Philosophy Classes in Boston, MA

Does history have a direction, a purpose, or an end goal? Can we deduce general historical patterns from studying the past? Is it naïve to hope and work for a better future? From the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century, liberal, Marxist, positivist, and post-structuralist thinkers have offered radically different responses to these fundamental...

In the early 20th century, a new generation of thinkers came to believe that European philosophy had reached a dead end. Reacting to what they held was the obfuscatory language and non-sensical direction of post-Kantian philosophy, Cambridge philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore set out to revolutionize philosophy through a fundamental rethinking...

The arrival of Jacques Derrida’s work lit the American intellectual landscape ablaze. For many American academics and critics in the 1970s and thereafter, the charismatic Algerian-born Derrida was the face of “French Theory,” and virtually synonymous with postmodernism itself. With his enigmatic prose and seemingly esoteric approach to language,...

Jacques Lacan always insisted that he was a thoroughgoing Freudian—perhaps the most orthodox Freudian of them all. A larger-than-life provocateur, Lacan’s oracular lectures and clinical innovations (including the notorious “short session”) ultimately led to his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Yet, despite...

Introduction to Aristotle: Philosophy, Ethics, and the Order of Nature For much of Western history, Aristotle was known simply as “the philosopher.” Systematic and extraordinarily wide-ranging, Aristotle’s thought encompasses everything from metaphysics to politics to psychology to logic to poetic tragedy—and even plant biology. A student...

What can we do to live in a fuller and more inspiring way? Ancient Chinese Philosophy provides some inspiring answers. This one-of-a-kind course introduces important Chinese thinkers and explores what we can use from Ancient Chinese Philosophy in our everyday lives to achieve greater awareness, flourishing, and connection to ourselves and others....

There’s more than a little irony in the fact that Ludwig Wittgenstein—widely considered to be among the most original and influential philosophers of the 20th century—held that his discipline’s “real discovery” was “the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy”. In his posthumously published masterpiece, ...

How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense...

Angela Y. Davis’ 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, is arguably the foundational text for the intellectual and political work being done by the prison abolitionist movement today. More broadly, Davis’ wide-ranging writing and political activism over the past five decades mark her as one of the most important contemporary intellectuals.In...

Friedrich Nietzsche is among the most notorious and controversial thinkers in the western intellectual tradition. He aimed to philosophize “with a hammer,” to demolish the philosophical tradition founded by Socrates and Plato and slaughter its most sacred cows. Central to that tradition is the value placed on truth, reason, objectivity, and a moral...

Introduction to Feminist Theory: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body This course will introduce key concepts in feminist theory. Guided by formative thinkers like bell hooks, Judith Butler, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Gayle Rubin, J. Halberstam, and Chandra Mohanty, our focus will be on how feminist thinkers have dramatically redefined concepts...