This course provides students with an introduction to the toolkit philosophy offers in thinking about questions of gender and gender-based oppression. We begin the class with a crash course in social metaphysics, where we think about what kind of thing social categories are and the agency we may or may not be able to practice with respect to them. We then learn about standpoint epistemology and various sorts of epistemic injustices, investigating the ways that those social categories we learnt about earlier may at once epistemically harm and help us. Finally, we turn our attention from the theoretical to the practical and apply the argumentative tools we learnt from the past units to understanding applied issues of gender in society.

In August 2017, the Washington Post published an article entitled “Why is millennial humor so weird?” The author described ‘millennial humor’ as “loops of self-referential quips warp[ing] and distort[ing] with each iteration, tweaked by another user embellishing on someone else’s joke, until nothing coherent is left”. 

Existentialism was a philosophical movement in the early 20th century which held the core tenets that (1) we are maximally and radically free, and that (2) there is no inherent meaning in life. We’ll read a wide variety of different existentialist texts (Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism and Being & Nothingness, Beauvoir's Second Sex, and Fanon's Black Skins, White Masks) and consider their advantages and shortcomings. We’ll also look at art (John Berger's Ways of Seeing), film (Palm Springs), and literature (Sartre's Nausea) to get a deeper sense of how these ideas actually present themselves in one’s lived experience.