This course will examine critically definitions, assumptions, and arguments central to religion. Topics may include interpreting the nature of religion, arguments for and against the existence of God, the relation between theology and philosophy, the relation between God and the world, paganism, the problem of evil, and the nature of religious language and experience.

This course is an introduction to the origin and development of the philosophical traditions of primarily China and Japan through a consideration of selected thinkers, schools, and classic texts of Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Zen. Questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics are emphasized with reference to the nature of reality and the person, social harmony and self-realization, causality, right action, and enlightenment. Comparisons may also be made with Western philosophers, both contemporary and classical.

This course will provide an overview of some of the major currents in Continental philosophy, the distinctive philosophical approach and style of thinking that emerges in the early 20th century largely as a critical response to German Idealism, Marxism, and the antecedent existentialism of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Continental philosophy is rooted in the history of philosophy, attentive to the world of experience, and develops in constant conversation with various other areas of human activities such as literature, politics, psychoanalysis, and religion. Among the major currents to be examined in the course are phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, structuralism, poststructuralism, French feminist theory, posthumanism, and speculative realism. Traditional philosophical topics such as ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, language analysis, feminist theory, ethics, and politics will be considered in the light of their reassessment by Continental philosophy. Figures covered may include Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Foucault, Levinas, Deleuze, Nancy, Derrida, Agamben, Irigaray, and Žižek, among others.