Fall 2022 Course Descriptions and Schedule
Course Schedule
Course Descriptions
To help you make an informed decision as to what courses to enroll in for the Fall 2022 term, we have compiled a list of course descriptions composed by the professors who will be teaching these classes. We hope that this will give you more insight into what will be taught in these classes. If you have further questions about a specific course, we encourage you to contact the instructor directly via email.
Please visit our YouTube channel to view our video course descriptions.
PHIL 3122 Nineteenth-Century Philosophy: Angelica Nuzzo
M/W 2:15-3:30 p.m., anuzzo@brooklyn.cuny.edu
The course offers an overview of 19th century philosophy focusing on the successive responses given to Kant's "Copernican revolution" on the one hand, and to Hegel's dialectical theory of spirit and history on the other. Our principal objective throughout the course will be to follow the different ways in which 19th century philosophers have been addressing issues concerning the power of reason and rationality, articulating the place of the human subject in the world of nature and history, and developing models of analysis and critique of social and political institutions. We will read selections of the following works: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Fichte's Vocation of Man, Hegel's Lectures on Absolute Spirit, Marx's writings on historical materialism, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.
The format of the course includes lecture, class discussion, and student presentation. Emphasis will be placed on the careful reading, interpretation, and discussion of texts.
Objectives: The course will teach how to read and critically interpret philosophical texts as well as how to extend the discussion to touch upon contemporary philosophical issues and problems.
PHIL 3142 Existentialism: Angelica Nuzzo
M/W 3:40-4:55 p.m., anuzzo@brooklyn.cuny.edu
The course offers an overview of the main topics and issues that characterize the philosophical movements known in the 19th and 20th century as ‘existentialism’ and ‘phenomenology’. Our principal objective will be to follow the different ways in which philosophers have addressed issues concerning the meaning of life and death, the significance of human individuality against the power of universal reason, the place of the human subject in the world of nature and history, and the meaning of historical and individual contingency. We will read selections of works by the following authors: Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit, master-slave dialectic), Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground), Sartre, and Buber (I and Thou).
Objectives of the course are learning how to read, explain, and interpret philosophical texts as well as to assess the historical transformation of philosophical ideas.
PHIL 3305 Ethics and Personal Relations: Matthew Moore
TDB, MatthewM@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Many of the moral issues we grapple with in our everyday lives have to do with our personal relationships: with our obligations to friends, lovers, parents, spouses and children, among others. Our ethical exploration of these relationships will bring us up against fundamental questions about partiality and impartiality, autonomy, altruism and self-respect. We will complement these more theoretical discussions with attention to some of the more important forms of human relationship|between friends, between spouses, and between parents and children|and the dicult moral questions connected with them, including: what is the moral value of marriage? what is forgiveness? why should one do more for a friend than one would for a stranger? what do grown children owe their parents? Readings will be drawn from both classical and contemporary sources. The format of the course will combine lecture and discussion, with an emphasis on discussion. No previous study of ethics is required.
PHIL 3306 Ethics and Society: Christine Vitrano
T/Th 9:30–10:45 a.m., cvitrano@brooklyn.cuny.edu.
This course focuses on important social issues that concern and affect us all, such as abortion, terrorism, torture, capital punishment, pornography, affirmative action, euthanasia, and animal rights. One aim of this course is to help you sharpen your critical skills by looking at these issues from all different angles.
We begin with a brief review of three classic moral theories (Aristotle’s virtue theory, Kantian deontology and Mill’s utilitarianism). The remainder of the course will examine the morality of these social issues, and it will involve a lot of class discussion.
PHIL 3309 Environmental Ethics: Mike Menser
M/W 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m., mmenser@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Climate chaos is here, from floods to fires to mass extinctions. Everyone now agrees that we need to act, but what should we do? What should we focus on? Who should pay? Who should benefit?
The 21st century has brought with it a range of environmental problems that humanity (and the rest of the earth) have never encountered so what’s Brooklyn College going to do about it? Climate change gets much of the press but mass extinction, soil degradation, water scarcity, and atmospheric and oceanic pollution pose problems potentially as catastrophic and NYC is feeling the impacts especially since Superstorm Sandy. Relatedly, a global economy heavily reliant upon oil, coal and gas threaten to further destabilize the global ecology as do further processes of economic development, urbanization, and population growth. And NYC is in the midst of a rebuilding effort which will spend 10s of billions to make us safer, but what kind of city do we want to create?
Mission of this class: 1) to become familiar with a range of ethical theories including human-animal rights, participatory democracy, environmental justice, and virtue ethics. 2) to be able to apply these theories to real world environmental cases both global and local and critique them; 3) to understand the historical, cultural, political and economic dimensions of environmental issues; 4) to critically assess the role(s) of the state, market, businesses, technologies and social movements for achieving sustainable development and “resilience”; 5) to understand the meanings of key terms in the debates: ecological footprint, sustainability, resilience, environmental racism/justice, food sovereignty, global warming, climate justice; green capitalism, “organic,” commons. 6/ a special focus this term will be Jamaica Bay and the NYC food system.
So what should be done and who should do it? This is a central question in applied ethics.
We shall be especially focused on the issue of “sustainability” and sustainable development and related issues of agriculture, food, and democracy as they apply to both rural and urban areas. Brooklyn and Brooklyn College itself will be of particular focus as we look at activities and proposals to make the campus and the borough more “sustainable” and resilient and fights over just what that means. Also, students will be required to morally evaluate their own consumption practices and construct a project to make BC more sustainable/resilient.
PHIL 3316 Medical Ethics: Anna Gotlib
T/Th 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m., agotlib@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Have you ever wondered whether our system of medical care treats people fairly? Or whether we ought to be able to choose when, and how, to die? Or perhaps about the connection between the law, public policy, and your access to a doctor? Or why our current pandemic is a medical, political, and social crisis? All of these questions, and more, reflect a rapidly-changing world of emerging biotechnologies, laws, and health care practices, placing significant pressures on our understanding of ourselves and our society. To ask difficult questions about how we are born, how we live, how we experience illness, and how we die -- and to begin to offer some responses -- is the work of medical ethics. Specifically, this course provides an introduction to medical ethics by addressing issues arising from the application of various models of ethical decision-making (moral theory) to questions of medical care, biomedical research, and healthcare justice. We will also consider some critiques of the ethical models themselves, and then ask what kinds of social policies (if any) might adequately address the complexities inherent in biomedicine. Topics to be discussed will include physician-nurse-patient relationships, human and animal research, emerging biotechnologies (such as stem cell research and cloning), neuroethics, health care and justice, public health and pandemics, and others. The format of the course is seminar-style discussion, with an emphasis on active student participation. There are no prerequisites for this course.
PHIL 3320 Foundations of Ethics: Christine Vitrano
T 2:15–3:30 p.m. and Th 1:25–3:30 p.m., cvitrano@brooklyn.cuny.edu
This course examines the most important moral theories in the history of philosophy. A person’s character plays a central role in ancient moral theories, and that is where this course begins. Starting with virtue ethics, we focus on readings by Plato and Aristotle, and then we turn to the work of Epicurus (hedonism), and Epictetus (stoicism).
Next, we turn to Hobbes (egoism), Kant (deontology) and Mill (utilitarianism). The course ends with a discussion of Camus and Sartre (existentialism).
PHIL 3121 Modern Philosophy: Daniel Campos
M/W 2:15-3:55 p.m., DCampos@brooklyn.cuny.edu
From the 16th until the early 18th centuries, as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bernoulli, and Newton revolutionized science, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume, among others, shaped the modern philosophical worldview.
What were their conceptions of the nature of reality? How could we attain knowledge of it? How should natural philosophy or science be practiced? What was the relationship between knowledge, opinion, and faith? What did the human freedom of will mean?
We will study these questions in order to understand how modern philosophy arose. This will help us understand what it means to be philosophically “modern.”
PHIL 3401 Metaphysics: Saam Trivedi
Tu/Th 9:05-10:45 a.m., trivedi@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Metaphysics, broadly understood as the study of reality, is often described as being at the abstract heart of Philosophy, with important connections to other branches of Philosophy, including epistemology; logic; the philosophies of mind, language, and science; ethics; and aesthetics. In this class, we will discuss some central issues in contemporary analytic metaphysics such as ontology, identity, properties, and causation. Both classic and contemporary readings will be used.
PHIL 3410 Epistemology: Robert Lurz
T 2:15–3:30 p.m. and Th 1:25–3:30 p.m., rlurz@brooklyn.cuny.edu
What you don’t know can hurt you!
What are the limits to human knowledge and understanding? Can we know and understand anything? Can we distinguish appearance from reality? Are there things that we cannot (or should not) know or understand? What are they and why? This course is intended to introduce students to a number of important philosophical issues and theories on the nature of knowledge and rational belief. Issues such as – skepticism, foundationalism, coherentism, and kinds of knowledge – are examined and discussed from classical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This is an excellent course for students who are interested in philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of science.
PHIL 3601 Philosophy of Science: Robert Lurz
T/Th 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m., rlurz@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Science is a unique and important way of understanding ourselves and the world. And yet despite its singular significance, there is much we do not understand about the nature of scientific knowledge and inquiry. What, for example, makes scientific explanations unique and different from say religious explanations, conspiracy theory explanations, and common-sense explanations? Science aims is to discover the causes of things, like diseases (epidemiology) and weather (meteorology), as well as natural laws, like the law of gravity (physics) and the law of supply and demand (economics). However, we still have a very poor understanding of what causation and laws of nature actually are. Science aims to provide objective explanations based on observed results of experiments. However, there are deep puzzles about how observations confirm scientific hypotheses, and whether any observation is ever truly objective. Science aspires to explain all aspects of the natural world. But is this really possible? Are there some natural phenomena, like the emergence of consciousness and the existence of the universe, that science will never be able to explain? These are some of the central questions in philosophy of science that we will be investigating in this course. This course is an introductory-level course that does not require any background in philosophy or science and does not have any prerequisites.
