PHIL 4101 Metaphysics

Professor Roy Cook

Lec 001 2:30 pm - 3:20 pm MWF

(Prereq: one course in history of philosophy or instr consent)

In this course we shall concentrate on some of the most central questions within metaphysics, and within philosophy more generally, including: universals and particulars; necessity, possibility, and possible worlds; and realism versus anti-realism. The course will concentrate on primary readings on these topics from prominent twentieth-century thinkers, along with secondary readings when appropriate.

PHIL 4231 Philosophy of Language

Professor Joseph Owens

Lec 001 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm TTh

(Prereq: 1001 or 5201 or instr consent)

On the one hand, our ability to employ and understand a language is a mundane sort of thing, familiar to all and posing no great puzzlement. But when one tries to go beyond the obvious, to develop some genuine understanding of the phenomenon, one if quickly faced with a number of deep and puzzling problems and even paradox. In this course we will probe a number of interrelated issues: What is the linkage between mind and meaning? How is reference determined? What is mental content and how is it determined? Etc. There are two required texts: Martinich, A. P. (ed.) The Philosophy of Language, 5th edition. Oxford University Press. Morris, Michael, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. Written assignments: One short paper, and one longer term paper.

PHIL 4320W Intensive Study of an Historical Moral Theory

Professor Michelle Mason                                                                    

Lec 001 12:45 pm - 2:00 pm TTh

(Meets CLE req of Writing Intensive)                                   

How should you live your life? Are wealth and fame the best you can aim for? What place should friendship and virtue play in such a life? For Aristotle (384-322 BC), these are some of the central questions of ethics. In this course, we will engage in a close reading of Aristotle's great ethical work, the Nicomachean Ethics, in order both to understand him in the context of his times and to assess what his ethical thought might have to offer us moderns.

PHIL 4324 Ethics and Education

Professor John Wallace

LEC 001 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm TTh

(Prereq: 6 cr in [philosophy or education] or instr consent)                                

Class Description: This course explores the question ?What is good education? and connections between this question and related questions: ?What is a good society?? and ?What is a good life?? Students will approach these questions in two ways, through reading and discussion and through design of educational settings intended to realize educational and societal values. Authors read will include John Dewey, James Herndon, Myles Horton, Marion Milner and D.W. Winnicott. Students will put the ideas they are studying to work in producing designs of educational settings. This course is for graduate students and undergraduate students, philosophy majors and non-majors.

PHIL 4607 Philosophy of the Biological Sciences

Professor C. Kenneth Waters

LEC 001 9:45 am - 11:00 am TTh

(Prereq: courses in [philosophy or biology] or instr consent)                        

Biology is a provocative science. We often hear that biology provides or will soon provide answers to a board range of questions with intellectual, social, and perhaps even religious import, including the following: Where did human beings come from? In what sense are forms of life contingent? What are the fundamental units of life? Is life reducible to molecules? What causes differences among organisms? We will investigate contemporary evolutionary biology and molecular biology to determine the extent to which science might answer such questions.

PHIL 5202 Symbolic Logic II

Professor Willam Hanson                          

LEC 001 10:10 am - 11:00 am MWF

(Prereq: 5201 or instr consent)                              

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the great metatheorems of Church, Goedel, and Tarski, and to provide a brief introduction to second-order logic. We will begin by studying some simple abstract "machines", Turing machines, and we'll use the knowledge thus gained to prove Church's Theorem (first-order logic is undecidable). Goedel's two incompleteness theorems (concerning limitations of formal theories) and Tarski's theorem (about limitations on defintions of truth) will then be studied, although some of the details of their proofs will be omitted. We'll also read and discuss a paper on the implications, if any, of Goedel's theorems for the philosophy of mind. Finally, we will study second-order languages. The great expressive power of these languages makes their logical properties very different from those of first-order languages. Required text: Boolos, Burgess, & Jeffrey, "Computability and Logic," 5th ed, and a small packet of articles.

PHIL 5221 Philosophy of Logic

Professor William Hanson

LEC 001 1:25 pm - 2:15 pm MWF

(Prereq: 5202 or instr consent)

Phil 5221 will deal with some central topics in the philosophy of logic. It presuppose a knowledge of the basics of first-order logic, such as can ordinarily be gained by successfully completing Phil 5201 and 5202. The main topics to be considered are: 1. The ground of logic; 2. The scope of logic; 3. Deviant logics. Under 1 we will consider tha nature of logical consequence, and we'll ask what it is that distinguishes logical truths from other truths. Under 2 we will ask whether certain extensions of first-order logic (e.g., second-order logic, the logic of plurals) should be considered parts of logic rather than mathematics. Under 3 we will first learn something about intuitionistic and relevance logics, and then ask whether there can be genuine disputes about which logic is correct. Readings will include papers by W.V. Quine, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Tarski, George Boolos, Michael Dummett, and others. There will be several short papers. No exams.

PHIL 5325 Biomedical Ethics

Professor Debra Ann Debruin                               

LEC 001 9:30 am - 12:30 pm T                                

Student may contact the instructor or department for information.

PHIL 5415 Philosophy of Law

Professor Brian Bix

Lec 001 1:25 pm - 2:15 pm MWF

(Prereq: 1003 or 1004 or 3302 or social science major or instr consent)

The course will offer an overview of a wide variety of topics in legal philosophy, from issues in analytical philosophy (e.g., regarding the nature of law, the requirements of justice, and whether there is a moral obligation to obey the law) to modern critical schools (e.g., law and economics, critical race theory, legal realism, and feminist legal theory). The course is aimed at graduate philosophy students and law students, though other graduate students and undergraduates willing and able to work at a graduate-student level are welcome. The readings come mostly from articles available on-line, supplemented by one short overview book. Course grades are based primarily on one term paper and one (closed book) final essay exam.

PHIL 5602 Scientific Representation and Explanation

Professor Alan Love

Lec 001 11:15 am - 12:30 pm TTh

(Prereq: instr consent)

Several 19th century philosopher-scientists argued for different conceptions of the nature of science or natural philosophy: August Comte, John Herschel, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill. To varying degrees, they disagreed about how best to characterize knowledge, explanation, and inductive inference concerning the natural world. These writings had a profound impact on the actual practice of science and have ongoing relevance for philosophical discussions of science today. In this course we will closely read portions of these author?s major contributions in an attempt to comprehend the nature of their arguments, as well as discern the effects of their different positions on working scientists (e.g. Charles Darwin). Additionally, we will look at the work of the methodologically reflective physiologist, Claude Bernard, in order to explore the key differences between the epistemologies of historical and experimental science that emerged in the 19th century.

PHIL 8085 Seminar: History of Philosophy - Modern Philosophers

Professor Douglas Lewis

SEM 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm TTh

(Prereq: instr consent)                           

We will address central problems of metaphysics (e.g., the existence of external and independent objects), epistemology (whether and how we acquire knowledge), and ethics (what is incumbent on us as moral beings and why it is so) and the solutions proposed in the contrasting philosophies of Descartes and Hume. I emphasize historical context and contemporary influence and also raise the question of what philosophy is and what it can accomplish.

PHIL 8130 Seminar: Epistemology: The Physical, the Social, and the Mental

Professor Geoffrey Hellman

SEM 3:50 pm - 5:50 pm T

(Prereq: 4105 or instr consent )

In what sense, if any, is physical science “fundamental”? Does this require the reducibility of higher order sciences (e.g. biology, the social sciences, psychology) to physical science? If not, what does it require, and should we believe it? After probing these questions, we’ll turn to an intriguing example from social geography, that of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel on the origins, distribution, and impact of civilizations and empires. This provides an excellent testing ground for some of the leading ideas on intertheoretic relations discussed in the opening section of the seminar.

Roughly the second half of the seminar will be devoted to the topic of “consciousness”, the last “hold-out” as it were (after the collapse of “vitalism”), of “human exceptionalism”, something essentially human and allegedly beyond the reach of physical science. Here we’ll examine leading arguments on two opposing sides of this as illustrated in work of Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained and David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind.

Students will be encouraged to make a presentation to the class framing discussion on the topic(s) at hand; and they will be expected to produce a research paper on a topic related to the material covered in the course.

PHIL 8180 Seminar: Philosophy of Language

Professor Peter Hanks

SEM 3:35 pm - 5:35 pm W

(Prereq: 4231 or instr consent)

In this seminar we're going to take an extended look at the theory of direct reference, arguably the most significant advance in philosophy of language in the past half century. According to this theory, ordinary proper names, e.g. 'Hillary Clinton', and other referential terms are non-descriptional. This means that names and other referential terms have no descriptive content as part of their meanings. This is in direct contrast with the Fregean or descriptivist theory of names and referential terms, which holds that names and other referential terms do contain descriptive information in their meanings. The Fregean view has been the target of some of the most important philosophical work of the past fifty or so years, including Kripke's modal argument, Putnam's twin-earth argument, and Kaplan's work on demonstratives. This work has raised a host of metaphysical and epistemological issues about essentialism and identity, a priori knowledge, the nature of belief, the semantics/pragmatics distinction, non-existent objects, the metaphysics of modality, and many other important topics. In this seminar we will carefully work our way through a large portion of the literature on these issues. The aim is to provide graduate students and advanced undergraduates a good working knowledge of the various positions and arguments in the debate about direct reference.

PHIL 8310 Seminar: Moral Philosophy

Professor Valerie Tiberius

SEM 3:50 pm - 5:50 pm W

(Prereq: 4310 or 4320 or 4330 or instr consent)

Student may contact the instructor or department for information.