Kant

A graduate seminar built around a slow, line-by-line reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, focused on whether the world science describes is in some sense shaped by the mind. You spend the term working through Kant's core machinery — the analytic/synthetic split, synthetic a priori knowledge, the Transcendental Deduction, and transcendental idealism — by presenting passages in class and writing two essays that defend a reading against the text. Expect to grapple seriously with Hume as background, and treat this as the foundation for almost any later work in epistemology, metaphysics, or post-Kantian philosophy.