Philosophy Course Descriptions

Encourages critical thinking about fundamental problems that concern existence, knowledge, and value. As a means to this end, several philosophical works are read, discussed, and evaluated.
Credits: 3

An attempt to employ critical reasoning in a variety of everyday contexts. Standards will be developed to help distinguish fallacies from argumentation, prejudice from evidence, and poppycock from science. The course will have a practical orientation. Not offered on a regular basis
Credits: 3

An introduction to deductive logic, including propositional and predicate logic, Aristotelian logic, problems of definition, informal fallacies, and the elements of linguistic analysis.
Credits: 3

An introductory course aimed at the improvement of moral reasoning. Analysis and assessment of contemporary examples are stressed.
Credits: 3

This course considers ethical and political challenges facing American society by asking questions about the issues such as the foundations of a just society, the legacy of slavery in the U.S., the meaning of leadership in democracies, the connection between morality and the law, the purpose of the freedom of speech, and how best to respond to injustice. The course promotes civic engagement through philosophical discussion and collaboration with faculty and mentors.
Credits: 3

Credits: 0-6

Credits: 1-6

An inquiry concerning which entities, if any, have rights, whether non-human entities can have rights, and how one could justify claims about non-human rights. The outcome of the inquiry depends on an adequate account of good-in-itself. The course includes a survey of the environmental problems facing this planet. Offered when demand is sufficient
Credits: 3

The insights and teachings of major living religions will be analyzed by a study of their basic texts and teachers: Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Comparison of how their teachings apply to such contemporary issues as war and peace, the environment, gender, race, sexual orientation, and economic justice.
Credits: 3

Computers have done more to change the world we live in than any other single development in recent times. These changes have created new moral issues which we must face. By looking both at considered ethical foundations of the past and the new challenges of the present and the future, this course attempts to provide a critical basis for meeting these new issues, which include invasion of privacy, computer crime, professional ethics and responsibility, ownership and stealing of computer technology, the political implications of computer power, and the impact of the use and misuse of computer technology. Not offered on a regular basis
Credits: 3

This course provides an introduction to contemporary work in feminist philosophy and will apply philosophical methods of reasoning to a variety of topics of feminist concern. Throughout the course we will stress the diversity of feminist theories and approaches. We will also emphasize the ways in which feminist work has intervened in various subfields of philosophy as well as taking up and evaluating feminist criticism and transformation of philosophy as a discipline.
Credits: 3

This course offers an overview of recent philosophical discussions of race. More specifically, we will take up philosophical methods and concepts in order to investigate the nature of race and to evaluate contrasting approaches to racial justice. Themes will span issues of value theory as well as epistemological and metaphysical concerns. Specific topics are likely to include questions such as: What is the nature of race-is it a biological category or a social construction? How does race as a categorization relate to racial identity? Can one change one's race? How is race related to knowledge production? What is the nature of ongoing racial oppression in the U.S. and how can it best be overcome?
Credits: 3

This is a topics course that focuses on contemporary social justice issues. Sections will involve moral, political, and/or legal philosophy with an emphasis on marginalized social identities and structural inequalities.
Credits: 3

An introduction to some of the central texts and viewpoints of the Eastern philosophical tradition. The views explored will be Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian. The approach will be primarily philosophical, not historical. The goal will be to understand and critically evaluate the main metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical ideas lying at the center of each tradition. The issues explored will include the status and nature of the self, the possibility of some ultimate indefinable immanent reality, the metaphysical status of space-time-matter-causality, the relation between opposites such as good and evil, and the nature of the good life.
Credits: 3

An introduction to critical reasoning skills that is narrowly focused on the specific needs of undergraduate prelaw students, and an analysis of original material in the legal field. Topics covered include basics of recognizing arguments, informal methods and techniques for evaluating arguments, techniques for writing argumentatively, the nature of the law and fundamentals of the legal context, the distinction between descriptive and normative legal reasoning, how lawyers reason, how judges reason, and detailed analysis of several important cases. Offered every fall
Credits: 3

An examination of selected problems in the philosophy of religion. Topics include classical and contemporary arguments for and against the existence of God, existentialist approaches to religion, science and religion, the meaningfulness of theological language, miracles, freedom, death, and immortality.
Credits: 3

A survey of the religious culture and the philosophical tradition of the ancient Mediterranean. Restrictions: Part of the summer Mediterranean Roots Program in Greece and Italy and is to be given together with the Humanities I course. It could be given during a regular semester, if demand is sufficient.
Credits: 2

An inquiry into the concepts of art and good art. Could soundless music," "Don Giovanni," "Brillo Boxes," the Sistine ceiling, Rambo III, and Macbeth possibly fall under one concept? Who is to say that the Beatles are better than Bach, or that Warhol is worse than Watteau ... or have we asked the wrong question? " Not offered on a regular basis
Credits: 3

This course will begin by looking at Plato’s reasons for finding an “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” and Aristotle’s response. This will lead to a discussion of what is, or should be, the effect of imaginative literature. More specifically—and this will be the course’s central focus—we will consider whether literature can make a contribution to our ethical knowledge in a way that philosophy does not. Inevitably this will bring up questions about the cognitive and evaluative nature of emotion. We will look, too, at two plays by Sartre to see what, if anything, they add to his purely philosophical writings. Finally, we will consider briefly whether it is possible for a work of literature to be aesthetically excellent yet morally suspect. Offered every other spring
Credits: 3

This course will examine philosophical problems raised by evolutionary theory, genetics and taxonomy. Questions to be addressed include: (a) Is biological theory reducible to chemistry and physics? (b) What is a species? Is there a single, correct way to classify organisms? (c) At what level does selection operate: individual organisms, groups, or "selfish genes"? (d) Does altruism exist in nature? (e) Can the evolutionary model usefully be applied outside of biology? In particular, is sociobiology a promising field of research, or merely an excuse for injustice? (f) Can there be such a thing as "scientific creationism"? Prerequisites: One course in biology or in philosophy, or permission of the instructor. Not offered on a regular basis
Credits: 3

This is a non-technical, introductory course in bioethics which explores questions of value with regard to medicine, the provision of healthcare, the very notion of health, and bio-technology aimed at improving our lives. We will consider the role of values within medicine and healthcare fields, the methods by which we can make (bio)ethical evaluations and the major values/principles underlying contemporary bioethics as a field. The bulk of the course will involve focus on specific moral controversies in medicine and biotechnology. These controversies might include: the value of patient autonomy, the ethics of cosmetic surgery, medicine and sexuality, reproductive technology, and ethical issues in death and dying.
Credits: 3

This course will introduce students to the central role of ethics in the conduct of business organizations and the people who administer them. Students will learn to identify ethical issues in business and to analyze them from the perspective of several philosophical moral traditions. We will consider ethical issues concerning both the overall economic system and the specific business areas of management, accounting, finance, and marketing. Students will be required to perform analyses of both philosophical readings and recent case-studies from the business world.
Credits: 3

Credits: 0-6

Credits: 1-6

An examination of the fundamental ideas of Western civilization against the Greek background that produced them. Original texts in translation are read. Selections from the works of such philosophers as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle are read, discussed, and evaluated.
Credits: 3

An examination of some of the fundamental ideas of philosophy in the modern period, with an emphasis on contributions to epistemology and metaphysics. Original texts in translation are read. Selections from the works of such philosophers as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant are read, discussed, and evaluated.
Credits: 3

This course will familiarize students with past and present theories and issues in the philosophy of education. Students will consider why humans educate themselves and their children; what they think constitutes reality; what knowledge is worth having and how humans beings acquire it; what constitutes the good life and how human beings organize society to promote it; and how education can encourage people to reflect on what it means to live ethically. The course will allow philosophy students to apply their knowledge of the discipline to an important realm of practical problems and provide education students an opportunity to think both critically and creatively about educational practice.(Cross listed with EDUC 305.) Prerequisites: PHIL 100 or INTD 203 or permission of instructor. Not offered on a regular basis
Credits: 3

This course will provide a chronological survey of Chinese philosophy. Chinese philosophy has often been characterized as 'humanism'. But this humanism has its cosmological roots. This course will begin with the basic cosmological view of the ancient Chinese, and then investigate how different humanistic approaches under the same cosmological view could emerge. Three main schools of thought to be covered are: Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism. The course will conclude with some contemporary articles on Chinese philosophy, and investigate how Chinese philosophy can develop from this stage on. This course has no prerequisites and assumes no background in philosophy or in Chinese language and culture.
Credits: 3

An examination of some of the leading motifs of phenomenology and existentialism. Thinkers and topics to include: Kierkegaard: Impossibility of an existential system; Faith and subjective truth; Teleological suspension of the ethical. Nietzsche: Death of God; Master morality, slave morality, and traditional morality; Will to power and the superman; Overcoming nihilism. Husserl: Critique of psychologism and historicism; Consciousness as intentionality; Grounding of knowledge and action on transcendental subjectivity; Life-world and the sciences. Heidegger: Meaning of Being and human existence; Authentic and inauthentic being towards-death; Human existence, temporality, and history. Sartre: Being, consciousness, and nothingness; Existence precedes essence; Freedom, bad faith, and authenticity; Possibility of an ethics.
Credits: 3

We will examine a range of issues concerning the nature of mind, consciousness, and self. What is a mind? What is the relationship between mind and body? What is consciousness? Can conscious events ever be completely analyzed in objective terms, or are they irreducibly subjective? What is the relationship between a self or person and a mind or consciousness? Can a person stay the same over time while the contents of his mind change radically? What makes a mind or person one thing rather than many? Is it possible for one mind or person to overlap with another, or are we essentially separate from one another? Is there any reasonable concept of personal survival after death?
Credits: 3

This course will consider some of the foundational issues we face in our search for the best group-living arrangements. Such issues will include, but not be limited to, the conflict between individual liberty and social equality, the criteria for just distribution of wealth, and the proper role and form of government. We will consider how questions about these issues have been addressed historically by philosophers since Plato and Aristotle. We will also explore how contemporary political works by Rawls, Nozick, and others might help us understand and try to solve our own political and social problems.
Credits: 3

Philosophical logic is the effort to represent aspects of valid reasoning with formal systems that can be applied to a variety of questions in philosophy. A comprehensive logic would account for all forms of rational inference in a single, manageable package, but instead, we have a variety of partial and competing systems aimed at various specific topics, including necessity and possibility, vagueness, degree, comparison, time, value, and knowledge, as well as non-standard alternatives to the classical logic of subjects and predicates. In this course, we will discuss the project of philosophical logic, survey (to varying depths) a broad range of theories in the field with applications, and look for general conclusions.
Credits: 3

This course will examine the nature of science. What makes the difference between scientific theories and nonscientific ones? Is there a special kind of reasoning for science, or just a special subject matter? Does science have a greater claim to knowledge? What are the limits of science? Can religion and morality be turned into sciences, or is there a fundamental gap of some sort between these different realms? We will consider these questions both naively and in terms of a set of philosophical theories of science that have been developed over the past century. We will also examine a variety of long-standing conceptual problems in particular sciences, including mathematics. Finally, we will look at the important consequences of science in today's society, in particular the pressing issue of "junk science".
Credits: 3

An examination of contemporary and recent views concerning the nature of language and the ways in which language is conceived as bearing on philosophical problems. Topics covered include theories of reference and meaning, truth, analyticity, opacity, proper names, definite descriptions, demonstratives, the possibility of translation, semantic representation, the nature of propositions. Offered: every three semesters Prerequisites: PHIL 111 and one other course in philosophy.
Credits: 3

A systematic exploration of the foundations of law. Major topics include the nature of law and the criteria for a legal system, competing legal theories, the relation between legality and morality, competing theories concerning criminal justice and the justification of punishment.
Credits: 3

Credits: 1-12

Credits: 1-15

Intensive reading in a philosopher or philosophical problem, under the supervision of a member of the staff. (Available at all levels.) Offered by individual arrangement
Credits: 1-6

This is a slot course that focuses on some area(s) of applied ethics at an advanced level. Each section will take up applied moral, social, and/or political issues from a philosophical perspective, drawing on contemporary philosophical work on the topic.
Credits: 3

An examination of classical and contemporary philosophical works addressed to the problems of intrinsic value, right conduct, good character, free will and responsibility, and moral knowledge.
Credits: 3

An examination of fundamental epistemological concepts, and especially of contemporary analytic philosophical approaches to them. Topics include the analysis of empirical knowledge, the nature and structure of justification, the internalism/externalism debate, the role of testimony in knowledge, and skepticism about the external world. We will also consider several meta-epistemological issues.
Credits: 3

An analysis of major metaphysical concepts, and especially of contemporary analytic approaches to them. Topics include identity, necessity, essentialism, possible-world semantics, events, objects and space-time, realism, and the ontology of abstract objects.
Credits: 3

Students with a serious interest in pursuing philosophy are advised to write a thesis: a lengthy, original essay on a special philosophical issue. Completion of the thesis will involve an oral defense. Permission of instructor required.
Credits: 3

For advanced students. Focuses on a single philosophical problem or philosopher, or a pair of problems or philosophers. Topic varies from term to term, and student presentations comprise a significant portion of the course.
Credits: 3

Credits: 0-6