Summer 2019 Albert Course Search HERE.
Please note: No prerequisites are required for any summer courses.
FIRST SUMMER SESSION:
PHIL-UA 5; Minds and Machines; MTWR 1:30-3:05; Jennifer Judge
Are minds physical, and could a computer have one? If you separated your brain and body while keeping the connections between them live, where would you end up? Might we be living in a simulation—and if we were, would everything we think we know about the world be wrong? And if you had the option of digitally facilitated immortality, should you take it? These are the issues that we will be exploring in this course, reading some classic papers in contemporary philosophy of mind along the way.
PHIL-UA 32; From Hegel to Nietzsche; MTWR 3:30-5:05; Daniel Brinkerhoff Young
An introduction to central European social and political philosophy of the 19th century. This course focuses on the legacy of G. W. F. Hegel's reflections on what makes a society rational and free; that is, what makes a society capable of fulfilling the deepest needs of human beings. Hegel began with a series of questions about the relationship between the individual and society. For example, if the human being's nature is to be free and self-determining, how can they be reconciled to a society of other free beings? Does society limit this freedom, or is it actually the source of this freedom? How can we overcome the alienation of modern life, which seems to break up humanity's natural relationships to the world and to others? This course will trace this line of thought from Hegel, to the radical social critics of the Left Hegelian school that followed him (especially Ludwig Feuerbach), and then to its development in the critique of capitalism found in Karl Marx. The course will conclude by considering how other post-Hegelians like S. A. Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche analyzed the relationship between human freedom, history, and society.
PHIL-UA 45; Political Philosophy; MTWR 11:30-1:05; Daniel Sharp
Examines fundamental issues concerning the justification of political institutions. Topics may include democratic theory, political obligation and liberty, criteria of a just society, human rights, and civil disobedience.
SECOND SUMMER SESSION:
PHIL-UA 3; Ethics and Society; MTWR 11:30-1:05; Annette Martin
This course will offer a philosophical exploration of racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. We will consider various views on how to understand different kinds of social inequality, asking, for instance: Is racism a matter of individuals’ deeply held beliefs and feelings? Is implicit bias the key to explaining gender inequality? We will then delve more deeply into views that take these phenomena to be primarily structural phenomena, and consider such questions as: What are social structures? What does it mean to say that racism is "institutional"? And if social inequality is largely a matter of social structures, then who or what is responsible for these injustices?
PHIL-UA 70; Logic; MTWR 3:30-5:05; Iliana Gioulatou
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 76; Epistemology; MTWR 1:30-3:05 Ben Holguin
Considers questions such as the following: Can I have knowledge of anything outside my own mind—for example, physical objects or other minds? Or is the skeptic’s attack on my commonplace claims to know unanswerable? What is knowledge, and how does it differ from belief?