Course List Links
Students: If you would like to take any of these past courses, please let me know. I can usually teach any seminar as an independent study. Course schedules for the following academic year are typically decided a year in advance, but I take student interest into account in determining which seminars to propose. I am always ready to teach Philosophy Without Gaps on demand if there is enough student interest. If you are interested in either an independent study or a course for next year, you can contact me at frierspr@whitman.edu.
Note: At present, this webpage is being updated and many of the links are not operative. Please email me if you want to see any of the syllabi for courses with broken links.
Past Seminars
(These are archived syllabi and may not be from the current or most recent version of the course. If you are currently taking one of these seminars, be sure to click the link from my main home page.)
- Kant's Moral Philosophy (Philosophy 338A)
- Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Philosophy 338A)
- Hegel's Moral and Political Philosophy (Philosophy 338A)
- Embodied Cognition (Phil 340)
- Moral Emotions (Phil 340)
- What is the Human Being? (Phil 355)
- Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (Philosophy 338A)
- Kierkegaard (Philosophy 338A)
- Contemporary Ethical Theories (Philosophy 340)
- Philosophy of Biology (Phil 484)
- Contemporary Philosophy of Science (Philosophy 340A, retaught as Phil 484)
- Genealogies of Morals (Philosophy 340A at Whitman, also taught at University of Notre Dame )
- The Ethical and the Real (Philosophy 252, University of Notre Dame, no web material)
- Montessori and Philosophy (Mont 889, taught multiple times at UW-River Falls Ed.D. Program)
Required Survey Courses in the History of Philosophy
- Modern Philosophy (Phil 202), student-driven syllabus template (version that starts with Sor Juana))
- ......., 2024 version (student-driven syllabus)
- ......., 2023 version (student-driven syllabus)
- ......., 2022 version (first student-driven syllabus)
- ......., 2021 version (Descartes, Hume, Sor Juana)
- ......., 2017 version, including moral and political philosophy
- ......., 2014 version with Anne Conway
- ......., 2011 version (traditional)
- Mexican Philosophy (Phil 204)
- Kant and 19th Century Philosophy (Phil 304), version ending in Nietzsche
- Kant and 19th Century Philosophy (Phil 304), version ending in Heidegger
- Ethics (Philosophy 127)
- Environmental Ethics (Philosophy 120)
- Philosophy of Religion (Philosophy 148)
- Philosophy of Education (Philosophy 120)
- Symbolic Logic (Philosophy 207, changed to href="http://people.whitman.edu/~frierspr/logic_plus.htm"Phil 109, currently Phil 487)
- Problems in Philosophy (Philosophy 117)
- Making Powerful Arguments: Concepts of Nature (GenS 176)
- Asking Complex Questions: The End(s) of the Body (GenS 175)
- Asking Complex Questions: Childhood (GenS 175)
- Antiquity and Modernity (taught in multiple versions, GenS 145-146)
Liberatory Pedagogies (formerly
Philosophy of Science (Philosophy 277)
History and Philosophy of Science (Philosophy 230)
Concepts of Nature in Modern European Philosophy (Phil 227)
Last updated: March 2025