Philosophy (PHIL)
Description: Historical-cultural introduction to philosophy. Considers a broad range of philosophical problems in relation to the major historical and cultural conditions which have influenced their formulations and proposed solutions. Topics: the principles of rational inquiry; the nature of knowledge; the metaphysics of mind, world, and God; and the sources and authority of morality.
Description: A wide-ranging examination of the philosophical, political, social, and economic aspects of food, its production and consumption. Topics include the ethical treatment of animals, factory farming, food justice, the relation of food to social and religious identity, and climate change.
Description: Critical survey of current issues and the role of philosophy in attempts to resolve them. Recent topics: sexual morality, pornography and the law, capital punishment, sexism and racism, extraordinary treatment for the terminally ill, abortion, church and state, and nuclear war and disarmament.
Description: Explores dynamics of information gathering and delivery in the context of value, access discrepancies, privacy, and autonomy.
Description: Introduction to the principles of correct reasoning and their application. Emphasis on improving skills of thinking and reading critically, analyzing and evaluating arguments objectively, and constructing sound arguments based on relevant evidence.
Description: Introduction to philosophical issues about the nature and justification of religious belief. Issues include the conception of God in Judaism and Christianity; the role of faith, reason, and religious experience in religious belief; the traditional arguments for the existence of God; the problem of evil; the idea of immortality; the relations between religion and science and religion and morality.
Prerequisites: Good standing in the University Honors Program or by invitation.
Description: Topic varies.
Description: Philosophical foundations of business ethics. Considers moral reasons, ethical decisions, and personal integrity as applied to such issues as advertising, discrimination, honesty, leadership, risk-taking, and whistle-blowing.
Description: Introduction to symbolic logic. The semantics and syntax of sentential and predicate logic. Translating into and from formal languages, determining the validity or invalidity of arguments, and constructing proofs within formal systems.
Description: Ethical issues in computer science, data science, and emerging technology. Topics include algorithmic bias and fairness, surveillance, privacy, big data, free speech and the interaction of technology and democracy.
Description: Philosophical study of moral problems in modern medicine, exploring such issues as the allocation of scarce medical resources, patients rights, research on human subjects, abortion, the care of seriously impaired newborns, and socialized medicine and the right to health care.
Description: Exploration of a number of topics to which both psychological research and philosophical reflection are relevant. Includes two kinds of cases: where psychological findings bear on the resolution of some traditional philosophical issues and where philosophical analysis and criticism can be helpful in understanding or assessing a psychological theory or finding.
Description: Introduction to cognitive science from the perspective of philosophy. Explores interrelations between topics in cognitive science and philosophy, and their relevance to the nature of the mind.
Description: Fundamental assumptions and philosophical foundations of varieties of feminist thought. Nature of gender, gender identity, sex differences, and the role of science in defining sex and gender.
Description: Wide range of basic issues in ethical theory, typically including: the nature of justice; the objectivity of moral values; the source of moral obligation; and the conditions of the good life. Each issue approached through historically important texts such as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Kant's Groundwork, and Mill's Utilitarianism.
Description: Basic concepts and problems of political theory. Freedom, equality, democracy, justice, and the relation of the individual to the state.
Description: Ethical dimensions in human relations to the environment. What is the nature of moral value generally, and what are the range of things that are morally valuable? Are there things that are fundamentally morally valuable beyond humans or human happiness (i.e., sentient creatures, ecosystems, and species)? What is the right thing to do given various answers to such value questions?
Description: Philosophical problems of the law and of legal systems. Includes legal reasoning, judicial interpretation, legal language and definition, legal obligation, law and morality, and legal paternalism. Concepts of law, constitutionality, legislative intent, fair trial, criminal responsibility, punishment, fault, and strict liability. Applications to social issues of individual freedom, human rights, privacy, discrimination, and justice.
Description: Beginnings of Greek philosophy: the pre-Socratics and the systems of Plato and Aristotle with emphasis on historical connections and the critical interpretation of texts.
Description: Survey of the more important systems in Western philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with emphasis on historical connections and the critical interpretation of texts.
Description: Introduction to the philosophical understanding of religion. Includes a number of views on the nature of God, on the possibility of knowledge of God's existence through either argumentation or religious experience, and on the relation between religion and morality.
Description: Topics vary.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent reading or research under direction of a faculty member.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Introduction to some major problems of epistemology, with emphasis on the understanding and evaluation of the problems, rather than on learning what various philosophers have said about them. Treats such questions as the nature and scope of knowledge; the sources of knowledge in perception, memory, and reasoning; the nature of evidence and its relation to knowledge; the possibility of knowledge of the mental lives of others; the nature and justification of inductive reasoning; and the concept of causality and its relation to explanation.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Introduction to some main problems, and some central concepts, of metaphysics. Focuses on the nature of being and existence, and on various questions concerning the relations between different kinds of entities: minds and bodies, causes and effects, universals and particulars, etc.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Major themes and classic texts in philosophy of language. The notion of meaning, the relationships between meaning and reference, meaning and truth, and the meaning and use of expressions.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Major problems in the philosophy of mind: the relation between the mental and the physical; the role of mental concepts in explaining human actions; the possibility of life after death; the concept of a person; the structure of character and personality; and the analysis of various important mental concepts, such as thought, belief, desire, emotion, sensation, and pleasure.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL
Description: Metaphysics of personal identity of persistence. Topics include nature of personal identity, survival through change, objects' movement or extension through time, the nature of time and the present, and issues of time, identity and persistence.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Critical analysis of the philosophical foundations of the sciences. Nature of theories, observation in science, the interpretation of theories, the scientific method, explanation, interfield relations, patterns of scientific development, and the role of philosophy in science studies in general.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Morality, considering the major views in normative ethics as well as a broad range of questions in theoretical ethics centering on the nature of morality and its place in human life.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Application of systematic moral theories to specific moral issues. Issues of social justice and environmental, journalistic and medical ethics.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Various competing contemporary philosophical approaches to issues of social justice, with special attention to issues of diversity, individual rights, political liberty, and distributive justice.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Critical exposition of the main classical and contemporary theories of art: Expressionist, Formalist, and Representationalist. Theories considered in definition of art, of aesthetic judgment, of art criticism, and of aesthetic value. Examples drawn from painting, literature, music, and movies.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Philosophy of Spinoza, focusing on his principal work, the Ethics. Various metaphysical and epistemological aspects of Spinoza's thought, including his ideas on the nature and existence of God, the relation between mind and body, and relations between language, truth and reason.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Ancient and medieval theories of morality. Connection between self-interest and morality, what morality is, and pleasure.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Ancient and medieval knowledge, focusing on perception, faith, and thought.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL.
Description: Ancient and medieval metaphysical theories, focusing on persons, gods, and properties.
Description: Topics vary.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent reading or research under direction of a faculty member.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent research leading to a thesis.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent research leading to a thesis.
Prerequisites: Philosophy major.
Description: Central philosophical problems or the work of some significant philosopher. Reading of primary sources, the interpretation of philosophical texts, and the writing of research papers.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Introduction to some of the basic concepts and problems in the philosophy of language. Topics to be discussed include reference, definite descriptions, names, demonstratives, truth, meaning, speech acts, and the logic of expressions involving so-called "propositional attitudes." Authors studied include Frege, Russell, Tarski, Austin, Grice, Strawson, Quine, Kripke, Kaplan and Davidson.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Intensive study of basic problems in the Theory of Knowledge: the nature of knowledge, the analysis of perception and memory, the justification of induction, the problem of how one knows other minds, and the analysis of a prior knowledge. Readings from recent work.
Second course in symbolic logic.
Description: An advanced course in symbolic logic, covering metatheoretical results about selected systems of logic. Topics may include: the soundness and completeness of classical propositional logic, and of some propositional modal logics; non-classical propositional logics; and extensions of and alternatives to classical first-order predicate logic
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Main problems in the philosophy of mind, including dualism and materialism, instrumentalism and eliminativism, wide and narrow content, qualia, and mental causation.
Prerequisites: 3 hours PHIL or graduate standing
Description: Intensive study of some main problems in the philosophy of science: explanation and prediction in the sciences, the nature of scientific laws, functional explanations in the sciences, the structure of scientific theories, the ontological status of theoretical entities, the reduction of scientific theories, and the confirmation of scientific hypotheses.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Intensive study of main problems in metaphysics, especially universals and particulars, the relation of mind and matter, the categories of the real, criteria of identity, and existential propositions. Readings from recent philosophers.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: The epistemological character of the social sciences. Character and explanatory role of social scientific generalizations, various explanatory strategies for social matters, the continuity or discontinuity of the social sciences with the special sciences, the importance of interpretation, and the place of rationality.
Prerequisites: 9 credit hours in PHIL
Description: Explore the foundations of ethics with consideration of major historical and contemporary views about the source of ethical obligation, practical normativity and morality.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Critical study of leading theories in ethics, with close attention to major works, chiefly modern and contemporary. Includes naturalism, intuitionism, emotivism, utilitarianism, Neo-Kantian ethics, and various current positions.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Foundational issues in human action, including the nature of intentional action, practical reasoning, moral responsibility, group agency, and various forms of irrationality.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Critical study of main problems and leading theories in social and political philosophy. Origin and justification of political obligation, with emphasis on social contact theories; the nature and foundation of individual rights and the strength of these rights when they conflict with each other and with concern for the common good; the principles of social justice and the obligation to protect the welfare of others; and the concepts of personal autonomy, liberty, equality, and freedom. Readings from a combination of historical and recent work, and emphasis on relating the various issues to current problems in society.
Description: Examination of classic books of 20th century jurisprudence. Topics include the relationship between law and morality and the development of legal positivism and its critics.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Advanced survey of ancient philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Aristotle, concentrating on central epistemological and metaphysical issues.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Advanced survey of early European philosophy from the late renaissance through the Enlightenment, concentrating on central epistemological and metaphysical issues.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL.
Description: Kant's philosophy, and of problems in the interpretation of his writings. The primary text will be the First Critique.
Prerequisites: 9 hours PHIL
Description: Survey of "Classical" German Idealism. Figures discussed include Kant, Jacobi, Reinhold, Schulze, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Focus on four lines of thought prominent in German Idealism-viz. Spinozism, skepticism, self-consciousness, and the relationship between the senses and the intellect.
Prerequisites: Permission.
Description: Independent and significant research project.