Our courses emphasize clear and cogent thinking about fundamental problems. They provide in-depth examinations of these problems—and their potential solutions—in the writings of great historical and contemporary philosophers. Whether you tangle with ethics, existentialism, logic, or metaphysics, you learn how to think about big issues and formulate your own ideas.
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What is the world really like? What are we? What is a person? Does God exist? Do we have free will? How can we know anything at all? These are perennial questions of philosophy, and P106 Introduction to Problems of Philosophy invites students to consider them carefully and systematically.
How should we act? What makes an act right or wrong? What makes a life good or bad? These questions have been at the heart of Philosophy for more than 2000 years.
Some reasoning is genuinely good: it makes it more likely that the conclusion is true. Some reasoning is not good at all. How can we tell which arguments are good ones? How can we improve our reasoning?
“Public philosophy” is philosophical work, written by philosophers, aimed at non-philosophers. The general idea is to take a topic with which people outside of philosophy are already concerned—say, propaganda—and use the critical skills one learns in philosophy to explore that topic, with an eye to participating in the ongoing public discussion.
Gender, sexuality, and race figure in all of our identities in one way or another. But what is gender? What is sexuality? What is race? Why do these categories matter so much? Should they?
What exactly do we mean when we talk about “the environment,” and what reasons are there to care about it? What obligations do human beings have regarding non-human animals, endangered species, and the natural environment? How might competing environmental interests be balanced, especially when they conflict with human economic interests?
Are there any moral constraints on business practices? Topics include the nature of loyalty, deception, coercion, and manipulation; the ethics of bluffing in the context of negotiation; whether certain kinds of advertising are unacceptably manipulative; issues concerning whistle-blowing; trade-offs between privacy and other values; the question of to whom businesses are responsible and what responsibilities they have.
Utilizing materials from the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics' annual Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl, students in this course will learn to develop and defend moral assessments of a wide range of case studies and topics in business and professional ethics, personal relationships, and social and political affairs. The course will involve a great deal of active debate.
Course offerings vary from semester to semester. The on-line course descriptions are intended to provide detailed information about the offerings of a given term.
Many of the sections of introductory courses, such as PHIL-P 106 Introduction to Problems of Philosophy, are topically subtitled, and students are well-advised to read the semester-specific course descriptions to find a section best suited to their interests. Course descriptions for the upcoming semester are usually available a few weeks before registration begins.
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