PHIL 106 - Philosophy & Contemporary Issues

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2025/26a: War and Peace. War is more than a discrete act. It is an embedded and enduring social phenomenon. War is part of a social system involving institutions, laws, professions, norms, and discourses. And it is a massive social problem, continually causing horrific injuries and injustices across the world. This course treats war in its full complexity. We investigate the traditional questions of just war theory: When, if ever, is war justified, and how should it be fought? But we also ask deep questions about the social practices of war. What is a military, and should we have one? If we have a military, how should it be integrated into our political order? What do gender, race, and class have to do with war? Why is war so often a colossal strategic mistake and what can we do about it? Do wars cause underappreciated harms—i.e., climate change, refugees, trauma—that should make it harder to justify? What promises and perils do new technologies pose for war and warfare? Graham Parsons.

Topic for 2025/26a: Authoritarianism. We are experiencing a global trend towards authoritarianism. This is a fact most accept readily. But what is authoritarianism? What’s causing it to become more prevalent across such diverse cultural and political contexts? What, if anything, is wrong with it? And: can we do something about it?

This course provides you with a philosophical introduction to authoritarianism: the history of the concept, its historical and contemporary varieties, its causes past and present, and the resources we have for diagnosing and (hopefully) resisting it. We focus especially on the political, economic, and psychological factors that unfetter authoritarian impulses in constitutionally democratic societies. This focus also familiarizes you with contemporary social and political philosophy, an indispensable tool of criticism and consensus-building for democratic publics today. Benjamin Randolph.

Topic for 2025/26b: 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.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS