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This course is designed to assist graduate students with the research and development of their new work. The weekly format is determined with the students. In class, they show works-in-progress, try out ideas with their colleagues, and discuss issues involved in their creative processes. Though the class meets only once a week, students are expected to spend considerable time each week in active, ongoing creative research; their independent projects will be presented to the public, either formally or informally, by the end of the term.

Graduate Teaching Fellows in Dance are integrated into the dance program as teaching assistants. In consultation with their academic advisors and the dance faculty, MFA candidates develop an assistantship schedule of approximately ten hours weekly; the courses they develop and teach are listed in the curriculum. All Teaching Fellows bring their own professional histories and contribute their own manners of teaching. Outside of listed class times, TBD, the Teaching Fellows will meet to discuss their courses with the designated faculty and with each other.

This class examines a variety of answers to the ancient question: How do I live a good life? We’ll engage with thinkers from diverse traditions across time and space as we clarify our own understanding of what makes life worth living and as we articulate a more developed conception of the good life.

The tragic protagonist is a person pushed to the breaking point- dealing with disaster, fate, suffering, unspeakable loss, and often the consequences of their own bad decisions. Greek tragedy shows human beings struggling in a world that often seems brutal, senseless, and beyond their control, where contingency is a hard fact of life. As such, tragedy raises significant philosophical questions: Does human life have purpose? How should we respond to trauma and suffering? How does one live an ethical life in a deeply flawed world?

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) describes his own work in metaphysics by analogy with Copernicus’s revolution in astronomy. He constructs a system of thought that attempts to move beyond the empiricism of Hume and the rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff. His method – critique – and his theory – transcendental idealism – have profoundly influenced all subsequent philosophy.

It is 416 BCE. A group of Athenian men are gathered together for a party, a celebration, a symposium. Among the company are the tragic playwright Agathon, Agathon’s lover Pausanias, the beautiful but doomed Phaedrus, the comic playwright Aristophanes, the doctor Eryximachus, and the (also perhaps doomed) philosopher Socrates. Diotima, a priestess from Mantinea, puts in a surprise appearance. Alcibiades, the glamor boy of Athens, makes a late, splashy, gate-crashy arrival. There are the usual snacks and drinks.

How does one’s social positionality affect one’s status as a knower? Who is heard? Who is believed? This seven-week course is focused on questions of justice and power in relation to knowledge. We will engage with recent work in social epistemology—philosophical theories of belief and knowledge—with an emphasis on feminist epistemologies, anti-racist epistemologies, and epistemologies of resistance. These approaches stress that knowers are embodied, situated, embedded in communities, and have multiple, intersecting social identities.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mathematics underwent a vast expansion, into new, exciting, and increasingly counter-intuitive realms. The subject risked mystification and mutual incomprehensibility between experts in different sub-fields. In the first part of the twentieth century, a group of French mathematicians, under the pseudonym Bourbaki, undertook an ultimately successful program to use the foundation of set theory to put all of mathematics onto a common conceptual and logical foundation.

“I, at least, am not a Marxist”&�Բ�����;Karl Marx