M.A. Program Requirements

Program Requirements

The master’s in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS consists of 36 semester units (two years of coursework), and is offered in both online and residential format. 

Online students are highly encouraged but not required to participate in the annual residential retreat, intensive courses, and other program-associated events held in and around the San Francisco Bay Area.

At the conclusion of their master’s program, all students take an integrative seminar which is structured to help consolidate what they have learned throughout the program. Through a process of collaborative inquiry, students refine their unique perspectives and their ability to bridge various bodies of knowledge while developing plans for their next steps after graduation. The course culminates with a public presentation to the assembled Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness community of the students’ key insights.

To understand the current ecological crisis, we need to investigate the ontological and epistemological foundations of our knowledge about the environment. The science of ecology, in its social and biophysical permutations, is a dominant way of understanding the natural environment. Examining the social construction of scientific and ecological knowledge will shed light on how we know and what we know about the natural environment. In this course, we will critically examine the social construction of scientific and ecological knowledge, coming to see Western scientific knowledge as a particular cultural phenomenon. We will examine countervailing epistemological understandings, such as situated knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge, that challenge the idea of a dispassionate and omniscient scientific viewpoint. We will investigate the compatibility of religious and spiritual insights with ecological knowledge. Applying feminist and non-Western epistemologies to environmental issues, we will seek to generate alternative ways of understanding ecological crises, which may, in turn, generate healing alternatives.

This is a course on consciousness. In one sense, consciousness is a subject we are each intimately familiar with. What could be more obvious than the fact that we think, feel, sense, and imagine things? But in another sense, consciousness remains a hotly contested object of academic study, with some claiming it does not exist at all and others claiming it is the only thing that does! This course examines the subject/object of consciousness from a plurality of disciplinary perspectives, including theoretical biology, neuroscience, psychology, transpersonal theory, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, phenomenology, psychedelic studies, and especially process philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational panexperientialism is explored as a potential naturalistic alternative both to deflationary accounts of consciousness offered by scientific materialism and to more inflationary accounts offered by philosophical idealism.

Can the ancient metaphor of “the book of nature” provide us with theoretical and imaginative tools for a critique of the current crisis of nature and culture? Increasingly, many see our current crisis crystallized in the apparent conflict between a humanism that ignores nature, on the one hand, and a naturalism that warps and disfigures our understanding of humanity, on the other. Can we look at things differently? This course seeks to respond to the prevailing crisis through a critical reconsideration of the metaphor of the book of nature, one of the central root metaphors for relating nature and culture throughout Western history. We will follow the development of this trope from its appearance in antiquity through to its high point of cultural influence in the Middle Ages, its transformation in early modern science and philosophy, and its continuing importance for much Romantic and environmental literature. Along the way, we will also consider the role of the imagination in the mediation of knowledge, the relationship between allegory and metaphysics, and the connection between dominant metaphors and the modes of consciousness attaching to them.