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Undergraduate Courses Summer 2007

First Summer Session

V83.0085
Philosophy of Language
MTWR 11:30-1:05
Eliza Block

Second Summer Session

V83.0015
Minds and Machines
MTWR 6-7:35
Geoffrey Lee
This course will address some of the central questions in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, including: Is conscious experience a purely physical phenomenon? Is the human mind a kind of computer? What is thinking, and what kinds of things are the “concepts” that people use to think about the world? What is the relationship between those parts of your mind that you are aware of – your beliefs, desires and experiences, and the largely subconscious neural processing that lies beneath them? What kind of thing is “sub-personal knowledge”, such as the knowledge that explains your ability to speak and understand a language?
The core reading for the class will be “Philosophy of Mind and Cognition” by Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson.

V83.0017
Life and Death
MTWR 1:30-3:05
Colin Marshall
This course will focus on the metaphysics and ethics of death. We´ll begin with metaphysical questions: what exactly is death? Is it the only way that life can end, or only one of several options? Is it the sort of thing it is even rational for us to fear? Does the idea of survival after death make sense? Later in the course, (after a crash-course in ethical theory) we´ll move on to specific issues in ethics, including euthanasia, abortion and the question of the moral status of animals. No background in philosophy is required, but the discussion will be focused and rigorous.

V83.0021
History of Modern Philosophy
MTWR 1:30-3:05
David Barnett
The 17th and 18th centuries were a time of intellectual revolution, during which many of philosophy's "Big Questions" first took their present shape. In this course, we will survey some major works from this period, including those of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and Kant (and Spinoza and Berkeley if time permits). Emphasis will be on epistemological and metaphysical topics, such as the existence/nonexistence of God, the relationship between the human mind and the physical world, the possibility/impossibility of genuinely free choices in a world governed by the Laws of Nature, and the nature of and limitations to our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. Prior background in philosophy will be helpful but not essential.

V83.0040-002
Ethics
MTWR 3:30-5:05
Matthew Seligman
In this course, we will examine some of the fundamental questions in moral philosophy as addressed in both historical and contemporary texts. Readings will begin with major figures in the history of philosophy, including Plato, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Mill. We will then transition to contemporary analytic moral philosophy, including some of the most influential and important papers of the last century. Throughout the course, we will focus on the interplay between substantive moral philosophy and metaethics. Particular attention will be paid to the question: why should I be moral?

V83.0070-002
Logic
MTWR 6:00-7:35
Matt Kotzen
Introduces the techniques, results, and philosophical import of 20th century formal logic. Principal concepts include those of sentence, set, interpretation, validity, consistency, consequence, tautology, derivation, and completeness.

V83.0076
Belief, Truth and Knowledge
MTWR 3:30-5:05
Karl Schafer
PLEASE NOTE: This course will meet in the seminar room on the second floor of the Philosophy Department, 5 Washington Place. It will not meet in 707 Silver, contrary to Albert.
Skepticism, in its various forms, challenges whether we can achieve knowledge of the world around us. Most of us assume that we can sometimes know lot about the world. But the skeptic holds that our knowledge of the world does not extend very far beyond our own subjective experience of things. In other words, the most we can know, according to the skeptic, is that things appear to us to be a certain way - not that they really are as they appear.
In this course, we will consider various arguments in favor of skepticism about the external world, the past, and other topics. Then we will evaluate various possible responses to these arguments. In doing so, we will also consider a variety of topics relating to the nature of knowledge and justification for belief, including whether it is possible for two people to reasonably disagree about some topic (say, whether God exists) while having access to all the same information.

V83.0080
Philosophy of Mind
MTWR 11:30-1:05
Jonathan Simon
This will be an introductory course in the philosophy of mind. What is it to have conscious experience, to be self-aware, or to have thoughts about and perceptions of the world around us? Do our mental lives have any causal impact on the physical world? Are there different kinds of consciousness? Do androids dream of electric sheep? ­ We will investigate whether these questions can be answered and explained in terms of the physical and computational architecture of our brains, or if we must say that there are irreducibly mental properties, states or souls. We will consider dualism, idealism, and materialism; inverted spectrum scenarios, zombie worlds, the “Mary” argument, mental causation, etc. No prerequisites, though familiarity with the general methods and concepts of contemporary analytic philosophy will come in handy.