Sample Syllabus Modules

Unit 1: Descartes’s dualism

Descartes’s Meditations

Unit 2: Hobbes’s materialism

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapters 1–6

Unit 3: Cavendish’s third way

Section on vitalism and panpsychism, as well as her critiques of Hobbes and Descartes, from excerpts from Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy

Unit 4: Spinoza’s mind–body parallelism

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Part 2

Unit 5: Leibniz’s and Berkeley’s idealisms

Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology and “New System”

George Berkeley, Three Dialogues

Unit 6: Kant’s transcendental idealism

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena

Other readings that also could be included: Boyle, Hume.