This course covers a range of philosophic problems centering on issues of personhood and rational agency. Readings are drawn from both classic and contemporary sources and address such topics as freedom of the will, personal identity, knowledge of the self, weakness of will and self-deception.
Aesthetics This course is a critical examination of the problems that arise in trying to understand the creation, nature, interpretation, evaluation, and appreciation of works of art. Art is viewed in its relation to other aspects of culture such as morality, economics, and ecology. A variety of classical and contemporary perspectives are examined.
This course surveys some of the fundamental philosophical questions that arise from the performing arts in general, and cinema in particular. What is a film? What does it have in common and how does it differ from other performing arts? How do these in turn differ from the other arts? What challenges do they pose to the traditional understanding of art? How do cinema and television differ?
Philosophers have long regarded language as the essential intermediary between thought and the world. Accordingly, this course studies philosophically important theories about language and more general philosophical conclusions drawn from considerations about language. Central topics concern meaning, reference, inference, existence, and truth. In addition to discursive language, some attention is devoted to systems of notation and of pictorial representation.
Epistemology, otherwise known as the theory of knowledge, addresses issues about the nature of knowledge, justification, and truth, issues that arise from questions such as "How do you know?" and "Can you be sure?" It has been an especially lively area of philosophy in English in recent decades; many currents in the humanities appeal to epistemological notions - such currents as post-modernism, relativism, social constructionism, feminism, and situated knowing. This course answers both developments.
This seminar examines the metaphysical and epistemological theories of the British Empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through close readings of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Berkeley's The Principles of Human Knowledge, and Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature. It considers such issues as realism, idealism and skepticism, the nature and scope of scientific knowledge, the nature of the self and self-knowledge, and personal identity.
This course introduces students to philosophy from Latin America -- broadly construed to include Indigenous philosophy -- and to Latinx philosophy in the United States.
This course consists of a philosophical examination of science. The course examines attempts to describe what is distinctive about science, including views concerning scientific methodology. The course also examines the character of scientific change, asking how one should understand the history of science. This examination leads to a discussion of the nature of scientific knowledge, including whether scientific entities should be considered real and what role values play in the development of science. Issues that arise from particular sciences also may be discussed.
European philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries struggled to make sense of ordinary perceptual experience in light of the emerging mathematical physics that culminated in Newton. This new physics presented a picture of the world according to which things in space and time are not as they appear to the senses, and thus overturned the Aristotelian world-view endorsed by the Church since the Middle Ages. The philosophical issues of this period concern the nature of knowledge of the world and how it is acquired.
This course is a moderately comprehensive and systematic treatment of Aristotle, including method, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and politics. It considers Aristotle's criticism of Plato's theory of forms and his own views about what is real, the relation of form and matter, the nature of the soul, the highest human good, and the relation of the individual and the community.