SP20 PHIL342

Metaphysics (PHIL342)
Dr. Keith Kaiser
Tuesdays & Thursdays  ·  12:30pm–1:45pm  ·  SPA–203

This course will address a variety of related issues traditionally considered matters of metaphysics, addressing in the process the matter of what metaphysics is—its purview and its practice. Specifically the course will address the nature of the mind in terms of the views known as dualism and materialism which will serve as a basis for considering the matter of free will and the apparent problem of types of determinism that would seem to arise from the acceptance of either view. These can be related to another kind of deterministic worry about the possibility of an omniscient being that knows the future. In addition, answers to these questions can frame, and even determine, answers to the question of what it is to be the same person through time (i.e., what it is that would make a picture of a two-year-old and a picture of twenty-two-year-old turn out to be pictures of the same person)—the question of personal identity.