After completing this course students are able to:

Intended for students with a specific interest in advanced research and an eye towards post-graduate studies in philosophy, this course is designed to meet the needs of students who wish to develop greater depth in their philosophical studies.

The course consists of rotating content based on the expertise of philosophy teachers at University College. It is organized thematically, and requires students to follow three seminars of five weeks each treating main categories of philosophical investigation, such as metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy of mind, language, religion and science.

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Spring 2016 - East and West: distinctions and non-duality
In the Spring of 2016, the leading theme of the Senior Seminar is: distinctions and non-duality. The seminar will deal with the use of philosophical distinctions by thinkers who assume that, at some metaphysical level, reality is one, continuous, uninterrupted or unlimited.
It’s no wonder that non-dualist philosophers use distinctions, in fact, as Robert Sokolowski explains: “philosophy is the intellectual activity that works with distinctions. Its method is the making and the questioning of distinctions… what happens in philosophy is that we interrupt our focus on what is being said and we turn to the distinctions that permit the things and states of affairs we are concerned with to appear… We turn to what normally remains latent. We foreground what was in the background”.
And yet a lot of questions remain: how do distinctions work when they are drawn by philosophers who use them to lay the foundation for their non-dual metaphysical system? If distinctions do not point to two separate domains, worlds or stuffs, what is their status?
We will read texts in which philosophers argue that distinctions —e.g. between here and there, past and future, subject and object, cause and effect, being and not-being, self and not-self, one and many— do not belong to reality, but rather either to our perceptual and conceptual apparatus or to our conventions and language or to a combination of these. What is the evaluation of these distinctions on the part of these philosophers? Some of the texts we will read, rather than stressing the conventional or transcendental nature of everyday divisions, regard them as arbitrary since they continuously shift and can be therefore never captured by our static ways of knowing reality; but they assume there might be real and shifting divisions that can be matched with a consonant behaviour.
Among the philosophers we will read, some claim that, whereas it is flawed to see distinctions as pointing to a real fragmentation of reality, it is important to impose them on reality: in fact, many of them enable us to make sense of the world on an everyday basis. Other distinctions, especially those newly introduced by the philosopher who reflects on them, have the purpose of leading us to some kind of awareness, of foregrounding something that was in the background, e.g. important continuities that usually remain latent, like what they regard as the fundamental metaphysical layer —e.g. being, reality, the process, the will, the way, pure experience, the place of true nothing. So-called dual-aspect theorists introduce a distinction between either two aspects or perspectives on the same reality. Other distinctions might be drawn or valued because they enable us to add meaning to a reality that might appear as fundamentally neutral and indefinite to start with.
Some attention will be devoted to the role of the individual in various non-dual systems: the one item that par excellence seems discontinuous, separated or different from the rest of reality: how do these systems account for this (seeming?) division?
The texts we read belong to or are inspired either by of one three non-dual Eastern philosophies: Taoism (Chuang-Tzu), Advaita Vedanta (Shankara), Mahayana Buddhism (Zen: Dogen, Wumen Huikai/ Mumon Ekai, Nishida); or by Western philosophers usually regarded as monists of some kind: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plotinus, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Bohm.