Classes
The graduate seminar involves paper presentations on current research by graduate students, department and cognate faculty, and visiting scholars. Graduate students must register in and attend the seminar on a continuous basis, and are only eligible to graduate once they have successfully presented a seminar.
All Masters students taking the thesis-based option must register for this course in every term.
Maintenance of Status
All Masters students taking the course-based option must register for "Maintenance of Status" for every term in which they are not registered in a course for credit.
GSR 960 Introduction to Ethics and Integrity
All graduate students are required to register for this short online course upon commencing their programs. The purpose of this course is to discuss ethical issues that graduate students may face during their time at the university. The five modules in GSR 960 look at general issues for graduate students including integrity and scholarship, graduate student–supervisor relationships, conflict of interest, conflict resolution, and intellectual property and credit.
Term 1: Fall 2024
PHIL 820 – Philosophical Texts: Law and Legal Pragmatism
In this graduate course, students will examine philosophical texts on the nature of law, with a special focus on legal pragmatism. Since much of the contemporary debate in N. American legal philosophy is dominated by both proponents and critics of legal positivism, the first part of the class will focus on explaining legal positivism, its separation thesis, and its views on the rule of law. The second part of the course will then turn to examine different kinds of critical reactions to legal positivism with particular focus for this graduate course on legal pragmatism. Richard Posner, Richard Rorty and Susan Haack offer more contemporary versions of pragmatism that will be examined critically, especially as they pertain to debates in the philosophy of law. Although they all agree that pragmatism has something to offer, they disagree significantly about their understanding of pragmatism and the kind of contributions pragmatism can make to our understanding of law and legal practice. By the end of this course, graduate students should not only have achieved an understanding of these particular philosophers and their philosophical texts on law and legal pragmatism, but also students should have achieved a critical understanding of the issues involved in the philosophy of law and with legal pragmatism.
Instructor: Maricarmen Jenkins
Contact: maricarmen.jenkins@usask.ca
Schedule: MWF 1:30-2:20 pm
PHIL 826 – Advanced Seminar in Philosophy of Mind: Philosophy of Emotion
This course is an advanced introduction to the philosophy of emotion. The course material is informed by the psychological study of emotion and focuses on classical philosophical texts and debates. In this class we will study a number of issues arising within emotion research. These issues include: the nature of emotion space, the relation between basic emotions and complex emotions, whether emotion is a bodily perception or a perception of the evaluative properties of objects, and/or whether emotion has a cognitive dimension, and/or whether emotion is essentially an affective feeling. We will also study the evolutionary and/or socio-cultural roots of emotion. We will study the relation between rationality, irrationality and emotion, and investigate whether humans enjoy infallible self-knowledge of their own emotions, or whether emotions often lead to self-deception. We will discuss the relation between emotion and behaviour: how strongly does behavioural indistinguishability (whether the behaviour be by robots, animals or other minds) count as evidence for the presence of emotion? Finally, we will look at the relation between emotion, value and morality: is emotion central to value assessments and morality, or does emotion conflict with morality?
Instructor: Dwayne Moore
Contact: dwayne.moore@usask.ca
Schedule: TTh 1:00-2:20 pm
PHIL 851 – Seminar in History and Philosophy of Science: Philosophy and Psychiatry
In the first half of this course we will consider philosophical topics related to psychiatry as a science, including the question of the reality and nature of mental illness, philosophical understandings of illness more generally, the nature and justification of psychiatric diagnosis, and the nature of psychiatric explanation. Along the way we will also explore the relationship between mental illness and responsibility, and the challenge of cultural and religious sensitivity in psychiatry. The second half of the course will take up a set of psychiatric phenomena—auditory verbal hallucinations, delusion, depression, and addiction. We will focus largely on the case of addiction and consider a variety of philosophical perspectives on it, considering, for example whether addiction is best understood as a brain disease of compulsion or if there are other, possibly better, ways of theorizing it.
Instructor: Sarah Hoffman
Contact: sarah.hoffman@usask.ca
Schedule: MWF 8:30-9:20 am
Instructor: Peter Alward
Contact: peter.alward@usask.ca
Schedule: TBA – see course Canvas page
Term 2: Winter 2025
PHIL 833 – Advanced Seminar in Ethics: Kantian Ethics
Kant’s ethical theory is grounded on the thesis that autonomy is the source of value. Value exists because rational nature (the capacity to set ends according to reason) exists and is an end in itself; morality is possible because we can be moved by principles of reason. To understand Kantian interpretations of Kant’s theory, we must first study the foundations of Kant’s account of obligation. To do this, we will focus on selections from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and The Metaphysics of Morals. Next we will study the work of contemporary Kantians as it relates to particular moral issues, including lying, responses to violence, obligations concerning non-human animals, and sex. This will help to reveal the richness of Kantian ethics and make it more obviously relevant to daily life.
Instructor: Emer O’Hagan
Contact: emer.ohagan@usask.ca
Schedule: TTh 11:30 am–12:50 pm
PHIL 862 – Seminar in Social and Political Philosophy: TBA
Instructor: Pierre-Francois Noppen
Contact: pf.noppen@usask.ca
Schedule: TTh 10:00-11:20 am
PHIL 871 – Seminar in Aesthetics: Words, Works, and Characters
This course will be focused around three separate but related metaphysical issues: the nature of words, the nature of musical works, and the nature of fictional characters. First, we will at look at words, such as “catastrophe” and “Peter.” We will be focused on the relation between words themselves and particular utterances and inscriptions of them. Second, we will consider musical works, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor and Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World. We will consider whether they are best viewed as abstract structural types or as persisting concrete entities of some kind. Finally, we will investigate the nature of fictional characters, such as Dorothea Brooke and Bilbo Baggins. Our guiding question will concern how characters can be objects of thought and talk – and authorial creations – given that they do not exist.
Instructor: Peter Alward
Contact: peter.alward@usask.ca
Schedule: M 6:00-8:30 pm
Instructor: Peter Alward
Contact: peter.alward@usask.ca
Schedule: TBA – see course Canvas page