Spring Courses

Logical Reasoning for Standardized Graduate Exams

What does it mean to be an engaged critical reasoner? Some think it is simply to be contrarian. This course will challenge that view by emphasizing reasoning activity as systematic and rigorous. This course will include argument construction and assessment, deductive and inductive logics, formal deductive logic, and the identification of fallacies and their avoidance. It will also challenge the students to address real-world issues!

Introduction to Philosophy

The Meaning of Life

What does it mean to live a good life? This course will challenge students to think about why they have come to college, what their next steps are, how a liberal arts education can prepare them for what comes down the road, and what is ultimately meaningful in life.

The course will include philosophical, literary, and psychological examinations of happiness, freedom (how do we make transformative life decisions), the value of college education, materialism/consumerism, and resilience in the face of suffering and mortality.

In short, you will work at answering the fundamental question: What is the meaning of it all?

Contemporary Moral Problems

An introduction to the application of basic moral concepts and theories to contemporary moral issues. Discussion topics will vary and may include: distribution of wealth and resources, capital punishment, torture, environmental ethics and sustainability, animal rights, euthanasia, abortion, cloning, genetic engineering, privacy rights, drug laws, marriage and sexuality, gun control, and affirmative action.

Introduction to Philosophy

Brains, Minds, and Machines

This course examines central questions in philosophy about the nature of the mind, the self, human rationality, perception/experience, and technology through the lens of work in cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and psychology. Some major topics and questions include: What are minds? Is the human mind a digital computer? Could a machine—e.g., a robot or a computer—be truly intelligent, or have experiences like humans and animals do? How does the brain “represent” its environment? In engaging these questions, the course also introduces students to foundational issues in cognitive science and artificial intelligence including: nativism vs. empiricism, mental representation, classical artificial intelligence vs. neural networks, modularity, evolutionary psychology, embodied cognition, and extended cognition.

Introduction to Philosophy

Philosophy, Technology, and Science Fiction

Evil robots! Mad scientists! Alien intelligences! This course introduces core philosophical ideas through a selection of accessible science fiction short stories and films. Does a society's technology determine its values and development? Does technology reflect our values or is it neutral? How do the development of new technologies help and harm people? What is a technological singularity? We will be exploring these questions in the philosophy of technology through how technological advances have been presented in science fiction. In addition, we will also be exploring the philosophical issues around how biological systems could be manipulated. What are the prospects and dangers of biohacking? What are the boundaries of what makes us human? How could different life and ecosystems evolve? Should there be scientific research that shouldn’t be done? Additional topics may include: Could I be deceived about the external world? Do we act freely or is everything predetermined?

Critical Reasoning

What does it mean to be an engaged critical reasoner? Some think it is simply to be contrarian. This course will challenge that view by emphasizing reasoning activity as systematic and rigorous. This course will include argument construction and assessment, deductive and inductive logics, formal deductive logic, and the identification of fallacies and their avoidance. It will also challenge the students to address real-world issues!

Introduction to Ethics

A critical study of basic moral concepts and problems contained in ethical theories of important western philosophers: relativism, egoism, happiness, obligation, justice, freedom, conscience, love, religious precepts, moral rules, moral attitudes and moral language.

Human Values in Medicine

Medicine, with its constant innovations, is a field where new possibilities continually arise, and with those possibilities come new, meaningful questions. In this course, we will examine the values we apply in making decisions about medical care, as well as case studies from real world clinical practice, to gain a deeper appreciation for the human, ethical aspects of medicine. This course should be of interest to any student preparing for a career in health professions and biomedical research.

Philosophy Writing

This course focuses on writing instruction, with particular emphasis on editing and revision, the use of logical argument structures, and proper research and citation methods. Significant quantities of both formal and informal writing will be required throughout the semester.

Philosophy Writing is ideally suited to students who are beginning to take upper-level coursework and wish to develop more sophisticated skills in argument-based writing. Although most students who take the course are Philosophy majors or minors, it is open to students from any major, especially those in which logic, mathematics, or other symbolic languages may be used to construct arguments.

Philosophy of Law

What is the law and how is it created? What makes legal authority legitimate, and what are its limits? What is the relationship between law and morality? What are legal rights and how should they be protected?

This course explores these questions and many others, including competing theories about the nature of the law and legal reasoning, constitutional interpretation, and punishment.

Ethical Theory

This course includes a detailed examination of selected topics in normative ethics and/or metaethics. Normative ethical questions to consider may include: Is the morally right thing to do always the thing that has the best consequences, as so-called "consequentialists" believe? What sorts of things are intrinsically good, i.e., good in themselves, regardless of their effects?

Metaethical questions to be considered may include: Are there any objective moral facts? If so, where do they come from?

The Philosophy of Art

An inquiry into historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives on the making, interpreting and criticizing of works of art, including relations of the arts to other dimensions of culture. This course will address questions such as "what is a work of art?," "what is beauty?," "can art be immoral?," and "what is the role of art in politics?"

Philosophy of Natural Science

This course will offer an examination of the philosophical problems associated with the methods of the natural sciences, the presuppositions of scientific inquiry, and the nature of scientific laws and theories.

Philosophy of Social Science

Through intensive and extensive conversational “lectures” (a series of village roundtable-like “dialectic”), course participants explore how certain “foundational” philosophical frameworks (such as social ontology/social epistemology) and certain science concepts co-examine social goods(be they physical, mental, economic, or axiological). In other words, the course examines how the human being apparently always manages to live simultaneously alone and with others amid questions about “money”… (economics), “wellbeing”… (psychology), “control” … (political science), “origins” … (anthropology), and “groupings” … (sociology). This course should be of interest to students in such disciplines as economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, medical humanities, criminology and criminal justice.

Philosophy of Mind

A discussion of various accounts of the nature of minds which focuses upon philosophical problems such as whether the mind is identical with the brain, the extent of similarities between human minds and computers, the nature of personal identity, and the relationship of mental activity to behavior.

This course will address questions such as: What is the nature mind? Is mind a unique sort of substance, just a program, or nothing at all? Do minds really have an effect on the world? If so, how? Could physical science ever explain the nature of mind? Could mind be somehow a fundamental constituent of reality?

Philosophy of Emotion

In this class, we will aim to understand emotions, moods, attitudes, and other affective phenomena from a broad, empirically informed perspective while keeping both practical and philosophical issues in mind. We will ask questions such as: What are emotions, moods, and the rest? How are these various affective phenomena related to one another? Are some emotions basic and universal? How do language and culture shape our affective experiences? How do emotions and moods provide information about our relationship to the world? Under what conditions are emotions and moods appropriate or inappropriate? What role do they play in our reasoning and decision-making? What role do they play in our ethical lives? What role do they play in the arts (e.g., music, literature, film)?