Teaching
Current Courses
Proto-Seminar (for first-year PhD students)
Introduction to Philosophy through Great Works (undergraduate level, past syllabus below)
Introduction to Philosophy through Great Works (undergraduate level, past syllabus below)
Past Courses
Advanced Topics in Modern Philosophy: The Principle of Sufficient Reason (graduate seminar, syllabus)
Introduction to Moral Theory: Virtue, Value, and Happiness (undergraduate level, syllabus)
Introduction to Philosophy through Great Works (undergraduate level, syllabus)
Kant (advanced undergraduate, syllabus)
Introduction to Philosophy (syllabus)
Ethics and Society II: Individual Obligations and Collective Moral Problems (undergraduate level, syllabus)
- Roughly speaking, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) says that every thing, fact, or state of affairs has an explanation that accounts for why it is the way it is. Traditionally understood, this principle demands thoroughgoing intelligibility for everything: if the PSR is true, then there are no brute facts, and everything can be explained. In the European philosophical tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries, many of the most important metaphysical and epistemological debates centered on questions about the status of the PSR and the upshots of a commitment to it. In this seminar, we will examine these debates and the place of the PSR in broadly rationalist metaphysical systems. We will focus on the following questions: (1) How exactly should we understand the demand for intelligibility made in the PSR? (2) Can the PSR be proved? (3) If the PSR is true, what follows from it? Necessitarianism? Idealism? Monism? (4) Does the PSR lead to paradoxes without a restriction of its scope? How might one argue for principled restrictions of its scope? The majority of the course will focus on historical figures, but we will also examine the recent revival of interest in the PSR in contemporary metaphysics. Our historical star players will be Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, but we will also read selections from lesser known figures whose influence on debates about the PSR was significant: Christian Wolff, Émilie du Châtelet, Alexander Baumgarten, and Christian August Crusius.
Introduction to Moral Theory: Virtue, Value, and Happiness (undergraduate level, syllabus)
- Suppose you make it your aim to live a happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life. Will pursuing a life that is good in this sense also lead you to be a morally good person? In this introduction to moral theory, we will explore these and other classic questions about what it is to be moral, what it is to live a happy life, and how being moral and living a happy life relate to one another. In our studies of being moral, we will explore consequentialist, deontological, and virtue ethical approaches to right action. In our explorations of happiness and the good life, we will cover subjectivist and objectivist approaches, questions about the role of meaning in living a good life, questions about how a theory of the good life should accommodate an account of disability, and questions about well-being in the digital world.
Introduction to Philosophy through Great Works (undergraduate level, syllabus)
- This course is an introduction to philosophy through the study of influential writings in its history. We will cover a range of questions in epistemology, value theory, and metaphysics, focusing especially on the following: What is knowledge, and what can we know? What is it to live a good life, and does the pursuit of happiness support or conflict with the pursuit of virtue? What is the makeup of fundamental reality, and how might it be different from what we initially take it to be? Is there causality in the world? What is the nature of the self? And do we have a self at all? We will study these questions by reading the works of Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, René Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, early Buddhism, and the Aztec (Nahua) philosophical tradition.
Kant (advanced undergraduate, syllabus)
- This course is an introduction to the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Since the 18th century, few philosophers have more profoundly impacted the disciplines of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and moral philosophy than did Kant. The course focuses on two of Kant’s most important works in these areas: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). Topics discussed will include: the nature and possibility of metaphysics, the relation between mind and world, knowledge and justification, the nature of space and time, causation, freedom and causal determinism, the autonomy of the will, moral motivation, the value of humanity, and the nature of moral obligation.
Introduction to Philosophy (syllabus)
- This course is a general introduction to philosophical questions, texts, and methods. It explores four main sets of questions in ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. (1) Does friendship require partiality, and is this in tension with morality? (2) Is our social media use shaping our beliefs in an acceptable way? Do we have implicit biases, and what are the costs of having implicit biases? (3) Do we have the kind of free will that would make us morally responsible for what we do? (4) Does physical matter really exist, or is everything is mental? Historically, why have some philosophers embraced an idealist metaphysics?
Ethics and Society II: Individual Obligations and Collective Moral Problems (undergraduate level, syllabus)
- This course explores how we as individuals should be thinking about our role in moral problems that are distinctively collective in nature. Are we responsible as individuals for climate change? Are we duty-bound to vote even when we are unlikely to make a difference to an election’s outcome? And how should we be thinking about societal problems such as racism? Is racism a problem pertaining to the beliefs and actions of individuals? Or is it a problem pertaining to groups and social structures?
Last updated September 2023 by Rosalind Chaplin