PHIL 106 - Philosophy & Contemporary Issues

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2024/25 a and b: Alienation. What does it mean to feel or to be alienated? Wanting things just because other people do? Not being able to identify with our social and political institutions? Or does it mean the narrowing of our activities, becoming workers who carry out tiny parts of broader processes that we can’t see and that we can’t control? How do ideas of alienation and meaninglessness have to do with ways that social life is organized — with the capitalist economy, for one, but also with institutions like race and gender? This course traces different views of alienation and its critique that runs through Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Marx, Lowe, Lukacs, and others. We also look at less conventional forms of alienation critique as part of our inquiry: fiction by Nella Larsen, and the film A Woman Under the Influence. Shivani Radhakrishnan.

Topic for 2024/25b: Love & Sex. This course focuses on contemporary and perennial questions about love and sexuality. What is love, and why are our romantic relationships so important to us? Are friendships and romantic relationships really that different? What, if any, is the relationship between love and sex? Are our current norms and practices surrounding sex good ones to have, or are there other ways we should be approaching sexuality? We explore topics such as romantic love, friendship, the nature of sex and sexuality, sexual ethics, taboos, and sexual identity through student-led discussions and deep engagement with philosophical texts. Rebecca Harrison.

Topic for 2024/25a and b: Feminist Ethics of Vulnerability and Care. (Same as WFQS 106) Prominent feminist philosophers, including Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero, have argued that vulnerability is a fundamental, ontological category for humans—we are all embodied and born of others, we require care to survive and thrive throughout our lives, and we are susceptible to forms of violence. While vulnerability is argued to be universally shared, it is nevertheless unevenly distributed according to historically and politically contingent features of our world that mark some lives as more valuable and grievable than others. This course carefully and critically examines feminist and queer theories of vulnerability and precarity in order to better understand what is meant by these terms and what kind of ethics and politics they give rise to. We also consider pressing questions about the ethics and politics of care, including: What would an ethical and just distribution of caring labor look like? What do philosophers have to say about the appropriation of “self-care” in neoliberal, capitalist contexts? How is care theoretically and practically constrained by dominant norms of family and kinship, and how are these being challenged in feminist and queer contexts? Rachel Silverbloom.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS