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Ancient philosophers thought carefully and deeply about human nature and its role in understanding ourselves, what makes a good human life, and how human societies should be structured. And in this course, we’ll examine a range of philosophical schools and figures from across the ancient world, paying special attention to their practical guidance for living well (schools studied may include, for example, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Mohism). We’ll often find broadly similar concerns, e.g., with the role of the emotions, the handling of desire, and the structure of our moral connections. But we’ll also find strikingly different approaches to these shared concerns: For example, should the emotions be cultivated through ritual, cleansed through reason, or defused through detachment? Throughout the course, we’ll balance close textual analysis of primary sources with broader thematic and comparative discussion as we think about what ancient insights into human nature can teach us about how to live well today. 

 

This course is a survey of major philosophical issues. We will ask both theoretical questions (What do we know? Does God exist? Do we have free-will?) and practical ones (What do we owe those with much less than us? Should we love everyone?) The common theme among the questions we ask will be meaning. That is, for each topic we discuss, we will examine how it bears on living a meaningful life: Is life without God, free-will, or immortality meaningless? Is a life meaningful in virtue of its impact on others? Is a meaningful life just one that you feel is meaningful? You have probably thought about some of these questions before and you will surely continue to think about and discuss these questions after the course ends.     

 

The mechanistic worldview of the Scientific Revolution, ushered in by figures like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, held out the prospect of understanding and explaining the world in new ways. But it also prompted an intense examination of ourselves by philosophers of the early modern period (roughly 1600-1800). Are we just material components of the world, mechanically explained, too? A key point of focus is the human capacity for reason: Does this set us apart from the world? What truths is it able to establish? What is practical reason able to achieve? Can human political interactions be explained in the same way as material interactions? We'll examine these questions across influential figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and Kant.

 

What does it mean to live a good life? Can morality be taught, or does it have to be lived rather than argued for? This course offers a survey of major schools of classical Chinese philosophy (Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism) and their successors. We will explore how Chinese thinkers approached questions about human nature, society, and the ideal life in ways different from their Western counterparts. Topics may include (1) the Confucian vision of moral development and self-cultivation, (2) the Mohist advocacy of an ethics in which everyone is to be treated impartially, and (3) the Daoist critique of Confucian moral preaching, along with its rejection of the idea that "truth" can be captured through theorizing and argument. All texts will be read in their English translations. No prior knowledge of Chinese is required.

 

This is an introductory course considering the question of one fundamental moral principle - right and wrong. The results are applied to moral problems of serious interest today. 

 

This introductory level undergraduate course studies several important views on the nature and justification of government, such as those of Plato, Hobbes, and Marx. 

 

Do we have free will? Is time real, or does it only seem to pass? Are race and gender things we’ve made up, or are they more fundamental to reality itself? Can we even answer these questions, and how certain can we be of our answers? This course introduces metaphysics and epistemology—the study of what reality fundamentally is and how, if at all, we come to know it—through questions like these. We begin with knowledge itself: what knowledge is, whether the skeptic can be answered, what makes a belief justified, and how our reliance on others shapes what we know. We then turn to metaphysics: the nature of time, causation, free will, ordinary objects, and the reality of social categories such as race and gender. We will treat texts as launchpads for building philosophical skills: critically engaging with texts, clearly articulating arguments, and being able to effectively explain and defend your own position. No prior philosophy coursework is required.

 

An introduction to the concepts and methods of modern deductive logic. Propositional logic is emphasized, but quantificational logic is touched upon. 

 

Douglas Blue 

An introductory course in philosophy of science. 

 

Aristotle offers one of the most systematic, nuanced, and compelling philosophical accounts of humans, the world, and our place in it. In this course, we'll explore Aristotle through the lens of his ethical thought and its foundations in his broader views of nature and the soul. The highest good, the subject of ethics for Aristotle, is the flourishing human life. But in order to understand what this is, we need to understand exactly what we are: natural things—hylomorphic compounds of form and matter—but of a special sort, living things, whose form is our soul. And along the way, we'll examine more generally how to explain the world and our knowledge of it. We'll draw readings from across Aristotle's works as we get acquainted with this highly original and highly influential figure.  
 

An investigation of a particular topic or figure in the field of ancient philosophy. 

 

This advanced undergraduate course examines major trends in contemporary analytic philosophy, including, for instance, some (but not all) of logical empiricism, logical positivism, Wittgenstein and his followers, ordinary language ("oxford") philosophy, Quine and his followers, Sellars and his followers, and so on. 

 

This course examines ethical and social issues that arise in connection with sport.  The course will be divided into two parts: the first concerns issues that arise within sport, such as using performance-enhancing drugs and seeking to injure opponents; the second concerns issues related to the integration of sport into society, such as whether there ought to be gender equity in sport (and what gender equity is) and whether sport has a legitimate place at institutions of higher education.

 

This course offers a study of philosophical and ethical issues regarding interpersonal relationships. 

 

This advanced undergraduate course concentrates on a few selected philosophical problems concerning the nature and justification of government; the selection will vary from one offering of the course to another. 

 

This course will be an in-depth exploration of a number of contested issues related to the practice of medicine, medical research and public health which are of philosophical, professional, and public policy concern. Some topics will include: the moral and professional obligations of physicians, patient autonomy, medical confidentiality, euthanasia and physician aided death, vaccination, and the moral imperatives and constraints distinctive to the conduct of medical research involving human subjects. This course should be of particular interest to philosophy majors as well as to students who are contemplating a career in medicine, biomedical research, public health, or health law. This course is an Approved Elective for the Undergraduate Certificate in Conceptual Foundations of Medicine.

Prerequisite: at least one course in Philosophy or History and Philosophy of Science or permission of the instructor.

This advanced undergraduate course addresses philosophical problems that arise in connection with art, such as the nature of works of art, the comparison and contrast between representational and non-representational art, the definition of beauty, and special obligations concerning art works. 

 

No course description is available. 

 

This course is designed to introduce students who have been exposed to linguistics and logic to contemporary work in the theory of meaning. 

 

This advanced undergraduate course develops skills in formal and informal reasoning in predicate-quantifier logic, and covers formal semantics for sentential logic, informal semantics for predicate-quantifier logic, and elementary syntactic metatheory. 

 

Update 10/5/26 

Ancient philosophers thought carefully and deeply about human nature and its role in understanding ourselves, what makes a good human life, and how human societies should be structured. And in this course, we’ll examine a range of philosophical schools and figures from across the ancient world, paying special attention to their practical guidance for living well (schools studied may include, for example, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Mohism). We’ll often find broadly similar concerns, e.g., with the role of the emotions, the handling of desire, and the structure of our moral connections. But we’ll also find strikingly different approaches to these shared concerns: For example, should the emotions be cultivated through ritual, cleansed through reason, or defused through detachment? Throughout the course, we’ll balance close textual analysis of primary sources with broader thematic and comparative discussion as we think about what ancient insights into human nature can teach us about how to live well today.

 

This course is a survey of major philosophical issues. We will ask both theoretical questions (What do we know? Does God exist? Do we have free-will?) and practical ones (What do we owe those with much less than us? Should we love everyone?) The common theme among the questions we ask will be meaning. That is, for each topic we discuss, we will examine how it bears on living a meaningful life: Is life without God, free-will, or immortality meaningless? Is a life meaningful in virtue of its impact on others? Is a meaningful life just one that you feel is meaningful? You have probably thought about some of these questions before and you will surely continue to think about and discuss these questions after the course ends.    

 

The central question of ancient ethics is still the most pressing question to ask ourselves: "How should I live my life?" This question also provides an ideal entry point into ancient philosophy more generally, because in order to answer it, we need to answer further questions about what we are and how we operate (moral psychology), what the world in which we live is like (physics and metaphysics), and how we know these things (epistemology). Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers offered some of the most interesting and insightful answers to these enduring questions. In this introductory course, we'll examine the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistics on a broad range of topics—often connected to the good life in one way or another—in order become familiar with this long, diverse, and important period in the history of philosophy.

 

This is an introductory course considering the question of one fundamental moral principle - right and wrong. The results are applied to moral problems of serious interest today. 

 

An introduction to some traditional philosophical perspectives on the nature of society. Philosophers studied might include Plato, Hobbes, Marx, and Twentieth-Century social theorists. 

 

An Introduction to PPE
This course provides an introduction to the thriving interdisciplinary field of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) from a philosophical point of view, covering its theoretical foundations, core technical tools, and analysis of contemporary moral and political issues. We will begin by familiarizing ourselves with the theoretician's toolkit, as developed both by ethicists, economists, and political theorists. We will then try to apply these theories and tools to analyze some contemporary issues. These will include not just time-honored topics in PPE (the duty to vote, climate change, universal basic income), but also those of recent and particular interest in the U.S. and the world (partisan gerrymandering, just policing, echo chambers, polarization, gun control, and advanced artificial intelligence). No prerequisites required.

 

This course is an introduction to biomedical ethics. Is it ever morally permissible for a doctor to lie to a patient? What about treating someone without their consent? Is there a moral difference between ending a patient’s life with a lethal injection and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment? When medical resources are limited, whose lives should we save — and why? What, after all, is the value of a human life? In this course, we will critically assess competing answers to these and other applied ethical questions about health treatment, medical research, reproduction, and end-of-life care.

 

If you ask ChatGPT, it will insist it’s not conscious, that it can’t think, and that it doesn’t have beliefs, desires, or emotions. But is it right? In many respects, it sure behaves like it has a mind. Is that enough for something to have one? If not, what more is there to having a mind? These are the kinds of questions we will ask in this class. Students will gain a deeper understanding of classic issues in the philosophy of mind and the ability to think critically about how these issues apply to contemporary artificial intelligence. 

 

 

An introduction to the concepts and methods of modern deductive logic. Propositional logic is emphasized, but quantificational logic is touched upon. 

 

This course provides an introduction to several problems common to philosophers and politics and introduces students to the different theories, modes of argument, and techniques of analysis used by the two disciplines to understand them. It is intended to help students deepen their understanding of the dominant political stance of our society. 

 

 In a series of lively, probing dialogues written over a long career, Plato sets the agenda for much of later philosophy. In this course, we'll aim to become well-acquainted with this foundational figure through the careful reading of select dialogues, primarily from the so-called early and middle dialogues. We'll emphasize works not typically studied in the introductory survey of ancient philosophy that allow us to explore a broad range of core Platonic concerns, such as: What is virtue, how is it acquired, and what's its role in a good life? What are the parts and capacities of the human psyche, and how do they explain action? What are the objects of knowledge, and how is knowledge acquired? What is real, and how do we explain the world around us? Dialogues studied may include, for example, Euthyphro, Meno, Crito, Protagoras, and the Republic.

 

The 17th and 18th centuries were a transformative period in European history, characterized by political, scientific, and philosophical revolutions. Some of the most prominent philosophers to emerge from this period – Locke, Berkeley, and Hume – have traditionally been grouped together as the “British Empiricists”. This course will explore in detail the thought of the British Empiricists, with the aim of providing an overview of the development of empiricism in Britain during the early modern period. Our focus will be on the philosophical developments, but we also will be interested in how those influenced, and were influenced by, their scientific contexts.

 

The primary aim of this course is to reach a general understanding of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. To this end, we shall examine the Critique’s central logical and metaphysical doctrines, with attention to their historical context. Following Kant as he seeks to determine whether a science of metaphysics is possible, we shall consider the fundamental question he poses (“How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?”), the way of thinking he follows in answering it (the so-called “Copernican Revolution”), and the doctrine of Transcendental Idealism on which his answer to this question depends. A second aim of the course is to gain familiarity with Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy. The final weeks will accordingly be devoted to his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he undertakes an analysis of common moral knowledge with a view to reaching a formulation of its supreme principle.
Prerequisite: Phil 0210 History of Modern Philosophy OR Phil 1110 Rationalism OR Phil 1140 Empiricism.

 
PHIL 1290 Topics in History of Philosophy (32262) 

THINKING ABOUT SOME ARGUMENTS CONCERNING THE NATURE, GOALS, AND SCOPE OF EDUCATION IN THE HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

Our explorations will be somewhat episodic and not comprehensive, but the goal will be to think about the interrelationships between how some historical philosophers in the western tradition (canonical and not) thought about the nature, purposes, and scope of education. We will be interested in issues such as: Whom should be educated and in the service of what goals? Who should teach whom? What is the relationship between the content of education and the future social and political roles of those being educated? How were the educational proposals of various philosophers related to their moral and political theories and to their views about the nature of knowledge and philosophy itself? Readings will range from classical Greece through the late 18th century and will include Plato, Musonius Rufus, Rene Descartes, Anna Maria von Schurmann, Jan Comenius, Bathsua Makin, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Francois Poulain de la Barre, Mary Astell, John Locke, Damaris Masham, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Immanuel Kant, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel.

 

The history of European religious thought (particularly Christianity) and the development of the idea of race are interwoven. While many devoutly religious people throughout history have, no doubt, been part of movements to oppose the horrific acts that occurred under colonization, end slavery, oppose Nazi anti-Semitism, or promote Civil Rights, for example, the very concept of separate races and the promotion of the ideal of white supremacy were in many ways innovations of European Christian theology. Indeed, religious arguments for white supremacy undergird many of the justifications for colonization and genocide, for slavery, and for Jim Crow laws and apartheid. As a result, despite important developments toward equality, racism remains ubiquitous and part of the underlying logic of the religious, political, and cultural milieu of American society, even if its effects often remain unnamed or are less explicit. This course is a philosophical exploration of the intersections of race, racism, and religious thought. It begins with an analysis of the philosophical and religious positions that solidified and promoted the idea of race, traces the entanglement of Western philosophy and Christian theology with racist political ideologies, and presents critical responses to race from African-American philosophers and liberation theologies. It ends by evaluating the continued effects of racism in American culture and religious thought and considers how we might both understand and respond to the epistemological, phenomenological, and existential effects of white supremacy in Western thought. 

 

Nearly every aspect of life is increasingly infused with AI. And nearly every aspect of life has always been infused with ethics. The sensible thing to do is thus to ask questions about when AI use is ethical: Is it wrong to use AI on your homework? Would it be wrong to use it to answer your texts? Should we be worried about its biases or about the fact that we rarely know why it makes the decisions it does? Do we have moral obligations to AI? And, most dramatically, how worried should we be about an AI-apocalypse? These are some of the questions this class will explore. But given the rapid pace of development of both the technology and the philosophical literature, we might find new ones to ask as the semester progresses. 

 

This advanced undergraduate course concentrates on a few selected philosophical problems concerning the nature and justification of government; the selection will vary from one offering of the course to another. 

 

This advanced undergraduate course develops skills in formal and informal reasoning in predicate-quantifier logic, and covers formal semantics for sentential logic, informal semantics for predicate-quantifier logic, and elementary syntactic metatheory. 

 

This course provides a broad, introductory survey of current issues in philosophy of science and treats philosophical problems such as confirmation, which are common to all sciences, as well as problems peculiar to individual sciences. 

 

“Local” Knowledge & Science in the Global South 

Philosophy of science has traditionally taken, as its objects of study, questions that arise most naturally in scientific research conducted in university settings. Recently, reflections on different practices of knowledge production within a more diverse set of communities -- indigenous communities in North America and former colonies in the Global South, for example -- have raised questions about the epistemological superiority of science relative to other knowledge systems, as well as how (de)colonization may bear on matters of epistemology.  

In this course, we will focus on the “local” knowledge, specifically in relation to “scientific” knowledge, as well as various proposals for epistemological and medical pluralism and scholarship that takes seriously practices of knowledge construction in communities outside the university. In what sense has science been characterized as “Western” or “Eurocentric”? What does this mean, both politically and epistemically? What does this have to do with legacies of colonialism? What exactly is meant by “local” knowledge? Is this a contradiction in terms? Is knowledge supposed to be “universal”? In what sense? What would a set of a epistemic practices that are truly pluralistic look like? What does philosophy in the field & in the community look like? 

This course offers a detailed study of one or more traditions in Indian philosophy, such as Jainism or Buddhism. 

 

Updated 3/20/26

 

An introduction to some ways in which ethical and social thought has been influenced by different views of human nature. Readings are from such authors as Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Freud. 

 

An introduction to some classical problems of philosophy. Topics vary, but might include skepticism, free will, the existence of god, and the justification of ethical beliefs. 

 

The aim of this course is to introduce students to some of the main achievements and leading ideas of ancient Greek philosophy up to classical times. Emphasis will be on understanding and evaluating the arguments and ideas of the Greek philosophical tradition. 

 

This course is an introduction to ethics. What makes an action morally right or wrong? What is happiness? Why be moral if you won’t get caught doing wrong? What, if anything, do we owe non-human animals or future human generations? Throughout this course, we will explore these and other questions raised by ethicists. No background in philosophy is required.

 

An examination of the arguments for and against the existence of god. 

 

An introduction to the concepts and methods of modern deductive logic.  Propositional logic is emphasized, but quantificational logic is touched upon. 

 

Updated 4/2/2026

What does it mean to be a human being? Are we fundamentally selfish, compassionate, or collaborative beings? Or is there something more to our nature? If so, what is it and why should we care? In this course, we’ll draw on both Eastern and Western philosophical attempts to make sense of the question human nature in hopes that a deeper understanding will help guide us on how to live and structure our society and institutions.

 

This course is a survey of major philosophical issues. We will ask both theoretical questions (What do we know? Does God exist? Do we have free-will?) and practical ones (What do we owe those with much less than us? Should we love everyone?) The common theme among the questions we ask will be meaning. That is, for each topic we discuss, we will examine how it bears on living a meaningful life: Is life without God, free-will, or immortality meaningless? Is a life meaningful in virtue of its impact on others? Is a meaningful life just one that you feel is meaningful? You have probably thought about some of these questions before and you will surely continue to think about and discuss these questions after the course ends. 

 

The mechanistic worldview of the Scientific Revolution, ushered in by figures like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, held out the prospect of understanding and explaining the world in new ways. But it also prompted an intense examination of ourselves by philosophers of the early modern period (roughly 1600-1800). Are we just material components of the world, mechanically explained, too? A key point of focus is the human capacity for reason: Does this set us apart from the world? What truths is it able to establish? What is practical reason able to achieve? Can human political interactions be explained in the same way as material interactions? We'll examine these questions across influential figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, and Kant.

 

What should we do with our lives? That's the central question this class explores. We'll look at some major theories about this question in philosophy. We'll also explore more specific issues in ethics, like the badness of death and what makes a life meaningful. The class will focus not just on what various people have thought about these issues but also on what we should think about them.

 

This is an introductory course considering the question of one fundamental moral principle - right and wrong.  The results are applied to moral problems of serious interest today. 

 

How can philosophy help us understand, navigate, and assess social institutions and relationships in our everyday lives? This course will explore this question in three different areas: education, knowledge, and relationships. Some questions that we’ll consider include: What is the point of education? How can it be used to address inequality and promote democracy? When is knowledge taken seriously – and importantly, whose knowledge? What factors affect how seriously someone’s testimony is taken? What should we do when we disagree with each other? Finally, this class will explore questions about the nature of our relationships with each other. What does it mean to be a good friend, romantic partner, and to love one another?

 

An examination of the arguments for and against the existence of god.

 

An introduction to the concepts and methods of modern deductive logic.  Propositional logic is emphasized, but quantificational logic is touched upon.

 

Are science and religion at odds or harmonizable? Do they coincide or represent completely separate discourses? This course examines the relationship between science, rationality, faith, and religion. Special attention will be given to ancient creation narratives and their interpretation, historical dialogues regarding faith and reason in the Western monotheist faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam), the scientific revolution, and various approaches to evolutionary theory. We will also consider practical, contemporary issues such as neuroscience and religious practice, ecology and faith, and scientific views toward gender and race.

 

Aristotle offers one of the most systematic, nuanced, and compelling philosophical accounts of humans, the world, and our place in it. In this course, we'll explore Aristotle through the lens of his ethical thought and its foundations in his broader views of nature and the soul. The highest good, the subject of ethics for Aristotle, is the flourishing human life. But in order to understand what this is, we need to understand exactly what we are: natural things—hylomorphic compounds of form and matter—but of a special sort, living things, whose form is our soul. And along the way, we'll examine more generally how to explain the world and our knowledge of it. We'll draw readings from across Aristotle's works as we get acquainted with this highly original and highly influential figure.  

 

The Quest for Happiness

We call “Hellenistic Philosophy” that part of Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy which was developed roughly between the end of the 4th and the end of the 1st century BCE, so after the death of Plato and Aristotle. This is the time of the so-called Hellenistic Schools, primarily that of the Epicureans and that of the Stoics. Both schools aimed to prepare their students for a happy, that is, flourishing, life, but they had very different views on what counted as a happy life. The Epicureans thought that this was a life of pleasure, the Stoics one of virtue. Which one should we choose? In this course we will examine the reasons provided on both sides. We will focus especially on ethics, but we will also look at some aspects of Epicurean and Stoic epistemology and physics.

Karl Marx   Capital: A Critique of Political Economy VOL 1  Penguin Classics
Karl Marx   Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon Hackett
Karl Marx   Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 2 Penguin Classics  
Karl Marx   Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3 Penguin Classics  
Karl Marx   Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy Penguin Classics  
 

The central content of this course will be devoted to several important books by Bertrand Russell (Our Knowledge of the External World), Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus-Logico- Philosophicus) and W.V. Quine, (Word and Object), along with other relevant materials as needed.  

 

This course explores the foundations of morality and other "normative" domains. We will ask questions such as: Are moral truths objective? What do we mean when we talk (and think) about morality? How do we know right from wrong? That is, we will be interested in questions about rightness, rather than questions about which actions are right.

 

What is Race?
Racial categories can determine a lot about people’s lives. But what does it mean to belong to a certain racial group? This course will explore different philosophical answers to the question of ‘what is race?’.  Where does the concept originate? Is race biological? Or is race a social construction? Is race a political or cultural category? What are the consequences of these accounts in relation to social and political institutions?

 

When, if ever, do you have an obligation to follow the law?  This course will investigate this question by examining competing accounts of political obligation and views of justified disobedience based on them.  The course will then consider what these views suggest about particular examples of disobedience, for example, in movements advocating for racial justice or the environment, as well as examples chosen by students for discussion.

 

  

This course is designed to introduce students who have been exposed to linguistics and logic to contemporary work in the theory of meaning.

 

An examination of the fascinating philosophical problems to which modern physical theories have given rise.  No previous formal training in physics or mathematics will be presupposed, since the basic physical ideas needed will be introduced largely qualitatively with an emphasis on concepts rather than equations.  Topics will vary from year to year with instructor, but center around classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory. 

 

This course will introduce students to the varieties of Jewish thought, which developed out the of the 19th and 20th centuries and to the present day. After exploring the historical context of the philosophical legacy of Jewish thought, we will consider how Jewish intellectuals sought to reimagine their Jewish faith and Jewish identity in response to various concerns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically, we will analyze Jewish responses to modernity and secularism, Jewish engagement with Western culture and Christianity, political theory (e.g, Marxism) and matters of social justice, Jewish feminism, and the prospect of ethics and religious faith after the Holocaust.

 

Updated 1/9/2026

 

Updated 8/16/2025

 

This course is an introduction to philosophy. Do we really know anything? Is anything beyond doubt? If the laws of nature turn out to be deterministic, are we really morally responsible for our actions? What is it that makes me “me,” rather than someone else? What sorts of changes can I undergo and still be me? If everyone will eventually die, does anything really matter? Is death any worse than pre-natal non-existence? What, if anything, do we owe each other? What about non-human animals, or early fetuses, or future generations — do we owe them anything at all? Throughout this course, we will explore these and other longstanding philosophical questions.

 

In this introduction to ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, we will closely read a number of Pre-Platonic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean texts and use them to investigate central philosophical questions in metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology, logic, and ethics. Here are some examples: What were the first causes of the world and what is the human’s place in it? What is knowledge and how can a human acquire it? What is human virtue? What does human happiness consist in? How does pleasure fit into a good human life? Is the world we cognize with our five senses the “real” world? What is the soul and what is its relation to the body? We will attempt to understand the import of these ancient thinkers’ distinct contributions in these central areas of philosophy, and, when applicable, we will work towards a synoptic view of the thinker’s system as a whole. We will devote much of our time to clearly laying out the premises of the arguments at hand to evaluate them for validity and soundness. No knowledge of ancient Greek or Latin is required.

 

This course introduces central questions of ethics and moral philosophy through the study of classic texts by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and others. These central questions include: What does it mean to live a good life? What role does “happiness” play in such a life? What is virtue? Morality? Can reason determine how we ought to live? What does it mean to be a “good” or “virtuous” person, and what motivates such a person? How important are ethics and morality in the first place? Where do and where should they fit into our lives? Throughout the term, we will notice the questions our authors raise and the different answers they give. We will also dialogue with them as we respond to their questions and raise a few of our own.

 

This course will be a gentle introduction to logic. We will slowly make our way through the material and learn important basic content and concepts of logic. We will learn what makes a good argument, and how the study of logic improves your reasoning and argumentation. We will cover symbolization, truth tables, and proofs for predicate logic. Overall, this course aims to be a gentle and easy first introduction to logic and arguments. No prior logic, philosophy, or mathematics knowledge is required!

 

What is it to be a human being? What is it to be good at it? Is there a tension between being good and being happy? And what is happiness, exactly? Is a happy life the same thing as a meaningful life? Are these the kinds of life we should ultimately strive for, or would that be too self-centered? Is there something better or higher that we should aim at—something perhaps transcendent? Or is it nonsensical to speak of “transcendence"? Questions such as these lie at the heart of philosophy. In this interactive, discussion-based seminar, we explore these and related questions by reading, writing, and thinking about a variety of thinkers from both Western and Eastern traditions across the vast, millennia-old history of philosophy. Throughout, our aim will be to explore the ideas that have shaped human self-understanding—and, in so doing, to better understand ourselves.

 

Europe’s Early Modern Period (1600-1800) witnessed many significant changes in science, technology, religion, politics, and society. Many thinkers revolutionized philosophy in order to make sense of these changes. These philosophers wrestled above all with questions about knowledge: what can humans know about themselves, about nature, and about the existence of God? The quest for the “foundations” of knowledge came to be seen as fundamental to philosophy and all other fields. We will study this momentous development in four figures: René Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Reid.

 

No Course Description Available

 

 

Updated 6-9-2025

 

What is it to be human? What is it that makes us different from other species or from advanced AI? Is there such a thing as "normal" or "abnormal” in human life? Are good and evil inherent parts of the human condition? And what is or should be our relationship with the environment, animals, and other people? This course will look at human nature from a broad point of view. We'll start with a bit of history, paying special attention to ancient and modern scientific views. Then we'll focus on what we know today from contemporary biology and archeology. We'll also look at the nature of the mind and personal identity, free-will and destiny, our place in the social contact, and the meaning of life overall. 

 

 This course is an introduction to philosophical thinking. The goal of the course is to introduce students to some core areas of philosophy and ways of thinking about philosophy. In the course we will survey some of the bigger issues in ethics (the study of what we ought to do), epistemology (the study of knowledge or what we can know), as well as metaphysics (the study of our concepts concerning the nature of reality and necessity). Along the way we will look at readings in the history of philosophy as well as some more contemporary articles that apply these ideas. In addition to introducing students to the content of philosophical thought, the course will also develop your ability to think philosophically. Thinking philosophically involves understanding and expressing your thoughts clearly. For this reason, the study of philosophy is useful to almost anyone. 

 

Modern philosophy covers the philosophy being done between (roughly) 1500 and 1800 CE. This period of philosophy is defined on the one hand by a handful of prominent philosophers that make up the "canon" (Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant, to name a few); on the other hand, it is defined by the prominence of a number a philosophical issues and schools of thought (rationalism and empiricism is perhaps the most prominent distinction) in nearly all areas of philosophy. We might also, however, understand it as a series of developments in philosophy. This period is characterized by its reflection on methodology, ending with reflections on our methodology of doing philosophy itself. This course will try to do justice to all of these ways of understanding this period. The goal of the course, therefore, is to teach students the figures, methods, and ideas that figured in this period of philosophy and how they are still active in philosophy today. Above this, our goal will be to develop our philosophical thinking more generally. In particular, to develop our ability to reason philosophically and express these thoughts in writing. 

 

We're constantly confronted with choices about what actions to perform. Many of these are trivial, but some we recognize as having a special kind of importance—moral or ethical importance. What is it that makes these decisions not just beneficial or expedient, but morally right or good? In this introductory course, after examining potential challenges, we'll explore some of the main ethical theories (including utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics), looking for frameworks and concepts that can help us as moral agents. But individual decisions and actions are only parts of a human life, so we'll also consider what kind of meaning a life might have, what might make a life as a whole a good one, and how we should think about our mortality.

 

This course will explore and attempt to unify three elementary notions: justice, practical wisdom, and freedom. We will begin by asking the question, what is justice? What is it to wrong someone?, or relatedly, what is it to do right by her? Our focus will be on problems involving life and death. A leading question will thus be what things are murder and what makes them so.

We will proceed to reflect on a second question: is justice rational?, or equivalently: is the genuinely wise person also just? In particular, why should a wise person care whether she is murdering someone? Where is the problem with those who are willing? The opposing view (immoralism) is that justice is some kind of fraud that only really stupid people would fall for. Can philosophy help us resist immoralism?

Next, we will explore the view that justice is an expression of wisdom (Socrates) and wisdom is an expression of freedom (Kant). This view might seem striking, for how could justice, which often restrains us from doing what we want to do, be an expression of freedom? We will attempt an answer to this question.

The course will end with a reflection on social conditions of freedom. Our focus will be on two historical cases of unfreedom, slavery and colonialism. We shall consider important ways, overt and subtle, in which they created conditions that were detrimental to freedom.

The preceding questions are among the most difficult questions of philosophy, so our treatment will be abbreviated. We will manage a preliminary development of these themes, using a mixture of classical and contemporary texts, as well as some relevant pieces of western and non-western fiction by Coetzee, Morrison, and Premchand, and poetry by Rumi, and Iqbal.

No course description available. 

 

This introductory level undergraduate course examines various ethical problems arising in medicine. The first half of the course introduces two approaches to evaluating what is right and wrong, consequentialism and deontology, and applies them to issues including the distribution of healthcare resources, problems regarding harm vs benefit, and medical research. In the second half of the course, we study philosophical questions regarding the nature of life, death, and disability in order to discuss ethical issues surrounding euthanasia, abortion, and enhancement.

 

In many of our discussions throughout the semester, students will be invited to consider implications for reproductive ethics. Is it possible to harm someone by bringing them into (a worthwhile) existence? Why is there so little research on drug safety during pregnancy? What ethical issues are at stake in commercial surrogacy? Should parents be able to choose the characteristics of their future children? This course is strongly discussion-based, and students will have the opportunity to design their own final project.

This introductory level course will address various epistemological questions about artificial intelligence (AI). We will begin by exploring classical debates in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, asking whether human intelligence can be modeled on how machines work. Then we will proceed to consider the recent development of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Claude. Investigating how LLMs generate strings of linguistic symbols, we will ask two philosophical questions to compare their operations with human linguistic activities: Do LLMs understand the meaning of words they receive or produce? Can LLMs engage in reasoning as human beings do? 

 

Throughout thinking about these open questions, students are invited to reflect on how we can or should employ LLMs. In particular, we will discuss the potential uses of LLMs in philosophy classes. Can they help us critically analyze given texts? Can they help us develop a creative but convincing argument? If they can, is it because their language uses have the same meaning as ours, and they are reasoning in the same way as we do? Or, can they still be a useful tool even though their mechanism radically differs from ours? The final project will provide students an opportunity to find their own answers to these questions.

What follows from what? This question is the topic of logic, one of the main branches of philosophy going back to antiquity. Logic has transformed the foundations of mathematics, birthed computer science, and informed many research programs in analytic philosophy.

 

This is a first course in logic for students with no background in the subject. We will learn how to formalize natural language arguments and assess their correctness. In particular, we will develop a notion of formal proof which will let us show, using precise rules of inference, when the conclusion of an argument follows from its premises. There are no prerequisites other than a willingness to reason mathematically.

PHIL 1040 Aristotle (UHC) (32152)

Plato’s Phaedo will provide the dramatic backdrop for this survey of Aristotle’s philosophy, from his understanding of the superlunary world, where love of god makes the heavenly bodies go round, down to the elements of which he takes the bodies of living creatures to be composed.  We’ll pay special attention to Aristotle’s conception of nature as normative, and to his biologically grounded account of an animal’s soul as the form of its body and so (pace the Phaedo’s dualism) inseparable from that body.  We’ll focus on human animals, who are supposed to be by nature both rational and political, even though some (principally women and so-called natural slaves) are thought to be less than fully rational and so not entitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship.  We’ll conclude with topics from the ethical and political works, especially Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia (usually rendered ‘happiness’) and the roles played in it by friendship, virtue, and philosophical activity. 

 

Larkin Philpot  

This course traces the flow of ideas during the long, rich, and diverse period of medieval philosophy. We'll peek in at key moments—from the fall of Rome to the fall of Constantinople, from golden age Baghdad to burgeoning Paris—to see how ancient ideas are adapted and the foundation is laid for the concepts and institutions of the modern world. We'll emphasize complete short works (by figures such as Augustine, Boethius, al-Farabi, Anselm, Abelard, and Aquinas) covering a wide range of topics, such as: The freedom of the will, the existence of God, knowledge and skepticism, the Aristotelian worldview, natural law, and the role of religion in ethics, happiness and the good life.

 

The Seventeenth Century saw stunning advances in modern science, advances which seemed in conflict with Aristotelian scholastic conceptions of nature and our knowledge of it. The three thinkers on whom we will focus in this course, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, responded by departing from traditional metaphysics and epistemology, inaugurating the rationalist movement in the modern philosophical period. These thinkers’ theoretical innovations have exerted significant influence on subsequent Western philosophy and remain highly relevant.

 

This course will consider the motivation, nature, and extent of rationalism’s departure from the philosophy which proceeded it; the rationalist reconfiguration of the concept of substance; the relations rationalists suppose to obtain between thought and reality and between mind and body; and the revolution in epistemology on which the rationalist program (arguably) rests. In exploring these and related topics, we will identify and assess Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s responses to the Cartesian philosophy with which we begin and attempt a critical assessment of the dialectic.

 

No course description available. 

 

The aim of this course is to help you form thoughtful and informed views on a variety of moral issues, both theoretical and applied. The course has three units. We begin with some theoretical questions about the nature of morality, but especially whether moral truth is objective, subjective, or relative. In the second unit, we examine three of the most prominent theories of right and wrong: Utilitarianism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics, with an eye to bringing out what is attractive and plausible about each. This unit is organized dialectically, with time dedicated to the case in favor of each view, and a week dedicated to the case against each view. We end the course by discussing four pressing ethical issues—War, climate change, poverty, and eating animals—with an eye to applying the theories discussed in the second unit. This course presumes that you have taken Introduction to Ethics. 

 

No course description available. 

 

Brock Bahler  

This course is a philosophical exploration of the intersections of race, racism, and religious thought. It begins with an analysis of the philosophical and religious vies that promoted the idea of race, traces the entanglement of Western philosophy and Christian theology with racist political ideologies, and presents critical responses to race from African-American philosophers and liberation theologies. We will also consider the continued effects of racism in America.

 

This course examines ethical and social issues that arise in connection with sport.  The course will be divided into two parts: the first concerns issues that arise within sport, such as using performance-enhancing drugs and seeking to injure opponents; the second concerns issues related to the integration of sport into society, such as why there ought to be gender equity in sport and whether sport has a legitimate place at institutions of higher education.
 

This course will be an in-depth exploration of a number of contested issues related to the practice of medicine, medical research and public health which are of philosophical, professional, and public policy concern. Some topics will include:  the moral and professional obligations of physicians, patient autonomy, medical confidentiality, euthanasia and physician aided death, vaccination, and the moral imperatives and constraints distinctive to the conduct of medical research involving human subjects. This course should be of particular interest to philosophy majors as well as to students who are contemplating a career in medicine, biomedical research, public health, or health law. Final papers will be on topics related to students’ individual interests within the framework of the course. This course is an Approved Elective for the Undergraduate Certificate in Conceptual Foundations of Medicine. Prerequisite: at least one course in Philosophy or History and Philosophy of Science or permission of the instructor.

 

One of the great wonders of human life is the creation of art. We write poems about love, make paintings of beautiful landscapes, express ourselves through song and dance, tells stories through plays and films. What exactly is art? What does art represent or express? Is there anything like a language of art? What is the value of art? And are we the only creatures that engage in artistic creation? This course will explore these and other fundamental questions in the philosophy of art. We’ll look at answers from historical and contemporary thinkers, such as Plato, Leo Tolstoy, and Arthur Danto. We’ll consider more recent issues, such as the role of artificial intelligence, the ethics of censorship, and the difference between things like art and pornography. The aim of this course is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of art and the philosophical questions that it raises. No previous experience with philosophy or the history of art is required. 

 

No course description available. 

 

No course description available. 

 

Dan Kaplan  

This is an upper undergraduate course on metaphysics. In particular, this course will be about the development of analytic metaphysics (which is the most prominent way that metaphysics is approached today). The course will be split into two main sections. In the first half of the course we will look briefly at logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy. These philosophies of the early 20th century rejected the study of metaphysics wholesale. We will also look at a series of influential works in the middle of the 20th century that led to the revival of metaphysics in analytic philosophy. Following this (in the second half of the course) will be a survey of some influential readings and important topics in analytic metaphysics. We will cover such topics as modality (necessity and possibility), the nature of universals and particulars, causation, time and persistence, as well as the nature of reality (realism and anti-realism). 

 

Robert Batterman 

An examination of the philosophical problems to which modern physical theories have given rise. No previous formal training in physics or mathematics will be presupposed, since the basic physical ideas needed will be introduced largely qualitatively with an emphasis on concepts rather than equations. We will cover issues in classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and statistical physics. 

 

W 9:00-11:30  

Jain philosophy is one of the ancient philosophical schools of the Indian subcontinent. Although the origin of Jain philosophy is hard to trace, emphasis on nonviolence started appearing in 900 BCE which often relates to the teaching of Jain’s 23rd Fordmaker Pārṣvanātha and it later was compiled in the text Ācārāṅgasūtra around 350 BCE. Jain philosophy is less in the mainstream philosophical discussion outside the Indian subcontinent than the Sāṃkhya, Vedānta, and Buddhist. This course will offer an overview of Jain practices and explore how Jain concepts about life contribute to building a more inclusive and sustainable world. Students will be able to explore various meditative, yogic, and ascetic practices of Jainism reading secondary Jain texts and primary texts in translation.

 

After the introduction and history of Jainism, we will discuss how Jain construed the concepts of non-violence and ethical conduct in the contexts of metaphysics, monastic and lay discipline, ritual, environmental and dietary concerns, and gender differences from the ancient period up to the modern period. The role of karma in the path of liberation (nirvāṇa) is scrutiny to understand the soul or higher self (ātman) in Jainism. Diving into the notions of the path of liberation, we will compare Jain's views with those of other Indian philosophical counterparts.

Gender and sexuality play an important role in attaining liberation of the soul and how they participate in shaping the Jain tantric practices will elicit dialogue. The overall emphasis of the course will be on the practice of ahiṃsā (non-violence), non-attachment (aparigraha), equanimity (sāmāyika), multi-perspectivism (anekāntavāda), the concept of karma, and how such practices better human actions to resolve conflicts and create harmony with other humans, nature, animals. Finally, we will investigate the history of voluntary death, vegetarianism-veganism, and environmentalism in Jainism.

 

No course description available.

The goal of this course is to offer an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy. We will start by examining the kind of philosophical questions in which the first Greek philosophers, the so-called Presocratics, were interested. These were primarily questions about natural philosophy, and especially about the first causes of the world and the place of human beings in it. The Presocratics will provide us with the background we need to explore the complex figure of Socrates and his analysis of what a good life consists in. What should we care for in order to live well, Socrates wondered, money, political power, or something else? He argued that, to live well, we should care for our soul. But what is a soul, and what does it mean to care for it? To answer these questions, we will examine Plato’s psychology and metaphysics and Aristotle’s criticism of them. Despite their differences, both Plato and Aristotle thought that, to have a good life, a human being had to be virtuous, but should we conclude from this that virtue is all one needs to be happy? We will end the course by considering two different answers to this question: that of the Epicureans, who thought that a flourishing life was a life of pleasure and viewed virtue only as a means to achieve pleasure, and that of the Stoics, who thought, in contrast, that virtue was all one needed to be happy.

We're constantly confronted with choices about what actions to perform. What is it that makes these decisions not just beneficial or expedient, but morally right or good? In this introductory course we'll explore the main ethical theories looking for frameworks and concepts that can guide us as moral agents. But individual decisions and actions are only parts of a life, so we'll also consider what makes a life as a whole a good one.

Social philosophy, broadly construed, considers issues related to the social world. Whereas a philosopher of biology might ask about the nature of biological individuals or whether genes carry information, a social philosopher might ask about the nature of nation-states or whether it makes sense to think about money as real or socially constructed. The purpose of this course will be to provide students with an introduction to a variety of key issues in social philosophy. Topics covered will include the nature of groups, issues related to legal interpretation, cooperation, tolerance.

 

Our social and culture identities—our racial, ethnic, religious, and gender identities, among others—play a central role in our lives, providing us with ideas about who we are and how we should be. As such, they raise a range of ethical and political questions. In this course, we will take up a variety of these questions, with a particular focus on questions that arise in the context of a diverse society, in which we are faced with practical dilemmas about how to live together with people from a broad range of backgrounds, the degree to which we should accommodate and respect the identities of others, and how we should balance our own (sometimes conflicting) social identities.

This course is divided into several sections. In the first few weeks, we will consider questions about the nature of social and cultural identities, and the possibility of speak across such identities. Then, we will consider issues related to ownership of cultures, particularly the notions of cultural property and cultural appropriation. After that, we will examine debates about cultural preservation and assimilation, with a particular focus on a debate within Africana philosophy about the ‘conservation’ of the races. In the second half of the class, we will turn to the more squarely political issue of multiculturalism. Here, we will read a range of perspectives on the compatibility of multiculturalism and modern liberal values, and then conclude with a debate about the apparent tensions between political solidarity and multiculturalism.

All readings for this course will be either posted on canvas or available through the University of Pittsburgh Libraries website.

To be human means to be part of a community, and inevitably being a part of a community means dealing with not just your own private affairs but with issues of public concern too. As has often been said, no person is an island, and the actions of all in some way directly or indirectly affect the lives of others. The purpose of this course is to guide students through a philosophical analysis of public issues of contemporary importance with an emphasis on how these issues look from the point of view of major moral and political theories. Special attention will be paid to the legal side of these issues. Topics discussed in this course include abortion rights, freedom of speech, environmental policy, and the relationship between law and society.

This is an introductory course considering ethical questions that arise in the context of medical care. The course has three parts.

 

In Part I, we will examine some of the most prominent approaches to ethical theory in philosophy. These will provide us with big-picture frameworks within which we can think about the more specific principles and claims relevant to issues in biomedical ethics.

 

In Part II, we will begin to apply these frameworks to particular issues in biomedical ethics. Part II focuses on issues that arise in an interpersonal medical context—between patients and their family members, and between patients and medical professionals. We will consider euthanasia, advance directives, family involvement in patient decision-making, and medical expertise. While learning about these topics, we will be introduced to key ethical concepts such as consent, relational autonomy, and epistemic injustice.

 

Part III will zoom out from the interpersonal context and address broader questions about healthcare allocation and health policy. We will start by considering the role of the state in providing healthcare, and whether there is a right to healthcare. Suppose there is such a right. Who should provide it? Can the state obligate certain individuals to become doctors or nurses? And can it obligate them to stay and work in certain areas or countries? These are questions of productive justice. We will address such questions in both a national and global context. We will also consider organ trade and the ethical limits of markets in healthcare allocation, and, finally, the ethics of pandemic policy.

What did philosophers of the past, women and men, have to say about women’s nature, moral character, education, and the roles they should play in society? How did these philosophers argue for their views? In this course we will consider women as both subject matter for, and participants in, a number of debates in the history of western philosophy from ancient Greece through the 19th century. Our reading will include selections from works by Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Musonius Rufus, Christine de Pizan, Anna Maria van Schurman, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Rene Descartes, John Locke, Mary Astell, Francois Poulain de la Barre, Dorotha Christiane Erxleben, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and Harriet Taylor.

No course description available.

An introduction to philosophical questions in epistemology and metaphysics. What does it mean to know something? And what do we know? What is real? We will take these questions as starting point to think about reasoning, evidence and science. We will also ask whether modern technology raises new skeptical problems.

 

At times, we are creative, intelligent, depressed, happy, homesick, free, or angry. These are not primarily states our bodies are in, but states that our minds are in. The guiding question of this course will be the following: are these states “real”, e.g. real mental states, or even reducible to bodily states? Or, are these states mere social constructions, states that we brought into existence by social agreement? Or, are they something else, real yet socially constructed? This question is especially pressing for mental disorders.

The course will discuss this question both abstractly and as applied to specific mental states. In the first part of this course we cover important philosophical discussions about the mind and its states, in order to gain the philosophical toolkit to apply our knowledge to states and disorders of contemporary concern. We will encounter Plato’s idea that the soul is divided into different parts, and then consider philosophical arguments on two important mental capacities: do we have a mental capacity of free will and creativity? In both cases, we will consider arguments for and against, but also the history of the respective concepts. 

In the second part of this course we turn to mental disorders. We will begin by clarifying what these are, and whether they should count as diseases or rather states that aren’t neurotypical. We then turn to case-studies, in which we apply our philosophical skills to ask the guiding question: are multiple- personality disorder, depression, autism, etc. real, or are these social constructions, or something third? Given how important this question is to contemporary society, students are encouraged to bring insights from their life and from social media (TikTok, Instagram, etc.) into class. 

This course will examine the chief arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as other topics central to philosophy of religion: the nature of religious experiences, the relation of faith to reason, the personal and cultural usefulness of religion & religious practices, and religious responses to evil (theodicy). Students will develop a working knowledge of the issues by reading and discussing traditional and contemporary scholars.

This course will examine the chief arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as other topics central to philosophy of religion: the nature of religious experiences, the relation of faith to reason, the personal and cultural usefulness of religion & religious practices, and religious responses to evil (theodicy). Students will develop a working knowledge of the issues by reading and discussing traditional and contemporary scholars.

What follows from what? This question is the topic of logic, one of the main branches of philosophy going back to antiquity. Logic has transformed the foundations of mathematics, birthed computer science, and informed many research programs in analytic philosophy.

This is a first course in logic for students with no background in the subject. We will learn how to formalize natural language arguments and assess their correctness. In particular, we will develop a notion of formal proof which will let us show, using precise rules of inference, when the conclusion of an argument follows from its premises. There are no prerequisites other than a willingness to reason mathematically.

In this course, we will read a selection of Plato’s dialogues that will allow us to become familiar with all the ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical problems Plato dealt with in his early and mid-career. The dialogues will not be among those that are often read in the survey course on ancient philosophy, except for some excerpts from the Republic. We will begin with the Euthyphro, and we will then move on to Crito, Meno, Symposium, Phaedo, and excerpts from Books 4 and 5 of the Republic. Through the Euthyphro, we will explore the problem of what makes something pious and, more generally valuable, by considering whether this is some intrinsic feature of a thing or rather one bestowed upon it by someone or something. In the Crito we will encounter the problem of determining how we ought to behave when our personal interest is in apparent conflict with that of our political community. The Meno will introduce us to Plato’s early epistemology based on the so-called theory of recollection. Finally, the Symposium and the Phaedo will allow us to both refine our understanding of Plato’s epistemology in light of his appeal to Forms, and to become familiar with his early career psychology. As we will see, in the Republic, Plato will introduce some important changes to both his epistemology and his psychology.

No course description available.

The primary aim of this course is to reach a general understanding of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. To this end, we shall examine the Critique’s central logical and metaphysical doctrines, with attention to their historical context. Following Kant as he seeks to determine whether a science of metaphysics is possible, we shall consider the fundamental question he poses (“How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?”), the way of thinking he follows in answering it (the so-called “Copernican Revolution”), and the doctrine of Transcendental Idealism on which his answer to this question depends. A second aim of the course is to gain familiarity with Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy. The final weeks will accordingly be devoted to his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he undertakes an analysis of common moral knowledge with a view to reaching a formulation of its supreme principle.

Prerequisite: Phil 0210 History of Modern Philosophy OR Phil 1110 Rationalism OR Phil 1140 Empiricism.

This course will examine the later philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It will center on a close reading of parts of his influential Philosophical Investigations, though we will draw on some of his other later writings and secondary sources insofar as they help make sense of that core text. The goal will be to gain an appreciation for Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic approaches to philosophical questions about language and mind and to make some first steps in trying to bring his views into contact with contemporary thinking about these subjects. Some prior exposure to philosophy of language or mind is helpful, but not a prerequisite.

One of the enduring questions in philosophy is “What is the meaning of life?” – or similarly, “What should I do with my life?” or “What is the ‘good’ life?” Many attempts have been made to answer this sort of question. Some philosophers have suggested that happiness is the key to life. Others have stressed that the development of one’s character or the pursuit of worthy goals is what matters. Others have even argued that there is no meaning to life or that the question “What is the meaning of life?” doesn’t make sense. The purpose of this course is to consider these questions and assess various attempts at answering them. We’ll look at modern and historical views as well as non-western perspectives. We’ll also consider questions of value – for example, what is the value of humanity (if any)?

 

The points of departure for this course are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, both adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948.  We will examine how these commitments relate to John Locke’s foundational defense of the rights to life, liberty, and private property.  Extensive consideration will be given to the right to life and its coordination with liberty rights and private property rights.  After studying Locke’s theoretical framework, we will examine how failures to observe the rights of human individuals ought to be compensated.  Though Locke does not consider the claim that some groups have a right to existence beyond the human rights held by the individuals, the Convention on Genocide seeks to enforce that claim.  The course finishes with an examination of the apparent limitations of rights theory with regard to climate change.

No course description available.

An upper-division course in the theory of knowledge. Not a general survey of the field, but an investigation of fundamental epistemological issues raised by skeptical arguments.

In ordinary life, we take ourselves to know many things. I know that I'm sitting at my desk right now, writing these words. However, on reflection, it is not so clear whether we can know anything. How can I rule out the possibility that I might be dreaming right now, or perhaps I'm a brain in a vat? We will use such skeptical arguments as starting point to think about knowledge, reasoning and evidence. What do we mean when we say that we know something? How can we gain knowledge by observing the world? We end by looking at skeptical problems raised by modern technology.

Do our proof systems for first order logic allow us to prove all and only the first order validities? How is it that we can prove facts about infinitely many infinite mathematical structures? When must a mathematical structure exist? What can we learn about a mathematical structure via properties of the formal language it interprets? To address these questions, we will develop the syntax and semantics of first order logic, study definable sets, and prove fundamental results like Gödel's Completeness Theorem, Compactness, the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem, and the Omitting Types Theorem. Time permitting, we will see Morley's Categoricity Theorem and rudiments of classification theory.

No course description available.

This course will examine the chief arguments for and against the existence of God, as well as other topics central to philosophy of religion: the nature of religious experiences, the relation of faith to reason, the personal and cultural usefulness of religion & religious practices, and religious responses to evil (theodicy). Students will develop a working knowledge of the issues by reading and discussing traditional and contemporary scholars.

 

If ethics is about the right thing to do and practical reason is about figuring out what to do, then they would certainly seem to be related in some way. But how exactly? In this course, we'll examine this fundamental question that we face as rational creatures and moral agents: How does the moral figure into our practical thought? Is practical reason merely a value-neutral capacity to figure out the means toward ends (and so perhaps the moral figures into our practical thought only contingently on our ends)? Or could it be that we can't be said to reason well at all, if our reasoning leads to immoral actions?