Course Descriptions

Graduate Courses

Lower Division | Upper Division

SPRING 2011

The prerequisite for courses in philosophy numbered 5000 and above is 12 hours of philosophy. Additional prerequisites for specific courses may be noted below.

5293/001 Ethical Theory   T, 3:00-6:00   Zagzebski
In this course we will begin with the question, “What is an ethical theory and what is it good for?” We will then turn to a survey of both traditional and contemporary versions of normative ethical theories: Aristotelian virtue theory, natural law theory, Kantian-style ethics, and utilitarianism. In the last part of the course we will look at a series of meta-ethical issues, including moral realism vs. anti-realism, moral luck, moral skepticism, moral dilemmas, and the relevance of empirical studies for ethics.

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).

5523/001 Epistemology  R, 3:00-6:00  Craig
This course will explore questions regarding human knowledge through a survey of contemporary epistemology. We will investigate the definition of knowledge, epistemic justification, and varieties of knowledge. More specifically, topics will include skepticism, contextualism, traditional definition of knowledge, foundationalism and coherentism, naturalized epistemology, externalism, and feminist epistemology.

5623/900 Phil of Social Science  W, 7:00-10:00  Ellis
This course is concerned with the philosophical issues at the heart of the social sciences.  We will start with some foundational questions: are social sciences directed primarily at predictive (causal) or interpretive theories? is the basic unit of analysis the individual or the group? can social science be objective?  We will then delve into some methodological issues: what sorts of models/accounts are appropriate for social sciences? how should those models/accounts be evaluated? what are the ethical obligations of social scientists?  Time permitting; we will also consider social science as a tool for philosophers (in ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of science, etc.).  The precise issues covered will depend, in large part, on student interest.

5313/900 Studies in Anc Phil – Aristotle   T, 7:00–10:00   Benson
The aim of this course is to introduce advanced undergraduates and graduate students to Aristotle’s philosophical works.  The enormity and diversity of Aristotle's works make it impossible - even in a survey course - to survey them all.  Accordingly, we will focus our attention on the following works: Topics, Categories, Posterior Analytics, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, and Nicomachean Ethics.  (Even so, in many of these cases we will only read part of the work.)  These works represent early Aristotle as well as later Aristotle.  They also represent Aristotle's methodology, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of nature, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics. The course will not presuppose any previous exposure to Aristotle or ancient philosophy in general. Although, students who have been exposed to either will find the course somewhat easier.  The requirements for the course are yet to be determined.  Texts: McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle.

6203/001 Seminar – Ethics   W, 3:00–6:00   Sankowski
This course is an examination of ethical and political conceptions of individual freedom and associated responsibility (particularly blameworthiness). The course will study questions about meaning, justification, and normative judgment.
 (1) The course will include some consideration of supposedly fundamental issues about free will or free choice, responsibility (blameworthiness), and determinism. We shall also consider the re-framing of more general ethical problems about freedom or blameworthiness in relation to scientific explanation of action. We shall pay some attention in this and subsequent parts of the course to the ethical dimensions of the social sciences.
(2) Next, we shall consider some problems about the ethics of freedom and responsibility in areas of ethics overlapping with social and political philosophy. How should we conceive of freedom and responsibility where ethics and social or political philosophy overlap? How if at all is social and political freedom (as an ethically charged notion) related to the moral freedom often thought to be central in discussions of “free will and determinism”? How is ethical responsibility as blameworthiness significant in social and political contexts? This second part of the course mostly assumes the circumstances of the nation-state.
(3) Next: increasingly, ethics beyond national borders not only attracts the interest of philosophers, but generates worldwide institutional changes.  How should we understand the ethical importance of “the globalization of ethics” in relation to freedom and responsibility?
Readings will probably include (but not be limited to) some subset of work by T.M. Scanlon, John Rawls (e.g., selections from Political Liberalism and the post-PL paper “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited”), Samuel Scheffler, Anthony Appiah (probably selections from Cosmopolitanism or The Ethics of Identity),  Amartya Sen (particularly selections from The Idea of Justice), and Martha Nussbaum. The readings will be primarily in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. But we may also consider some prior background literature (mostly late twentieth century) in philosophy and related disciplines, and maybe one contemporary philosophy author from outside the Anglo-American tradition.  There will be a midterm and a final, and a 15-20 page required paper. Students will be expected to participate actively in the seminar.

6393/001 Seminar – History of Philosophy   M, 3:00–6:00   Cook
This seminar will investigate selected views of the modern philosophers, in particular of the Cartesians (understanding this to cover Descartes as well as his followers). I have not yet determined exactly what we will cover, but one area of interest will be modern philosophers’ attitudes towards necessity and possibility in general and towards actualism and possibilism in particular. As background, we will read some contemporary work on actualism by people like Robert Adams, and probably a little medieval stuff. We will then work though Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Arnauld, and of course Desgabets. Other possible areas of investigation will be determined by what students want to investigate and by what’s going on in the current literature on the Cartesians.

6593/900 Seminar – Contemporary Philosophy   M, 7:00-10:00   Elugardo
The topic of this seminar is the metaphysics of perception. We will examine several philosophical accounts of perceptual content, including Sense-Data Theories, Adverbialism, Representationalism, Direct Realism, and Disjunctivism, among others.  Here is a sample of the sorts of questions we will be addressing: What are the objects of perception (material objects or something that is intermediary between the mind and the material world)? Do we perceive things and their properties directly or do our experiences represent things in certain ways?  Do our perceptual experiences have any intrinsic qualitative features of which we are immediately and introspectively aware or are our experiences transparent to the mind? Is the phenomenal texture of a veridical visual experience reducible to the texture of the external states of affairs that one sees, as phenomenal externalists hold? If so, then doesn’t that mean that no pure hallucination can perfectly match a veridical visual experience in phenomenal texture, and that indeed, hallucinations have no phenomenal content? Surely it seems logically possible that there could be matching hallucinations. On the other hand, if a pure hallucinatory experience can perfectly match the phenomenal texture of a veridical visual experience, then doesn’t that show that being visually acquainted with external, mind-independent objects that have sensible qualities is unnecessary for the visual experience to have the phenomenal content it has?  In this seminar, we will look at a number of philosophical responses to these and other related questions and try to determine which, if any, has the best chance of being true. Readings for the seminar will be a mixture of classical and contemporary writings on the philosophy of perception.  Course requirements will be announced at a later date.