disciplines, and easier access to the resulting work has led to a field of consciousness studies.
That said, consciousness is still a very hard problem, the hard problem, perhaps, and we deepen our understanding of it by integrating our new findings with insights we have already gained. In this course we will do just that by exploring, through theory and practise, some of the most important philosophies of consciousness and their connections to recent scientific consciousness research. Some of the perspectives we will be looking more closely at are Buddhism, Phenomenology, and Embodied Cognitive Science.
Learning Hours: 144 (24L;12Lb;84P)
Prerequisite: Level 3 or above
PHIL 390 A/B
Philosophical Practice
Topic: Ethics/Duties, Constraints, Prerogatives, and Permissions
FALL & WINTER – IN PERSON
This is a skills course intended especially for students considering graduate study in philosophy. The fall term provides intensive training in philosophical writing. Its topic is always one of the department's core areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy or history. The winter term is a practicum: students will serve as writing tutors for the PHIL 111.
Here are some innocuous claims. Some states of affairs are better than others, in virtue of being better for persons than others. (For example, states of affairs in which we suffer less are better, other things equal, than those in which we suffer more.) We have presumptive moral reason to help bring about better states of affairs, which will sometimes be decisive. But we also have prerogatives to favour our own interests, sometimes at the expense of what is impartially best. Third, and lastly, we are subject to moral constraints, which limit what we can do in pursuit of our own, or others’, good. Again, none these claims is terribly controversial. Nevertheless, taken together, they give rise to various puzzles, and even paradoxes. Our task will be to work through some of these (in particular, their treatments in the contemporary literature), and toward a better understanding of duties, constraints, prerogatives, and permissions.
Texts/Readings: All readings will be available on OnQ.
Assessment/Fall term: Written argument reconstructions (2 total); argument reconstruction rewrites, supplemented with critiques (2 total); final essay; participation; presentation
Assessment/Winter Term: Practicum performance. Note that we will not meet weekly during the winter term; practicum hours and occasional class meetings will be scheduled around students’ other academic commitments.
Learning Hours: 228 (36S;42Pc;144P)
Prerequisite: level 3 or above and permission of the department.
Note: This course is capped at 15 students. Admission is by application: a letter of interest, a letter of recommendation from a Philosophy faculty member, and an informal transcript. Normally, successful applicants will (i) be registered in a Philosophy Major or Medial Plan and (ii) have a GPA of at least 3.0 in each of PHIL 250 and PHIL 257. Please e-mail your letter of application and informal transcript to Professor Gordon-Solmon (kg59@queensu.ca); ask your reference to do the same with their letter.
Applications received by August 10, 2022 are guaranteed consideration. After that date, applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the class is full.
LEARNING HOURS 228 (36S;42Pc;144P)
Requirements: Prerequisite Registration in a Philosophy Major Plan and (a GPA of 2.4 in each of PHIL 250 and PHIL 257) and permission of the Department.
PHIL 444/844
Philosophy in the Community
WINTER – IN PERSON
This is an exciting new course open that provides an opportunity to upper-level Philosophy concentrators (third and fourth year) for a volunteer placement in the community. Students consider how philosophy can bear upon, and be informed by, the work of a particular community organization, affording a unique learning experience that can also contribute to career development. The course involves placement hours, occasional class meetings, regular reports and a final research essay that analyses both philosophical literature and the placement experience.
Learning Hours: 120(9S;27Pc;84P)
Prerequisite: Level 3 or above. Students must complete an application and have permission from instructor.
Application form should have deadline of September 19. 2022.
Please retain the blurb at the top of the linked page, which warns the pandemic might mean remote format for some activities, but delete this paragraph on the main page:
More information about the course, community placements, and how to apply can be found at this link.