FALL 2025 COURSES IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND/OR CRITICAL THEORY

Anderson, PHIL 048 PO, Intimate Relationships. The first few decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed seismic shifts in the ways that individuals worldwide establish and sustain relationships. At the same time, many of these shifts speak to long-considered questions about the nature of love that philosophers have been considering for millennia. This course will focus on romantic/erotic love, friendship, and self-love, drawing on key texts from the history of philosophy to the present day. (may not yet be on Portal)

Kirk, Eng 153 PO Medieval Proof: Test, Trial, Experiment. What makes us modern if not our experimental disposition? We demand proof; we conduct experiments; we test everything: nuclear weapons, pregnancy, drugs, IQ, DNA, HIV and everything else. This, we think, distinguishes us from our medieval forebears. Still, what is more characteristic of the Middle Ages than their regimes of proof?––trial by ordeal; the test of a hero in a quest; demonstrations of the number of angels on the head of a pin. The purpose of this seminar is to see what, if any, difference obtains between medieval and modern experiences of verification. Keeping in mind modern and contemporary work on the experimental disposition of modernity (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Latour, Ronell), we will examine the reality probes sent out by literary, juridical, logical, theological, mystical, and scientific texts from the Middle Ages.

Kreines, Phil 198-CM Kant to Hegel: Reason/Nihilism
The context is a growing unease that Enlightenment reason would undermine traditional religion—either in favor of Spinoza’s monism, which holds that all things are one, with no transcendent God and no creation; or in favor of what then came to be called “nihilism.” Kant’s critique of reason offers a moderating reform. F. H. Jacobi’s response is more radical: a subordination of rational demonstration, anticipating existentialism. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel attempt to find their way through these options, inspired by Spinoza but oriented to new freedom-centered forms of a philosophical "system". Pre-req: two previous courses in philosophy.

Mubirumusoke, AFRI128 / PHIL142: Black Phenomenology.
Phenomenology is a school of philosophy that emerged at the turn of the 20th century and is described by its forefather Edmund Husserl as a philosophy of experience. This class will explore how black experience challenges the Eurocentric proclivities that structure phenomenology's fundamental tenets. 'Black phenomenology' is not a school of thought in opposition to phenomenology, but an engagement with different black thinkers who in articulating black experience, have come to reject, modify, and, in some cases, adopt in non-intuitive ways ideas concepts and frameworks from classical phenomenology and its many outshoots. Cross-listed as PHIL142 CM.

Seitz, GEOG 145 HM, Feeling Natural? A 2021 poll conducted by the American Psychiatric Association found that two in three American adults described feeling anxious about the impact of climate change on life on Earth. Contemporary environmental politics are nothing if not emotional. But psychoanalysis and affect theory also gently remind us that emotions - particularly emotions that arise in the face of socially induced catastrophe - are in many respects trained and historical rather than simply "natural." At stake in this course is not dismissal of legitimate contemporary feelings of climate anxiety and grief, but a turn to psychoanalysis and affect theory to think structurally and historically about how those feelings come to be, and about the complex relationships between feeling differently and prospects for environmental justice.

Seitz, GWS179B HM, Envy: A Queer Feeling? Amid unbearable social realities, envy is everywhere. We "hate-watch" the rich and beautiful on our screens. Reactionaries envy those whom they imagine to benefit "unfairly" from affirmative action. Some Leftists even envy the Right's ruthless political discipline. For the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, "the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable — the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it," is also foundational to our capacities for love and gratitude. But if envy is ubiquitous, even universal, its geographies are highly uneven. It's often suggested that the oppressed envy the oppressors - and vice versa - but this does not make envy a great equalizer. With guides like Klein, Sianne Ngai, and Mari Ruti, this course will explore feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, critical-race, Marxist, and other anti-oppressive perspectives on the politics of envy, resentment, and related "bad" political feelings with a (broadly) queer eye toward breaking normativity.

EXPECTED SPRING 2026

Eisenstadt: RLST162 PO - Modern Jewish Philosophy. We begin with early modern attempts to define Judaism as a religious, political, and/or philosophical thing, and follow the questions this endeavour raises as they develop into 20th century theory about the role of dialogue with the other in the formation of the self.  We read selections from Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise, Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Buber’s I and Thou, and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. 

Friedlander - MS 148D: Powers of Pleasure: This course explores relationships between pleasure (and related concepts of desire, happiness, jouissance, erotics, etc.) and power.  It draws upon work by Freud, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Berlant, Lorde, Jameson, hooks, Fiske, Saketopoulou, and more. Letter grade only. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, and MS 051 PO.

Friedlander & Krips: MS 149T PO-01. An overview of core traditions in Critical Media Studies through in-depth engagement with key texts. This course serves as preparation for the Senior Seminar by consolidating a foundation in critical theory. Areas of focus include the following: The Frankfurt School, The Chicago School, Pragmatism, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, Semiotics, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Psychoanalytical Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Critical Race Theory. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, or MS 051 PO, and one upper level theory class (MS 147 PO - MS 149 PO). May be repeated once for credit.

Kreines: Continental Philosophy: Alienation and Critique from Hegel to Derrida. PHIL100E A survey of continental philosophy, from Hegel to Derrida, with a special focus on themes of alienation and critique.