2022-2023 Course List

Structure and logic of religious belief. Problems such as the existence of God, evil, immortality, miracles, and religious language.

This course will undertake a close reading and study of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and other texts.

A study of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Theories of meaning, speech acts and semantics, relation of language to the world.

Theories of knowledge and justification, skeptical attacks on the possibility of knowledge, and anti-skeptical defenses.

An investigation of the most fundamental concepts of reality, including the nature of things, identity over time, modality, causation, free will, space and time, and universals and particulars.

Major philosophers and philosophies of the late 20th Century.

Discussion of philosophical issues in law by way of connecting legal problems to well-developed and traditional problems in philosophy, e.g., in ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology, and investigates the philosophical underpinnings of the development of law. The course takes an analytical approach to law (as opposed to historical sociological, political, or legalistic approaches) and devotes a substantial part of the semester to a major work on law written by a philosopher.

Intensive study of a single philosopher or topic.

In-depth analysis of major European existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre.

Aesthetic principles, theories, and the creative process. Theories of visual arts, music, literature, dance, etc.

This course investigates some of the central philosophical issues in our thinking about film, including questions about narrative, ontology, ethical criticism of film, the role of artistic intentions in interpretation, artistic medium, and the art/entertainment distinction.

The nature of consciousness, mind and body relations, freedom of action.

This course examines the conceptual and philosophical complexities of efforts to understand the mind in science. Topics include the difference and similarities between humans and other animals, the nature of psychological explanation, and reductive strategies for explaining consciousness, intentionality and language. Fall

Cognitive and epistemic issues surrounding sensory perception, including the nature of perception, its immediate objects, and its ability to deliver knowledge of the world.

Philosophical issues concerning the mental lives of non-human animals, with emphasis on consciousness, rationality, language, and implications for non-human animal ethics.

Nature of explanations, causality, theoretical entities, and selected problems.

This course examines conceptual and philosophical issues in biology, the nature and scope of biological explanation and conflicts between evolutionary and religious explanations for the origin of life.

Examines the nature and methods of alternative strategies of theory construction in the social sciences and the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions and implications of such strategies. For example can people, their behavior and norms of rationality be understood in naturalistic terms or must they be understood only in culturally local terms.

Special event of less than semester duration.

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Restricted to Philosophy Honors students. Permission of department and instructor required.

Restricted to Philosophy Honors students. Permission of department and instructor required.

Prerequisites:

PHIL 495

Restricted to Cognitive Science Majors in their final year.

Individual study of a philosopher or problem.