Teaching

This course offers an intensive study of the philosophy of Mary Shepherd, with the aim of placing graduate students in a position to contribute to current research on her work. We will closely read Shepherd’s two major publications, An Essay upon the Relation of Cause and...

E.B. White once said that “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” In this class, students will ignore White’s warning and explore a series of philosophical theories of humor, including superiority, sentimentalist...

Science is a defining feature of modern life. But what is science? How did it arise? What are its foundations and implications? In this introductory-level course, students will explore key philosophical ideas such as empiricism, evidence, induction, naturalism, realism, and...

This regularly offered course offers an introduction to the history of intellectual reflection on religion and belief in the western tradition. We’ll read roughly a half dozen perennial works drawn from authors ranging from Augustine of Hippo to William James. Along the way...

Science is a defining feature of modern life. But what is science? How did it arise? What are its foundations and implications? In this introductory-level course, students will explore key philosophical ideas such as empiricism, evidence, induction, naturalism, realism, and...

Science is a defining feature of modern life. But what is science? How did it arise? What are its foundations and implications? In this graduate-level course, students will explore a wide-range of topics in the philosophy of science such as empiricism, evidence, induction...

Mary Shepherd engages some of the most hotly debated issues of the 18th and 19th centuries: in epistemology, the nature and status of causal or scientific reasoning and sensory perception; in metaphysics, the nature and status of causation and of the external world. Her...

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were among the most exciting and revolutionary periods in the history of philosophy. Among the most prominent philosophers working in that period, Locke, Berkeley and Hume have traditionally been grouped together under the label...

Notoriously dismissed by Petrarch as the “Dark Ages” and still often overlooked today, the medieval period included some of the most profound thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. In this course, we will examine three of its great traditions, Platonism, Scholastic...

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were among the most exciting and revolutionary periods in the history of philosophy. Among the most prominent philosophers working in that period, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz have traditionally been grouped together under the label...