Teaching

This course introduces students to issues of global justice through a mix of classic texts and contemporary texts. Each week, students consider a topical problem in global justice. 

Topics include civil and uncivil disobedience, immigration, citizenship, gentrification, wealth inequality, exploitation, colonialism and violence, war, torture, terrorism, genocide, and patriotism.  

Students read a variety of authors: Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Milton Friedman, Henry David Thoreau, Emma Goldman, Karl Marx, and Desmond Tutu. 

This course covers fundamental concepts in social and political philosophy: political authority, legitimacy, rights, freedom, property, ideal and non-ideal theory, justice, class, oppression, and disobedience, and revolution. 

The first half of the course considers great texts commonly taught in the classical liberal tradition, from Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx and Engels.

The second half examines contemporary social and political theories that follow that tradition: Marxism, communitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, the capabilities approach, multiculturalism, structuralism, and libertarianism.  

I teach two online sections of this course, one with a teaching assistant.

This course explores the historical relationship between Western philosophy and race and investigates the ways in which philosophy can be used to address contemporary racial issues. 

It contains five units: ontology (mostly social constructionist views), science (race realism and implicit bias) morality (racial fetishes, and racist jokes), politics (economic discrimination, affirmative action, and mass incarceration), and culture (ethnic naming, white fragility, and woke racism).