Current Courses
- PHIL 3110 - Political Philosophy [ syllabus ]
This course offers an introduction to some of the key ideas and problems of political philosophy. It covers justifications for a state; arguments for and against democracy; the extent to which a government should be allowed to influence its citizens's lives; some contemporary conceptions of justice (including global and social justice); the relationships between politics and both morality and the economy; the grounding of rights, desert, and power; and the influence of ideology on our political thought.
- PHIL 3310 - Moral Philosophy [ syllabus ]
Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is arguably one of the most important books in moral philosophy produced during the 20th Century. This course covers the work's scathing critique of moral argumentation and theorizing in contemporary society, its aim at reevaluating the enlightenment of the Enlightenment, and its rethinking of the history of the virtues from early heroic societies up until the present.
Past Courses
- PHIL 2010 - Introduction to Ethics [ syllabus ]
At some time or another, we're all forced to ask ourselves difficult questions about how best to act. We may even occasionally ask ourselves more ambitious questions like, "How ought one live?" This course looks at various ways philosophers have tried to answer these sorts of questions from the time of Socrates through to the present. It also explores some more concrete ethical questions like the debate over abortion, the purpose of criminal punishment, the role moral luck in our lives, and the characterization of and appropriate response to terrorism.
- PHIL 3120 - Philosophy of Art [ syllabus ]
This course is an introduction to the analysis of the nature of art, aesthetic experience, and its significance in our lives. It begins by considering the familiar question, "What is art?" largely in an attempt to set aside the felt need for definitions here. It then goes on to discuss theories of beauty, ugliness, and what grounds these properties; ideas about what kind of value art can have and why it is worth our time; the importance of aesthetic experience and authenticity; and the ontology and meaning of artworks. Throughout, the aim is to illustrate the theories and concepts introduced by applying them to specific problem cases and concrete artworks.
- PHIL 3130 - Philosophy of Law [ syllabus ]
This course is an introduction to some of the classic problems of general jurisprudence guided by H.L.A Hart's most influential work, The Concept of Law, which asked and gave answers to questions that have driven the field since its publication in 1961. The first part of the course surveys central questions such as: (1) "What is a law?" and "How do laws differ from conventional or customary rules, the dictates of morality, and threats?" (2) "What criteria must be met for a rule to be a law?" (3) "What kind of compliance do laws demand?" The final few weeks focus on the details of several major theories of adjudication including those of the legal formalists, Ronald Dworkin's constructivisism, and those of proposed by the American Legal Realists.
- PHIL 3200 - Formal Logic [ syllabus ]
Students completing this course will gain competence with some of the fundamental tools of scientific and philosophical reasoning. They will also learn valuable skills---including the ability to analyze and evaluate an argument's formal structure---for understanding and critiquing arguments wherever they appear. Their ability to comprehend, translate into, and calculate with symbolic languages will also be significantly strengthened. The concepts and methods learned in this course (e.g., understanding and constructing valid arguments) will, more generally, also help students engage in much finer written and oral communication, where perspicuity and logicality are so crucially important.
- PHIL 3250 - Inductive and Scientific Reasoning [ syllabus ]
This course studies the principles underlying scientific and inductive reasoning. It begins by asking, "What makes something a science?" "What makes a certain pattern of reasoning scientific?" "What is a scientific theory?" and "What counts as evidence in favor of a particular theory?" It then explores some of the most important theories of how evidence confirms or disconfirms scientific theories. In particular, so-called classical and Bayesian theories of confirmation are evaluated in terms of how well they fit the practice of actual reasoning in science as well as in terms of how well they deal with a number of well-known paradoxes of confirmation. The course also considers the value of theoretical simplicity; the role of inference to the best explanation in science; and ways one might proceed when dealing with inconsistent theories or pieces of evidence.
- PHIL 3500 - The Modern World View [ syllabus ]
The modern world is shaped by, and understood in terms of, modern theories and concepts that have developed over the course of roughly the last century. This course offers a broad survey of some of the key ideas that constitute our contemporary view of the world. It explores modern ideas about human beings (including our evolution, language, and mind); modern views of our societies (including their politics, ideologies, institutions, economics, and art); and modern views of the physical world we inhabit (including methods of reasoning, physics, computer science, mathematics, and history). The goal is not only to understand these important ideas, but also to reflect on how they have changed our values and our understanding of our place in the world.
- PHIL 5200 - Philosophical Applications of Symbolic Logic [ syllabus ]
Despite the title, this course mostly focuses on presenting the technical tools of modern mathematical logic. It seems to be the case that the application of these tools to philosophical problems is fairly straightforward once the obstacle of understanding the methods themselves is overcome, so it's the view of the course that familiarity with more techniques will be of more use in the long run than going into detail about any particular application. The schedule is tentative and choices between further investigation of model and proof theory; complete coverage of Gödel; and a sampling of modal logic often has to be made.
- PHIL 6000 - Virtue Ethics [ syllabus ]
This course is a substantially expanded, graduate-level version of PHIL 3310. It is devoted to a close reading of some of MacIntyre's most important works, especially After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? It engages with a wide range of important figures in the history of ethical thought as well as many other significant philosophers, authors, playwrights, social scientists, and political theorists.
- PHIL 6100 - Seminar in the History of Philosophy: Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein [ syllabus ]
This course studies the history and methods of analytic philosophy as the subject developed over roughly the first half of the 20th Century. It proceeds by examining key texts from Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, some of the earliest authors to consciously employ tools for tackling philosophical problems that eventually came to characterize work in the analytic tradition. The struggle to understand the particular problems these philosophers are struggling with and the solutions they offer, is paired throughout by the consideration of more general questions such as, "What is the method of "analysis" that these authors hope to make use of?" and "How must we conceive of philosophical problems if they are to be solvable through a kind of analysis?"
- PHIL 6330 - Metaphysics [ syllabus ]
This course provides an introduction to historical and contemporary approaches to modality in metaphysics. It aims to be historically careful during the first portion of the course, but the primary goal is to make sense of where particular contemporary problems come from and to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of various attempts to handle them. The (roughly) second half of the course involves working through Amie Thomasson's Norms and Necessity. As Thomasson's account is a descendant of so-called linguistic accounts, the course regularly crosses into the territory of philosophy of language.