NYU Philosophy Graduate Seminars
The PhD program features five types of regular courses (in addition to a Proseminar for first-semester doctoral students and a Dissertation Seminar for advanced students). All except Associated Writing courses are available to MA students.
- Background Courses (
Advanced Introductions
). These courses are intended to supply a basic grounding in core areas for students who have not done intensive work in those areas. They cover a few interrelated central topics. - Intermediate Courses. These are more specialized than Background Courses. Topics may include causation, consciousness, parts and wholes, vagueness and indeterminacy, personal identity, the role of content in psychological explanation, the fact-value distinction in ethics and in epistemology, theories of justice and Kant's Critique of Judgement. These courses are intended to be accessible to a broad range of students, and not oriented just to advanced students and faculty who may be attending.
- Research Workshop Courses. The topics of these course may be still more specialized, and they may be oriented to advanced students specializing in the subject and to faculty members in attendance.
- Associated Writing Courses. These courses may be taken in conjunction with Research Workshop courses, though they needn't be. During the semester, the student will submit drafts of the developing paper, discussing each draft with the professor before moving on to the next draft. The aim is for the student to learn the craft of writing a professional level philosophy paper. (The final paper for the Associated Writing Course can also serve as the term paper for the Research Workshop course.)
- Research Seminars. Most years, the Department offers two Research Seminars:
- The NYU Colloquium in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory. This course has been taught by Professors Dworkin and Nagel for many years and is attended by many professors. In a typical session, the members of the seminar receive copies a week in advance of work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading the week's work, the students discuss it with Dworkin on the day before the Colloquium. Then at the Colloquium the next day, Nagel and Dworkin give critiques of the work, and the author responds to the critiques and also to questions from others in the audience. In recent years, the thinkers of the week have included John Rawls, Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams and Judith Thomson.
- The NYU Seminar in Mind and Language. This course is modeled on the Colloquium in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory. It has covered topics such as consciousness, concepts, objectivity, normativity, and rule-following