PHI 350 Plato
A detailed reading and discussion of several major dialogues of Plato with numerous references to selected parts in other dialogues. Plato’s positions on the nature and purpose of philosophy, as well as his tentative answers to the central questions of philosophy, will be contrasted with those of some other philosophers. Carroll Keeley, Corrigan, Ranasinghe/Three credits
PHI 322 Advanced Topics In Ethics
This course is designed for Juniors and Seniors who wish to go beyond the basic level of study in ethics to examine a major text or an issue in moral philosophy. A familiarity with basic moral theories and problems studied in ethics (PHI 202) will be presupposed. This course may focus on a particular text, author, or issue according to the interests of the instructor and students. Possible topics include: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; Environmental Ethics; Kant’s Groundwork and Critique of Practical Reason; the Problem of Evil; Theories of Virtue: Ancient and Modern; and Global Ethics. Carroll Keeley, Colvert/Three credits
Course of Philosophy at Assumption College
PHI 312 Contemporary Women In Philosophy
The purpose of the course is to introduce the student to the philosophical ideas of five contemporary thinkers: Simone de Beauvoir, Hanna Arendt, Simone Weil, Suzanne Langer, and Susan Sontag. Each woman’s work involves a quarrel with modernity which in every case except Langer’s is occasioned by experience, either proximate or remote, of the Second World War and its aftermath. But in each case the grounds for the quarrel differ. Our analysis will evoke these differences: the existentialist ethics of Simone de Beauvoir, the political emphasis of Arendt, Simone Weil’s religious thought, Langer’s aesthetics, and Sontag’s hermeneutics of culture. Carroll Keeley/Three credits