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Undergraduate Courses Summer 2011

First Session

This course will be divided into two broad sections, the first concerning the metaphysics of life and death, and the second concerning some normative and applied ethical issues surrounding life and death. As for the metaphysics, we’ll begin by exploring what exactly life and death might be. What does it take to be alive? What does it take for a person to persist through time? Is some sort of afterlife possible? If so, what might that consist in? Turning to the ethical issues, we’ll ask about what matters in survival, what makes someone’s life go best, and whether there is an appropriate attitude to hold toward the inevitable prospect of death. Would immortality be desirable? Finally, we’ll turn to certain real world issues. Is euthanasia ever permissible? How about capital punishment? What sort of duties to we owe to the living? The dead? The Unborn? To non-human life?

Readings will be drawn from the following texts, possibly along with supplementary readings to be downloaded from the internet:

John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality
John Martin Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of Death,
Andrew Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics

Examination of the major figures and movements in Greek Philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle.

Introduces problems raised by the nature of art, artworks, and aesthetic judgment. Topics include the expressive and representational properties of artworks, aesthetic attention, and appreciation; and the creation, interpretation, and criticism of artworks. Readings from classical and contemporary sources.

The fundamental question of logic is: what differentiates good reasoning from bad? A closely related question is: how can we ensure our reasoning is good? In this course, we'll develop a set of tools to help answer these questions. Our toolkit will consist of two formal languages, sentential logic and predicate logic. We'll learn how to formally translate sentences of English, to construct rigorous arguments, and to assess the validity of formal reasoning. Through our study of these languages, we'll come to appreciate the subtlety and ambiguity--even unclarity--of our own language, and we'll get an up- close look at the relationship between language and reality.

The course website is: http://logic.mglazier.net/

Second Session

This course will serve as an introduction to some of the central questions of philosophy -- questions such as: What makes an action morally right or wrong? Is there a God? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? How can we attain knowledge of the world beyond our own minds? Do we have free-will, or are our actions pre-determined? What is the Good life? We will examine both classical and contemporary philosophers' perspectives on these issues, with a focus on developing the tools required to construct and analyze philosophical arguments, and to think clearly and creatively about philosophical questions.

An intensive introduction to the discipline of philosophy, by way of study of conceptual issues in cognitive science, focusing on the conflict between computational and biological approaches to the mind. Topics covered include whether a machine could think, the reduction of the mind to the brain, connectionism and neural nets, mental representation, and whether consciousness can be explained materialistically.

Examination of the major figures and movements in philosophy in Europe from the 17th to the early 19th century, including some of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

This course is an introduction to philosophical ethics. We will primarily study the three major traditional approaches to ethical theory, namely, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology, reading classical works that are most representative of these views (works of Mill, Aristotle, and Kant, respectively). Then, we will turn to Levinas’ works for a more contemporary take on ethics, which is radically different from the former three.

Examines moral issues in medical practice and research. Topics include euthanasia and quality of life; deception, hope, and paternalism; malpractice and unpredictability; patient rights, virtues, and vices; animal, fetal, and clinical research; criteria for rationing medical care; ethical principles, professional codes, and case analysis (for example, Quinlan, Willowbrook, Baby Jane Doe).

Examines the nature of law, its relations to morality, and its limits. Topics: positivism and natural law theory, theories of criminal justice and punishment; concepts of liberty, responsibility, and rights. Considers the views of such thinkers as Austin, Bentham, Dworkin, Fuller, Hart, Rawls, and others.

An introduction to the basic techniques of sentential and predicate logic. Students learn how to put arguments from ordinary language into symbols, how to construct derivations within a formal system, and how to ascertain validity using truth tables or models.

This course will be a survey of central issues in epistemology. We will begin with some seemingly mundane observations about the nature of inquiry—namely, that in seeking answers to questions (e.g. How should I spend my summer? Who’s going to win the World Series? What’s the square root of 49?), we often take ourselves to know the answers, or have rational opinions, or have good evidence for our beliefs. These observations raise important questions, such as: What is it to know something? What is required to be rational? What is it to have good evidence, or reasons? And these questions lead to others, such as: Is it possible for two people with the same information to reasonably disagree? Can we really know things about the world around us, beyond how it appears? Is there anything we can be certain about, and if so, how? This course will address these questions (among others) and examine various answers to them.

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? 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, mental states or souls. We will consider dualism, idealism, and materialism; inverted spectrum scenarios, zombie worlds, the “Mary” argument, mental causation, etc.