2025 Courses

Instructor: Alirio Karina

This course surveys histories of slavery and unfreedom so as to elaborate the problems of discourse, evidence, definition, and politics that surround the various mechanisms and modalities of historical unfreedom, considered alone and in comparison. Over six sessions, we will explore various histories in which we can see the coalescence of specific facets of unfreedom into models for unfreedom—the child, the wife, the serf, the slave, the worker—and consider what is at stake when these models are forced, by reality, to intersect or reach their limits.

Instructor: Colin Drumm

What is Philosophy? Does Philosophy happen any time anybody thinks about anything, or is it a particular mode of thinking, engaged in by particular kinds of people, on particular topics? This course will particularize the universal claims of Philosophy by examining both attacks on, and defenses of, Philosophy produced by the encounter of Philosophy with other discourses making rival claims to truth. As an Introduction to Philosophy that does not simply take for granted the assumption that Philosophy is a legitimate enterprise worth doing, the course will examine a selection of apologetics, polemics, and irenics.

Instructor: Sean Capener

In this course, we’ll examine and assess a number of proposed origin stories for the economic, political, and social structure critics call ‘capitalism.’ In the process, we’ll explore various ways in which each answer to the question ‘when is capitalism’ might really be a way of litigating a series of related, but different questions—questions like ‘what is capitalism’ and ‘how does capitalism differ from whatever came before it?’ At stake throughout are questions about money, power, and politics in the present era, as well as narratives of legitimacy, illegitimacy, and historical change.

Instructor: Joy Shokeir

Animal domestication irrevocably altered life on our planet, producing a morphological and behavioural suite of characteristics—tameness, fecundity, and neoteny—known as “domestication syndrome”. Once introduced into the Domus, domesticated animals divided the domesticated world from the wilderness, revolutionized ecologies, and laid the foundations of civilizations. Looking beyond dogs as the first domesticated species, human evolution itself bears the marks of domestication in our neotenous skulls and tamed behaviour, making us the product of the “zeroth” domestication. Throughout this course, we will critically examine how domestication has shaped the bodies and lives of human and non-human animals from the Paleolithic to Modernity.

Instructor: Sean Capener

To hear the philosophers tell it, our contemporary moment is inescapably ‘post-Kantian.’ On the one hand, the story goes, the shadow of Kant’s influence looms so large that even those thinkers who repudiate his philosophy do so on the terrain it established. On the other hand, Kant’s shadow looms so large because his philosophy represents an intellectual revolution on a scale comparable to the idea that the Earth revolves around Sun rather than the reverse–a ‘Copernican revolution’ from which, we are told, there is no going back. In this course we will evaluate both Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and the narrative of inescapability that surrounds it, paying particular attention to questions of race, religion, property, and theodicy.

Instructor: Martin Devecka

Islam emerged out of a Late Antique historical moment that, in its particularly Arabian instantiation, is still not well understood. We'll be looking at traditional Islamic accounts of Islamic origins alongside archaeological, epigraphic, and linguistic evidence as well as modern speculative historiography in order to get a sense of Islamic origins and what, if anything, connects the before time to the after time. That means trying to locate Islam as an outgrowth of Late Antiquity, but it means trying to answer some of these questions too: What is an origin, anyway? What do we mean when we talk about something "new" in history? And when does "antiquity" end, if it ever does?

Instructor: Colin Drumm

Today, the economic concept of “Value” is the nearly exclusive province of Marxists, whose claim to rigor is based upon preserving this concept in the face of the so-called marginalist revolution. But when Marx talked about Value he was not insisting on a partisan concept, but adopting and re-configuring a pre-existing one. This course examines the history of the Value concept leading up to Marx, who, as its first intellectual historian, presented this history as culminating in himself. We will re-examine this history by re-introducing the centrality, elided by Marx, of questions about the state: Value theories were developed by British and French economists to intervene into debates about the power of the state to tax, spend, and borrow and the implications of these activities. This trajectory will be traced through an examination of the works of Petty, Cantillon, Steuart, Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and others.

Instructor: Jules Delisle

Across cultures, children occupy paradoxical roles: they may be idealized as symbols of hope or cast aside as incomplete beings. They can simultaneously represent purity and vulnerability while also being treated as disposable resources. We will explore these extremes by analyzing "neontocratic" societies, where children are central to social structures, alongside "gerontocratic" ones, where they are subordinate until they achieve adult status. Themes such as attachment, play, caregiving, education, and social control will reveal how childhood shapes and is shaped by ecological, political, and economic conditions.