Classes

First-year graduate seminar. A presentation-intensive seminar on topics in normative philosophy (broadly construed). Open only to first-year graduate students in Harvard's philosophy department.

Graduate seminar (co-taught with Christine Korsgaard). Some things are good, whereas others are bad, and some emotional responses to those things are fitting, whereas others are unfitting. We will consider recent and historical work on these two pairs of categories (good/bad...

Lecture course. An introduction to the theory of knowledge. Topics include skepticism about the external world, the analysis of knowledge, sensitivity and safety, the regress of reasons, foundationalism vs. infinitism vs. coherentism, and internalism vs. externalism

Undergraduate seminar. A close reading of Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick’s neglected masterpiece Philosophical Explanations. Topics include philosophical methodology, the identity of the self, why there is something rather than nothing, knowledge and skepticism, free will...

Graduate seminar (co-taught with Susanna Siegel). An examination of the epistemic and psychological structures of inquiry and related phenomena. Questions to be addressed will be both normative and descriptive. They will include: What is inquiry? What, if anything, is its...

Lecture course. Metaphysics is currently undergoing a revolution: the era of "intensional" metaphysics in which the machinery of possible worldstook center stage is giving way to a new period of "hyperintensional" metaphysics in which notions such as grounding, essence, and...

Lecture course. A close examination of three metaethical views that take a deflationary approach toward the moral domain: nihilism, relativism, and expressivism.

Graduate seminar. Contemporary work on the 'because' of grounding, the 'because' of causation, and the 'because' of rationalizing basis, with a particular focus on applications in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of law, and other normative disciplines.

Graduate seminar. Recent work on the structure, nature, and basis of various normative categories, such as the evaluative (good, bad, better, and so on) and the deontic (required, permitted, forbidden, and so on). Special attention will be paid to the hypothesis that the...

Graduate seminar (co-taught with Susanna Rinard). Recent work on the norms that govern belief and other doxastic attitudes. Questions to be addressed could include: Are there non-evidential reasons for belief? Is there a distinctively epistemic sense of rationality, and if...

Graduate seminar (co-taught with Derek Parfit). We shall discuss some conflicting views about what matters, normative reasons, how it would be best for things to go, and the wrongness of acts. We shall also discuss some conflicting metaethical views about these views.

Freshman seminar. The practice of making judgments about right and wrong, of ascribing praise and blame, of deliberating about what one should and should not do -- in short, the entire network of commitments, duties, and customs that makes up that peculiar institution known...