Metaphysics

A graduate-level engagement with the questions that sit underneath everything else: what exists, what it means for something to exist, and how categories like time, cause, possibility, and kind carve up reality. You'll work through primary texts from Quine, Lewis, Putnam, McTaggart, and others, defending readings in seminar, taking quizzes on the arguments, and writing two shorter essays plus a research paper that stakes out your own position. The payoff is learning to handle the kind of abstract argumentation that shows up downstream in philosophy of mind, language, and science, where these debates over existence and modality keep resurfacing.