PHIL690 SP25
Seminar in Special Topics (PHIL690)
Topic: Personal Identity and Population Ethics
Dr. Cory Wright
Tuesdays · 5:30pm–8:15pm · LA1–204
This course is a reading of Parfit’s (1984) Reasons and Persons. Our primary topics will be personal identity and population ethics. Hence, we shall discuss two kinds of interrelated questions. The first kind will be applied metaphysical questions about personhood—that is, questions about sameness, difference, identity, change, nature, location, etc. For example, what are you, and where are you located? Are there criteria to determine whether someone is one-and-the-same person over time? Is every human a person? More generally, if something is a person, what properties will it have; and if something has those properties, will it be a person? The second kind will be ethical questions about ourselves and about future people. For example, is it rational to act against our own best interests? Do we owe anything to future generations? Is it better if more people live longer lives? Should we prefer a much larger population of people that would be better off overall despite each member leading a life that is barely worth living? There will be no expert in the room, and there is no guarantee that we will be much wiser at the end of the course; mostly, we will just be 16 weeks closer to death ourselves. But it won’t have been boring, will have been meaningful, and we will at least have read one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century.
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PHIL370 SP25
Rationality and Decisions (PHIL370)
Dr. Alysha Kassam
Tuesdays & Thursdays · 3:30pm–4:45pm · LA1–307
This course introduces students to formal techniques for making and evaluating decisions. In order to develop their skills in representing and analyzing decisions, students will be exposed to concepts and methods from areas such as symbolic logic, probability theory, and game theory. While we will be interested primarily in normative issues (having to do with how one ought to reason), we will also take note of empirical findings regarding how human beings tend to actually make decisions. The course is aimed at equipping students with tools they can use to improve the decisions they make and to avoid common errors of reasoning.
GE area: upper-division B (science)
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PHIL352 SP25
Philosophy of Law (PHIL352)
Dr. Amanda Trefethen
Mondays · 5:30pm–8:15pm · LA5–246
This course will introduce students to the study of philosophical topics related to law and its adjudication. Some of the questions we will address include: What is law? Why, when, and how are we constrained by the law? Is there an essential relationship between law and morality? Can there be a ‘right answer’ in legal disputes? And what does it mean to have ‘liberty’? Toward this end, we will analyze the theoretical debates between legal positivism and natural law, as well as engage in a discussion of more specific legal and normative topics such as free speech rights, privacy rights, paternalism, and the constitutional commitments to due process and equal protection. Our readings will include works by such philosophers and legal scholars as Thomas Aquinas, John Austin, Ronald Dworkin, Lon Fuller, Jean Hampton, Angela Harris, H.L.A. Hart, John Stuart Mill, Margaret Radin, John Rawls, and Judith Thomson.
GE/GR areas: upper-division C (humanities), upper-division D (social science), WI (writing)
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PHIL483/583 SP25
Philosophical Psychology (PHIL483/583)
Charles Wallis
Mondays & Wednesdays · 12:30pm–1:45pm · LA5–149
This course begins with a historical approach to examining the development of the concept of mind in antiquity, as well as the development of the contemporary sciences that constitute cognitive science. We will then examine contemporary topics, debates, and methodology of philosophy of mind and the various cognitive sciences with emphasis on psychology and neuroscience. Topics include but are not limited to the nature of mental representation, human memory systems, human inferential abilities, and the nature and significance of qualitative conscious experience.
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PHIL493/593 SP25
Special Topics in Metaphysics (PHIL493/593)
Phenomenal Consciousness
Dr. Wayne Wright
Mondays & Wednesdays · 11:00am–12:15pm · LA5–246
This course is focused on phenomenal consciousness, which is the qualitative “what it is like” aspect of experience. It has long been wondered how phenomenal consciousness fits into the physical world. How is it that the three pound lump of gray matter between our ears can give rise to the delicious aroma of freshly baked bread, the throbbing pain of a broken finger, or the thrilling sensation of one’s stomach dropping on a rollercoaster ride? When two different people look at the sky and verbally agree that it is blue, is it possible that the sky looks radically different to them in their visual experiences? It seems safe to say that you know that you are phenomenally conscious, but how do you know that anyone else really is? Perhaps the brain is the wrong place in the world to look for answers to these questions. Maybe phenomenal consciousness is somehow altogether separate from the physical nature of the world. We will spend the first half of the course working through one of the major philosophical works on phenomenal consciousness from the 1990s. While now over twenty-five years old, the view developed in this book is still influential today. In the second half of the semester, we will go through a mix of classic and more contemporary readings, in order to get a better sense for what is at stake in the philosophical debate over consciousness and the positions that are available.
[Back up to current course descriptions]
PHIL491/591 SP25
Special Topics in Modern Philosophy (PHIL491/591)
Leibniz
Dr. Marie Jayasekera
Mondays & Wednesdays · 2:00pm–3:15pm · LA5–149
Called ‘polymath’ and ‘the last universal genius’, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is considered by many today to be one of the great thinkers of the early modern period. He made significant and influential contributions not only to philosophy but to disciplines as far-ranging as mathematics, physics, jurisprudence, and history.
This course will cover a subset of his countless writings and correspondence to get a sense of his mature philosophical thought on issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and ethics. Time permitting, we may also read some of his writings on other philosophers in the period, such as Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, and Berkeley, both to see how he saw his contemporaries and for the light those works shed on his own philosophy.
Students taking this course will work on developing their ability to read historical texts; practice identifying, articulating, and analyzing arguments and positions from those texts; and practice constructing their own arguments about the texts and expressing those arguments in writing and orally during class meetings. Students should be prepared and willing to work through challenging primary texts and to engage actively in discussion with the material and the ideas of the other participants in the class.
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PHIL496/596 SP25
Special Topics in Value Theory (PHIL 496/596)
Meta-ethics
Dr. Max Rosenkrantz
Tuesdays & Thursdays · 11:00am–12:15pm · LA5–149
This is a course on meta-ethics in the first half of the 20th century. Meta-ethics is concerned generally with the meaning of ethical language. Specifically, it is concerned with such questions as the following:
- Are ethical claims true?
- If they are true, what makes them true?
- If they are true, how are they known to be true?
- If they are not true, what meaning do they have? Emotive? Prescriptive? Or perhaps no meaning at all?
We will read classic works by G. E. Moore, H. A. Prichard, W. D. Ross, C. L. Stevenson and R. M. Hare. We will also read classic works by authors with three-initials in their name (Welcome to my syllabus, G. E. M. Anscombe!). We will not read anything by anyone who has a complete first name (Sorry, Phillipa Foot and Roderick Firth, you’re out!).
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PHIL414/514 SP25
British Empiricism (PHIL414/514)
Dr. Larry Nolan
Mondays & Wednesdays · 3:30pm–4:45pm · LA5–149
In this course we shall investigate the rich and lively philosophical debates between three of the leading British Empiricists: Locke, Berkeley, Hume. Topics to include the origin of ideas, the nature of the mind or self, proofs of God’s existence, proofs for the existence of the external world, skepticism and the limits of human knowledge, causation, the primary-secondary quality distinction, real vs. nominal essences, and the problem of induction. Open discussion of the philosophical issues will be strongly encouraged.
Course Requirements:
(a) Regular attendance and frequent participation
(b) Two take-home assignments
(c) Final exam
** Graduate students have the option of writing multiple drafts of a term paper in lieu of assignments (b) and (c).
Texts:
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Penguin)
Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Oxford)
Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (Oxford)
Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hackett Publishing)
[Back up to current course descriptions]
PHIL620 SP25
Seminar in History of Philosophy (PHIL620)
Topic: Hegel’s Science of Logic
Dr. Kyle Banick
Mondays · 5:30pm–8:15pm · LA5–151
This course will center around a close reading of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Though Phenomenology of Spirit is perhaps Hegel’s most widely read work, it is the Logic that is the core of Hegel’s philosophy; and so this course can be both an introduction to Hegel’s thought (no previous familiarity will be assumed), as well as a deepening for those who may have encountered Hegel previously. Our focus will be on an intensive study of the primary text, but we will also grapple with important interpretive debates—most crucially whether the categories Hegel develops in the Science of Logic are to be understood as categories of being or categories of thought. In other words, we will try to understand whether Hegel’s work is a metaphysics that reasserts metaphysical speculation against Kant’s limitations, or a work that remains within the post-Kantian tradition which seeks to limit metaphysical speculation.
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PHIL342 SP25
Metaphysics (PHIL342)
Dr. Patrick Dieveney
Tuesdays & Thursdays · 9:30am–10:45am · LA5–246
This course is an introduction to contemporary metaphysics. Some of the topics that will be covered include: e.g., problems with identity and change over time; different views of necessity and possibility; and agent causation and free will. To cover these topics, we will address questions such as: what is the nature of time? How can an object change over time yet remain the same object? What makes a person the same person over time? Is time travel possible? Are our actions free or causally determined? If we lack free will, can we make sense of moral responsibility?
In addition to providing students with a broad background in many of the central issues in metaphysics, another central goal of this course is to illustrate the value of resolving the philosophical problems discussed. To this end, we will periodically evaluate the impact that various answers to central questions from metaphysics have on other areas of philosophy and science. We will compare and contrast the different kinds of reasoning and arguments common to debates in metaphysics with those employed in these other areas. The aim of this interdisciplinary analysis is to illustrate the importance of these debates and consider how resources from other areas of study might shed light on their resolution.