PHIL 238 - Social and Political Philosophy

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

This course introduces students to some historical and contemporary debates within political philosophy and in contemporary debates about various social problems and their connection to political philosophy.

Topic for 2022/23a: Knowledge, Ignorance, Power. This course primarily takes up texts from feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, and queer theory in order to engage a series of related questions about the relationship between knowledge, ignorance, and power: How is what we know (and how we know it) related to social and political life and systems of power? How is one’s intelligibility, within a set of dominant norms and discourses, often determinative of the livability (and grievability) of one’s life? In what way is ignorance not always reducible to a “lack” of knowledge, but can also be something that is systematically produced? What are some ways that we can resist violent discourses of knowledge and ignorance, and what liberatory practices of producing knowledge are being imagined and generated today? Rachel Silverbloom.

Prerequisite(s): One 100-level course in Philosophy.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS