Fall 2026 Graduate Seminars
PHIL 700.01 – Seminar in Selected Problems (Moral Attitudes)
Thursdays 9:30 – 12:15 PM with Prof. Macy Salzberger
This seminar will focus on moral attitudes towards oneself and others in interpersonal relations of various kinds. How can we identify the morally admirable attitudes and distinguish them from related morally vicious or defective attitudes? Why should we cultivate and encourage these good attitudes and avoid various contrasting attitudes? The aim of the seminar is not primarily to master a given set of readings but to prompt further exploratory thinking about the attitudes in question. Emphasis will be on well-focused discussion and seminar papers.
PHIL 715.01 – Seminar in Philosophical Writing
Wednesdays 12:30 – 3:15 PM with Prof. Arezoo Islami
PHIL 718.01 – Teaching Philosophy
Online with Prof. Arezoo Islami
The class will meet online 3:00-4:00 PM on the following Fridays: August 28, September 11, September 25, October 9, October 23, November 13, and December 4, 2026.
PHIL 725.01 – Philosophical Foundations of Law (Recent Work in the Philosophy of International Law)
Mondays 3:30 – 6:15 PM with Prof. Kurt Nutting
If you think the whole world, and not simply our campus, is falling apart, you’re not alone in your thoughts.
Wars, threats of wars, and armed conflict continue in the Persian Gulf, in central Europe, in the Caribbean, in central Africa (and elsewhere, even in Greenland!); anthropocentric climate change may have crossed a critical tipping point; a global economy in which a few hundred billionaires own as much as billions of non-billionaires – all while the international institutions and rules created over the past eight decades to deal with such crises, and such sources of future wars and miseries, are pushed to the side and ignored by the most powerful states, not least of all the United States.
Not to mention the weight of historical injustices, including those affecting indigenous peoples, or the injustices of slavery and imperialism, which are still awaiting equitable resolution.
The doctrines of international law point in contrary directions; international law structures the status quo, a status quo characterized by grave injustices, but they also include critiques of that status quo. As one theorist puts it, the structure of international legal argument runs “from apology to utopia.”
The goal of this seminar is to better understand, from a philosophical point of view, both the limitations and the potentials of international law, in both the apologetic and the utopian dimensions of these phenomena.
We will look at recent developments in the theory of international law, building on pragmatist, feminist, Marxist, and “Third World” approaches. Among the philosophers and legal theorists we are likely to read are Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Thomas Pogge, Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Thomas Franck, Susan Marks, Antony Anghie, Martti Koskenniemi, and Adom Getachew. We will also look at judicial decisions and other legal materials to help focus our discussions.
PHIL 770.01 – Seminar in a Classical Author (Wittgenstein)
Tuesdays 12:30 – 3:15 PM with Prof. Mohammad Azadpur
This seminar follows a single question as it mutates across Wittgenstein’s career: what becomes of philosophy once we see how language both enables and seduces thought? We begin with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the interpretive fault line that still structures contemporary debate: standard/ineffability readings, which treat the book as advancing substantive theses about logic, world, and language, versus “resolute” (or “new”) readings, which insist that the Tractatus is designed to undo the very impulse to state such theses by making us attend to its literary form, method, and therapeutic ambitions. Along the way we test competing pictures of early Wittgenstein’s ontological atomism, picture theory, and the boundary between sense and nonsense—especially the idea of philosophical nonsense—and we examine how the work’s famous “ethical” ambitions (and its kinships with Kierkegaardian strategies) reshape what philosophy can responsibly claim to do. Readings in this unit include Russell, Hacker, Anscombe, Diamond, Conant, Williams, and Kuusela.
The second half turns to the Philosophical Investigations, taking §201’s sceptical paradox as a hinge for the major themes of later Wittgenstein: the critique of Tractarian aspirations, rule-following and normativity, the Investigations’ distinctive method, metaethical consequences of “going on” in practice, and the private language argument. Here we read Wittgenstein alongside (and against) influential contemporary interpreters—Kripke’s sceptical challenge, Cavell on the ordinary, and a sustained set of exchanges among McDowell and Brandom (with Diamond returning as a persistent interlocutor)—to ask what, if anything, counts as an answer to philosophical skepticism once meaning is anchored in use and shared forms of life rather than in hidden rails beneath our words.
PHIL 772.01 – Seminar in a Classical School (Spinoza & Rationalism)
Mondays 12:30 – 3:15 PM with Prof. Alice Sowaal
Spinoza (1632-1677) has been variously described as "God-intoxicated" and determinist, as a heretic, a rationalist, and a mystic. What were his theories, how have they been interpreted, and how do they help us understand our social and political lives today?
PHIL 828.01 – Philosophical Issues in A.I.
Wednesdays 3:30 – 6:15 PM with Prof. Carlos Montemayor
This course will cover the implications of artificial intelligence for policy, industry, and society at large, including issues concerning social justice. The main question of the course is, in what sense is artificial intelligence “artificial” and “intelligent.” We will explore this issue through the relation of two fundamental capacities of the human mind: phenomenal consciousness and attention. Ethical issues are normative, and the question of how phenomenal consciousness and attention relate to normativity will be analyzed in detail, in the context of analogous questions regarding artificial intelligence.
PHIL 850.01 – Seminar in Philosophy of Science
Thursdays 4 – 6:45 PM with Prof. Acacio de Barros
The goal of this course is to explore some of the main interpretations of quantum mechanics and the philosophical issues that come with them. We will start by building a formal, though simplified, background to understand some of the puzzling aspects of quantum mechanics, such as Schrödinger’s cat. We will see that the main challenges stem from three features of quantum theory: unitary quantum evolution, the completeness of the wave function (or quantum state), and measurement irreproducibility. We will observe that major interpretative frameworks, like many-worlds, Bohmian mechanics, or consciousness-causes-collapse, challenge or reinterpret at least one of these features. We will assess each interpretation in light of metaphysics, natural laws, causality, probability, and explanation. This course will be mainly student-driven, but we will include brief lectures that go beyond the readings to clarify the technical aspects of the texts.
PHIL 890.01 – Seminar: Current Issues in Philosophy (Continental Philosophy)
Mondays 9:30 – 12:15 PM with Prof. David Peña-Guzman
This course will be a survey of major thinkers and themes in Continental Philosophy—a tradition in European thought that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Readings will be selected from figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault.
PHIL 896.01 – Culminating Experience Peer Work Project
Online with Prof. Mohammad Azadpur
* A MANDATORY course orientation will take place on Friday, August 28, 2026 at 3:00 PM. A Zoom link will be emailed to all registered students beforehand. Additionally, there are four required study group meetings that take place over the course of the semester. These group meetings are held on Fridays at 3:00 PM (exact dates TBD). Please email Professor Mohammad Azadpur with any questions at azad@sfsu.edu.
The above schedule is subject to change without notice.