The syllabus for Metaphysics is the result of my aim to put the “classical” subjects in contemporary metaphysics like personhood, mind, and the potentiality-actuality distinction into engagement with key questions in the metaphysics of race, gender, and sexuality. I designed the syllabus for a class composed of mid-to-upper-level students that would include many non-majors, which we tend to get in our classes here at Penn State. Since this would be the only Philosophy class that many enrolled students will take, I wanted to be sure to introduce the foundational issues while also demonstrating to students of subjects like Psychology, Sociology, and Gender and Women’s Studies some ways in which metaphysics is relevant, perhaps tacitly so, to the issues they study elsewhere. (As a philosophical pluralist myself, I should also mention that this syllabus leans heavily “analytic” to balance out the course offerings at my current institution.)
The course is divided into three sections: (1) metaphysics of individuation, (2) metaphysics of reality, and (3) metaphysics of gender, sexuality, and race. The first two sections tend to be highly abstract and therefore demanding of students, while the third serves as something of a payoff for their close attention through some more familiar and applied subjects.
The first two also provide students with tools for considering the third. For instance, we study the notion of ‘power’ as the ontological capacity to act upon and be affected by another abstractly early in the class before turning to the applied senses of privilege and oppression in the latter third. Similarly, we consider in section two the distinction between substance ontology and the ontology of ground, with the former entailing understanding being as self-grounding independence and the latter as dependent grounding-in-other. This opens up questions of gender, sexuality, and race, insofar as students can consider how these notions do and do not derive from internality and externality, as well as what it would mean to say that race or gender do or do not “exist.” As a final example, we spend a week on David Lewis’s well-known account of possible worlds, considering what is necessary at all worlds and what is possible at some but not others before applying this subject to the questions of inequity, oppression, and praxis in the latter third.
The version of the syllabus I have submitted here is a light revision of the last version I taught, including a few texts that I have not yet used in the classroom. In any case, its structure is tried and true. I imagine it could easily be adapted for similar, intro-level courses, preserving the thematic structure while making the readings more accessible.
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Colin C. Smith
Colin C. Smith is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Philosophy Department at Penn State University. His research on ancient Greek philosophy has appeared in Review of Metaphysics, Ancient Philosophy, Classical Philology, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches a wide range of subjects in philosophy.
