Fall 2025 Course Offerings

For a complete list of courses and course descriptions, please see the University Catalog. If you have further questions, please contact the department at 207.581.3866.

Course Offerings

PHI 100(0991-LEC) Class #85983, Contemporary Moral Problems, Web Online Only – EIGHT WK 09/02/25 – 10/24/25, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 49, Instructor: Joe Arel
Course Description: Examines a variety of moral problems causing controversy in contemporary society.  Focuses on evaluating arguments for and against competing solutions to these problems.  Also discusses different philosophical strategies for thinking about moral obligations and relationships.  Topics surveyed may include abortion, affirmative action, euthanasia, feminism, the environment, capital punishment, welfare and aid to the needy, technology, war and racism, among others.  Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad, and Social Context & Inst.   

PHI 100(0992-LEC) Class #85982, Contemporary Moral Problems, Web Online Only – EIGHT WK 10/20/25- 12/12/25, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 49, Instructor: Joe Arel
Course Description: Examines a variety of moral problems causing controversy in contemporary society.  Focuses on evaluating arguments for and against competing solutions to these problems.  Also discusses different philosophical strategies for thinking about moral obligations and relationships.  Topics surveyed may include abortion, affirmative action, euthanasia, feminism, the environment, capital punishment, welfare and aid to the needy, technology, war and racism, among others.  Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad, and Social Context & Inst.  

PHI 102(0001-LEC) Class #85984, Introduction to Philosophy, TTH, 9:30-10:45am, Stevens Hall 375, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: Hao Hong
Course Description: This course is intended to introduce undergraduate students to the study of Western Philosophy.  Students should come away from the course with some familiarity with problems and individuals who have influenced the developments of Western philosophical thought.  The course will offer opportunities for students to engage with these problems and with the texts of important philosophers as a means to developing their own skills as thinkers.  While it is not possible even to summarize over 2500 years of Western philosophy, students will develop an understanding of the kinds of questions and ideas that concern philosophers and begin to cultivate their own relationship to those questions and ideas. Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad 

PHI 102(0003-LEC) Class #85985, Introduction to Philosophy, MWF, 10:00-10:50am, Hitchner Hall 203, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: TBA
Course Description: This course is an introduction to the fundamental ideas and methods of the western philosophical tradition. Students will engage in close, guided readings of significant texts from this tradition and will be given the tools necessary to develop their own original ideas in response to it. Additionally, readings for this course will be presented and organized thematically rather than chronologically, so students can expect to encounter a wide variety of sources within western philosophy. Students should come away from this course with a strong grasp of the core themes of the western philosophical tradition, as well as the ability to articulate their own original ideas regarding it.  Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad. 

PHI 102(0004-LEC) Class #85986, Introduction to Philosophy, MWF, 1:00-1:50pm, Deering Hall 113, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: Mike Devito
Course Description: An introduction to philosophical thought and critical thinking through an engagement of ideas from the world’s philosophical traditions. Questions will be asked about the nature of wisdom and knowledge, the essence of reality and of ideas, human nature, virtue and community, justice, and political life. Students will learn and understand some important questions and different theories in major areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Gen Ed: Ethics and West Cult Trad. 

PHI 102(0005-LEC) Class #85987, Introduction to Philosophy, MWF, 2:00-2:50pm, Deering Hall 113, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: Mike Devito
Course Description: An introduction to philosophical thought and critical thinking through an engagement of ideas from the world’s philosophical traditions. Questions will be asked about the nature of wisdom and knowledge, the essence of reality and of ideas, human nature, virtue and community, justice, and political life. Students will learn and understand some important questions and different theories in major areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Gen Ed: Ethics and West Cult Trad. 

PHI 102(0990-LEC) Class #85988, Introduction to Philosophy, Web Online Only, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 49, Instructor: Joe Arel
Course Description: This course is intended to introduce undergraduate students to the study of Western Philosophy.  Students should come away from the course with some familiarity with problems and individuals who have influenced the developments of Western philosophical thought.  The course will offer opportunities for students to engage with these problems and with the texts of important philosophers as a means to developing their own skills as thinkers.  While it is not possible even to summarize over 2500 years of Western philosophy, students will develop an understanding of the kinds of questions and ideas that concern philosophers and begin to cultivate their own relationship to those questions and ideas. Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad. 

PHI 103(0001-LEC) Class #84270, Think!, MWF, 10:00-10:50am, Stevens Hall 375, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: Robby Finley
Course Description: A study of principles used to distinguish correct from incorrect reasoning including the nature of thought, uses of language, recognition of arguments, informal fallacies, purposes and types of definition, deduction and induction.  Emphasis on understanding and mastering through practice some fundamental techniques for testing the soundness of many different kinds of reasoning.  Gen Ed: West Cult Trad.  

PHI 104(0001-LEC) Class #85516, Existentialism and Literature, MWF, 9:00-9:50apm, Winslow Hall 201, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: TBA
Course Description: Existentialism is a revolutionary movement in 20th century philosophy that studies the ways in which it is up to us to make our lives and our world meaningful. The texts we will read in this course will offer insightful and perspective-shifting studies of human nature in addition to challenging us to reflect personally on the values by which we live and, indeed, to ask ourselves whether we are honest with respect to how we live our lives. We will also consider works of contemporary literature that help to bring out these existentialist themes in particularly vivid and intimate ways through their content as well as their form of expression.  Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad, Artistic and Creative Expression.  

PHI 201(0001-LEC) Class #87151, Practicing Philosophy, TuTh, 11:00am-12:15pm, The Maples 217, 3 cr. 
Max Enrollment: 20, Instructor: Derek A. Michaud 
Course Description: An introduction to the methods and conventions of contemporary philosophy, with a focus on providing students with the skills needed to read, understand, discuss, analyze, and write philosophy. Through this writing intensive course, students will learn techniques, terminology, and diverse styles of doing philosophy. It has no prerequisites and is open to all students interested in developing philosophical and writing skills. Typically offered once a year with varying topics. There are no prerequisites. Gen Ed: West Cult Trad, and Writing Intensive. 

PHI 214(0001-LEC) Class #86606, Continental Philosophy, TuTh 9:30-10:45am, The Maples 217, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 30, Instructor: Don Beith
Course Description: In this course we will systematically study the issue of human freedom and the perils of authoritarianism through reading works of brilliant twentieth century existentialists, psychoanalysts and critical theorists. Our study commences with existentialism through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The World of Perception and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. We will next work to systematically understand how mass culture, prejudice, repression and authoritarianism imperil freedom, reading parts of Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew. In September our department will also host the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, giving us the special opportunity to interact with contemporary continental philosophers. Gen Ed: Western Cultural Tradition and Social Contexts and Institutions 

PHI 221(0001-LEC) Class #86994, Classical Chinese Philosophy, TuTH 2:00-3:15pm, Steven Hall 155, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 30, Instructor: Hao Hong
Course Description: This course provides an introduction to major philosophical schools in the “classical” period of (pre-Qin) China, including Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, and Legalism.  We will concentrate on early debates over human nature and the best practices of self-cultivation, the general nature of the cosmos and the human role in it, and the proper ordering of society.  We will read not only the original texts by early Chinese philosophers, but also contemporary discussions and developments of their views.  These different philosophical positions greatly influenced later Chinese intellectual and social history, including the development of Buddhism, and shaped cultures and religions in Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia as well. Thus, understanding these early debates is an important stepping-stone for understanding East Asian thought and culture generally. Gen Ed: Ethics, Cultural Div & Intl Perspect. 

PHI 232(0001-LEC), Class #85138, Environmental Ethics, TuTH, 12:30-1:45pm, Lord Hall 100, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: Don Beith
Course Description: A study of environmental ethical principles ranging from the history of Maine ecology to contemporary issues in environmental justice. We will study Thoreau’s The Maine Woods alongside traditional ecological knowledges and Wabanaki thinking, then read the ethics of the built environment through Alexander Wilson’s The Culture of Nature and other social constructivist thinkers, concluding our investigations with Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor and ecofeminist thinkers. Gen Ed: Ethics, Population & the Environment, and Social Context & Inst. .  

PHI 232(0900-LEC), Class #85139, Environmental Ethics, Web Online Only, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 29, Instructor: Joe Arel
Course Description: A critical survey of major contemporary discussions of human relationships to nature and the causes of the environmental crisis. Special attention will be given to building an ethical vocabulary for interpreting the place of humans in relation to the non-human. Gen Ed: Ethics, Population & the Environment, and Social Context & Inst.  

PHI 235(0001-LEC), Class #84759, Biomedical Ethics, TuTH, 11:00am-12:15pm, Stevens Hall 365, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: Susan Bredlau
Course Description: We will investigate the ways we are always engaged in ethical decision making and how it is often those practices that we assume are helpful or good that most require ethical consideration. We will focus on experiences of illness, disability, and dying to consider how these experiences challenge common understandings of our bodies, health, and what it means to care for others. We will also examine how interactions between individuals are always situations within broader social and political contexts and reflect on how our understanding of disease, mental illness, and scientific research impedes or supports communal, as well as individual, well-being. Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad, and Social Context & Inst.   

PHI 250(0001-LEC), Class #84781, Logic, MWF, 9:00-9:50am, Stevens Hall 365, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 40, Instructor: Robby Finley
Course Description: This course is designed as an introduction to the study of deductive reasoning from a formal perspective. It is composed of two intermixed parts: In the first, we develop theories that allow us to represent everyday arguments in a symbolic language and then evaluate whether the corresponding arguments are valid. This is the technical part of the course where you will learn new symbolic languages and associated syntactic and semantic analyses, along with a variety of interesting mathematical results about those languages, their uses, and their abilities. The second part of the course is more philosophical, and we will address questions like: what makes a formal language and rule system a good representation of valid arguments in natural language? Are there natural language arguments these formal systems fail to capture? Can we fix that? What are the uses and limitations of these formal systems? What alternatives are open? These sorts of questions will be in the background as we progress, and we will take some time each week to think about a particular philosophical aspect of the symbolic logic we are learning.  Gen Ed: Quantitative Literacy, West Cult Trad. 

PHI 317(0001-SEM) Class #85568, Phenomenology, TuTH, 12:30-1:45pm, The Maples 217, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 20, Instructor: Susan Bredlau
Course Description: Phenomenologists argue that our understanding of ourselves and our world must be grounded in the careful description of everyday experience. In this course, we will focus on the work of both classic and contemporary phenomenologists and investigate how our conception of consciousness, our bodies, other people, sexuality, language, and human freedom is transformed through the careful description of our experience. This course will be grounded in careful reading of the texts and class discussion; class discussion should enable us to achieve insights that we could not achieve simply by working on our own. Gen Ed: Ethics, West Cult Trad. 

PHI 353(0001-LEC) Class #84760, Minds and Machines, MW, 2:00-3:15pm, The Maples, 217, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 20, Instructor: Robby Finley
Course Description: A study of classic and recent work in the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. Topics include the relation between mind and body, the nature of consciousness, knowledge of other minds, neuroscience of free will, computational models of the mind, whether machines can have minds, and the limits of artificial intelligence. Gen Ed: Western Cultural Tradition and Social Contexts and Institutions 

JST 200(0001-LEC) Class #86765, Introduction to Judaism, TuTh, 2:00-3:15pm, Williams Hall, 219, 3 cr.
Max Enrollment: 25, Instructor: Bill Siemers
Course Description: This course is a history of antisemitism, describing its manifestations from pre-Christian Alexandria to the founding of the State of Israel. Students will be exposed to several academic and popular theories of antisemitism, exploring debates about its proper scope and development, and integrate these ideas with a study of the arc of Jewish history, read closely together in primary sources. 

For questions or permission, please contact The Philosophy Department at 207-581-3866 or email Jen Bowen at jennifer.bowen@maine.edu