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What are the ideas that made us, as a society, who we are today? Who are the thinkers who proposed them, and why?
The history of philosophy explores how philosophical and scientific thought has evolved over time, in relation to wider society.
As citizens of a modern world, we have inherited a rich legacy of philosophical ideas and debates from great thinkers. The history of philosophy allows us to understand who we are in new ways and, using the resources this philosophical lineage provides us, helps us address today's concerns and solve today's problems.
Our robust philosophy program covers the great thinkers, their ideas, debates and how they have shaped the world we live in today, from Socrates and Plato to the postmoderns.
First year
PHIL102 Theories of Human Nature
Second year
PHIL213 Postmodern European Philosophy
PHIL214 Medieval Philosophy
PHIL224 Ancient Greek Philosophy
PHIL225 The Ground and Nature of Rights
Third year
PHIL321 History of Philosophy seminar
| Professor Claude Romano | German and French phenomenology |
| Heidegger; Gadamer; Levinas; JL Nancy; Kant; Kierkegaard | |
| Professor Robyn Horner | Marion; Lacoste; Derrida; Levinas; Lyotard |
| Nietzsche; Kierkegaard; religious existentialism, Camus; Sartre; De Beauvoir; Cioran | |
| Deleuze, Rancière, Derrida | |
| Lexi Eikelboom | Merleau-Ponty; Agamben |
| German and French phenomenology | |
| German and French phenomenology |
| Freud; Lacan; Klein; Zizek | |
| Freud | |
| Freud; Rank; existential psychotherapies |
| The Frankfurt School (1st, 2nd, 3rd generations); The Budapest School; Marxism and post-Marxist political philosophy; Zygmunt Bauman; Charles Taylor | |
| Max Horkheimer; Herbert Marcuse; Franz Neumann; Gyorgy Lukacs; Ernst Bloch | |
| Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Honneth | |
| From Hegel to Derrida |
| Plato; Epictetus | |
| Professor Claude Romano | Greek philosophy |
| Plato; Aristotle, Stoicism; ancient philosophical institutions and practices; classical receptions |
| Benjamin DeSpain | Aquinas; Thomism |
| Nicholas of Cusa | |
| Professor Claude Romano | Renaissance philosophy |
| Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, experimental philosophy (Locke), neostoicism, the enlightenment philosophies |
| Adam Smith; moral sentiments; sympathy, empathy and emotion | |
| Professor Claude Romano | Philosophical romanticism |
| Professor Claude Romano | Phenomenology and the Analytic tradition (from early Wittgenstein onward) |
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