This course examines ethical issues related to the implementation of artificially intelligent systems in medicine and healthcare from a philosophical perspective. Topics include (but are not limited to): algorithmic biases in medical diagnoses and healthcare decisions; the impact of AI on the ability to foster trust and respect patient autonomy; disagreements between clinicians and AI decision-support systems; and the implementation of empathic or empathy-simulating AI in healthcare.

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.

This course is a survey of some of the central issues in contemporary metaphysics, the area of philosophy devoted to understanding the fundamental level of reality. Topics of the course may include existence and nonexistence, identity, personal identity, possibility and necessity, time and persistence, realism and antirealism, and free will. Featured philosophers may include W.V.O. Quine, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Derek Parfit.