Philosophy

This course examines the fundamental presuppositions of every area of human life and inquiry. This course looks at philosophy by taking up questions about the nature of knowledge, the human mind and its relation to the body, the principles of right action and of a good life, and freedom and constraint in a just political order. It examines both contemporary and historically influential approaches.

This course examines influential theories of nature and the environment in philosophy and a range of interdisciplinary writings, from Aristotle to the present.  The course explores the following questions: Is there a connection between how nature has been conceived in philosophy and science and the current environmental crisis? Is the notion of nature still a meaningful term in the Anthropocene?  What is the difference between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’? How should humans understand their relationship to ‘nature’? These questions will be addressed from a range of perspectives, such as: Phenomenology, Critical Theory, German Romanticism, environmental ethics, Ecofeminism, contemporary thought and non-Western approaches. Drawing on these diverse traditions, the course examines possible alternatives for understanding the human-nature divide.

This course offers an introduction to the problems, concepts, and methods of logic. Topics include: the object of logic; truth and demonstration; basic concepts of set theory; syntax; semantics; interpretation; truth; formalization; logical truth; equivalence; consequence.

This course concentrates on a number of philosophical approaches that help us understand the relationship between media and technology and our lived experience. Media theory and whether specific technologies and media, like writing and print, provoke structural changes in patterns of thought, action and experience are discussed. The course also deals with the critical philosophies of technology in the Marxist tradition, the hermeneutic tradition and the feminist tradition as well as contemporary debates about ethics, labor, and the environment. These topics encourage us to think about how, to paraphrase the historian Melvin Kranzberg, media and technology are neither good nor bad nor are they neutral. A variety of different media and technical artifacts, including AI, health care technologies, books, social media, the alphabet, and education are considered. This course requires that students have completed an upper division course in the humanities as a prerequisite. Prior knowledge of philosophy is recommended.

This course continues the exploration of various moral theories, emphasizing approaches which are not part of standard introductions. 

After discussing contemporary utilitarianism, the course looks at ethical egoism and its standing in empirical research on, e.g., human evolution. Subsequently, the course discusses David Ross's idea of prima facie duties within ethical pluralism and Tom Scanlon's contractualism in which he expands John Rawls’ approach to morality as such. The course concludes with moral particularism and its denial that there are general moral principles. 

This course offers a reflection on science and acquires cross-disciplinary analytical skills. It addresses the notions of problematization, definition, and reasoning, notably through the reading of philosophical texts.
 

This course will guide students toward an understanding of the intellectual challenges and debates of gender in the discipline of philosophy. It will seek to explore how the assumptions of gender have shaped philosophical discourse, and how feminist thought has destabilised and reconfigured the parameters of debates in epistemology, ethics, and social and political philosophy.

This course will discuss temporal logic, deontic logic and epistemic logic. For temporal logic, apart from philosophical issues about time we will focus on the treatment of temporal aspects of natural language in formal linguistics. For deontic logic, we will especially focus on strategies for the solution of paradoxes related to the system of standard deontic logic. 
 

This course examines the philosophy OF film, the philosophy IN film, and philosophy AS film. The course includes film theory, philosophy in films as abstract ideas and arguments, and has a different film genre each week to review.

This course introduces the essential concepts and techniques of critical reasoning, formal propositional logic, and basic predicate logic. Among the central questions are these: what distinguishes an argument from a mere rhetorical ploy? What makes an argument a good one? How can we formally prove that a conclusion follows from some premises? In addressing these questions, students also cover topics such as argumentative fallacies, ambiguity, argument forms and analyses, induction versus deduction, counterexamples, truth-tables, truth-trees (tableaux), natural deduction, and quantification.