Fall 2025 Upper-Level Course Schedule
Note: all scheduling information is provisional and subject to change due to unforeseeable events. We recommend confirming the information on this page with an advisor before adding a class, especially if the exact schedule or faculty member assigned to the class is especially important to you. You can get up-to-date advising from the HSS Student Success Center
by emailing hssuccessteam@Fullerton.edu. You may also search classes on the CSUF Schedule of Classes webpage.
| Professor | Course | Time |
| Calarco | Postmodernism (PHIL 383) | MW 1130-1245 |
| Coplan | Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art (PHIL 311) | T 4-645 |
| Coplan | Philosophy of Sex and Love (PHIL 325) | TTh 230-345 |
| Davis | Social/Political Philosophy (PHIL 345) | MW 1130-1245 |
| Heiner | Contemporary Moral Issues (PHIL 320) | MW 1000-1115 |
| Heiner | Existentialism (PHIL 323) | TTh 100-215 |
| Heiner | Ethical Theory (PHIL 410) | TTh 230-345 |
| Howat | American Philosophy (PHIL 379) | TTh 100-215 |
| Lambeth | Seminar in History of Philosophy (PHIL 480) | TTh 230-345 |
| Lee | Philosophy of Race, Class, & Gender (PHIL 377) | TTh 1130-1245 |
| Lee | Phenomenology (PHIL 425) | TTh 1000-1115 |
| Liu | Meaning and Mind (PHIL 345) | TTh 230-345 |
| Liu | Asian Philosophy (PHIL 350) | TTh 1130-1245 |
| Directed Study (PHIL 399) | ||
| Independent Study (PHIL 499) |
Fall 2025 Course Descriptions
Calarco: Postmodernism (PHIL 383)
This course examines the transition from “modernism” (roughly, the period of philosophy running from Descartes to Kant and Hegel) to “postmodernism” (which begins with Nietzsche’s critique of the presuppositions of modernism and continues in twentieth-century Continental philosophy). Our guiding thread for this examination will be the question of the “subject,” that is, the “self” or “agent” that underlies cognition, ethics, and politics. Some of the questions that are posed in the transition from modernism to postmodernism include: What is the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge? And between subjectivity and morality? What occurs to classical conceptions of knowledge and morality when dominant conceptions of the subject are displaced? Does postmodernism signal the end of ethics and knowledge tout court, or does it create the conditions for another ethics and form of life? We will close the course by examining how recent decolonial critiques of Eurocentric notions of subjectivity uncover problematic aspects of modernity that postmodernism has tended to overlook.
Davis: Social/Political Philosophy (PHIL 345)
This is an upper-division survey course. We will read historical and contemporary authors on what (if anything) justifies state power over individuals, what makes a government truly democratic, what rights we have against the state, what justice requires when distributing benefits and burdens within a society, the nature of rights, and the nature of equality among persons. We will also look at newer issues, including automation, basic incomes, and the philosophy of work. My teaching combines lecture and discussion. Prerequisite: three units of philosophy, or permission of the teacher.
Heiner: Existentialism (PHIL 323)
A hallmark of existential philosophy is the paradoxical incompleteness of existential questions. We are often led to confront this incompleteness and the structures of our existence in moments of crisis, in times of war or distress, in moods of anxiety or despair, in circumstances that unravel the habitual meaning-contexts of our concerns and force us to make choices and act in ways that exceed the framework of the familiar. Such ruptures, according to existential philosophy, exhibit the errancy of the traditional claim that the foundations of our being or our values reside outside of us—whether in a divine creator, established institutions, or readymade social systems. Existential thought views human being not as a given (natural or cultural) but as a project, a practice. We must choose our values, our actions, ourselves, and full responsibility for these choices ultimately rests upon us. As French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre put it, we are condemned to be free, and authentically inhabiting that freedom is an always unfinished process plagued with structural tendencies toward evasion and self-delusion. In short, we frequently lie to ourselves to avoid the anguish of our freedom.
This course examines existentialist perspectives on freedom, responsibility, authenticity, self-deception, and oppression by studying significant texts drawn from European, Africana, and Native American existentialist philosophy, literature, and film since the late nineteenth century, and by reading those texts in relation to the lived contexts of concern from which they emerge. The first half of the course will explore the philosophical fundamentals of European existentialism, looking at the work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and French philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The second half of the course will examine existentialist thought beyond (and in dialogue with) Europe, from what Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel calls “the underside of modernity.” Existential questions of identity, agency, and liberation have been continually, and often urgently, posed and confronted by people whose very humanity has been denigrated by the modern world. We will analyze such questions as they are articulated in exemplary existential works by enslaved African abolitionist Frederick Douglass, African American philosopher Angela Y. Davis, Caribbean cultural and political theorists Frantz Fanon and Stuart Hall, Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, African American novelist and cultural critic Toni Morrison, and Latina feminist philosopher María Lugones.
Heiner: Ethical Theory (PHIL 410)
Are morally upstanding actions those that produce the best outcomes for the greatest number of stakeholders, or are there some ethical principles that should never be violated, no matter what good consequences would result? What is structural injustice, and what is the nature of our moral responsibility, if any, for harms and injustices for which we are not individually blameworthy, but in which we are collectively implicated? How do political discourses and media (traditional and social) shape our ethical responses to the suffering of others, and how should suffering be represented in order to cultivate ethical responses to others? How do border walls and immigration restrictions express and shape our moral obligations to others both within and across nation-states? What are the limits of autonomy in ethical life, and how do vulnerability, interdependency, and opacity complicate moral agency? This course, designed for advanced philosophy undergraduates, will examine these questions of ethical theory, casting sustained analytical and critical attention to their concrete implications for our everyday self-understanding, moral decision-making, civic participation, and ethical interactions with others. Course authors may include Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Angela Y. Davis, Iris Marion Young, Judith Butler, and Wendy Brown.
Howat: American Philosophy (PHIL 379)
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of seismic change in America, forcing deep philosophical reflection on some of the most pressing issues of the era. How should a nation rebuilt after slavery and civil war reckon with racial injustice and inequity? Could faith survive the scientific upheaval of Darwin’s theory of evolution? How should we think about the pursuit of truth differently in a world increasingly shaped by scientific inquiry and institutions? Out of these struggles—and in conversation with both European and indigenous traditions—a uniquely American school of thought emerged: pragmatism.
Pragmatism resists easy definition, but at its core lies a powerful idea: the meaning of any belief or theory is found in its practical consequences. In this course, we will explore the diverse thinkers who shaped pragmatism—including Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Du Bois, and Cooper—asking not only what it means to call oneself a pragmatist, but what it means to be both an “American” and a “philosopher.” Along the way, we’ll examine how these ideas continue to resonate today, shaping the way we think about knowledge, morality, pluralism, and social progress.
Lambeth: Seminar in History of Philosophy (PHIL 480)
In this course, we will read Martin Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time: one of the most significant philosophical works of the 20th century, and one of the most difficult. Reading the first division, we will consider Heidegger's groundbreaking phenomenology of the everyday world, which starts from our engagement with ordinary items like tools, and examines how social norms shape that engagement. Reading the second division, we will consider Heidegger’s existentialism, examining his argument that to live authentically, we must come to terms with our mortality and with our fundamental responsibility for everything that we do. Throughout the course, we will focus on carefully reading the primary text, though class discussions will consider scholarly debates about Being and Time, as well as its wider influence on Continental European philosophy.
Lee: Phenomenology (PHIL 425)
Phenomenology as a discipline of philosophy, focuses on the interstices between the subject and the world, without presuming a clear demarcation between the subjective and the objective. By attending to the ambiguous and indeterminate relation between the subject and the world, phenomenology highlights the pivotal role of experience in any and all claims to knowledge. Phenomenology means the study of experience. Experience eludes analysis because the ephemeral structure of experience counters analysis’s systematizing tendencies. Perhaps as such, philosophy has still to fully understand how to theorize experience.
With such close study of experience, phenomenology has introduced new understandings of the subject, consciousness, embodiment, and structure of the world, even introducing the new vocabulary of ontology to replace metaphysics. This class will focus on three of its central figures, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The class ends with a few articles that explore present day implications of the phenomenological structure including within neuroscience, politics, and ontology.
Lee: Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender (PHIL 377)
Despite the history of analyzing race, class, and gender as separate phenomena, the three are integrally linked. Perhaps because our present analysis predominantly treats them as three wholly separate entities, we have yet to achieve an encompassing understanding of them. This class will focus on the interstitial connections among the three. Beginning from the Latin American and Asian American philosophy before considering the usual binary that defines studies of race—the black-white binary—we shall continue to ask how class and sexuality disrupt and force the dialogue to change and expand its parameters.
Liu: Asian Philosophy (PHIL 350)
This course will teach Asian philosophies with heavy emphasis on Chinese philosophy such as Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism (especially Zen), and Neo-Confucianism. We will study the different worldviews, conceptions of human nature and the good life from these philosophical perspectives, and where suitable, make comparisons with Western philosophies, religions and values.
This course meets GE Category C.4 and Category Z (Cultural Diversity).
Liu: Meaning and Mind (PHIL 375; cross-listed as LING 375)
What is meaning? What is the nature of language? How does one’s speech convey what one means with one’s words? What is the relationship between language and mind? How is linguistic communication possible? This course serves as an introduction to philosophy of language, with the focus on the interplay between meaning and mind. What one thinks or says has a lot to do with one’s understanding of the meaning of words as well as the sociolinguistic conventions governing the usage of such words. We will explore a host of issues related to meaning and mind, such as the nature of language, the meaning of meaning, speech act and communication, interpretation and belief report, naming and reference, etc. Students are expected to do all readings thoroughly. Class participation is strongly emphasized.
