In the last ten years, I’ve taught classes on the history of philosophy (especially 19th century German philosophy), social and political philosophy, social metaphyiscs, the philosophy of race, and the philosophy of social science. You can access the syllabi for my favourite classes here:

The Semantics, Metaphysics, and Politics of Race (Syllabus)

In 2020, the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain at the hands of the police in the United States sparked a renewed wave of protest against police violence. However, what was new this time was that this protest also prompted a broad public debate about racism here in Germany. A central part of this debate concerned whether the term ‘Rasse’ should be removed from German Basic Law, replaced by another, or retained (albeit in a modified meaning). Last November, this debate culminated in the Federal Government’s declaration that it would replace the term ‘Rasse’ from Basic Law with an altered formulation to protect against racist discrimination. Others in the debate have pushed back against this demand, interestingly citing an anti-racist cause as their reason for doing so: They object that the legal concept of race is a necessary instrument to tackle racist discrimination. This debate revolves around questions that also fall into the domain of philosophy and, more specifically, the philosophy of race: What does our “race talk” mean? To what kind of entities does it commit us? What are races, according to these commitments, and do they match our best scientific theories, say, in biology or sociology? Should we change the meaning of our racial classifications such that they better serve our theoretical or practical ends? The lively philosophical discussion of the semantics, metaphysics, and politics of race suggests that it might also shed light on the philosophical issues underlying the current public debate over ‘Rasse’ in Germany. In this seminar, we will discuss philosophical accounts of the ordinary or ‘folk’ meaning and concept of race and the central metaphysical views on the nature and existence of race. These views will include anti-realism/eliminativism, social constructionism and biological realism. Two questions that will chiefly concern us in our discussion are: Can these views be applied to the German context and, if yes, how? Is there one ‘folk’ concept of race shared across different cultural contexts, or rather several different folk conceptions of race relative to these contexts?

Social Structure and Social Structural Explanation (Syllabus)

‘It’s a structural problem.” That’s a statement you might have come across more often recently, for instance, in discussions about racism, sexism or other kinds of social inequality. Whereas such appeals to social structure have been common in the social sciences for several decades, philosophers – and analytic philosophers, in particular, have long remained sceptical towards the concept. Only more recently have some among them begun to appreciate the relevance of social structure to the explanation of certain social phenomena and particular forms of social injustice, in particular.
But what exactly is a social structure, and why should we prefer an explanation of some phenomenon in terms thereof rather than, say, individual attitudes and behaviour? This is a question that social theorists have sought to answer for several decades. Although we can already find implicit answers to these questions in early social theory going back all the way to Marx, Giddens’ theory of ‘structuration’ was crucial in putting the notion of social structure at the heart of the sociological debate. Moreover, this theory has sparked several debates that persist until today and that have, in the last years, also spilt over into philosophy. Here, particularly due to the ground-breaking work of Sally Haslanger, they have become the topic of a lively new field of inquiry.
In this seminar, we will engage in debates over the nature of social structure and of structural explanation in the social sciences. Since many of these debates hark back to central themes in Marx’s social theory, we will begin by discussing some of the central texts in which he elaborates on these themes. Against this historical background, we will then turn to Giddens’ theory of ‘structuration’, its critics, and the further developments they have spawned. Before we turn to the most recent philosophical debate over social structure and structural explanation in social science, we will first revisit the earlier debate over ‘methodological individualism’ to understand why (analytic) philosophers have long been so sceptical about these notions. We will close our discussion with Sally Haslanger’s account of social structure and social-structural explanation and further accounts that have built upon it.