Instructor's Course Descriptions

to home pageInstructors' Course Descriptions for Spring 2013

The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Spring 2013 were submitted by the course instructors. Exceptions are descriptions in brackets {…}, which have been adopted from the Undergraduate Catalogue (students desiring further information regarding the specific content of courses with bracketed descriptions are advised to contact the instructors directly).

Specific information regarding the dates, times, and locations of these courses may be found in the Registrar’s official Schedule of Courses for Spring 2013.

If the instructor is designated as ‘Staff’, the actual instructor for the course has yet to be determined. If you are looking for a complete syllabus for a course, check the Syllabi area for availability.

Descriptions

PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy - Dr. Duncan

This course is a general introduction to philosophy. The class will be divided into four main sections.

Throughout our discussion of these various topics, we will have two main aims. The first is to come to understand some views that philosophers have had on these issues. The second is to develop your own relevant skills in such matters as careful reading, critical thinking, and clear writing.

Assessment will be by a combination of papers and exams. This course will count for 4,000 words of Gordon Rule writing requirement credit.

Assigned readings will be taken from Perry, Bratman, and Fischer (ed.), Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, sixth edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues - Dr. Westmoreland

An introduction to moral philosophy through selected contemporary issues such as abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering and the treatment of animals.

PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues - Mr. Claypool
PHH 3100 Ancient Greek Philosophy - Dr. Palmer

This course is designed to familiarize students with some of the main ideas of those thinkers who stand at the beginning of the western philosophical tradition. Although it concentrates on the three great philosopher of the Classical phase of Greek philosophy – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – some attention will also be given to their predecessors and successors in the Presocratic and Hellenistic phases. PHH 3100 is the first part of the Philosophy Department’s 3000-level history of philosophy sequence. Together with PHH 3400: Modern Philosophy, PHH 3100 aims to give students an understanding the major questions addressed, the range of answers offered, and the methods employed in the history of Western philosophy. PHH 3100 is required of all philosophy majors and meets an area requirement for the minor. It also counts towards the Humanities and International General Education requirements.

PHI 3130 Symbolic Logic - Dr. Ray

The course is designed to provide the student with a basic working knowledge of first-order logic and semantics, and familiarize him or her with some basic metalogical results. We will cover basic topics in elementary logic including: propositional, quantificational, identity, free, and modal logics, formal semantics, completeness. We will also formulate the philosophical underpinnings of our subject with special care.

PHM 3202 Political Philosophy - Dr. Ahlberg

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to contemporary thinking on a range of issues in political philosophy. In the first part of the course we will read John Rawls’ restatement of his very influential theory of justice as fairness, and proceed by looking at a series of alternative views: the capabilities approach, Libertarianism, communitarianism, and a liberal group rights approach. The course will conclude with some particular challenges to thinking about ideal justice, including the unique issues raised by gender, disability, and the family. Students can expect several short writing assignments throughout the semester, as well as two take-home essays and a final in-class exam. Participation in class discussion will be integral to students’ success in the class, and attendance will be required.

PHI 3300 Theory of Knowledge - Dr. Liu

This course is a standard treatment of the issues and arguments in epistemology. We discuss the traditional problems and attempted solutions as well as recent alternatives. The readings are from a selection of the classics in the field, some of which are historical but most of which are contemporary. The students are required to write two papers and take a take-home exam; and they are also expected to actively engage in class discussion. The class will be run in a seminar style; and so students should be well prepared (e.g. having carefully read and thought about the assigned readings) before going to each class.

PHH 3400 Modern Philosophy - Dr. Biro

This course will consist of a close reading and discussion of some central texts (or parts thereof) in modern philosophy. These are all included in the one required text: R. Cummins and David Owen (eds.), Central Readings in the History of Modern Philosophy (Wadsworth, second edition). There will be two examinations. In addition, you may write a paper; if you do, your course grade will be based on the best two of the three grades.

PHP 3786 Existentialism - Dr. Auxter

In this course we will examine the philosophical themes and concepts of existentialism in context – including historical, geographical, cultural, religious, social, and political contexts. The goal is to identify and evaluate contributions to philosophical debates about reality, knowledge, personal identity, sensibilities, consciousness, values, and commitment. We will read both classical and contemporary texts.

Topics:

Requirements:

There will be two essay tests written during the term and two essays written in a final examination. A 1000-word paper on a topic chosen by the student is due by the last class.

Texts:

PHI 3930 Medicine and Philosophy - Dr. D’Amico

This course provides an understanding of the concepts and practices of modern medicine as they relate to issues in philosophy of science as well as moral and political philosophy. The course will divide into two parts. First, it discusses the history of medicine as dealing with such theoretical concepts as causation, disease, and physiology. The second part will concern issues in bioethics and the central topic of whether access to medical care is a social good (thus problems in the justice and economics of health care distribution). The course will include some guest lectures on transplant surgery, the interpretation of medical test results, and critical care medicine. Readings will include, among others, selections from Lester King’s Medical Thinking: An Historical Introduction, Norman Daniels, Just Health Care, and A Bioethics Reader, edited by Peter Singer.

PHI 3930 Philosophy of Race - Dr. Westmoreland

This is a Special Topics class on the History of the Race Concept. Students will first examine the formulation and use of race as a “scientific” concept in philosophical discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Second, they will investigate roles played by concepts of race in philosophies that focus on “lived experience” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Figures to be studied include Voltaire, Kant, Darwin, Du Bois, Sartre, Fanon, and Alcoff.

PHI 4542 Philosophy of Space and Time - Dr. Liu

This course takes an in-depth, semi-historical approach to the issues concerning the nature of space, time, and space-time. We will read the excerpts, with commentaries, of such philosophers and scientists as Plato, Aristotle, Copernicus, Leibniz, Newton, and Einstein. We will discuss such famous debates on the nature of space and time as the Leibniz-Clarke debate over whether space and time are substances or relations. We then read mostly contemporary philosophical investigations of the nature of time, discussing such issues as whether time is real or illusory, what the relation is between time and change, etc. We will also explore the meaning of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, and their implications on our conceptions of space and time. The course will be run in a seminar style, with in-class discussions of the ideas and issues as the main components. Students will be assigned two papers as part of the requirements for the course, one short at the middle of the term, one long at the end, and a final take-home exam.

PHH 4644 Continental Philosophy - Dr D’Amico

This course is a critical study of how philosophy was transformed in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries thereby producing the current profile of the field. We will trace the background of Edmund Husserl’s turn to philosophy under the influence of Franz Brentano. We will then review Husserl’s efforts to propose a philosophical method and to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline. We will also read some selections from the movement of neo-Kantianism that ran parallel to Husserl but influenced philosophy more broadly in the areas of philosophy of science and philosophical logic. The second part of the course will then selectively read from the early work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as figures who tried to understand Husserl’s work in the wider context of philosophy and evaluate it as a method. There will be PDF files for all these authors as well as related articles on the course’s e-learning page. The main course texts are: Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytical Philosophy and Michael Freidman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger.

PHI 4930 Reasoning - Dr. Ray

Philosophy is especially concerned with bringing reason to bear on tough questions. Philosophical texts and discourse are rich in reasoned case-making in the form of argumentation and dialogic disputation. In this course, we will develop our skill in the identification and extraction of arguments from philosophical texts. This is primarily a skill-building class. We focus on practical techniques that help us understand, and will make central use of diagrammatic techniques for representing the structure of arguments. We will learn strategies for understanding challenging arguments and developing clear, defensible interpretations/criticisms of them. As a bonus, along the way, we will have considered and discussed many renown arguments in philosophy. Finally, we will turn things around and show how these very same techniques make writing a thesis-defense essay dramatically easy. (You will never look on a paper assignment the same way again!) We will also learn about different kinds of case-making and argument, and ways these may characteristically differ in different areas (e.g. law). The skills gained in this class will improve your own reasoning skills and critical discernment.

This course requires subscription to a web-based diagramming service (free to the student) for the duration of the course. There is no required textbook to purchase.

Note: This is not a course in logic and no training in logic is presupposed. The content of this course will be of value to every student – students of logic will learn a fundamental complementary skill.

PHI 4930 The Problem of Evil - Dr. Witmer

The problem of evil is one of the major topics in philosophy of religion. The problem, briefly, is that the existence of God -- understood as an all-powerful and perfectly good creator -- appears to conflict with the obvious fact that the world contains a great deal of evil. The problem is quite old; the ancient philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) is reputed to have said:

"Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?"

There is an enormous literature on the problem. This class will provide a systematic review of the problem, possible replies, and its relevance for assessing theistic or atheistic belief. Specific topics we will cover include traditional theodicies (e.g., appealing to justice and the need for punishment, the idea that evil is a mere privation, the appeal to free will, the importance of "soul building," necessary conditions on appreciating goodness), less familiar theodices (e.g., process theodicies, suffering as providing divine insight), the distinction between "logical" and "inductive" versions of the problem of evil, the "skeptical theist" response to the problem of evil, the relation of the problem to other evidential questions about theism, and general issues about morality and the epistemology of moral judgement. Requirements include frequent writing exercises as well as at least one substantial argumentative paper.