Course Descriptions

Graduate Courses

Undergrad Courses | Upper Division | Graduate Courses

SPRING 2010

UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED, THE PREREQUISITE FOR COURSES IN PHILOSOPHY NUMBERED 5000 AND ABOVE IS TWELVE HOURS OF PHILOSOPHY. OTHER SPECIFIC PREREQUISITES ARE SO INDICATED.

5293/001 Ethical Theory   M, 3:00-6:00   Sankowski
This course aims primarily to foster critical thinking, dialogue, and intelligent choice and action about ethics. The course will be useful to both philosophy and other graduate students, especially those in the humanities and social sciences, but also natural science and professional areas students. The course encourages the student to examine one’s own moral ideas (and those of others) with an appreciation of history and the contemporary cultural contexts in which they have figured and now do figure. The course includes older, classical and more contemporary authors. The emphasis here is much more on contemporary theory and practice. The ethical concepts the course emphasizes are individual freedom, responsibility, and ideas about the best politics and ethics education (in light of one’s conceptions of freedom and responsibility). The course takes an interdisciplinary and pragmatic approach to ethical theory, including references to empirical matters such as cultural context, globalization, etc. Authors and works examined will include some subset of the following: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (selections); Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (selections); J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism (selections) and/or Mill, On Liberty (selections); C. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (selections); P. Singer, One World-The Ethics of Globalization, Second Edition (selections); A. Sen, Identity and Violence-The Illusion of Destiny (selections). Adjustments in the readings may be necessary, especially depending on prior courses taken by students in the class. There will be a midterm and a final, both primarily essay-focused exams. There will be a paper required of all students in the class; this will be ten pages minimum for undergraduates and fifteen pages minimum for graduate students. The class will proceed by lectures constantly supplemented by Socratic questions and discussion to the extent possible given class size. Some supplementary readings will be used if available through legally acceptable copying and if the resulting cost of readings is within legally acceptable limits.

5523/001 Epistemology   T, 3:00–6:00   Riggs
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with determining the nature, structure, and extent of human knowledge.  This course will serve as a survey of the most serious problems faced by both classical and contemporary epistemologists.  With respect to knowledge, there are two fundamental questions that we will attempt to answer:  What is knowledge?  How much can we know?  Contemporary debates over the nature (internalism/externalism) and structure (coherentism/ foundationalism) of epistemic justification will be examined along with the debate over the connection between epistemic and ethical normativity (the ethics of belief).

5543/001 Philosophy of Mind   M, 7:00–10:00   Montminy
This course provides an overview of traditional and contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind.  We will examine different accounts of what the mind is, and how it fits into a physical universe. We will also consider issues such as how the mental can causally interact with the physical, whether computers can think, how much our thoughts depend on the nature of our social and physical environments, and what consciousness is.

5143/001 Symbolic Logic II   R, 3:00–6:00   Swoyer
The purpose of this course is to familiarize you with the scope and limits of formal logic and computation. We will begin with an introduction to basic set theory. We employ set theory to characterize the semantics of predicate logic with identity. We then use this characterization to investigate the fundamental properties of the logic: (1) the soundness and completeness of certain syntactic methods for determining whether arguments are valid; (2) the undecidability of whether collections of sentences are logically consistent; (3) the Skolem-Lowenheim Theorems, which show there are important limitations on the expressive power of the logic. And we’ll study the two “Godel Incompleteness Theorems”, which show the inability of any logic to compute all the truths about the natural numbers that are expressible in arithmetic, and show that any consistent theory strong enough to represent the natural numbers cannot “prove its own consistency”.

5313/900 Studies in Anc Phil – Plato   T, 7:00–10:00   Benson
 The aim of this course is to introduce advance undergraduates and graduate students to Plato’s philosophical works. The enormity and diversity of Plato’s works make it impossible - even in a survey course - to survey them all. Accordingly, we will focus our attention on some or all of the following works: Apology, Crito, Laches, Euthyphro, Charmides, Protagoras, Glorgias, Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Theaetetus, Parmenides, and Sophist. (Even so, in some of these cases we will only read part of the work.) These works represent Plato’s methodology, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, ethics, and political philosophy. In conjunction with these primary readings there will also be some readings from vast secondary literature. Text: Cooper, Plato: Complete Works

6203/900 Seminar – Ethics   W, 7:00–10:00   Trachtenberg
This seminar will address the following issue in moral philosophy.  On the one hand, to adopt a rational approach to ethics involves a commitment to at least some general moral principles, which serve as the reasons that justify moral evaluation and/or action.  But on the other hand, the complex details of the specific circumstances in which evaluation or action occurs can be taken to demand a more particularized, even ad hoc response to the situation.  Philosophers have discussed the space between these two poles in terms of moral judgment.  From (at least) Aristotle forward, philosophers have appealed to our capacity for judgment to explain how we apply general moral principles to specific cases.  But the capacity of moral judgment itself remains puzzling.  How, exactly does it operate?  How do we acquire, or improve it?  In the seminar we will consider some classical (Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant) and contemporary (Arendt, McDowell, Nussbaum, and Larmore, among other) writers who have taken up the question of judgment.  We will place a certain amount of emphasis on the case of political judgment—i.e. the kinds of evaluative and action-oriented judgments we make in the political, and not strictly the moral, sphere.  Specific readings will be determined later, and made available on-line, or in the department.  The main work for the seminar will be an APA style conference paper, to be presented toward the end of the semester.  In addition, students will submit contributions to a course website based on their research into the literature on the topic, and will, a few times over the semester, present their work to the class.

6383/900 Seminar – Chinese Philosophy   R, 7:00–10:00   Wang
This seminar examines the thoughts of three most influential classical Confucian philosophers: Kongzi (“Confucius”), Mengzi and Xunzi.  Through a careful reading of the primary texts and influential secondary work, we will explore the intersection of virtue ethics, moral psychology, and human nature in the work of these three philosophers.  Among other issues, we will examine the familistic feature of Confucian social and political philosophy and the dialogue between these philosophers and their contemporaries such as Zhuangzi, Mozi, and Hanfeizi.  No knowledge of classical Chinese is required.  All readings are in translation.

6393/900 Seminar – History of Philosophy   T, 6:30-9:20   Chance
The focus of this seminar will be Kant’s conception of reason and related issues in his theoretical and (hopefully) practical philosophy. After exploring the development of this conception in the pre-critical works of the 1760’s and 1770’s, we will examine the various roles assigned to reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. These include the explanatory role reason plays in Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics as the source of “transcendental illusion”; its cognitive role as a source for principles that guide our investigation of nature, what Kant calls its “regulative” use; and its practical role as a source for “rational faith” in the existence of God and immortality of the soul. Schedule permitting, we may also explore the conceptions of reason of some of Kant’s predecessors and dialectical opponents—such as Hume, Locke, and the German philosopher Christian Wolff—in an effort to situate his views and identify appropriate standards for their success. No prior knowledge of Kant’s philosophy will be assumed.