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Past Graduate Courses

(For a list of upcoming/current graduate courses, click here.)

Fall 2023 Courses

PHIL 6395: Metaethics (Class #19981)

Prof. Phillips
Mo 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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This Seminar will divide into two halves. In the first half of the semester we will examine seminal 20th century versions of four main views in metaethics: non-naturalism, naturalism, non-cognitivism, and error theory. The latter part of the survey will be organized around responses to two influential challenges from the1970s: John Mackie’s defense of error theory and Bernard Williams’s development of internalism about reasons.

In the second half of the seminar we will discuss two recent presentations of contrasting views in metaethics: Tim Scanlon’s defense of non-naturalism in Being Realistic About Reasons and Bart Streumer’s treatment of error theory in Unbelievable Errors.


PHIL 6395: TBA (Class #19982)

Prof. Loewenstein
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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The topic of this seminar is the relationship between time and causation. Questions we will investigate include, could there be causation in a timeless world? Is backwards causation possible or is the very idea of it incoherent? What explains the temporal asymmetry of causation (causes always precede their effects) at our world? Is the (apparent?) directionality of causation objective, or is it a perspectival – that is, dependent on us and our point of view? And more.


PHIL 6395: Philosophy of the Special Sciences (Class #19983)

Prof. Buckner
Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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Philosophy of science often focuses on metaphysical issues—such as unity, reduction, and explanation—in the abstract. In this course, we will rather study these questions as they arise from within the “special sciences”, such as biology, neuroscience, and psychology. In this course, we will review debates surrounding central posits in the special sciences—in particular species, concepts, heuristics, emotions, and intelligence. Central questions will involve the following:

  • Which disagreements are genuine and which are merely rhetorical or terminological?
  • How can we distinguish ontological disagreements from methodological or epistemological ones?
  • How can or should such disagreements be resolved?
  • Should findings from other sciences be deemed relevant to answering these questions—and if so, in what way?

In the latter third of the course, we will focus especially on the concept of "intelligence" in recent artificial intelligence research--particularly on critical arguments about its history in psychometrics and its application as a yardstick for progress towards human-like AI in deep learning. Note that in this course we will get our hands dirty with details from the sciences. Background readings on basic texts in these areas are available on request.

Spring 2023 Courses

PHIL 6395: Anger (Class #23601)

Prof. Coates
Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM , Room: AH 512

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This seminar will investigate the significance (or maybe insignificance) of anger in both interpersonal and political contexts. To do so, we'll spend a bit of time reading various historical philosophers (e.g., Aristotle, Cicero, Adam Smith, and Nietzsche) before turning to contemporary debates about what anger is, its value in interpersonal relationships, its value in political organization, and its connection to justice more generally. The philosophers we'll read on these issues include (but are not exhausted by) Martha Nussbaum, Audre Lorde, Myisha Cherry, Glen Pettigrove, and Amia Srinivasan.


PHIL 6395: Language, Ontology and Logic (Class #23602)

Prof. Garson
W 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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Exploring the interaction between language and the nature of reality has been a defining feature of the analytic tradition. An important influence on this conversation was the development of formal logic, especially formal semantics. This seminar will begin with extensional semantics in the style of Tarski, and contrast it with possible worlds semantics. We will then explore the ontological issues raised by these frameworks, with an eye to their implications for theories of meaning, and possible reform of the logical underpinnings. Near the end of the course, we will consider connectionist accounts of language that might challenge the formal tradition. Philosophical figures will include Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke, Putnam, and Fodor. Topics will include ontological arguments for God’s existence, linguistic indeterminacy, the ontology of possible worlds, contingent identity, free logic, the meaning of logical connectives, vagueness, the language of thought hypothesis, and connectionist representation. Students will help determine which topics are covered near the end of the course. Students will be required to write reaction papers to each week's reading. They will also submit a project proposal, due well before the end of the term. I will use the proposals to help students refine their projects. Once projects are accepted, each student will give an oral presentation on it to the class. A final paper of between 7,000 and 10,000 words is due at the end of the term.


PHIL 6395: Philosophy of Games (Class #23604)

Prof. Mag Uidhir
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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The seminar topic is the philosophy of games. The issues we will cover are the nature of games as well as their relationship to the good, performance, play, fiction, agency, and art.


Spring 2022 Courses


PHIL 6395: Seminar in Philosophical Problems (Class #13822)

Prof. Sommers
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM , Room: AH 512

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6395: Empiricism and Artificial Intelligence (Class #13823)

Prof. Buckner
Regular Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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In this class, we will critically explore the debate around "deep learning" (deep neural networks)--currently the most popular approach to artificial intelligence in computer science--and its relevance to human intelligence by linking it to the history of theorizing about the mind by empiricist philosophers like Aristotle, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Sophie de Grouchy, and William James. The current engineering debate over deep learning can be mapped to traditional debates between rationalists like Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz on the one hand and these empiricists on the other. The rationalists in both philosophy and engineering tended to be “nativists”—that is, they thought that intelligence or rational cognition requires significant amounts of knowledge to be innate, part of the mind's unlearned basic toolkit (which today, we suppose, is granted to us by evolution). Empiricists, on the other hand, insist that all knowledge must in some way be derived from experience. Something that has been lost in the translation of this older dispute to the current moment, however—much to the debate's detriment—is that the historical empiricists were all faculty psychologists, supposing that knowledge was derived from experience only via the active processing of general-purpose cognitive faculties, such as abstraction, memory, imagination, attention, and empathy. Recent rationalists like Jerry Fodor, Steven Pinker, or Gary Marcus tend to discuss the empiricists' views on these faculties only reluctantly, whereas they formed the core of nearly every major empiricist’s answer as to how knowledge is derived from experience. Current debates over the prospects for deep-learning-based AI would be greatly enriched by connecting them back to this rich tradition of faculty psychology from the historical empiricists.

We will explore these topics by reading a book manuscript on the topic written by the instructor. Course topics will be structured around the theories historical empiricists have offered for these important cognitive faculties and linked to current attempts to model them using deep neural networks. In the course of the discussion, we will introduce a number of other epistemological, ethical, and political topics of pressing importance to the development of state-of-the-art AI technology.


PHIL 6396: Seminar in the History of Philosophy (Class #13821)

Prof. Yau
We 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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No further information is available at this time.

Fall 2021 Courses

PHIL 6395: Metaethics (Class #26646)

Prof. Phillips
Mo 4:00PM - 7:00PM, Room: TBD

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This Seminar will divide into two halves. In the first half of the semester we will examine seminal 20th century versions of four main views in metaethics: non-naturalism, naturalism, non-cognitivism, and error theory. The latter part of the survey will be organized around responses to two influential challenges from the1970s: John Mackie’s defense of error theory and Bernard Williams’s development of internalism about reasons. In the second half of the seminar we will read two recent articulations of contrasting views in metaethics: Tim Scanlon’s defense of non-naturalism in Being Realistic About Reasons and Jonas Olson’s defense of error theory in Moral Error Theory: History, Critique, Defense.


PHIL 6395: Seminar in Philosophical Problems (Class #26712)

Prof. Loewenstein
Tu 2:30PM - 4:00PM, Room: TBD

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6395: Hard Choices (Class #26713)

Prof. Coates
Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: TBD

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In this course we'll consider three different ways in which agents can face hard choices and what these varieties of choice tells us about the nature and norms of agency and rationality. The readings for this course will include works by Martha Nussbaum, Ruth Chang, and L.A. Paul.

Fall 2020 Courses

PHIL 6395: Seminar in Philosophical Problems (Class #21223)

Prof. Weisberg
TBD, Room: TBD

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6395: The Methods of Ethics (Class #21224)

Prof. Phillips
TBD, Room: TBD

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In this seminar we will read and discuss the whole of Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics.


PHIL 6396: The Metaphysics of Individuation in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Class #21210)

Prof. Hattab
Th TBD, Room: TBD

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Answers to metaphysical questions about how things in nature are individuated as distinct substances, with unique identities over time, have widespread implications. As genetics advances, cloning and other recent bio-medical technologies increasingly blur the line between artificial and biological substances. Simultaneously, advances in neuroscience and materialist theories of the mind put pressure on the early modern separation between material identity and personal identity, the latter of which John Locke famously located in continuity of consciousness. Environmental science and the ethical-political implications of the climate and corona pandemic stress the interconnectedness of all parts of the natural world and the collective impact of our individual actions. Canonical 17th century philosophers like Descartes, Locke and Spinoza argued for theories of individuation that carved off the material mechanistic realm subject to scientific laws and technological manipulation, from the individual, mental realm that provides resources for personal identity, freedom, moral responsibility and political rights. In doing so they made possible advances in modern science and technology, but their failure to integrate the physical/natural realm and mental/normative realm, contributes to current, seemingly intractable philosophical problems. There is a growing need for fresh conceptual resources to define what constitutes an individual in nature, in general, and a human being, in particular, in order to develop a more integrated view of relations between parts of nature and our moral responsibilities. Studying historical accounts of individuation may not solve these problems but enables a fresh start by revealing how past theories may inform current assumptions about what counts as an individual and by taking us out of our comfort zone to stimulate new ways to think about them. To this end, we will study highly influential medieval and early modern theories of individuation available in translation, as well as some recent secondary literature on this topic. Readings will likely include, among others, texts by Boethius, Avicenna, St Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, Suarez and René Descartes. Students who read Latin are invited to join me in a related reading group to translate select texts by influential renaissance philosophers on this topic.

Spring 2020 Courses

PHIL 6395: Seminar in Philosophical Problems (Class #24053)

Prof. Sommers
Mo 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6395: Temporal Asymmetries and Fixed Past/Open Future (Class #24054)

Prof. Loewenstein
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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Intuitively it seems clear that the past is "settled"/"fixed"/"closed" in a way in which the future is not. Unlike the past, how the future will go seems to depend on what happens now. The future can still be influenced. In contrast, it is too late to affect the past. How to make sense of this (apparent) asymmetry? Is it right? Is the past fixed and the future open? What, precisely, do we mean when we talk about past fixity and future openness? Does the truth of the claim that the past is fixed and the future open depend on whether determinism is true? (Many think the answer is “no”.) Does it depend on our metaphysics of time: e.g., on whether presentism, eternalism or the growing block theory is true? (Many think the answer here is 'no', too.) Is the past actually fixed and is the future actually open? And how does this apparent asymmetry relate to the other temporal asymmetries, e.g., that causes precede their effects, that the future seems to counterfactually depend on the past but not vice versa, that we have memories and other traces of the past but not of the future, etc.? We will read articles addressing these difficult and still unresolved questions. The first part of the seminar will focus on the temporal asymmetries in general, which will involve learning about, among other things, David Lewis's influential (but unsuccessful) attempt to account for the asymmetries with his classic semantics for counterfactuals, followed by David Albert's presently popular attempt to explain the asymmetries with the second law of thermodynamics (i.e., entropy increases) and the "Past Hypothesis" (the world began in a low-entropy state). In the second half of the course we will read articles which are more specifically about how to make sense of the notions of closed past/open future, and about whether the past is in fact fixed and the future open, in particular..


PHIL 6395: Philosophy of Deep Learning (Class #24057)

Prof. Buckner
Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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Deep learning neural networks have recently blown through anticipated upper limits on Artificial Intelligence (AI) performance. Though modern deep learning technology is only a few years old, they have already worked themselves into many aspects of our daily lives. They structure and label our search results, organize our shopping lists, recognize our faces, diagnose our diseases, may soon drive our cars, and already defeat us in games as complex as chess, go, and Starcraft II. Many also regard them as the best models of human perceptual judgments. They have also, however, manifested a variety of puzzling foibles, and attracted a number of influential detractors who worry that an overabundance of naïve enthusiasm will lead to another “AI Winter” when hopes for deep learning superintelligence fail to materialize. In this class, we will critically explore the explosion of deep learning, covering a wide spread of topics in this course so that there's something for everyone: different explanations for deep learning's success (esp. for computer vision, game playing, and medical diagnosis), standard criticisms of deep learning (esp. debates between "rationalists" in AI like Pearl and Marcus and "empiricists" like the Deep Mind group), relevant history of philosophy (esp. from Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant), philosophy of science (esp. what kind of explanations deep learning can offer), adversarial examples, the black box/interpretability problem (esp. GDPR law and the XAI movement), the legal philosophy surrounding automated agents driven by deep learning, concerns about problematic bias in deep learning applications, DL as a model of cortical function in cognitive neuroscience, the use of Generative Adversarial Networks in aesthetics and art, and deep learning in scientific data analysis (to interpret fMRI data, discover new exoplanets around distant suns, or predict protein folds to discover new drugs).

Fall 2019 Courses

PHIL 6395: Philosophy of Film (Class #25383)

Prof. Mag Uidhir
We 4:00PM - 7:00PM, Room: AH 512

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This course deals with the principal issues in contemporary analytic philosophy of film as well as how these issues intersect with a variety of disciplines outside of philosophy (e.g., film studies, art history, psychology and cognitive science), with special attention paid to puzzles of narrative-engagement (e.g., horror, painful art, and suspense). The course will also focus on defining cinema itself as well as a species of both art and philosophy. The bulk of the course will address issues surrounding how audiences engage with film, e.g., how audiences emotionally respond to film fictions (and the rational analysis of such responses). To better facilitate understanding of these issues, optional screenings of films will take place after class.


PHIL 6395: Doxastic Agency (Class #25384)

Prof. Oliveira
Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: TBA

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Typical human beings seem to have agency. In broad terms, this is to say that our actions are typically "under our control", that they are typically “ours", that we are typically “responsible" for them, and that we can be “obligated" to act in certain ways. Philosophers, of course, disagree about how to best understand each of these notions and their inter-connections. But however we choose to think about them, our question in this class will be whether they apply equally well to our beliefs: are we agents with respect to our beliefs in the same (or nearly same) way that we are agents with respect to our actions? Are we, in other words, doxastic agents? Given the broad sense of agency just outlined, we can address this question by addressing the following subquestions instead: are our beliefs typically under our control? In what sense are our beliefs typically ours?  Are we typically responsible for our beliefs? Can we have obligations to believe in certain things? After some background material, we will read the most recent work on each of these topics. Students will write weekly reading reports and a 3K-5K words final paper.


PHIL 6395: Reference and Inference (Class #25385)

Prof. Garson
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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Reference and inference are two important themes in theories of meaning. One intuition has it that the meaning of an expression is what it refers to, so that meaning is a relation between word and world. Another attractive idea is that the meaning of a sentence is given by its role in inference - what entails it and what it entails. Then meanings of words in sentences can be characterized by what they contribute to the inferential roles of sentences they belong to. The seminar investigates the connections and tensions between these two conceptions of meaning.

            We set the stage with a historical introduction - contrasting Wittgenstein's views in the Tractatus (the picture theory of meaning) with those in the Investigations (meaning as use). This will be followed by a discussion of Quine on indeterminacy of reference.  Kripke's ideas about contingent identity, rigid designation, and referential vs. descriptive accounts of referring terms will be treated next, along with an account of formal semantics, including possible worlds and 2D semantics. We will then take up Putnam's indeterminacy of meaning arguments and their connections to realism. Following that there will be a discussion of the problem of explaining how brain states can have representational content. Students will play a role in determining topics of later parts of the class.

            The course sits at an intersection between the philosophy of language, logic, the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, metaphysics and epistemology. Broad questions addressed include the following.  What explains the link between an expression and what it is about? To what extent do the rules for the use of a symbol determine its meaning?  What are the relationships between conceivability, necessity, analyticity and the a priori? How is it possible for the brain to represent the world? How is communication possible between people who disagree about what is true about the world?

Spring 2019 Courses

 

PHIL 6395: The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Class #15226)

Prof. Weisberg
We 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious.  The challenge arises because it does not seem that the subjective and qualitative aspects of conscious experience fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements.  It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether the creature is conscious. 

The problem is a major focus of research in contemporary philosophy of mind, as well as a considerable body of empirical research, in psychology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics.  The problem touches on issues in ontology, on the nature and limits of scientific explanation, and on the accuracy and scope of introspection and first-person knowledge, to name but a few.  Reactions to the hard problem range from an outright denial of the phenomenon causing the trouble to naturalized reduction to panpsychism and full-blown dualism.

In this course, we’ll consider the hard problem in detail, and survey some of the more important reactions to it.  All course readings will be available on the course website.  Students are required to write a seminar paper (15-20 pages) on a topic approved by the professor.


PHIL 6395: Special Topics in Philosophy (Class #18894)

Prof. Coates
We Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: TBA

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6396: Descartes (Class #15227)

Prof. Hattab
Mo 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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René Descartes (1596-1650) is best known among philosophers for his method of doubt and the cogito, which laid the ground for the apparent substance dualism articulated in his Meditations on First Philosophy. Consistent with his professed method, Descartes is thought to have broken completely with the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy marking the start of modern philosophy. He is thus often blamed for various ills of the modern world, most notably the alienation of mind from body, individual from world, thought from action and theory from practice. Though such criticisms are somewhat justified, the historical Descartes lies buried under layers of interpretation added by subsequent philosophers. Some of what appear as novel problems unique to Cartesianism took center stage due to subsequent readings of Descartes’ works, while the ways in which he merely responded to and drew out implications of prior theories and arguments receded into the background. Our aim will be to penetrate beyond the mythology surrounding Descartes’ contribution to our discipline to make sense of his philosophical enterprise on its own terms and within its historical context. To this end, we will not just read his Meditations, but we will situate them, along with the Objections and Replies within the context of his equally important works on scientific method, natural philosophy and the passions of the soul. To arrive at a more accurate understanding and appreciation of Descartes’ works, we will also, to the extent that they are available in translation, read extracts from prior and contemporaneous philosophical works that inform Descartes’ approach to the philosophical questions of his day. Seminar participants will thus gain a broad foundation in the origins of modern philosophical thought as well as learn general methods for interpreting any historical philosophical text.

Fall 2018 Courses

 

PHIL 6322: Logic & Philosophy (Class #22882)

Prof. Garson
TuTh 11:30AM - 1:00PM, Room: M 111

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This course is an introduction to the application of logic to philosophy. It provides a background in predicate logic sufficient for navigating the philosophical literature, and serves as a graduate level introduction to the philosophy of logic. The first half of the course will be concerned primarily with predicate logic: translation of English argumentation into predicate logic notation, proofs and trees for checking validity, and discussion of some metalogical features such as soundness, completeness, and the lack of a decision procedure. The second half will explore applications of predicate logic to a number of philosophical issues, including the theory of descriptions, the paradoxes of material implication, and the semantical analysis of natural language. We will also look at topics in non-standard logics including modal logic, tense logic, free logic, multi-valued logic and others. Students will have the opportunity to select the topics to be covered to match their philosophical interests.

Text: Predicate Logic (PL) H. Pospesel The text will be used primarily as a resource on predicate logic, and to provide necessary exercises. Other course materials will be handed out in class. Exercises will be due weekly and represent a substantial portion of the students’ grades. There will be an in-class Midterm Exam and a Final.


PHIL 6395: Agent-Relative Reasons (Class #22874)

Prof. Phillips
We 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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In this course, we are likely to read, inter alia: Sidgwick, Moore, Ross, Broad, Nagel, Parfit, Williams, Korsgaard, McNaughton and Rawling, Crisp and Mark Schroeder.


PHIL 6395: Philosophy of the Special Sciences (Class #22875)

Prof. Buckner
Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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Philosophy of science often focuses on metaphysical and epistemological issues—such as unity, reduction, and explanation—in the abstract. In this course, we will rather study these questions as they arise from within the “special sciences”, such as biology, neuroscience, and psychology. In this course, we will review five debates surrounding central posits in the special sciences: species, concepts, emotions, cognition, and deep learning neural networks. Central questions will involve the following:

  • Which disagreements are genuine and which are merely rhetorical or terminological?
  • How can we distinguish ontological disagreements from methodological or epistemological ones?
  • How can or should such disagreements be resolved?
  • Should findings from other sciences be deemed relevant to answering these questions—and if so, in what way?

Note that in this course we will get our hands dirty with details from the sciences. Background readings on basic texts in these areas are available on request.


PHIL 6396: Seminar in the History of Philosophy (Class #22873)

Prof. Hattab
Mo 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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No further information is available at this time.

 

Spring 2018

 

PHIL 6305: History of 18th Century Philosophy (Class #22452)

Prof. Hattab
TuTh 10:00AM - 11:30AM, Room: AH 302

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Enlightenment philosophers developed complex philosophical systems to address the tensions that the scientific revolution had produced between: 1) the world as we experience it through the senses 2) the world as described by science, and 3) traditional metaphysical notions of substance, cause, the self and freedom of the will.  Much of this course will therefore be devoted to getting clear on the different ways in which these tensions get resolved in George Berkeley’s idealism, David Hume’s radical empiricism, Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism, and Thomas Reid’s common sense philosophy.  Our primary goal is to understand the theoretical foundations of enlightenment thought through careful study of Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, and Thomas Reid’s Inquiry and Essays.  A second and related goal of this course is to improve your reading, reasoning and writing skills.  To that end, we will pay careful attention to the forms of reasoning employed in the assigned texts, and you will complete a series of writing assignments teaching you how to interpret historical texts, break down an argument, evaluate it and formulate objections to it.  


PHIL 6322: Logic and Philosophy (Class #22450)

Prof. Garson
TuTh 11:30AM - 1:00PM, Room: M 109

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   This course is an introduction to the application of logic to philosophy. It provides a background in predicate logic and modal logic sufficient for navigating the philosophical literature, and serves as a graduate level introduction to the philosophy of logic.
        The first half of the course will be concerned primarily with predicate logic: translation of English argumentation into predicate logic notation, proofs and trees for checking validity, and discussion of some metalogical features such as soundness, completeness, and the lack of a decision procedure.
        The second half will explore applications of predicate logic to a number of philosophical issues, including the theory of descriptions, the paradoxes of material implication, and the semantical analysis of natural language. We may also look at topics in modal and other non standard logics including counterfactuals, intuitionistic logic, and the logic of vagueness.  Students will play an active role in determining the topics in the second half of the course.


PHIL 6344: Philosophy of Science (Class #22453)

Prof. Weisberg
MoWe 1:00PM - 2:30PM, Room: C 108

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6358: Classics in the History of Ethics (Class #22458)

Prof. Morrisson
MoWeFr 9:00AM - 10:00AM, Room: L 212L

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6376: Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution (Class #22451)

Prof. Brown
TuTh 1:00PM - 2:30PM, Room: AH 7

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In this course we will examine the interaction between philosophy, science, and religion during the 17th and early 18th centuries, the century of the Scientific Revolution. In particular, we will discuss the debates that arose concerning the nature of explanation, scientific methodology, the status of natural laws and their relation to miracles, and the status of so-called "occult qualities." All of these issues were joined in the protracted conflict that arose between Continental philosophers and scientists, most prominently Leibniz (1646-1716), and the English Newtonians (Newton: 1643-1727) over the status of gravitational force. This conflict involved a central methodological, debate, pitting the Newtonian "experimental philosophy" against the "mechanical philosophy" favored on the Continent. This conflict, in its many and varied forms, will be discussed in detail, as will the equally vexed debate about the "force of a body's motion" — the so-called vis viva controversy.


PHIL 6395: Animal Cognition (Class #22448)

Prof. Buckner
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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When philosophers have attempted to define human nature, it is often by reference to or contrast with that of animals. And yet the most natural way to understand the thought processes of animals is by comparing their abilities to (what we think we know about) our own.  Our thinking about animal minds thus seems trapped between two biases:  viewing animals as wordless, furry versions of ourselves (anthropomorphism), and holding that animal thought is only rational, interesting, or otherwise valuable insofar as it resembles human cognition (anthropocentrism).  These doubts can leave us wondering whether a rigorous empirical study of animal cognition is even possible.

In the first half of this course, we will review the study of animal thought from the Ancients to the current explosion of empirical work on animal cognition.  We will begin with the debates about human nature in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, continue to survey the notion of the wordless “brute” caught in the debate between the rationalists and empiricists, review the dramatic way that Darwin’s theory of evolution changed the terms of the debate, explore the foundations of comparative psychology in Morgan and Romanes, consider the arguments of the radical behaviorists, and finally assess the cognitive revolution against the behaviorist’s epistemological strictures. 

In the second half, we will explore particular debates in current animal cognition research.  The empirical study of animal cognition today is a highly interdisciplinary field—with crucial contributions by psychologists, ethologists, philosophers, and biologists—that aspires to use well-designed experiments to overcome the biases of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism.  However, there remain a variety of philosophical challenges facing the field, such as whether folk psychology (appealing to contentful mental states like beliefs and desires) provides a viable framework for the empirical study of animal psychology, whether animals have consciousness, whether animal cognition can be studied in the lab or only in the wild, and whether neuroscience might provide additional purchase on these issues.  We will conclude the course by reviewing the ways in which these issues arise in several debates over particular animal cognitive capacities, such as tool use, episodic memory, theory of mind, transitive inference, and metacognition.


PHIL 6395: Contemporary Metaethics (Class #22447)

Prof. Phillips
Mo 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6396: Seminar in the History of Philosophy (Class #22449)

Prof. Freeland
Th 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6397: Philosophy of Film (Class #22454)

Prof. Mag Uidhir
We 5:30PM - 8:30PM, Room: AH 302

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6397: Aesthetics (Class #22455)

Prof. Freeland
TuTh 11:30AM - 1:00PM Room: AH 201

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No further information is available at this time.


Fall 2016


PHIL 6304: History of 17th Century Philosophy (Class #11180)

Prof. Brown
TuTh 11:30AM - 1:00PM, Room: SW 219

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An examination of the central metaphysical and epistemological issues in 17th-century philosophy. The works of some of the major philosophical figures of the century will be systematically discussed. These figures include Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz.

There will be two essay examinations: a midterm and a final. Students will also be required to submit a 12-15 page term paper (20-25 pages for graduate students) on a topic determined in consultation with the instructor.


PHIL 6332: Philosophy of Language (Class #23962)

Prof. Buckner
TuTh 10:00AM - 11:30AM, Room: AH 302

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This course is an introduction to the philosophy of language. This is a large area that encompasses many topics, including meaning, truth, the relationship between logic and language, and the distinctions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In the first half of the course, we will review some classics in this area by Frege, Russell, Tarski, Quine, Wittgenstein, Austin, Grice, Kripke, Putnam, Davidson, and Evans. We will consider how these issues intersect in some of the central "problems" of philosophy of language, such as vagueness and language learning. In the final section of the course, we will explore more recent interdisciplinary work on the way that language evolved from the protolinguistic communication systems of non-human animals, including views such as that of Dorit Bar-On, Joëlle Proust, and Tecumseh Fitch.


PHIL 6358: Classics in the History of Ethics (Class #20818)

Prof. Phillips
MoWe 1:00PM - 2:30PM, Room: AH 7

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In this course we will read and discuss the most important ethical works of four central figures in the modern history of ethics: John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), G.E. Moore (1873-1958) and W.D. Ross (1877-1971). There will be three pieces of written work for the course: a take home midterm and a take home final, both consisting of two questions each requiring about 4-5 pages of writing, and a 7-8 page paper.


PHIL 6383: Ancient Philosophy (Class #19943)

Prof. Hattab
TuTh 1:00PM - 2:30PM, Room: MH 129

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In this course we will study the origins of Western Philosophy, beginning with the earliest surviving fragments of Ancient Greek philosophical texts by the Presocratic philosophers, dating back to the early sixth century BC.  The Presocratics were mostly concerned with explaining the origins and nature of the universe, and its parts.  Through our study of their theories you will become familiar with the branches of philosophy known as Metaphysics and Epistemology.  Metaphysical questions concern the nature of reality, which can include the nature of divine beings and the soul as well as physical beings. Epistemological questions concern the possibility, nature and extent of our knowledge of these beings.  In the second part of the course we will not only encounter a different kind of philosophical answer to these questions, but we will also encounter a different kind of philosophical question.  Socrates (469-399BC), and his student Plato (c.427-347BC), were not just interested in figuring out where things came from and what their ultimate natures were.  It is fair to say that they were more interested in figuring out what human beings should do in order to successfully live.  This involved posing and attempting to answer questions such as:  “What kind of life is a good life?”  “What is the good?”  “What is justice?” and “What kind of a state best promotes the good and just life?”  The first three questions fall under the branch of philosophy called Ethics, and the last two come under Political Philosophy.  In the third part of the course we will study the philosophy of Plato’s student, Aristotle (384-322BC).  Aristotle, who was arguably the most influential philosopher in the history of Western thought, addressed all these questions in a systematic manner and developed new areas of philosophical study such as Logic, History of Philosophy and Philosophy of Science.  Finally, we will conclude the course with one post-Aristotelian school of Philosophy.  Through Epictetus’ Handbook we will learn about the Stoic approach to the good life.


PHIL 6395: Moral Responsibility and the Emotions (Class #23696)

Prof. Sommers
Mo 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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This course examines the debate over free will and moral responsibility, focusing on the tradition that began with P.F. Strawson’s groundbreaking essay “Freedom and Resentment.” Strawson argued that metaphysical concerns about the threat of determinism were misguided, that they “overintellectualized the facts” about blame and praise.  He sought instead to ground our responsibility judgments in the natural human attitudes and practices expressed in our interpersonal relationships.  The framework of these attitudes and practices, according to Strawson, “neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justification.”  The paper launched a new literature and single-handedly shifted the emphasis of the philosophical debate from metaphysics to ethics.  We’ll examine Strawson’s ideas, his critics, and whether contemporary “Strawsonians” are staying faithful to the spirit of that remarkable essay.


PHIL 6395: Consciousness Debunked (Class #23970)

Prof. Weisberg
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: TBA

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This seminar will develop a debunking response to the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers 1996).  The hard problem claims that even if we knew all the functional and physical facts about a creature we’d still be unable to determine in principle if the creature is conscious.  The main line of support for this claim lies in the way consciousness appears to us from the first-person perspective.  A debunking claim challenges this line of evidence by providing an alternative explanation of how consciousness appears to us, one compatible with physicalism.             

In the seminar, we’ll first develop a clear statement of the hard problem and then sketch the general debunking approach, considering parallel arguments in moral theory and philosophy of religion.  Next, we’ll review a range of debunking-style claims in consciousness studies from Derk Pereboom, Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, and others.  Then we’ll introduce a novel version of the debunking approach, one that builds on previous views, but hopefully avoids their difficulties.  We’ll close by considering what empirical evidence might be relevant to establishing the debunking claim, looking at evidence from the psychology of expertise, automaticity, and confabulation, among others.

The seminar deals with contemporary issues in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, epistemology (particularly first-person knowledge), and in cognitive science.  Students will be required to write one seminar paper on a topic approved by the professor.


PHIL 6395: Aesthetics (Class #23971)

Prof. Mag Uidhir
Th 4:00PM - 7:00PM, Room: AH 512

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PHIL 6397: History of 20th Century Philosophy (Class #22354)

Prof. Morrison
MoWeFr 9:00AM - 10:00AM, Room: AH 302

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In this class we will explore the 20th century response to the diagnosis of nihilism that Nietzsche levels at Western Civilization at the end of the 19th century. We will read three thinkers – Camus, Adorno and Murdoch – who are very different in their concerns but who can be read in terms of their response to the challenge of nihilism. What are the possible solutions each offers and how do these solutions relate to each other? 


Spring 2016


PHIL 6334: Philosophy of Mind (Class #23314)

Prof. Weisberg
MoWe 1:00PM - 2:30PM, Room: SW 219

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6356: Feminist Philosophy (Class #23437)

Dr. Luttrell
MoWeFr 11:00AM - 12:00PM, Room: AH 202

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This course is advanced survey of feminist philosophy, in terms of its intellectual and political history, as well as its current debates. The goal of this course is two-fold: first, an acquaintance with the evolution and debates of historical feminist theory, and second, a critical engagement with some of the central and current concerns of the field. We approach our topics from the perspective of intersectionality, and topics covered include: the role of women in the history of philosophy; liberal and radical feminisms; accounts of the body and problems of essentialism; women, war and peace; transnational feminisms; masculinities. Students will be encouraged to connect their own research and activism interests to issues in feminist philosophy. Given that this is an advanced-level class in philosophy, the pace will be quick and the reading will be plenty. You are expected to read the material assigned for the day and to actively participate in all of the discussions, and, in the end, produce a well-formed research paper.


PHIL 6382: Medieval philosophy (Class #23435)

Prof. Hattab
TuTh 1:00PM - 2:30PM, Room: AH 512

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This course delves into the writings of influential Christian, Jewish and Islamic medieval philosophers on philosophical issues like the problem of evil, God’s existence, free will and moral responsibility, the nature and source of virtue, the basis of knowledge and the foundations of political authority. We will begin with St Augustine’s Confessions, and then read select works by St Anselm, St Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Tufayl, Al Ghazali, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Moses Maimonides, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Assignments include three philosophical essays, at least one group presentation and a debate.


PHIL 6386: History of 19th Century Philosophy (Class #20700)

Prof. Morrison
MoWeFr 9:00AM - 10:00AM, Location: L 212L

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In this class we will look at the religious, political, and moral thought of the 19th century through three very different windows: Kierkegaard's The Present Age, Mill's On Liberty, and Nietzsche's The Gay Science. How are the diverse perspectives presented in these books related? Is each thinker responding in his own way to a shared set of intellectual problems or do they even hold a sense of what the problems are in common?


PHIL 6387: History of American Philosophy (Class #23315)

Prof. Freeland
TuTh 11:30AM-1:00, Room: H 34

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No further information is available at this time.


PHIL 6395: Seminar in Philosophical Problems (Class #23309)

Prof. Coates
We 1:00PM - 4:00PM, Room:AH 512

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PHIL 6395: Logic and Ontology (Class #23310)

Prof. Garson
Tu 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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In analytic philosophy, doctrines on ontological matters have been strongly influenced by developments in formal logic. This seminar will begin with a historical introduction concerning the influence of predicate logic. It will include a survey of ontological themes in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Quine’s views about what there is. Then we will study Tarski’s theory of truth and some of its many-valued alternatives. Here ontological concerns will focus on time, and will include fatalism, the open future, and time’s passage. A third concern will be modal logic and especially possible world’s semantics. Possible topics of discussion include: the ontological status of possible worlds and possible objects, contingent and trans-world identity, and essentialism. Finally, we will study two-dimensional semantics and its application to arguments for dualism in the philosophy of mind. If we have time, we might even take a look at so called ontology as practiced in artificial intelligence research, and its dependence on the framework of predicate logic. After the first few weeks, students will play a role in determining the direction of the course.


PHIL 6396: The Problem of Universals (Class #23308)

Prof. Hattab
Mo 2:30PM - 5:30PM, Room: AH 512

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In this seminar we will trace the ways in which the problem of universals is addressed and transformed over the course of the history of philosophy. We will begin with the origins of the problem in key passages of Aristotle’s works and examine solutions to the problem developed by his most influential medieval commentators: Avicenna, St Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. We will then look at the ways in which these solutions were both criticized and developed by various early modern philosophers, such as Francisco Suarez, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza. We will conclude with some contemporary literature on the significance that their criticisms of Aristotelian universals have for current theories of universals.


PHIL 6397: Philosophy of Cognitive Science (Class #23311)

Prof. Buckner
TuTh 10:00AM - 11:30AM, Room: Room TBA

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  • Can robots have minds? Could my mind be downloaded to a computer?
  • Is my behavior caused by my beliefs and desires, or is it all just neural activity in my brain?
  • Do animals have thoughts? What kinds of experiments could we perform to find out?
  • Must cognitive science appeal to representations? How can we accurately map or represent the world around us?
  • How did intelligence evolve? What distinguishes rational life forms from non-rational ones?
  • What counts as a good explanation in cognitive science? Is the mind governed by general laws (like physical particles), chemical mechanisms (like biological life forms), or is intelligence something that inexplicably emerges out of the chaotic firing of billions of neurons?

Cognitive science attempts to answer these questions through the cooperation of psychology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, biology, and anthropology. In this course, we will review the philosophical and methodological foundations of cognitive science, especially regarding how findings from so many different sciences with different methods could fit together in a coherent way. We will discuss how cognitive science began as a response to behaviorism in psychology, and cover its attempts to answer these daunting questions with scientific rigor. In particular, we will see what the major paradigms in the history of cognitive science would say about these issues, including classical computationalism, connectionism, dynamicism, and the predictive coding approach. No philosophical background is required, but an introductory course in Logic, Psychology, or Computer Science is highly recommended.

Required Reading: Andy Clark, Mindware - An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science, 2nd edition