Teaching
Regularly Offered, PHI 102: Introduction to Philosophy
In this course, we learn about western philosophy by approaching some central questions of philosophy: What should count as philosophy and what is it for? What is knowledge and can I ever know anything? What counts as 'real' and how do I access it? What can I say about my mental experience of the world and are other things conscious in the same way? When, if ever, am I free to choose to act or believe? What makes a choice or action a reasonable or rational choice? What makes something good and what does that mean for my choices? What does it mean for my obligations to others and role in society? Through discussion of these problems we come to learn methods that philosophers employ, practice skills in philosophical inquiry, gain tools in precise and careful analysis, and think about the relationship between philosophy and other fields.
Regularly Offered, PHI 103: Think!
There are a few ways to think of this course and its content: as a course in "applied epistemology," or as a course designed to reflect on and develop "intellectual virtues," or as a course in "critical thinking" (although I am not a fan of this last option myself, because I don't think it means anything). To put things simply and without jargon, in this course we think about what we know, how we know it, and what methods we can use to better seek out knowledge in the future, i.e. how we can reason better. To approach these topics we focus on the practice of giving reasons for belief through arguments. Since arguments can vary so much with respect to purpose, rhetorical effectiveness, clarity, and language of expression (amongst other things), our approach is multiform: we will discuss psychological results that show where people tend to reason badly, the rights sorts of terms and languages for rigorously talking about arguments, precise theories for evaluating the strength of deductive and inductive arguments, a variety of applications of the theories we learn, and we will read some classic philosophical works along the way. Learning these skills requires regular practice in class and through homework exercises, in-class assignments, and some games and puzzles, so that one can apply them in all domains of life.
Alternating Falls, PHI 210: History of Ancient Philosophy
This course offers a survey of ancient Greek (and Roman) philosophy with the goals of (i) introducing students to central questions in ancient philosophy, (ii) connecting those questions to debates in philosophy that continue to be of interest today, and (iii) developing general philosophical skills, such as how to analyze philosophical texts, how to reconstruct arguments, and how to discuss and criticize arguments. We focus on a few major figures and schools of thought: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics and Skeptics (with Presocratics interspersed where appropriate and a brief look at Neoplatonism at the end). Topics range from questions in metaphysics and epistemology (What is the nature of reality? What are the most fundamental entities that make up the world? How do I even approach such questions?) to questions in ethics and political philosophy (What is the good? What is the best sort of life for a human to live? How should groups of humans be structured?) to questions about action and agency (How could I fail to act in accordance with what I think is best? In what sense can my will be said to be free?).
Alternating Springs, PHI 222: Philosophy of Games
The activity of playing games is a core aspect of human life. In many ways though, you might think such activities are frivolous: by their nature, games require arbitrary restrictions we place on our actions and choices for the sake of the enjoyment of the ensuing struggle. The goal of this course is to disillusion you of such an idea and equip you with the skills needed to analyze, discuss, and think deeply about games as aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical objects. As such, this course will introduce you to many of the tools that philosophers use and many classic philosophical problems as exemplified in the medium of games. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, we learn a set of analytic tools for addressing a range of questions: What are games? What are their unique features as aesthetic objects (vs, say, paintings)? What are games for and what is their value? What, if anything, do games express and how should we interpret them? In the second part, we explore how games (in particular, formal theories of games) can be used to approach classic philosophical problems like: What is the rational choice when my options are uncertain? Why do we have the ethical beliefs that we do? How did our language and ability to communicate develop? In the third and final part, we think about the reverse, namely, how the lens of philosophy can be used to approach and understand games. For example, we will think about questions like: Is it morally permissible to play games with gratuitous violence or racist/sexist representations? Are my choices in a game (and in life) free and my own? In what ways do players identify with characters in games and what matters for personhood and personal identity in general? In thinking through all these questions, students will gain skills in both philosophical analysis and thoughtful discussion of aesthetics objects.
Every Fall, PHI 250: Formal Logic
This course is designed as an introduction to the study of deductive reasoning from a formal perspective. It is composed of two intermixed parts: In the first, we develop theories that allow us to represent everyday arguments in a symbolic language and then evaluate whether the corresponding arguments are valid. This is the technical part of the course where you will learn new symbolic languages and associated syntactic and semantic analyses, along with a variety of interesting mathematical results about those languages, their uses, and their abilities. The second part of the course is more philosophical, and we will address questions like: what makes a formal language and rule system a good representation of valid arguments in natural language? Are there natural language arguments these formal systems fail to capture? Can we fix that? What are the uses and limitations of these formal systems? What alternatives are open? These sorts of questions will be in the background as we progress, and we will take some time each week to think about a particular philosophical aspect of the symbolic logic we are learning.
Every 3-4 years, PHI 353: Minds and Machines
The formal description is: a study of classic and recent work in the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. Topics include the relation between mind and body, the nature of consciousness, knowledge of other minds, neuroscience of free will, computational models of the mind, whether machines can have minds, and the limits of artificial intelligence. What this means is that we are interested in questions about the mind and how the mental arises out of things like us (the matter that makes up our brain?) and whether it might just as well have arisen in other sorts of things (the silicon and electricity of a computer?). Right now you are reading a syllabus, which involves a lot: your visual experience of the paper/screen, your language processing centers breaking down the symbols into words and meaningful sentences, your memory accessing your related experiences and connecting together what you are reading to your past experiences, and your reasoning in thinking about how you might answer these questions or plan out your future semester. What is the nature of all of these mental activities? Are they identical to physical brain states? Could we locate the precise neurons associated with those activities? In what ways is your brain state or experience about this syllabus? How do our minds represent things in the world at all? Your experience also has a feel or what philosophers call a phenomenal character – reading this syllabus is a very different experience from seeing the red of a pepperoni on a pizza or tasting the pizza itself. How can the brain give rise to this phenomenal character? Could a computer do all of these things too? ChatGPT might certainly say it knows what the red of a pepperoni looks like, but could it? What would it need to do so? These questions (among others) will be driving our seminar.
Every 3-4 years, PHI 404: Pragmatism, Democracy, and Education
Pragmatism, understood as a philosophical tradition starting in the 1870s and as a general approach to philosophical inquiry, stands as one of the most important American contributions to philosophy. It is perhaps best characterized by a commitment to (i) an anti-foundationalist and fallibilist model of inquiry and to (ii) the view that the meaning of a concept is determined by its practical consequences. In this seminar, we are especially interested in the application of these commitments to democracy and education in the pragmatist tradition. We start with a careful reading of the classical pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. In Peirce we find a model of inquiry/learning and a theory of meaning, in James we find an extension of this model of inquiry to questions about value and spirituality, and in Dewey we find a broadening of this model from the individual to a society and an application of it to the study of education and democracy. We then continue by looking at the work of contemporary inheritors of the tradition, which include Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Susan Haack, and Cheryl Misak, among others. This allows us to explore later developments of the position that apply pragmatic ideas in lots of different ways, from cultural critique to models of deliberative democracy and education’s role in the modern democracy. We will see how pragmatism has had a lasting effect on a variety of debates not only in philosophical methodology, but also in the philosophy of education and social and political philosophy.