Academic Year 2019-20, King’s College London
Autumn 2019
6AANA032/ 7AAN2053, 19th-Century Continental Philosophy
This module introduces two of the most influential and subtle of modern philosophers: G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Beginning with a brief overview of Kant’s philosophy, the course examines how Hegel and Nietzsche attempt, in very different ways, to refine, transform, or destroy the legacy of the Enlightenment. The focus, in particular, will be on the understandings of history, rationality, and the process of the emergence of norms conveyed in texts such as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality.
6AANB039, Gender & Philosophy (co-led with Mirjam Müller)
This module offers students the opportunity to think critically and analytically about gender. It is also an opportunity to consider the ways in which critical analysis of gender-related issues might contribute to philosophy as a discipline. In pursuing these aims, it will engage with a wide selection of philosophical debates relating to gender across a range of areas within the discipline.
Academic Year 2018-19, University of Toronto
Autumn 2018
ETH350H1, Topics in Value Theory: Aesthetic and Moral Value
This course explores the relationship between moral and aesthetic value. Can one be explained in terms of the other? Does the value of art consist in the moral valence of its content or effects? Can moral and aesthetic reasons ever come into conflict, and if so, must we always adjudicate in favor of the moral? These questions will be addressed with a combination of historical and contemporary philosophical readings and examples from literature and film.
Winter 2019
ETH230H1, Morality in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality in Historical Context
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most widely known and widely misunderstood among modern philosophers. On the Genealogy of Morality is in some respects his most traditional book—it is written in the form of three “essays” or “treatises” rather than aphorisms or Bible parody—and is therefore the work of Nietzsche’s most often assigned to undergraduates in survey courses. But like all of Nietzsche’s writing, it is deceptively readable, highly allusive and elliptical, and requires a lot of historical and contextual knowledge to properly understand. So this course is intended to guide students through a careful reading of the Genealogy, providing some of the background information needed to understand where Nietzsche’s sweeping historical and cultural claims are coming from and why the Genealogy is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the ethical landscape we find ourselves in today.