PHIL

In this course students first read about the experience of disabled people and the history of the disability rights movement in the US, and how the approach to disability has evolved through time. Then, students devote some time thinking about the nature of disability; two families of approaches to disability are discussed (the biomedical model and the social model) with particular attention to philosophical accounts. The course transitions toward more applied questions, such as: What is the relation between disability and well-being? Is disability intrinsically bad?

This course provides students with a unique opportunity to practice applying ethical theories to controversial ethical problems. An Ethics Bowl is a collaborative yet competitive event in which teams analyze a series of wide-ranging ethical dilemmas. Throughout the semester, students research and discuss case studies dealing with complex ethical issues in a number of practical contexts and possibly compete in an Ethics Bowl. Cases concern ethical problems on wide ranging topics, such as personal relationships (e.g. dating, friendship), professional ethics (e.g.

This scheduled weekly interdisciplinary seminar provides the context to reflect on concrete experiences at an off-campus internship site and to link these experiences to academic study relating to the political, psychological, social, economic and intellectual forces that shape our views on work and its meaning. The aim is to integrate study in the liberal arts with issues and themes surrounding the pursuit of a creative, productive, and satisfying professional life. Students receive 1.0 unit of academic credit for the academic work that augments their concurrent internship fieldwork.

This course invites students to go beyond the traditional classroom, and bring the ideas and practices of academic philosophy to a public audience. For example, Students may coorganize an undergraduate conference, in which they peer review submission from students across the country, construct a conference program, and provide commentaries on presentations. Or, students may coach ethics bowl, which is a competition aimed at solving ethical dilemmas, to local high school students on a weekly basis.

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

Independent study is available to those students who wish to continue their learning in an area after completing the regularly offered courses in that area.

Conducted as an advanced seminar, the course addresses topics from value theory, understood to include ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of religion. Each student writes and presents a substantial seminar paper related to the course. Representative course topics include sources of normativity, virtues of character and moral rules, personal identity and moral responsibility, objectivity and moral relativism, the role of reason in ethics, critical theory, ethics and psychoanalysis, and religious commitment and civil liberties.

Conducted as an advanced seminar, the course addresses topics from metaphysics and epistemology, understood to include the philosophy of mind. Each student writes and presents a substantial seminar paper related to the course. Representative course topics include human freedom and the causal order, conceivability and possibility, number and other abstractions, the infinite, a priori knowledge, relativism and truth, knowledge of the self, intentionality, mental causation, and the nature of consciousness.

Conducted as an advanced seminar, the course addresses topics from the history of philosophy, typically concentrating on a major philosopher or philosophical movement. Each student writes and presents a substantial seminar paper related to the course. Representative course topics include Plato, the Stoics, Ancient and Modern Skepticism, Aquinas, Rationalism, Hume, Idealism, Nietzsche, the Pragmatists, and Russell and Wittgenstein.

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind, which involves the cooperation of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and more. This course reviews the foundational methodological questions of cognitive science from a philosophical perspective. To do so, the course offers a historical overview of the development of cognitive science, from classical representationalist responses to behaviorism to contemporary anti-representationalist approaches--with a special focus on embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (4E) cognition.