Search for Spring 2024 courses on Albert.
PHIL-UA 1; Central Problems in Philosophy; M/W 9:30-10:45am; Zachary Goodsell
An introduction to philosophy through the study of selected central problems. Topics may include: free will; the existence of God; skepticism and knowledge; the mind-body problem.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
*This course fulfills the philosophy introductory course requirement, only. If you have already taken an introductory course, it will not count toward the major or minor.
PHIL-UA 5; Minds and Machines; T/R 12:30-1:45pm; Tyler Brooke-Wilson
What is a mind? Can machines have minds? How would we know? This class approaches these central questions in the philosophy of mind drawing on readings in philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and AI.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
*This course fulfills the philosophy introductory course requirement, only. If you have already taken an introductory course, it will not count toward the major or minor.
PHIL-UA 6; Global Ethics; M/W 3:30-4:45pm; K. Anthony Appiah
This course aims to accomplish two things. The first is to introduce three broad traditions of normative thinking about social issues from around the globe: a Confucian tradition, one based in Islamic legal traditions, and one derived from European liberalism. The second is to address three current areas of normative debate: about global economic inequality, about gender justice and human rights. We shall explore these first-order questions against the background of the three broad traditions. Our aim will be to understand some of the differences of approach that shape the global conversation about these issues that concern people around the world.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
*This course fulfills the philosophy introductory course requirement, only. If you have already taken an introductory course, it will not count toward the major or minor.
PHIL-UA 21; Early Modern European Philosophy; T/R 11:00am-12:15pm; Anja Jauernig
This course offers an introduction to modern philosophy and central philosophical problems addressed in the modern period (late 16th to 18th century). The course will focus on topics in metaphysics and epistemology. These topics include the nature and relation of mind and body, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the existence of the external world, causation, the scope and limits of knowledge, the existence of God, and the apparent conflict between freedom and determinism. We will be studying selections from the works of the following philosophers: Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, Baruch Spinoza, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, Anne Conway, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Mary Shepherd, Johann Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant.
Readings: Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources, edited by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, third edition, Hackett (2019)
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 40; Ethics; M/W 3:30-4:45pm; Sanford Diehl
This course is an introduction to central texts and topics in moral philosophy. We will spend the first half of the term studying major works from the history of the subject and the second half on contemporary work. Questions we will consider include: What is morality? What is the best kind of life? What role does morality play in the best kind of life? What is the relationship between philosophical reflection about morality and common sense? We will pay special attention to questions about the point of ethical theory and about the points of view it should incorporate or express.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 60; Aesthetics; T/R 3:30-4:45pm; Rob Hopkins
This course provides a guide to some of the main issues in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The issues fall into three main groups. First, what is art, and why does it matter? Does art offer us knowledge of a distinctive kind? Does it give voice to feelings and aspects of our lives we cannot articulate by other means? Does it reshape the way we see the world? More generally, does it offer a realm of value that is autonomous, or is the beautiful an aspect of the good or the true? Second, how do we engage with art? What is the role in that engagement for emotion, imagination, reason or experience? What role is there for knowledge or expertise, given that it is tempting to think judgements about art should be based on our own experience? Third, what is the nature and significance of certain of art’s key features, such as intention and meaning; matter, medium and technique; representation and expression; form and content; beauty and sublimity; style, genre and tradition?
We’ll look at a range of literature, much of it contemporary, some classic (e.g. Kant, Collingwood, Langer and Goodman). Some of our discussion will apply to art per se, some will be limited to individual arts. And not everything we discuss will be art – some of the questions, and some of the possible sources of art’s value, have close parallels in things that are not art, or, at the limit, not even artificial.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 70-001; Logic; M/W 11:00am-12:15pm; Caroline Bowman
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.
PHIL-UA 70-002; Logic; M/W 2:00-3:15pm; Caroline Bowman
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.
PHIL-UA 70-003; Logic; T/R 9:30-10:45am; Vishnya Maudlin
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.
PHIL-UA 78; Metaphysics; T/R 9:30-10:45am; Zachary Goodsell
Discusses general questions concerning the nature of reality and truth. What kind of things exist? Are there minds or material bodies? Is change illusory? Are human actions free or causally determined? What is a person, and what, if anything, makes someone one and the same person?
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 80; Philosophy of Mind; T/R 2:00-3:15pm; Ned Block
This course examines the question of whether AI can be sentient or sapient through the lense of the conflict between computational and biological approaches to the mind. The first half of the course will focus on sapience, i.e. machine intelligence and thought, and the second half will be on sentience, i.e. what it is like to perceive and think. The approach to sapience will start with classic issues in the philosophy of AI, the Turing Test, the blockhead, Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and functional role semantics as the answer to Searle. The functional role semantics point of view will be applied to ChatGPT, Dalle-3 and other large language models. The second half of the course on sentience will consider the inverted spectrum hypothesis, whether there is more informational capacity in consciousness than in cognition, higher order theories of consciousness and phenomenal consciousness vs access consciousness.
We will ask whether computational and biological approaches are complementary or whether they conflict; that is, whether the mind is fundamentally computational or whether it is fundamentally neural or whether it can be fundamentally both.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 85; Philosophy of Language; M/W 11:00am-12:15pm; Paul Horwich
“Socrates was poisoned.” By making those marks on a piece of paper or by mouthing the corresponding vocal noises we can make a claim about someone who lived in the distant past. How is that possible? How do our words come to mean what they do? How do they manage to pick out or latch onto particular portions of reality, even ones with which we’ve never had any contact? How does language enable us to convey thoughts – some of them true -- about everything from black holes, to the hopes of a friend, to properties of prime numbers? For that matter, what is meaning? What is truth? And what is thinking? This course will explore these and other philosophical questions about language through a reading of seminal works by 20th-century thinkers, including Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, and Chomsky.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: Logic (PHIL-UA 70) and one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 90; Philosophy of Science; T/R 3:30-4:45pm; Pablo Zendejas Medina
We will consider a wide range of questions about the method, subject matters, and organization of science, with examples and case studies primarily from the natural sciences but also from social science. Central questions will include: is there a "scientific method", and if so what is it? What claims do theories and models in science make about the world? What are scientific laws, and what role do they play in the explanations that scientists give? How are scientific communities organized, and how should they be?
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 93; Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science; M/W 9:30-10:45am; Michael Strevens
We will discuss the relevance of recent discoveries about the mind to philosophical questions about metaphysics and ethics. The questions include: What is causation? Is there a right way to “carve up” the world into categories? Why do we see the world as consisting of objects in places? Is there such a thing as objective right and wrong? Is there such a thing as free will?
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 103; Topics in Metaphysics & Epistemology; W 2:00-4:30pm; Peter Unger
Though there will be many shorter selections read and discussed, as well, this course will be primarily concerned with what’s presented in Professor Unger’s most recent book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy. This book discloses how terribly little has ever been accomplished in the core of academic philosophy – in metaphysics, and in the most metaphysical parts of, or aspects of, epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. What’s more, it exposes how terribly little has been even attempted on that most central philosophical front in the last half-century, or more. For philosophical sophisticates, this will seem shocking: Most academic philosophers are under the impression that, with the work of such brilliant thinkers as Saul Kripke, David Lewis and Hilary Putnam, mainstream philosophy has made some real contributions to our understanding of how things are, in certain quite deep and general respects, with concrete reality - with the likes of water and gold, and tables and chairs, and sentient beings, too. But, as Empty Ideas explains, that’s all just an illusion, pretty easily recognized as such, when, as the book tries to make happen, philosophical sophisticates are awakened from their dogmatic slumbers. As Professor Unger greatly hopes, you will greatly enjoy being awakened from any and all of your own dogmatic slumbers, whatever yours may be.
Prerequisite: Epistemology (PHIL-UA 76), Metaphysics (PHIL-UA 78), or Philosophy of Science (PHIL-UA 90). May be repeated once for credit as topics change.
PHIL-UA 104-001; Topics in Language and Mind; R 11:00am-1:30pm; Paul Horwich
This course will address a series of problems relating to our concepts of truth and meaning. Can “true’ be defined? If it can, then how? If it can’t, what engenders its meaning? Ought we wish for our beliefs to be true? If yes, then for what reason? Is “true” itself a term of evaluation? Are all truths absolute, or are some merely relative? Can we even make sense of “relative truth”? What sort of thing, or property, is the meaning of a word? Are there objective facts as to what words mean? Should we explain meaning in terms of truth – or is it the other way around?
Prerequisite: Logic (PHIL-UA 70) and either Philosophy of Mind (PHIL-UA 80) or Philosophy of Language (PHIL-UA 85). May be repeated once for credit as topics change.
PHIL-UA 104; Topics in Language and Mind; T 4:55-7:25pm; Matthew Moss
This course will focus on recent work in the philosophy of language. Topics covered may include: vagueness; modality; tense; and the semantics of proper names and descriptions.
Prerequisite: Logic (PHIL-UA 70) and either Philosophy of Mind (PHIL-UA 80) or Philosophy of Language (PHIL-UA 85). May be repeated once for credit as topics change.
PHIL-UA 201; Junior Honors Proseminar; T 11:00am-1:00pm; Cian Dorr
To be taken by honors program students in the spring of their junior year.
In the first part of the semester, students study a variety of potential topics for honors theses, as determined in part by the interests of those enrolled. (Some possibilities:-- “”What is truth?”; “Are there absolute facts as to what we do is, or is not, morally right?”; “How can something not merely exist, but necessarily exist?; “Are experiences nothing but states of the brain?”)
Later in the semester, students present and discuss their own original work, leading toward the development of a detailed and substantial honors thesis prospectus.
Each student must submit a thesis prospectus at the end of the semester. Its approval by the course instructor and a prospective faculty advisor is required to pass the course.
Prerequisite: Admission to the Junior Honors Proseminar is by application to the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Criteria:
- Minimum 3.65 GPA in the philosophy major and overall
- At least five courses in philosophy, including at least two straight As in philosophy courses above intro level not including Logic UA-70
- A writing sample: a paper written for a class, with the instructor’s grade and comments
- A list of the professors and TAs who have taught your courses.
For current juniors, applications are due to the DUS by end of day Monday October 30th for Spring 2024 enrollment.
PHIL-UA 301, 302; Independent Study
Prerequisites: approval of a faculty supervisor, as well as the approval of either the department chair or the director of undergraduate studies. Available only for study of subjects not covered in regularly offered courses. 2 or 4 points per term. This course may be used in connection with an internship or practical training, but must also include substantial philosophical reading and writing. Only one Independent Study in connection with an internship may count toward the program requirements.