Teaching and Syllabi Samples
Classes Taught.
Lecturer: Evil and Ethics
Winter 2024, first year undergraduate seminar course, Philosophy department, Carleton University.
Lecturer: Happiness and the Good Life.
Summer 2023, second year undergraduate course, Philosophy Department, Carleton University.
Lecturer: Environmental Ethics.
Winter 2023 and 2024, second year undergraduate course, Philosophy Department, Carleton University.
Lecturer: The Citizen and the State.
Winter 2022, first year undergraduate course. Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Lecturer: Philosophy of Religion.
Fall 2019: Philosophy of Religion, second year undergraduate course. Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Teaching Assistant: Moral Issues.
Winter 2021, first year undergraduate course. For Dr. Jacqueline Davies, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University. Online due to COVID-19.
Teaching Assistant: Social Diversity and Political Resistance in a Global Pandemic.
Fall 2020, second year undergraduate course. For Dr. Lisa Guenther, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University. Principal’s Dream Course. Online due to COVID-19.
Teaching Assistant: Science and Society.
Winter 2020, second year undergraduate course. For Dr. Mark Smith, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University. Online.
Teaching Assistant: Aesthetics.
Fall 2017: Aesthetics, third year undergraduate course. For Dr. Deborah Knight, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Teaching Assistant: Introduction to Philosophy.
Fall 2018- Spring 2019: Fundamental Questions: Introduction to Philosophy, first year undergraduate course. For Dr. Jacqueline Davies, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Nominated for excellence in Teaching Assistance award from the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Society.
Teaching Assistant: Philosophy: Gender, Sex &Love.
Winter 2018: Philosophy: Gender, Sex, and Love, second year undergraduate course. For Dr. Jacqueline Davies, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Teaching Assistant: Girlhood Studies.
Fall 2016: Girlhood Studies, second year undergraduate course. For Dr. Miranda Green-Barteet, Gender Studies Department, Western University.
Guest Lecturer: Feminist Aesthetics.
Winter 2019: Feminist Aesthetics including Linda Nochlin and Anne Eaton. For Jacquelyn Maxwell, Philosophy and Feminism, third year undergraduate course, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Guest Lecturer: Plato’s Symposium.
Winter 2018: The first three speeches of Plato’s Symposium. For Dr. Jacqueline Davies, Philosophy: Gender, Sex and Love, second year undergraduate course, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Guest Lecturer: Continental Aesthetics.
Fall 2017: Aesthetics in Continental Philosophy including Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. For Dr. Deborah Knight, Aesthetics, third year undergraduate course, Philosophy Department, Queen’s University.
Guest Lecturer: French Thought.
Fall 2016: Monique Wittig, Hélène Cixous, and Jacques Derrida. For Dr. Antonio Calcagno, French Thought, fourth year undergraduate seminar course, Philosophy Department, Kings College at Western University.
Syllabi for Classes.
Happiness and the Good Life
In this course we will consider what it means to be happy and how we can live a rich and fulfilling life. The pursuit of happiness is a quest that has been taken by myriad thinkers across time and in all walks of life. In North America, we tend to think of happiness as a shallow concept that we are required to exhibit in public, while making small talk, or which can be fulfilled by material acquisitions. This type of happiness attached to appearances, pleasure-seeking and capitalism is never truly fulfilled because it always requires more, and it often necessitates turning away from life’s uncomfortable realities. Philosophy, as the exploration of knowledge and the love of wisdom, seems to be at odds with this shallow version of happiness. The philosophical exploration of happiness is a question of living a meaningful life on a much deeper level. This means investigating the realities of our world and still finding meaning, depth, and a deep sense of inner fulfillment. But can one truly be happy without some sort of pleasure? We will turn to the history of “western” philosophy and examine the question of human mortality as it affects us politically, individually, and environmentally. Questions of friendship, solitude, and social justice will also be investigated as they pertain to human happiness. Additionally, the course will look to Indigenous, Buddhist, and Hindu perspectives on living a good life. Ultimately, students will have a number of perspectives, questions, and possibilities for living an examined life that is also one filled with meaning, purpose, and happiness.
The State and the Citizen.
This introductory course will examine political philosophy through seven units: The history of political philosophy, Rights versus Obligations, Social Contract, Abolitionists, Civil Disobedience (The Bhagavad Gita and its heirs), Economic Influences on the Political, and political aesthetics.
Readings will range from ancient philosophy to contemporary thinkers, including works within and beyond the “Western canon,” and will be available on the course website or through the Queen’s library website. Each class will introduce a new thinker and examine how that thinker conceptualizes our rights and responsibilities as members of the larger community.
Image: Edel Rodriguez. Strangers. 2018
The Presence of Evil and the Possibility of Ethics
This introductory philosophy course will examine our ethical duties as humans alongside the problem of evil in our world. From Sophocle’s Antigone in ancient Greece, to Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann after the Second World War, to contemporary political turbulence, this course will offer ways to think through some of the most challenging aspects of humanity. We will use philosophy texts as a jumping in point for how to flourish at university, cultivating the tools necessary to succeed in a humanities degree while we consider some of the greatest existential issues of our times.
Introduction to Environmental Ethics.
This course addresses a series of questions relevant to the evaluation of environmental issues from a philosophical perspective. Why is the natural environment valuable? Does it possess value only insofar as it provides us with some instrumental good or does it have inherent worth independent of that which human beings derive from it? Should we preserve and protect the natural world for its own sake or simply for our own? How might the answers we give to these questions inform our environmental activism and our public policies? In an attempt to address these questions, the course will look at various arguments philosophers have offered regarding the natural world’s value, and assess various strategies that have been proposed and pursued in the name of respecting and/or preserving our natural environment. Material for this course draws from historical and contemporary philosophy across various schools and traditions. While the course will be accessible to students with non-philosophical backgrounds, its methods of evaluation will prepare students to succeed in upper-level courses in ethics and social and political philosophy.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818.
Philosophy of Religion.
We live in an age of intellectual secularism and yet it is also undeniably an age of popular religious extremism. Notions of God are often excluded from logical conversations and yet religious ideas form the basis of our laws, mores, and education systems. This course will trace the origins of religious thought from Plato and Aristotle to present day scholars such as Catherine Keller and Richard Kearney with investigations into: Medieval adaptations of ancient texts into Abrahamic religions; Nietzsche’s notion of “the death of God”; mysticism; environmental theology; womanism and spirituality; atheist responses; and religious thinkers in Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. This course will not assume or suggest any belief system but will explore the Great Ideas that have been adapted through religion and will ask students to consider the notion of God as an intellectual placeholder for meaning, devotion, suffering, and the wonder of being a human.
Job Rebuked by His Friends. William Blake. Linelle Set. Boston: Fogg Art Museum, 1821.
Aesthetics.
Art is often considered the zenith of human culture; the expression par excellence of the human condition; and in the face of the nearly unthinkable cruelties of humankind, it is an answer to why it is valuable to believe in humanity. The definitions of art are as myriad as the varieties of art itself and this course will explore some of these ideas through the philosophical notion of aesthetics. This survey of the philosophy of aesthetics will include the following topics: Western Aesthetic Origins, Feminist Art, German Idealist Aesthetics, Indigenous Aesthetics, Existentialism/ Phenomenology & art, Philosophy of Race & Aesthetics, Post-Modern Aesthetics, Spirituality & Art, and Art as a political act. Each topic will involve considering a variety of artforms and probing how the art we create also creates us. Of particular interest in this course will be the overlapping of philosophy and art. Students will be asked to consider how art and philosophy may (or may not) inform one another and shape our understanding of the world. The potential of aesthetics as world-making gives art an important ethical, political weight that will continually be examined alongside its beauty, wonder, and sometimes shocking revelations.
La Trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). Rene Magritte. Oil on canvas. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1928-29.
Indian Philosophy.
This course will introduce the rich and diverse philosophical thought of the Indian tradition. Through a close examination of the ancient philosophical texts the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the class will explore how these texts have been in conversation with the “Western” tradition and bring into question the very division between “East” and “West” while noting the unique aspects of Indian Philosophy. Political philosophy’s notions of civil disobedience and nonviolence will be traced from the Gita to the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Junior. After examining the ethical structure of the Sutras, the class will consider popularized Western adaptations of Yoga. The final portion of the class will be an in-depth examination of the metaphysics and cosmology of reincarnation with the contemporary Indian academic and spiritual leader, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait and the case study of Shanti Devi, a woman who infamously recalled her past life.
Image: The Cosmic Form of Krishna (Vishvarupa from the Bhagavad Gita). Rabi Behera. Orissa's Paata Painting on Tussar Silk.
Advanced Environmental Philosophy.
We live at a time of unparalleled fear, anger, and conflict around ecological degradation, climate crisis, and environmental justice. School walkouts, protests at all levels of government, and refusals from politicians and corporations to take serious action, all point toward an imminent tipping point. The current consumer capitalist-oriented understanding of the natural world as a commodity for human consumption sets the human being outside of nature in the domain of culture and civilization. At best, the human is a steward or caretaker of the land but is always over and above it, distinguishing himself as an exception to the natural order. As philosophers examining these issues, one possibility is to reimagine our connection with nature at its very foundation. Two schools of thought that do just that are new materialism and ecofeminism. In the past two decades, these schools have cross-pollinated in certain thinkers and a radical, vibrant expression of the earth and our place upon it has emerged as a potential alternative. While these may seem to be relatively new ways of thinking, they exist in the Western philosophical tradition as far back as Spinoza and similar modes of thought can be found in many indigenous philosophies (one of which will be examined in this course) and philosophies of the far east.
The convergence of new materialism and ecofeminism is an emerging area of environmental philosophy that seeks to decenter the human being. Rather than asserting man as the measure of all things, new materialist/ ecofeminist thought investigates humanity’s place as one part of a vital ecosystem. This post-modern shift away from Western philosophy’s modern focus on Kantian subjectivity and world leads to ontologies, epistemologies, and ethics that are radically relational and non-hierarchical. This course is divided into five main sections that will explore these fascinating and important philosophical ideas: (1) an introduction to the content and the philosophical traditions; (2) Establishing an ontology through Barad’s text Meeting the Universe Halfway; (3) Establishing a politics through Bennett’s text Vibrant Matter; (4) Giving voice to nature through Kimmerer’s text on moss and Lowenhaupt Tsing’s text on mushrooms; and finally (5) considering the implications for theology and social justice.
Image: Suite Lunatique. Edith Meusnier. Château de Villevêque, 2014