Nazarbayev University

Upper-division undergraduate

Philosophy of Agency (Fall 2023). Intentional action, reasons for action, practical reasoning, akrasia/weakness of will, addiction and responsibility.

Free Will & Moral Responsibility (Fall 2022/Spring 2024). Survey of contemporary philosophical work on free will, including: Classical compatibilism, Libertarianism (Agent- and event-causal approaches), 'Frankfurt'-type cases and responses thereto ('Flicker of Freedom,' 'Dilemma Defense'), Contemporary compatibilism, Skepticism and Hard Incompatibilism, Source Incompatibilism, Agency Incompatibilism.

Lower-division undergraduate

Introduction to Philosophy (Fall 2023). Introduction to Philosophy by way of Descartes’s Meditations. Alongside the Meditations (with substantial portions of the Objections and Replies and recent scholarship on Descartes), we read more contemporary work on issues such as skepticism, the self and personal identity, God and the problem of evil, free will and moral responsibility, and consciousness and the mind-body problem.

Introduction to Ethics (Spring 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023). Lower-division undergraduate survey of moral philosophy. Required for all NU graduates.

Columbia University/Barnard College

Contemporary Civilization (Fall 2020–Spring 2022). Yearlong discussion seminar centering on topics in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophical anthropology in the Western tradition. The Contemporary Civilization syllabus includes work by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault. You can read more about the distinctive aims of Columbia's Core Curriculum here, and about Contemporary Civilization specifically here.

Introduction to Philosophy (Summer 2021). (See description above.)

Metaphysics (Summer 2019, Summer 2018). Upper-division undergraduate course covering realism vs. nominalism; the ontological structure of concrete particulars (including the problem of the one and the many); endurantism vs. perdurantism; personal identity; the metaphysics of modality; causation.