Instructor's Course Descriptions

to home page Instructors' Course Descriptions for Spring 2010

The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Spring 2010 were submitted by the course instructors. Exceptions are descriptions in brackets {…}, which have been adopted from the Undergraduate Catalogue (students desiring further information regarding the specific content of courses with bracketed descriptions are advised to contact the instructors directly).

Specific information regarding the dates, times, and locations of these courses may be found in the Registrar’s official Schedule of Courses for Spring 2010.

If the instructor is designated as ‘Staff’, the actual instructor for the course has yet to be determined. If you are looking for a complete syllabus for a course, check the Syllabi area for availability.

Descriptions

PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy - Dr. Duncan

This course is a general introduction to philosophy. We will begin by discussing two dialogues of Plato, possibly the most famous and most influential of philosophers. These will also introduce some themes we will see again later in the course, such as philosophical reflection on ethics, puzzles about how much we really know, and the question of how much reason and argument can tell us about religious issues.

The rest of the class will be divided into three main sections. The first of these sections will look at the philosophy of religion, focusing on arguments for and against the existence of God. Though many people are inclined to say that religion is a matter of faith, not reason, there is a long and well-established tradition of giving arguments about such matters, which are supposed to be persuasive independently of faith.

The second section will consider epistemology, the theory of knowledge. We’ll focus here on skeptical views: views that allege we know much less than we usually think we do. Some philosophers have been skeptics about particular issues, while others have produced arguments that suggest we know very few things, or perhaps nothing at all.

The third section will be about ethics. We’ll consider whether one might have a moral theory (a very general account of what makes things good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous and vicious) and what that might look like; discuss some skeptical approaches to ethics; and look at philosophical discussion of some concrete ethical problems.

Throughout our discussion of these various topics, we will have two main aims. The first is to come to understand some views that philosophers have had on these issues. The second is to develop your own relevant skills in such matters as careful reading, critical thinking, and clear writing.

Assessment will be by a combination of papers and exams. This course will count for 4,000 words of Gordon Rule writing requirement credit.

Most readings will be taken from Jonathan E. Adler and Catherine Z. Elgin (ed.), Philosophical Inquiry: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007).

PHI 2010 Introduction To Philosophy - Mr. Walker

The class is a general introduction to the traditional questions of philosophy, such as: Who are we? What can we know? How should we live? and What sort of reality do we inhabit? These topics will be approached through a historical survey of key philosophers, with a view towards understanding their respective responses to their predecessors. The text used will be the anthology, Philosophical Conversations: A Concise Historical Introduction, edited by Norman Melchert.

PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues - Dr. Tresan

Many moral issues are easy. Is it okay to win someone’s trust so that you can gain money or sex from them in a way that they would never have consented to if you hadn’t deceived them? Is it morally okay to scratch your nose, in typical circumstances? These issues will never be the topic of a course in moral philosophy. Other issues are hard, but largely because no one knows the relevant nonmoral facts - or only experts in something other than philosophy. For instance, what is the best tax policy? Of course, there are deep issues of moral principle raised by this. But unless we settle those issues in favor of no taxes at all, they’ll still leave us with the task of determining which policy is best suited to achieve our aims. And that is something one could spend a career in economics studying.

In this course we’ll consider issues that are of neither of those two sorts, at least not entirely. That is, they aren’t obvious. And they aren’t difficult simply because they involve complex non-moral issues, although those inevitably arise. Typically these issues involving balancing various considerations, some speaking one way, others speaking another way. Part of working out what to think about these issues is simply identifying the various considerations at work - which is itself not always easy. And we have to consider questions of priority between important values. And in the background lie very deep questions about the nature of morality, and other philosophical questions which we can’t settle, or even give much attention, but which inevitably play some role in our thinking about these matters.

The course has two general aims. The first aim is to inspire you to think about some crucial questions related to morality. These questions include: What is morality? What is the moral status of various controversial actions? Which moral principles can we be confident are true? How can we improve our thinking about morality? These are questions well worth thinking about, and the main purpose of the readings and the lectures will be to get you to think about them.

The second aim is to give you some practice in thinking and writing critically. Philosophy is distinguished from other forms of inquiry partly by its reliance upon thought not observation. In this course, you will get practice thinking and writing by considering and evaluating various hypotheses about morality, including, hopefully, your own.

PHH 3100 Ancient Philosophy - Dr. Müller

This course is an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy. It is the first part of the Philosophy Department’s 3000-level history of philosophy sequence. We will explore some of the key issues and problems that were discussed and debated by ancient Greek philosophers. We will read extensively in works of Plato and Aristotle. We will discuss ancient ethics, epistemology, philosophy of nature (physics), and metaphysics. Our main concern will be to understand each philosopher’s views and methods and their reasons for holding these views. We will pay close attention to the arguments that the ancient philosophers used to support their views. The course should be both interesting and challenging. Many of the views that we will explore will seem strange, bizarre or surprising (and many times also very appealing) to the modern reader, and many of the texts will be difficult and unfamiliar in format and style, so you should be ready to work hard in the course.

Required Texts

  1. Plato, Five Dialogues, 2nd edn., trans. Grube (Hackett).
  2. Plato, Republic, trans. Reeve (Hackett).
  3. Aristotle, Introductory Readings, ed. Terence Irwin, Gail Fine (Hackett).
  4. Hellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, 2nd edn., trans. B. Inwood and L. Gerson (Hackett).

Grading: 2 Essays, Midterm Exam, Final Exam, Quizzes, Attendance

PHH 3111 Ancient Ethical and Political Philosophy - Dr. Palmer

This course will comprise a sustained study of Platonic ethical and political thought. Since Plato views the function of any political association as the promotion of its members’ well-being, we shall begin by reconstructing as best we can Plato’s theory of what human well-being actually consists in from dialogues including the Protagoras, Gorgias, Laches, Euthyphro, and Charmides. We shall then focus on Plato’s response to the perceived failings of radical Athenian democracy and his successive efforts, in both the Republic and the later Statesman and Laws, to determine the form of political association most capable of executing the function of such an association and how one might actually come close to bringing it into being. The focus throughout will be on Plato’s views of genuine human well-being, how individuals may best seek to attain it, and how the state may be best organized to promote its attainment by its citizens.

PHH 3400 Modern Philosophy - Dr. Biro

[A survey of the work of major philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, from Descartes to Kant, in the primary texts.]

PHI 3130 Symbolic Logic - Dr. Filip

[A systematic study of forms of deduction; techniques and topics include truth-functional analysis and quantification.]

PHI 3130 Symbolic Logic - Dr. Liu

[A systematic study of forms of deduction; techniques and topics include truth-functional analysis and quantification.]

PHI 3633 Bioethics - Dr. Butchard

This course systematically addresses the ethical issues that arise in medicine and biotechnology. Topics include abortion, euthanasia, organ donation, and experimentation.

PHI 3693 Ethics of Communication - Dr. Auxter

In this course we will cover themes and topics in philosophical discussions of the ethics of communication. We will read both classical and contemporary texts in Western, African, and Latin American traditions.

Topics:

Requirements:There will be two essay tests written during the term and two essays written in a final examination. Class attendance is required. A 1000-word paper on a topic chosen by the student is due by the last class. The final examination is on April 28th (12:30-2:30pm).

Books:

PHI 3300 Theory of Knowledge - Dr. Ludwig

The three fundamental questions of epistemology are: What is knowledge?, What do we know?, and How do we know it? This course will be concerned with the problem space these questions generate and with the contemporary literature that responds to it.

These questions are interdependent. The first waits on the other two, the answer to each of which constrains the other. We start out with pre-reflective views about what we know and about how we know things. What we take ourselves to know bears on what it takes to know and so how we know things. For if we know it, the actual relations we bear to what is known must suffice. Thus, it also bears on what it is to know something. What we take to be our basic ways of coming to know things, together with how we take things to be, in turn bears on what we can know, and so on what we do know, and likewise on what knowledge is. In practice, we think about these things together. We adjust our views about what we know in light of what we take to be our ways of knowing. We adjust our views about what counts as a way of knowing in light of what we take ourselves to know. There is also an important interplay between the questions of what we know and how we know it and what our relation is to the various domains about which we take ourselves to have knowledge: our own minds, the external world, the minds of others, the future, the past, the unobserved, mathematics, logic, the good and the beautiful, what is necessary and possible, and so on. Philosophers who give primacy to the question how we know what we do tend to see the reach of knowledge as more limited. Those who give primacy to the question what we know tend to adjust their conception of knowledge, or of our relation to the world, to vindicate our ordinary views about what it is that we do and can know.

Epistemology is of fundamental importance in itself, as delimiting the range of the ambition of human inquiry and characterizing the nature of its goal, and as a critical tool in every area of philosophy for the development of the proper method of inquiry. We begin with the central problematic of epistemology, namely, skepticism, and organize our discussion around responses to it. All the central issues of epistemology are fallout from the response to the problem of skepticism:

PHI 3650 Moral Philosophy - Dr. Tresan

In this course we explore two main branches of moral philosophy, metaethics and normative theory, primarily the former. Metaethics is inquiry into the nature of morality which is relatively independent of questions about just which actions are morally right or wrong. For instance, metaethicists inquire into whether there really are moral facts and if so what distinguishes them, and how they relate to, facts of other sorts; whether and in what sense moral facts are objective or depend on us; how we might come to know anything about morality; and just what we’re doing when we make a moral judgment. Morality is a subject for the empirical sciences as well as philosophy, of course, and in recent years philosophers have increasingly looked to the work of anthropologists, psychologists, economists, and others to find data to illuminate the aspects of morality they’re interested in. How did morality evolve? To what extent, and in what ways, is moral judgment bound up with emotions? To what extent are there cross-cultural variations in moral norms? These and other questions are empirically tractable, and philosophically suggestive although we have to be very careful about what conclusions we draw from the data. We will look at some of the empirical work on morality which philosophers have tried to exploit, and consider whether it reveals as much as (and what) they think. We will also explore normative theory, inquiry into basic moral principles. Here we look for a general account of what makes actions right or wrong, required or forbidden. For instance, is the moral status of an action always determined entirely by the total value of its consequences? At first glance this is plausible, but a deeper look reveals some serious challenges. For instance, killing an innocent to save two seems to yield more total value, but does not seem right. If that’s correct, then what determines the moral status of actions in addition to, or instead of, the value of their consequences?

PHI 3700 Philosophy of Religion - Dr. Witmer

The philosophy of religion includes issues that touch on a wide range of philosophical areas-such as epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, among others. Arguably the most fundamental question in this area is whether or not there exists something deserving of the title “God.” The notion of God here presumed is, roughly, the traditional Western conception of God as an unlimited, all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe, something deserving of worship or religious devotion. The course is devoted to examining arguments for and against the existence of such a being. Our first step will be to get a broad overview of many of the main issues by reading a lively debate between a Christian and an atheist; we will then turn to a closer examination of several key arguments, including: pragmatic arguments (Pascal’s Wager), ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, arguments from miracles and religious experience, the problem of evil and the relevance of morality to theism.

It should be noted that while a student could take this as his or her first or second course in philosophy, the material is not generally pitched at an introductory level; some background is certainly advisable.

PHH 4141 Seminar in Ancient Philosophy - Dr. Palmer

“Empty is the word of that philosopher by which no human suffering is alleviated. Just as there is no benefit from medicine unless it treats the diseases of the body, likewise there is no benefit from philosophy unless it removes the sufferings of the soul.” These words by Epicurus capture the spirit of philosophy in the ancient world during the so-called “Hellenistic” period (traditionally dated from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the end of the Roman Republic in 31 BC). This period is dominated by three major philosophical schools–Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Academic Scepticism–each of which is concerned in its own way with articulating a vision of how the individual may attain happiness and freedom from disturbance by living in accordance with nature. Hellenistic philosophy has in the past few decades come to be rightly appreciated as one of the most exciting and prolific periods in ancient thought, in which some of the fundamental problems of philosophy were put on the map for the first time. The free will debate, for example, originates in this period and stands as the Hellenistic debate par excellence. Both the Epicureans and Stoics, moreover, elaborated empiricist epistemologies to accompany their thorough-going materialist metaphysics (in conscious opposition to Plato and Aristotle). The Sceptics’ subsequent critique of their rivals’ empiricism, and the responses to these criticisms in turn, foreshadow similar debates in modern times. Although the Hellenistic philosophers made important advances in logic, epistemology, physics, and metaphysics, their interest in these subjects was always in service of an overriding concern with ethics, the study of human nature and how life ought to be lived. Human happiness ultimately rests, they believed, upon the proper exercise of reason, whereby erroneous beliefs about what is to be feared, desired, valued, etc. can be replaced with correct beliefs founded upon an understanding of our own nature and the nature of the world we inhabit. We shall follow the standard Hellenistic division of philosophy into logic, physics, and ethics in surveying the principle views of the Epicureans and Stoics, discussing the Sceptics’ criticisms of their respective positions at the appropriate points. We shall also study the Platonic Academy’s turn to scepticism during this period and the subsequent revival of Pyrrhonian scepticism, with a view to understanding how ancient scepticism differs from its modern counterparts. We will also devote some attention to the manifestations of Epicureanism and Stoicism after their initial flourishing in the work of Lucretius and Epictetus.

PHH 4420 Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment - Dr. Duncan

This course will examine the moral philosophy of David Hume and Adam Smith. It will focus on Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). We will also look briefly about some earlier views, such as those of Thomas Hobbes and Francis Hutcheson, and some later ones, such as those of Jeremy Bentham.

The themes discussed will include the roles of reason and emotion in ethics; whether we have a moral sense, and what such a thing might be; the view that moral judgments involve thought about an impartial spectator; and some early suggestions of utilitarian theories.

A main aim of this course is that you come to know something about the views and arguments of Hume and Smith. Another is to develop a set of skills that are useful in thinking about the history of modern philosophy, philosophy more generally, and other issues. These include close reading, critical thinking, and the ability to write critically and carefully. Most classes will be structured around discussions of primary texts, and others around discussions of relevant works of secondary literature.

PHI 4542 Philosophy of Space and Time - Dr. Liu

A study of the nature of space and time: subjects may include the concepts of substantival space and time (or space-time), relational space and time (or space-time), dynamical space-time, conventional space-time metrics, casual reduction of time, time’s arrow, dimensionality of space (or space-time).

PHI 4930 Love and Friendship - Dr. Müller

This course is an investigation of the nature and value of love and friendship. We will discuss the most important philosophical theories of love and friendship. We will ask and try to find out why and in what way love and friendship matter both to our individual lives and to the functioning of societies. We will read both the historically most important contributions (such as the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Freud) as well as some contemporary literature.

Required Reading:

Grading: 3 Essays, Quizzes, Attendance