Subject Description
Philosophy

PHIL 325 | 19th-Century Philosophy

This course is an introduction to philosophical systems of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, J.S. Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Topics include the nature of history and historical change, the extent of human freedom, the relation between individuals and their cultures, the historical and psychological importance of religious, moral, and philosophical consciousness, and the nature of truth.

PHIL 323 | Kant

This course consists of a careful reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, designed to provide a thorough introduction to the epistemological aspect of Kant’s critical philosophy.

PHIL 240 | Formal Logic

Formal logic is the science of reasoning and argumentation. It uses mathematical structures to establish a formal language to express thoughts and evaluate the coherence of series of thoughts. Students learn about and work with two logical systems in this course: truth-functional logic and first-order logic.

PHIL 106 | Language, Knowledge, and Power

This course investigates the ways in which power relations--such as racism, sexism, and ableism--structure two significant areas of individual and collective behavior: language and knowledge. It shows the necessity of philosophizing in critical engagement with the world by connecting social phenomena with social scientific theories. It also shows philosophy’s strength in making fundamental inquiries and bridging academic disciplines by drawing on diverse types of empirical evidence.

PHIL 104 | Existentialism

Existentialism describes an influential set of views that gained prominence in Europe following World War II, stressing radical human freedom and possibility, as well as concomitant responsibility and anxiety, in a world bereft of transcendent significance. This course examines the nineteenth-century philosophical roots of such views, their leading twentieth-century philosophical and theological expression, and a few of their most compelling incarnations in literature.

PHIL 350 | Moral Psychology and Metaethics

This course is focused on the interconnection between value judgments and a scientific perspective on the world and human psychology. Drawing on philosophical work that connects to and draws implications from attempts to study human behavior scientifically, the course explores answers to questions like: What motivates ethical action -- is it emotions, reasoning, or something else? What is the connection between a person’s values and their behavior?

PHIL 340 | Philosophy of Cognitive Science

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.

PHIL 333 | Philosophy of Emotions

Anger, fear, joy, sadness, disgust, surprise, envy, pride, jealousy, love, grief -- without emotions our experience of the world would be flat and grey, void of the upheavals, accelerations, and turns that make the journey of life so exciting. But what are emotions? What kind of mental state are they? Are there universal emotions, or are all emotions culturally-relative? What does it mean to feel fear -- as opposed to think -- that something is scary? How can we know that someone is envious? Is disgust always bad? Can joy be inappropriate?