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PHIL5100 Proseminar in Values
Professor Fileva
SEC 001 LIBR M498 T 5:00P-7:30P
Restricted to first-year Philosophy grad students only. Counts toward Values requirement for MA and PhD students.

PHIL5150 Topics in Applied Ethics: Consumer Ethics
Professor Boonin
SEC 001 CASE E313 TR 11:00A-12:15P
Counts toward Values requirement for MA and PhD students.

This course will discuss a variety of questions about the ethics of consumer boycotts and principled divestment. We’ll start by drawing some distinctions to develop a typology of boycotts. These will include distinctions about the reasons for boycotting (e.g., that a good is produced unethically, that it’s produced by a producer that does (or expresses support for) something else that’s unethical, that it’s produced in a state or country whose government does something unethical), the nature of the goods being boycotted (e.g., purchases that give the buyer exclusive ownership of a good, like a piece of chicken, and those that give the buyer non-exclusive access to something, like a ticket to a cockfight), and a distinction between boycotting in the sense of refusing to buy certain products and boycotting in the sense of not only refusing to buy them, but refusing to use them even if they’re available for free.

With these distinctions in mind, we’ll take a critical look at the arguments some philosophers have offered to try to show that boycotts in general, or certain kinds of boycotts, are typically unethical. These include arguments for the claim that boycotts, or certain kinds of boycotts, are objectionably harmful, coercive, corrupting, unfair, or undemocratic. We’ll then move on and assume for the sake of the argument that boycotts are generally permissible and critically evaluate a variety of responses that philosophers have offered to the central challenge of trying to show that boycotts can be not just permissible, but morally good or obligatory. The challenge is that in a large and complex market economy, it can seem reasonable to suppose that an individual’s choice not to buy a certain good will have no effect on the number of such goods that are produced or on how they’re produced and unclear why it would be morally good or obligatory for them to boycott the good if that’s true. One kind of response to this challenge appeals to consequentialist considerations and argues that it’s reasonable for a consumer to expect that, on average, their boycotting a product really will make a difference. The other appeals to various non-consequentialist considerations to argue that it can be wrong for you to buy certain products even if your doing so has no effect at all on their production. These include arguments that appeal to claims about collective responsibility, unjust enrichment, unjust enriching, and the expressive value of consumer purchases. For each argument we look at in response to this challenge, we’ll focus on three questions: (1) if the argument works, which kinds of boycotts would it apply to? (2) if the argument works, how wrong would it make it for you not to participate in those boycotts? (3) does the argument work in the first place?

Finally, we’ll consider a puzzle about ethical divestment. It might initially seem clear that if you should boycott a given company, then you should also divest yourself of any stock you might own in it. But there’s a potentially important difference between boycotting and divesting: you can stop buying a company’s products without someone else starting to buy them, but you can’t sell your stock in a company without someone else buying it from you. If it’s wrong to buy a company’s products and wrong to own stock in the company, this means you can boycott its products without helping someone else do something wrong but you can’t divest yourself of the stock without helping someone else do something wrong. Since it seems wrong to help someone do something wrong, this has led at least one philosopher to claim that there’s a problem with the very idea of principled divestment that doesn’t arise in the case of ethical boycotts. We’ll distinguish between a stronger and weaker version of this puzzle about principled divestment and consider whether any of the solutions in the literature the puzzle has generated works for either of them. Time permitting, we’ll also consider a few additional topics depending on the interests of the students enrolled in the course.

PHIL5240/ENVS5240 Seminar in Environmental Philosophy
Professor Hale
SEC 001 SEEC S103S W 1:00P-3:30P

This seminar is structured to bring practical environmental issues into the range of view of philosophers, as well as to help environmental scientists and policy analysts more readily recognize theoretical debates that may be informing their research. As such, it aims to strike a balance between the abstract and the practical. Because of its unique student composition -- approximately one third environmental scientists, one third environmental policy and law students, and one third philosophers -- discussions tend toward “on the ground” issues. Nevertheless, they remain firmly rooted in the growing body of work published in what is widely called “environmental philosophy.”

Structurally the course cuts a path between informing students of historically significant work in environmental theory, covering approaches such as land ethics and deep ecology, and engaging practical policy questions to see how they might inform analytic philosophy.  We begin in the first third of the semester by raising questions about the origins and future of environmental philosophy. A third of the way through the semester we then turn from these broad-brush theoretical questions to focus on two central application areas: climate change and species conservation. At the end of the semester, we examine and criticize some of the more market-oriented approaches to environmental conservation.

Philosophy students working in applied ethics will find much of interest in this class, but any student who anticipates writing or teaching in the area will also benefit. Again, due to the unusual student composition, drawing sometimes from different units and schools, written assignments are tailored to the needs of each student, generally in consultation with them. If some contingent of the class is interested in taking the class a different direction, the readings and topics for each day, detailed below, are also open to change.

PHIL4/5450/PHYS4/5450 History and Philosophy of Physics
Professor Demarest
SEC 001 CLUB 13 TR 2:00P-3:15P

This course will introduce students to some of the foundational issues in physics. The course will be divided into five units. 1) The methodological history of physics, including notions of observation, verification, and interpretation; 2) The methodological and metaphysical issues of realism, explanation, and laws of nature; 3) The development of special and general relativistic spacetime from Galilean and Aristotelian space and time; 4) Statistical mechanics and chance, including the emergence of the direction of time, agency, and causation; 5) Quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, non-locality, and various `realist’ interpretations. No background in math, physics, or philosophy will be assumed and I will provide relevant background for students as needed. However, the course covers issues that are conceptually very challenging. Therefore, students ought to anticipate spending a great deal of time outside of class in order to master the readings and to review lecture material. Disrespectful behavior will not be tolerated, as philosophical inquiry requires curiosity and open discussion.

PHIL4480/5480 Formal Methods in Philosophy
Professor Saucedo
SEC 001 CASE E313 TR 12:30P-1:45P

PHIL6000 Seminar in the History of Philosophy: Scotus & Friends
Professor Pasnau
SEC 001 CHEM 133 W 5:05P-7:35P
Counts toward History requirement for MA students and History - Open requirement for PhDs.

Medieval scholastic philosophy is the most technically challenging period in the history of European philosophy (at least prior to our own era), and John Duns Scotus is the most difficult figure from that period. Why run a seminar on his work? Because he is a spectacularly innovative and deep philosopher, responsible for, among much else,

• the most influential premodern version of a libertarian theory of freewill;
• the first systematically developed alternative to a eudaimonistic theory of ethics;
• the first articulation of modality in terms of a possible-worlds framework;
• the first appeal to haecceities to account for the individuation of substances.

We will look at all of this and more. To help us through these difficult texts, we will situate Scotus’s views in light of his near contemporaries and spend time more time than usual looking at recent secondary sources.

PHIL6200 Seminar in Social & Political Philosophy
Professor Sridharan
SEC 001 CHEM 133 M 5:05P-7:35P
Counts toward Values requirement for MA and PhD students.

The Unjust Pursuit of Justice

In this course, we will explore whether a particular society’s definition of justice ought to take into account the personal (moral) limitations of individuals within that society. For instance, if a society contains a certain amount of irremediable racial animus, ought the very notion of racial justice in that society reflect that fact? After establishing the contours of our inquiry through an examination of the intersection of economic self-interest, racial violence, and ideal theory, we will apply the tools we’ve developed to topics such as disability, gender, labor, policing and/or other student interests.

PHIL6340 Seminar in Epistemology: Epistemic Normativity
Professor Talbot
SEC 001 GOLD A350 TR 3:30P-4:45P
Counts toward M&E requirement for MA and PhD students.

Epistemology is, to a large extent, the study of standards for evaluating beliefs or credences.  For example, epistemologists think about what it takes for a belief or credence to count as knowledge; to be justified, reasonable, or rational; to fit one's evidence; to be coherent with one's other attitudes; and so forth.  For any of these standards, we can ask, "So what if our beliefs or credences do or don't meet these standards?  Why would that ever matter?"  That's what this class will be about:  whether and why conformity with epistemic standards matters.  And does explaining the importance of epistemic standards require changing how philosophers typically understand those standards?

PHIL6380 Seminar in Metaphysics: Laws of Nature & Causation
Professor Demarest
SEC 001 LIBR N424A R 5:00P-7:30P
Counts toward M&E requirement for MA and PhD students.

This course will introduce students to different approaches to the laws of nature, including Dretske/Tooley/Armstrong accounts, Humean accounts, governing accounts, and powers accounts. It will also introduce students to different approaches to causation, including counterfactual accounts, interventionist accounts, and powers accounts. As many of these accounts engage with reduction and emergence, we will also spend some time on these topics.

PHIL4020/5020 Topics in the History of Philosophy: Hellenistic Philosophy, Advanced Topics Epicureanism and Stoicism
SEC 001 CLUB 13 TR 2:00P-3:15P
Professor Bailey

The Epicureans and the Stoics were both materialists, determined to do philosophy without the abstracta and repellent mathematosis of Plato (especially) and Aristotle (derivatively). But they were both admirably consistent Schools, and their pursuit of global materialism brought them into unexpected territory in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Morality. This course follows that development. We begin with Epicuren Atomism and its attempts to avoid determinism, analyze The Master Argument of Diodorus Cronus and its deterministic consequences (accepted to some degree by the Stoics) and then pursue the Stoic theories of time, place, and eternal recurrence. The Stoicism covered in the course is the Athenian Stoa which, as a School making major contributions to philosophy, ended with the death of Chrysippus in 206 BCE.   

Counts toward History requirement for MA and Ancient or Open History requirement for PhD

PHIL4120/5120 Philosophy & Animals
SEC 001 DUAN G2B21 TR 11:00A-12:15P
Professor Norcross
Counts toward Values requirement(s) for both PhD and MA

PHIL4/5450/PHYS4/5450 History & Philosophy of Physics 
SEC 001 TBA TR 12:30P-1:45P
Professor Ritzwoller
Does not count towards distribution requirements.

PHIL5550 Metaphysics & Epistemology Proseminar
SEC 001 CHEM 133 T 5:00P-7:30P
Professor Saucedo
PHIL5550 Metaphysics & Epistemology Proseminar
SEC 002 16 P 24 HUMN 180 T 5:00P-7:30P
Professor Pasnau
Restricted to first-year Philosophy graduate students only; required for both MAs and PhDs 
Counts toward M&E requirement(s) for both PhD and MA

PHIL6100 Seminar in Ethics: Philosophy of Death
SEC 001 LIBR M498 W 5:05P-7:35P
Professor Heathwood

We'll cover at least the following three topics in the philosophy of death, probably 3-4 weeks for each:

1. Posthumous harm.  We'll read some or all of David Boonin’s 2019 book Dead Wrong: The Ethics of Posthumous Harm, and perhaps also some articles, such as George Pitcher's, "The Misfortunes of the Dead."
2. Whether death can be bad for the one who dies, including for animals.  Possible readings include Epicurus; Thomas Nagel, "Death," Fred Feldman, “Some Puzzles about the Evil of Death”; Jens Johansson, “The Timing Problem”; John Broome, "The Badness of Death and the Goodness of Life”; Ben Bradley, "When Is Death Bad for the One Who Dies?”; Ben Bradley, “A Gradualist View ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ the Badness of Death"; Ted Sider, “The Evil of Death: What Can Metaphysics Contribute?"; Alastair Norcross, “The Significance of Death for Animals”; Elizabeth Harman, “The Moral Significance of Animal Pain and Animal Death.”
3. How we should feel about death.  We might read Kaila Draper, "Disappointment, Sadness, and Death”; Kaila Draper, "Death and Rational Emotion"; Ben Bradley, “Fitting Attitudes Towards Deprivations”; Ben Bradley, “Existential Terror.”

And then perhaps our fourth and final topic will be determined by student interest.  Possibilities include the Lucretian symmetry argument for the view that we shouldn’t be bothered by death, the relation of death to the meaningfulness of life, personal identity and the survival of death, or what death even is (which might include the definition of death in medical contexts).

In addition to attending each week, participating in class, and doing all the reading, the course requirements will likely include (i) a weekly question, criticism, or comment on each reading; (ii) a long abstract of around 750 to 1,000 words, which would ideally form the basis of your term paper; (iii) a talk in which you present the main ideas for your term paper and take questions from the audience; and (iv) a term paper of around 4,000-7,000 words.

Counts toward Values requirement(s) for both PhD and MA

PHIL6100 Seminar in Ethics: Virtue Ethics & Politics
SEC 002 LIBR M498 M 5:05P-7:35P
Professor Warmke
Counts toward Values requirement(s) for both PhD and MA

What is virtue? And what relevance does virtue have to political life? This seminar will explore these two questions. We will read and discuss Heather Battaly’s Virtue for a primer on virtue theory in general and virtue ethics in particular. Then we will turn to a series of papers on specific virtues arguably relevant to political life. Course requirements: short in-class presentations and a final seminar paper.

PHIL6400 Seminar in Philosophy of Science: Anomalies & Scientific Discoveries
SEC 001 OL R 5:00 - 7:30
Professor Cleland
Counts toward M&E requirement(s) for both PhD and MA

Course Description:

Intuitively speaking, an anomaly is a phenomenon (object, event, or process) that is “surprising” in the sense of being unanticipated or unexpected. A scientific anomaly is a phenomenon that conflicts with widely accepted, well entrenched scientific beliefs (theories and dogmas) about the world.

The first half of this course provides a survey of important developments in 20th century philosophy of science through the lens of the role of anomalies in scientific practice and reasoning. Anomalies seem to have been viewed by logical empiricists and falsificationists as little more than especially surprising, failed predictions. The situation changed radically in the latter half of the 20th century with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn famously elevated the concept of anomaly to a central place in his influential account of the nature of scientific practice and theory change. Late 20th century philosophical discussions of the role of anomalies in science revolve around criticisms of Kuhn’s account or alternatively efforts to reconcile his account of anomalies with pre-Kuhnian accounts of scientific practice and discovery. As underscored by the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the term ‘anomaly’ was rarely used before Kuhn’s writings, took off after the publication of his now classic book, reached a peak in 1985, and is now (spring of 2023) down to pre-Kuhnian levels. Tellingly, the current entry “Scientific Discovery”, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, mentions anomalies only briefly in the context of an historical discussion of responses to Kuhn’s account. We will explore the history of philosophical thought about the role of anomalies in science through the writings of influential 20th century figures in philosophy of science, including Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Larry Laudan, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, and Lindley Darden.

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest among scientists in anomalies, most notably among field scientists (astronomy, geology, planetary science, astrobiology, and biology) and “big” data scientists. The former is inspired in part by the development of sophisticated tools and methods for exploring the natural world, such as the James Webb Telescope, which has uncovered novel astronomical phenomena that are difficult to explain in terms of our current scientific understanding. The latter has emerged from the use of AI algorithms for exploring enormous quantities of data for “hidden” regularities, which has revealed unanticipated outliers, leading to efforts among data scientists to distinguish (mere) outliers from anomalies. Indeed, some scientists (e.g., physicists at CERN) actively characterize their research as literally hunting for anomalies (viz., for a new physics beyond the Standard Model). The time is ripe for philosophy of science to return to the topic of the role of anomalies in scientific practice and discovery. The second half of the class will philosophically explore the role of anomalies in contemporary science through (i) remote presentations by scientists investigating and/or searching for scientific anomalies and (ii) contemporary writings on anomalies by philosophers of science coupled with accessible summaries and reviews of pertinent scientific research involving anomalies (with more technical papers recommended for the scientifically sophisticated student).

Requirements: Graduate level status in either philosophy or science. Ideally the class will contain a mix of philosophy and science graduate students.

Evaluation: Term Paper Project (prospectus, talk, and term paper)

• 5-page prospectus stating your thesis and how you are going to approach it in a term paper. Your prospectus should show that you understand the relevant philosophical and scientific material required to successfully complete your term paper project. You will receive extensive feedback on your prospectus. (10% of your grade)
• 15 minute talk on your term paper project during the last week of classes (presented at a workshop on anomalies in science open to grad students and faculty, followed by a celebratory party at my house). (10% of your grade)
• 10-15 page term paper. (80% of your grade). The term paper may either defend a thesis or be more like a phil compass style opinionated survey of a debate.

Note: Background of students in science and philosophy will be taken into consideration in grading of the term paper.

PHIL 5100 Proseminar in Values
Professor Heathwood
SEC 001 KTCH 1B31 W 4:40-7:10
Restricted to first-year Philosophy graduate students only; required for both MAs and PhDs

An advanced introduction to contemporary analytic ethics.  We'll focus mainly on theoretical ethics – in particular, metaethics, the normative ethics of behavior, and axiology – and we'll also cover some applied ethics.  Specific topics likely include:

• the debate among the main metaethical theories (naturalism, non-naturalism, nihilism, expressivism)
• the debate between the two leading approaches in the normative ethics of behavior (consequentialism and deontology)
• the debate among the three leading approaches to well-being (hedonism, desire satisfactionism, and the objective-list theory)
• some central topics in population axiology (e.g., the repugnant conclusion, the non-identity problem)
• the ethics of abortion (including Marquis's harm-based account of the wrongness of abortion, deprivationism about the badness of death, and Thomson's rights-based defense of abortion).

Course Goals:

• to gain a solid understanding of central debates in several main areas of ethics, and to develop the ability to come to one's own reasoned views on these debates
• to learn to be sensitive to and gain practice in the careful formulation of doctrines and arguments in ethics
• to learn about and reflect on issues of methodology in ethics
• to develop one's philosophical writing by practicing it and receiving detailed feedback on it
• to gain practice discussing philosophy orally in a productive way
• to be exposed to some work of some of the faculty in our department.

We’ll read Matthew Chrisman’s textbook What Is This Thing Called Metaethics? as well as a bunch of classic primary texts by philosophers such as G.E. Moore, J.L. Mackie, J.S. Mill, Robert Nozick, W.D Ross, Derek Parfit, Judith Thomson, and others.

Counts toward Values requirement(s) for both PhD and MA

PHIL 4360/5360 Metaphysics
Dr. Bevan
SEC 001 CARL 202 TR 11:00-12:15

An introduction to analytic metaphysics for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that studies reality in general. Metaphysicians ask questions about the nature of such general features of the world as existence, necessity, and identity. Analytic metaphysics is metaphysics as practiced in analytic philosophy. We will be engaging with some of the central debates in this tradition and reading some of its most influential practitioners. By doing so students will learn about the landscape of contemporary metaphysics. They will also learn about some debates in philosophical methodology and meta-philosophy, and they will gain some familiarity with the formal methods that metaphysicians use to clarify and model their theories.

Counts towards M&E requirement(s) for both PhDs and MAs

PHIL 4480/5480 Formal Methods in Philosophy
Professor Staffel
SEC 001 LIBR N424A TR 3:30-4:45

This class is intended to be an introduction to some central topics in formal epistemology. Formal epistemology is a relatively recent branch of epistemology, which uses formal tools such as logic and probability theory in order to answer questions about the nature of rational belief. An important feature that distinguishes formal epistemology from traditional epistemology is not just its use of formal tools, but also its understanding of the nature of belief. Traditional epistemology tends to focus almost exclusively on what is called ‘outright belief’, where the options considered are just belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment. By contrast, it is widely accepted among formal epistemologists that this conception of belief is too coarse-grained to capture the rich nature of our doxastic attitudes. They posit that humans also have degrees of belief, or credences, which can take any value between full certainty that something is true, and certainty that it is false. To see why this makes sense, consider the fact that we can have outright beliefs in various propositions, but still have varying degrees of certainty in them. For example, I believe that 2+2=4, and that Freddy Mercury was born in Zanzibar, but I am much more certain of the former than the latter. This can be captured elegantly in a framework that allows for both outright and graded belief.

The shift in focus towards degrees of belief has generated a rich research program, parts of which integrate with issues in traditional epistemology, and parts of which are specific to the debate about degrees of belief. Important questions in the field are for example: How are degrees of belief related to outright beliefs? What constraints are there on rational degrees of belief, and how can they be defended? How can we adequately represent degrees of belief in a formal framework? How do ideal epistemological norms bear on what non-ideal agents like us ought to believe? The results of these debates are relevant for many areas of philosophy besides epistemology, such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, ethics, and practical reasoning.

Does not count toward requirements for either PhDs or MAs

PHIL 6000 Seminar in the History of Philosophy: Hume
Professor Pasnau
SEC 001 KTCH 1B31 M 4:40-7:10

The seminar will work through the entirety of Hume’s masterpiece, the Treatise of Human Nature, devoting equal time to each of its three parts, on the understanding, the passions, and morals. Along the way we will consider some of the important recent scholarship on Hume.

Counts as Modern History requirement for PhDs; counts as History requirement for MAs

PHIL 6100 Seminar in Ethics: Logic and Metaphysics of Value
Professor Oddie
SEC 001 VAC 455 TR 12:30-1:45

Counts toward Values requirement(s) for both PhDs and MAs

PHIL 6340 Seminar in Epistemology: Moral Epistemology
Professor Steup
SEC 001 CLUB 6 T 5:00-7:30

In the first half of this seminar, we will discuss Justin Clarke-Doane’s recent book Morality & Mathematics, as well as relevant additional readings on moral realism vs anti-realism, moral skepticism, and evolutionary debunking. In the second half of the seminar, we will either carry on exploring these issues, or we will discuss some selected papers from the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell volume Contemporary Debates in Epistemology.

Counts towards M&E requirement(s) for both PhDs and MAs

PHIL 6380 Seminar in Metaphysics: Higher-Order Metaphysics
Professor Saucedo
SEC 001 CLUB 6 R 5:00-7:30

We'll go through the recent surge of cutting-edge literature on the metaphysics of higher-order phenomena. We'll devote special attention to questions about the nature and fineness of grain of properties and facts of arbitrary order, and to questions about ground and metaphysical explanation in connection with them. We'll dedicate the first third or so of the semester to gathering the formal and philosophical background required to delve into these questions, building up from scratch.

Counts towards M&E requirement(s) for both PhDs and MAs

PHIL 5010 Single Philosopher: Mill
Professor Jacobson
SEC 001 HLMS 177 W 5:05P-7:35P

Counts by default for open History requirement for PhDs (or towards Values requirement on request); counts as Values requirement for MAs

PHIL 4300/5300 Philosophy of Mind
Professor Rupert
SEC 001 HUMN 335 TR 2:00P-3:15P
This course addresses three families of questions. The first pertains to mental content: How do our thoughts get their meaning? Is thought-content essentially normative? How do we know the content of our own thoughts? The second concerns the relation between the mental domain and the universe as it’s depicted by natural science: How could a mental state cause physical behavior? Could distinctively mental phenomena appear in a world composed ultimately of nothing more than “atoms in the void”? The third focuses on consciousness in particular: How could conscious experiences appear in a physical world? Do conscious experiences have irreducible aspects to them? How is conscious experience connected to the self and its decisions and actions?

Counts towards M&E requirement(s) for both PhDs and MAs

PHIL 5550 Metaphysics & Epistemology Proseminar
Professor Saucedo (PhD section)
SEC 001 HLMS 196 R 5:00P-7:30P
Professor Pasnau (MA section)
SEC 002 HLMS 269 R 5:00P-7:30P

In the M&E proseminar this spring, Pasnau & Saucedo will take, as our focal text, Michael Della Rocca’s recent book, The Parmenidean Ascent (OUP 2021). As the title suggests, Della Rocca defends what he calls an “uncompromising” monism, which he applies not just to ontology but also to action, knowledge, meaning and truth. Over the course of the seminar, we will work through these varied topics, and supplement our focal text with various additional classic readings from recent philosophy.

Restricted to first-year Philosophy graduate students only; required for both MAs and PhDs; counts toward M&E requirement(s) for both PhD and MA

PHIL 6000 Seminar in the History of Philosophy: Plato: Gorgias and Phaedrus
Professor Lee
SEC 001 HLMS 196 TR 12:30P-1:45P
Is there an ‘art of argument’ (technê logôn) and if so which has the better claim to providing such an art or skill: rhetoric or philosophy? In the Gorgias and Phaedrus, Plato undertook this question about how we should argue, and what kind of effect or power that argument and persuasion has in politics, and in our lives. In this course we will do a careful reading of these two dialogues, and try to come to an understanding of how Plato thought philosophy is distinct from rhetoric and sophistry. Topics covered in this course include Plato’s conceptions of rhetoric and philosophy, moral psychology, and Plato’s political philosophy.

Counts toward Ancient History distribution requirement for PhDs; counts toward History requirement for MAs

PHIL 6000 Seminar in the History of Philosophy: Early Modern Metaphysics
Professor Kaufman
SEC 002 HLMS 196 T 5:00P-7:30P

The seminar will examine issues concerning material substances: the nature of material substances, individuation, unity, identity over time, composition, constitution, divisibility, atoms v. gunk, parts and wholes.

Authors: Suárez, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Boyle, Locke, More, Conway, Bayle, Digby, Charleton.

We will also read relevant secondary literature.

Counts toward Modern distribution requirement for PhDs; counts toward History requirement for MAs

PHIL 6200 Seminar in Political Philosophy
Professor Wingo
SEC 001 HLMS 177 M 5:05P-7:35P

Counts toward Values requirement(s) for both PhDs and MAs

Fall 2022

PHIL 4040/5020 Studies in 20th Century Philosophy: Frege, Russell, & Gödel
Professor Oddie
SEC 001 TR 9:30A-10:45A HLMS 177

At the turn of the twentieth century a German philosopher, Gottlob Frege, and an English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, were both endeavouring to lay bare a sure and certain foundation for mathematical knowledge. Both were initially confident that pure logic was not only necessary but sufficient in itself for the enterprise. Their program, known as logicism, was to derive the entirety of  mathematical knowledge from the most basic and obvious principles of pure reason, like modus ponens and reductio ad absurdum. The program was impressive not only in its ambitious scope but also in the many revelations it laid bare. However, it quickly ran up against some simple but apparently devastating paradoxes. These paradoxes, which have a common ancestor in the ancient paradox of the liar, share certain family resemblances to one another which came sharply into focus with Cantor’s development of the theory of the infinite. In this course we will explore these paradoxes as well as some attempts to resolve them—notably the theory of types. We will also explore their connections to the famous incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel, which, it has been argued, put the final nail in the logicist coffin. (Note: PHIL4040/5020 is in part a philosophical exploration of the logical results explored in PHIL4440/5440 Topics in Logic. The two courses can be taken independently but they are complementary and could fruitfully be taken together.)

Fulfills the Open History requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 5100 Proseminar in Values
Professor Fileva
SEC 001 M 5:05P-7:35P HLMS 177

In this course, we will make a serious attempt to disentangle the purely psychological and the normative dimensions of value. We will ask, for instance, whether and how our evolved psychological tendencies bear on value and moral knowledge, whether psychological egoism is true and whether ethical egoism would be shown to be true if psychological egoism is, and whether a person’s inability to do something disloyal is a psychological one or an inability of some other kind.

Restricted to and required of all first-year Philosophy graduate students, both PhD and MA, with the exception of BAM students, who may take the course but are not required to.

Fulfills the Values requirement for MA students. Counts towards the Values requirement for PhD students.

PHIL/ENVS 5240 Seminar in Environmental Philosophy
Professor Hale
SEC 001 M 5:45 - 8:15 SEEC
 
This seminar is structured to bring practical environmental issues into the range of view of philosophers, as well as to help environmental scientists and policy analysts more readily recognize theoretical debates that may be informing their research. As such, it aims to strike a balance between the abstract and the practical. Because of its unique student composition -- approximately one third environmental scientists, one third environmental policy and law students, and one third philosophers -- discussions tend toward “on the ground” issues. Nevertheless, they remain firmly rooted in the growing body of work published in what is widely called “environmental philosophy.”
 
Structurally the course cuts a path between informing students of historically significant work in environmental theory, covering approaches such as land ethics and deep ecology, and engaging practical policy questions to see how they might inform analytic philosophy.  We begin in the first third of the semester by raising questions about the origins and future of environmental philosophy. A third of the way through the semester we then turn from these broad-brush theoretical questions to focus on two central application areas: climate change and species conservation. At the end of the semester, we examine and criticize some of the more market-oriented approaches to environmental conservation.
 
Philosophy students working in applied ethics with find much of interest in this class, but any student who anticipates writing or teaching in the area will also benefit. Again, due to the unusual student composition, drawing sometimes from different units and schools, written assignments are tailored to the needs of each student, generally in consultation with them.

Fulfills the Values requirement for MA students. Counts towards the Values requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 6000 Seminar in the History of Philosophy: Medieval Philosophy
Professor Pasnau
SEC 001 W 5:05P-7:35P HLMS 177

This course will look at a range of topics concerning later medieval metaphysics. Among the topics we are likely to cover are determinism and freedom, problems about identity and individuation, and theories of matter and essence. Authors to be discussed will include Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, William Ockham, and John Buridan.

Fulfills the Open History requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 6100 Seminar in Ethics: Metaethics
Professor Norcross
SEC 001 T 5:00P-7:30P HLMS 196

Fulfills the Values requirement for MA students. Counts towards the Values requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 6340 Seminar in Epistemology: Intuitions in Philosophy
Professor Talbot
SEC 001 TR 3:30P-4:45P HLMS 196

Intuitions are commonly used either as the starting point or as an important source of data for philosophical theorizing.  There is a rich literature challenging this practice and responding to these challenges.  This course will cover some of this literature.

We will discuss the following topics, focusing on recent papers both criticizing and defending the use of intuitions:

• Findings on cross cultural variation in intuitions
• Work on instability in individual intuitions
• Evolutionary debunking of intuition-based philosophy
• The causal disconnection between intuitions and the abstract objects they are about (e.g. moral facts)

Much of the discussion of intuitions in this literature focuses on moral intuitions, and so if you are interested in moral knowledge, moral skepticism, and/or moral realism you will likely find a lot to think about in this course.  However, these arguments are also relevant to philosophical methodology outside of ethics, so should be interesting to anyone thinking about knowledge of philosophical facts more generally.

This is a course in epistemology, and in discussing these issues we will learn a lot about what knowledge and justification might require in general (beyond just discussions of intuitions).

Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for MA students. Counts towards the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 6380 Seminar in Metaphyiscs: Paradoxes
Professor Huemer
SEC 002 W 5:05 - 7:35 HLMS 177

This course will examine philosophically interesting paradoxes, such as the Liar Paradox, Russell's, the Sorites, Newcomb, Ravens, Littlewood-Ross, Hilbert's Hotel, and more. Readings will be drawn from Paradox Lost and Approaching Infinity, perhaps among other sources. We will try to determine whether "This sentence is false" is true or false, whether the set of all sets that don't contain themselves contains itself, when adding a single grain of sand converts a non-heap into a heap, and so on.

Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for MA students. Counts towards the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 4010/5010 Single Philosopher: James
Professor Fileva
SEC 001 MW 3:35-4:50 HLMS 247

William James is a highly original thinker. He is the type of thinker who shares several insights per page. James drew attention to the overlooked connections between rationality and sentiment (for instance, sometimes, we feel we understand) and he explored the nature of introspection (the philosopher’s preferred method of inquiry); he developed a new theory of emotion (studied in psychology classes today) and an illuminating account of the self. James’s discussion of religious experience and of the role of belief in action and from here, belief’s role in the world present serious challenges to the hurried endorsement of a naïve correspondence theory of truth. In this course, we will delve deep into James’s writings. Sometimes, students will find they agree with James, and sometimes, they will disagree. But this much is certain: you will never feel as though reading James is an exercise in thinking about matters of no real consequence. James held the view that philosophical debates ought to focus on what’s important. In “What Pragmatism Means,” he writes: “It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.” James exemplified his own philosophy of philosophy. His writing is not only intellectually interesting and thought-provoking, none of what he wrote would fail his own relevance test: what James wrote about matters and deeply so.

Satisfies the Open History of Philosophy distribution requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 4020/5020 Topics in the History of Philosophy: Virtue Ethics Ancient and Modern
Professor Lee
SEC 001 TR 9:30-10:45 HLMS 177

In this course, we will begin with a solid grounding in Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, with original readings from Aristotle and the Stoic authors. We will then read a selection of papers and books in modern virtue ethics which examine, criticize, respond to, and develop ideas in the ancient authors. Possible topics include: the nature of character virtue, the role of practical reason, virtues as dispositions and the situationist critique, virtues and eudaimonism, the egoistic critique of virtue ethics, the critique of naturalism in virtue ethics, virtue ethics and perfectionism. Readings from contemporary virtue ethics will include, e.g., Annas, Hursthouse, Anscombe, Murdoch, Zagzebski, Nussbaum, and others.

For MA students, can satisfy EITHER the History of Philosophy distribution requirement OR the Values distribution requirements (student’s choice); however, students who choose History must write history-focused papers.  For the PhD program, can EITHER satisfy the Ancient History of Philosophy distribution requirement OR count towards the Values distribution requirement (student’s choice); however, students who choose Ancient History must write history-focused papers.  For all students we'll assume by default that they choose History unless we are told otherwise.

PHIL 5030 Greek Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
Please contact Professor Lee for meeting details.

Selected readings in classical philosophy, in the original language, with a focus on achieving fluency in reading philosophical Greek. This is a single-credit hour class, and requires knowledge of ancient Greek.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 8.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.

PHIL 5040 Latin Philosophical Texts
Professor Pasnau
Please contact Professor Pasnau for meeting details.

Selected readings in classical and medieval philosophy, in the original language, with a focus on achieving fluency in reading philosophical Latin. This is a single-credit-hour class, and requires knowledge of Latin.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 8.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.

PHIL 5150 Topics in Applied Ethics: AI Ethics
Professor Boonin
SEC 001 TR 2:00-3:15 HLMS 196

This course will focus primarily on four features of advanced machine learning forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that are widely believed to raise distinctive moral problems in certain contexts. For each feature, we will focus primarily on a single example involving government use of machine learning algorithms in the context of the criminal justice system or the military. This course does not presuppose any familiarity with AI in general or machine learning in particular, and we'll start with a quick overview of the relevant background material before turning to the moral problems. Here is a brief description of the four main issues we'll be focusing on (decisions about additional topics to be covered will depend on the interests of those who end up enrolling in the course and some of the topics may extend beyond AI ethics depending on the interests of the group).

1. Bias. One widespread concern about the use of machine learning algorithms in the criminal justice system involves the ways that they can replicate, strengthen, and even introduce racial bias. For this feature of machine learning, we will focus on the controversy surrounding predictive policing algorithms, which draw conclusions from massive amounts of historical crime data and are widely used by US police departments to make decisions about where and when to deploy police officers. The most prominent objection to such algorithms maintains that they amount to a high-tech version of racial profiling. In this unit, we'll look at a variety of arguments that try to show that racial profiling is morally impermissible and consider whether any of them are successful and, if so, whether they can successfully be extended to the case of predictive policing algorithms.

2. Opacity. The earliest kinds of AI algorithms were fully transparent: if you wanted to know why a particular set of inputs led to a particular output, the programmers could give you a complete and explicit answer. But more recent and advanced forms of machine learning are completely opaque. In such cases, even the programmers can't explain why a particular set of inputs let to the output the system generated. This feature of such systems seems to raise a moral problem in cases where it may seem plausible to suppose that people have a right to an explanation of the basis of a decision that was made about them. For this feature of machine learning, we will focus on the debate over the use of digital risk assessment tools. These are data-driven predictive instruments used to determine the probability that a given defendant will show up in court or that a given offender will reoffend, and they are widely used in the US to help judges and parole boards make decisions about bail, parole, probation, and even sentencing. In this unit, we'll take a critical look at the two main arguments that have been offered against their use in such contexts: that they violate due process rights, and that they violate a transparency condition that is a prerequisite for political legitimacy.

3. Autonomy. Simple, first-generation AI algorithms do only, and exactly, what their programmers tell them to do. But advanced forms of machine learning allow a system to learn on its own, modify itself as a result, and eventually behave in ways that its programmers neither intended nor anticipated. In some sense, such systems seem to be autonomous: they make their own decisions based on lessons they learned on their own after they were activated, lessons that were not directly given to them by, or perhaps even comprehensible to, their programmers. To the extent that computer systems driven by machine learning technology can be significantly autonomous, this raises the question of who (or what!) should be held responsible if we deploy them and they make bad decisions. For this feature of machine learning, we'll focus on the widespread opposition to the development of lethal autonomous weapon systems. We'll focus primarily on the most prominent argument against their development, based on the claim that their use would involve creating an impermissible "responsibility gap" on which no one could be held responsible if innocent people were injured or killed as a result of their deployment. But we will also look, at least briefly, at one or two other arguments against their use.

4. Scale. The latest AI technology also makes it possible for systems to be connected on a massive scale. This feature seems to pose a moral problem because it's plausible to suppose that some things that are innocuous in small doses can become objectionable in much larger doses. The main concern of this sort that "Big Data" has generated concerns its effects on privacy. For this unit, we will focus primarily on CCTV-enabled mass public surveillance that uses facial-recognition technology. We'll critically examine an argument that aims to establish that this practice does not violate the right to privacy and consider whether the argument can be successfully extended to cover other forms of surveillance, such as tracking people's locations via their cell phone signals, and to so-called "dataveillance" (e.g., constructing profiles of consumers without their knowledge based on digital records of past purchases).

Satisfies the Values distribution requirement for MA students and counts towards the Values distribution requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 4450/5450/PHYS 4450/5450 History and Philosophy of Physics
Professor Demarest
SEC 001 TR 12:30-1:45 HLMS 237

This course will introduce students to some of the foundational issues in physics. The course will cover: 1) The methodological history of physics, including notions of observation, verification, and interpretation. 2) The development of special and general relativistic spacetime from Galilean and Aristotelian space and time. 3) Statistical mechanics and chance, including the emergence of the direction of time and causation. 4) Quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, non-locality, and various `realist’ interpretations. We may also discuss laws of nature, theories of chance, symmetries, and scientific explanation. No background in math, physics, or philosophy will be assumed and I will provide relevant background for students as needed. However, the course covers issues that are conceptually very challenging. Therefore, students ought to anticipate spending a great deal of time outside of class to master the readings and to review lecture material.

PHIL 5550 Metaphysics and Epistemology Proseminar
Professor Saucedo
Restricted to first-year Philosophy graduate students only; required for first-year PhD students
SEC 001 R 5:00-7:30 HLMS 196

Satisfies the M&E distribution requirement for MA students and counts towards the M&E distribution requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 6200 Seminar in Social and Political Philosophy
Professor Wingo
SEC 001 M 5:05-7:35 HLMS 177

A general political problem is how to balance the need for concentrated power in the hand of the state -- which is needed for effective governance -- against the egalitarian desire to equalize power. Post-colonial African politics has generally regarded those aims as excluding each other. As such, African politics, as well as contemporary Western politics, demonstrate remarkable empathy for citizens’ suffering from power, but limited sympathy for same citizens’ ambitions for power. When citizens rise up as in the recent Arab Spring and in the seemingly perpetual protests all over African countries against the excesses of state power, the predictable exhortation from the United Nations Secretary-General and Western governments is to urge the governments cracking down on protester to “exercise restraint” and for the citizens to protest peacefully. This exhortation comes from a limited conception of power as a zero (or “negative”) sum good. This seminar will examine a richer nonzero-sum good or positive good conception of power that all can have at the same time thereby defining democracy from a perspective of political power. This seminar promises to be one of a kind.

Satisfies the Values distribution requirement for MA students and counts towards the Values distribution requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 6340 Seminar in Epistemology: Belief and Control: Doxastic Voluntarism versus Involuntarism
Professor Steup
SEC 001 T 5:00-7:30 HLMS 196

In this seminar, we will read recent work for and against doxastic involuntarism: the thesis that we don’t have voluntary control over our beliefs. In his 1973 paper “Deciding to Believe,” Bernard Williams argues that voluntary belief is conceptually impossible because belief, as he puts it, “aims at truth.” While this paper has been highly influential, most involuntarists follow William Alston, who in his 1988 paper “The Deontological Conception of Epistemic Justification” argues that voluntary belief is psychologically impossible. Alston claims that belief is like cell metabolism or the secretion of gastric juices: outside of the sphere of things we can control through our will.

My view is that doxastic involuntarism is mistaken. I claim that we have no less voluntary control over our beliefs than we have over our actions. We will begin looking at several articles in which I defend doxastic voluntarism. Next, we will discuss the two seminal articles mentioned above. This will probably take up on third of the semester. In the remaining two thirds, we will read papers selected from the bibliography below.

Bibliography:

• Alston, William. 1988. “The Deontological Concept of Epistemic Justification.” In Alston 1989. Epistemic justification. Essays in the theory of knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Bennett, Jonathan. 1990. “Why is Belief Involuntary?” Analysis 50:87-107.
• Hieronymi, Pamela. 2013. “Believing at Will.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 35: 149-187.
• Hieronymi, Pamela. “Responsibility for Believing.” Synthese 161: 357-373.
• Helton, Grace. 2020. “If You Can’t Change What You Believe, You Don’t Believe It.” Nous 54: 501-526.
• Leary, Stephanie. 2017. In Defense of Practical Reasons for Belief.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95: 529-542.
• Rettler, Lindsay. 2018a. “In Defense of Doxastic Blame.” Synthese 195: 2205-2226.
• Rettler, Lindsay. 2018b. “Faith, Belief, and Control.” American Philosophical Quarterly 55: 95-109.
• Roeber, Blake. 2019. “Evidence, Judgment, and Belief at Will.” Mind 128: 837-859.
• Schmitt, Margaret. 2015. “Freedom and Reason.” Synthese 192: 25–41.
• Setiya, Kieran. 2008. “Believing at Will.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 32: 36-52.
• Shah, Nishi. 2002. “Clearing Space for Doxastic Voluntarism.” The Monist 85: 436-445.
• Shah, Nishi and Velleman, David. 2005. “Doxastic Deliberation.” Philosophical Review 114: 497-534.
• Williams, Bernard. 1973. “Deciding to Believe.” In: Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press): 136–151.
• Vitz, Rico. 2008. “Doxastic Voluntarism.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Wagner, Verena. 2017. “On the Analogy of Free Will and Free Belief.” Synthese 194: 2785-2810.

Satisfies the M&E distribution requirement for MA students and counts towards the M&E distribution requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 6400 Seminar in Philosophy of Science: Time in Historical Science
Professor Cleland
SEC 001 W 4:40-7:10 HLMS 177

Time plays different roles in science:  Insofar as it is thought to be a fundamental aspect of physical reality, understanding the nature of time is a central goal of physics. Time also serves as a critical constraint on scientific methodology, a limitation, that plays out differently in the practices of historical scientists and ahistorical scientists (those investigating timeless characteristics of nature). These differences in the roles of time in science (as constraint on practice and subject of investigation) are not independent since the structure of time determines the possibilities for collecting evidence for hypotheses and theories.

This course explores the multifaceted, often ignored, role of time in the practices of the historical sciences vis-à-vis the ahistorical sciences.  Topics to be discussed include: (1) Differences in the methodology of historical and experimental sciences. Classical accounts of scientific methodology (e.g., hypothetico-deductivism, Bayesianism, and falsificationism) ignore the fact that historical scientists and experimental scientists are positioned differently in the causal "flow" of events in phenomenal time and that this affects their respective capacities for seeking evidence for historical conjectures about particular past events, such as the end-Cretaceous mass extinction, and timeless universal laws of nature. (2) Scientific taxonomies (putatively natural kind classification systems) provide theoretical frameworks (the relata) for scientific laws and principles. Most taxonomies in the natural sciences are atemporal. The Periodic Table of chemical elements, where the identity of an element and its interactions is the same at any position in time, is a good illustration. The Darwinian concept of biological species, where the existence of later organisms is path dependent on those of earlier organisms, provides the notable exception.  This presents difficulties for historical scientists interested in understanding the origin and development of nonbiological phenomena, such as terrestrial planets and long-ago events on our own planet Earth. Scientific laws relating categories based on time independent classification schemes are difficult to apply in historical contexts. They are typically swamped by contingencies arising from interfering extrinsic conditions and processes occurring over the time span concerned. This raises the interesting philosophical question of whether it is possible to develop (nonbiological) systems of historical natural kinds capable of supporting historical principles for reasoning scientifically about the past.  (3) It has been argued that it is easier to be a scientific realist about (believe in the existence of) the very small (e.g., subatomic particles) than things in the remote past (e.g., trilobites).  We will investigate these arguments in the context of differences and similarities in the evidential bases for the claims of historical and ahistorical scientists.

Satisfies the M&E distribution requirement for MA students and counts towards the M&E distribution requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 4020/5020 Topics in History: Aristotle's Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy
Dr. Huismann
TR 2:20-3:35 HLMS 196

This seminar will address Aristotle’s seminal contributions to metaphysics and natural philosophy, broadly construed (so as to include e.g. aspects of his philosophy of mind and human nature). The topics we will cover include substances, propositions (especially the present status of future contingent propositions), causation, luck, the soul and its relation to the body, the distinction between actuality and potentiality (and its relation to human happiness), and Aristotle’s conception of the divine.

This satisfies the history requirement for MA students, and the ancient philosophy requirement for PhD students.

PHIL 5010/4010 Single Philosopher: Plato’s Republic 
Professor Lee
MWF 1:50-2:40

PHIL 5030 Greek Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
Contact Professor Lee for meeting details

Selected readings in classical philosophy, in the original language, with a focus on achieving fluency in reading philosophical Greek.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 8.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.

PHIL 5040 Latin Philosophical Texts
Professor Zachary Herz
Contact Professor Herz for meeting details

Selected readings in classical and medieval philosophy, in the original language, with a focus on achieving fluency in reading philosophical Latin.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 8.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.

PHIL 5100 Proseminar in Values
Professor Wingo et al.
Restricted to first-year Philosophy graduate students only
SEC 001 T 5:00-7:30 HLMS 196
Counts towards the Values requirement for the Ph.D. program.
Fulfills the Values requirement for the M.A. program.

In this team-taught proseminar, we will study a mix of classic and contemporary texts in ethics and political philosophy, in four units arranged by topic as follows:

• Moral Epistemology
• Consequentialism: Classic and Contemporary Readings
• Contemporary Philosophical Conceptions of Power and Political Power
• Classic Readings in Applied Ethics

Nota Bene: Instructor of Record is Ajume Wingo

PHIL  5360/4360 Metaphysics
Professor Demarest
SEC 001 TR 12:30-1:45 HLMS 196
Counts towards the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program.
Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the M.A. program.

In this course we will consider some of the big questions in metaphysics: What exists? What are properties? What is fundamental? What is space? What is time? How do objects and people persist through time? Do we have free will? Does God exist? There is no textbook, but there will be a lot of readings (all posted on Canvas), weekly assignments, and high expectations.

PHIL 5480/4480 Formal Methods in Philosophy
Professor Saucedo
SEC 001 TR 2:00-3:15 HLMS 177

This course is an introductory survey of some of the advanced formal methods employed in contemporary philosophy. It's meant to help advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students acquire the tools necessary to access the formally sophisticated literature published in today's leading philosophy journals. We'll start by reviewing first-order logic from both semantic and proof-theoretic standpoints and associated technical machinery (including elementary set theory and model theory). Then we'll focus on two topics: (i) higher-order logic (up to introductory type-theory and the lambda calculus) and (ii) non-classical logic (including multi-valued systems, intuitionism, and free logic). Time permitting, we'll touch on elementary material in modal logic. 

PHIL 6000 Seminar in the History of Philosophy: The Early Greek Philosophers and Their Critics
Professor Lee
SEC 001 TR 3:30-4:45 HLMS 196
Fulfills the Ancient Philosophy History requirement for the Ph.D. program.
Fulfills the History of Philosophy requirement for the M.A. program. 

This seminar will be about the beginnings of philosophy in Greece, covering figures such as the Milesians, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Pythagoras, the Eleatics (Parmenides, Melissus, Zeno), Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, as well as the so-called Sophists such as Protagoras and Gorgias. It will include topics such as (i) what is “philosophy” or “science” in the early Greek context? (ii) what debt did early Greek philosophy have to the East? (iii) what were some distinctive features of the Presocratics, as opposed to Socrates and the philosophers who came later? (iv) Were the Sophists philosophers? And if not, why not, given their writings on philosophical topics? (v) What influence did the early Greek philosophers have on later philosophers – including Socrates, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans? We will not only read early Greek philosophers, but also reactions to the Presocratics by later philosophers who were influenced by them, or who criticized them. Thus, for example, we will discuss Plato and Aristotle’s reactions to Presocratic philosophy of nature (metaphysics), to Parmenides and Zeno’s use of ‘dialectic’, and Plato and Aristotle’s reactions to the sophists in their ethical and political philosophy.

PHIL 6100 Seminar in Ethics: Metaethics
Professor Norcross
SEC 001 W 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Counts towards the Values requirement for the Ph.D. program.
Fulfills the Values requirement for the M.A. program.

Topics in Metaethics: We will explore various topics in metaethics, such as the debates between Expressivism and Descriptivism, Internalism and Externalism about moral motivation, Realism and Non-realism, and the nature of moral reasons.

PHIL 6340 Seminar in Epistemology: Reasoning and Rationality
Professor Staffel
SEC 001 MW 3:00-4:15 HLMS 177
Counts towards the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program.
Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the M.A. program.

In order to understand the nature of rationality and reasoning, we must draw on various different philosophical fields, such as epistemology, logic, and philosophy of mind, as well as research from empirical psychology. We will ask questions like: what does it take to be rational, or a good reasoner? Is reasoning well the same thing as following the rules of logic? What kinds of mental states can be involved in reasoning, and are subject to constraints of rationality? Are human beings generally rational or irrational? What can a philosophical investigation of reasoning learn from cognitive science, and vice versa? The semester will be divided into five modules. The modules will be on the following topics:
(1) The nature of reasoning
Possible readings by McHugh & Way, Broome, Boghossian, Besson, Carrol
(2) The norms of reasoning and their relationship to rules of logic
Possible readings by Harman, MacFarlane, Steinberger, Arpaly & Schroeder
(3) The function of reasoning
Possible readings by Mercier & Sperber, Dogramaci
(4) Modeling human reasoning
Possible readings by Williams, Evans & Elqayam, Hahn
(5) Chosen by course participants

PHIL 6340 Seminar in Epistemology: Epistemic Normativity
Professor Steup
SEC 002 M 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Counts towards the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program.
Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the M.A. program.

1. The Epistemic
In his 1985, Alston explicates what he means by 'epistemic justification' in terms of the epistemic point of view: aiming at a large belief system with a good ratio of true over false beliefs. Cohen 2016a argues that 'epistemic' is not a word in ordinary English but a technical term that must be defined in a theoretically neutral way. Cohen shoots down various attempts to provide such a definition. Conee 2016 proposes a plain language definition of 'epistemic'.
2. Epistemic Teleology
Alston's 1985 remarks on the epistemic point of view suggest a teleological conception of epistemic evaluation: it's the kind of evaluation that's relevant when we aim at a certain goal or telos: that of maximizing truth in a large belief system. Kelly 2003 defends what could be labeled 'epistemic purism'. He argues that the teleological approach is fundamentally misguided.
3. Epistemic Consequentialism
According to epistemic consequentialism, the epistemic rationality of a belief is fixed by its consequences. Suppose I'm in circumstances such that, by believing that the earth is flat, I'll bring it about that ten thousand true and non-trivial beliefs will be added to my belief system. The consequentialist view says I'm going to be epistemically justified in believing that the earth is flat. Berker 2013a and 2013b argues that such a view does not respect the separateness of propositions, and he accuses Goldman's process reliabilism of being an example of a consequentialist view. Goldman 2015 argues that Berker misunderstands his view: process reliabilism looks at the past history, not at the future consequences, of a belief. Berker 2015 insists that his criticism of Goldman's view sticks.
4. Reasons for Belief and Reasons for Action
Here is what looks like unproblematic starting point: for the evaluation of beliefs, epistemic reasons are relevant; for the evaluation of actions, practical reasons (moral or prudential) are relevant. Are there also epistemic reasons for actions? If epistemic reasons are truth-relevant reasons, arguably the answer is 'no' (since actions don't have truth values). On the other hand, actions can have significant consequences with regard to how well you're doing epistemically. Perhaps there are epistemic reasons for not being negligent in gathering relevant evidence. Are there also practical reasons for belief? Consider a cancer patient who has evidence indicating that most likely he'll die within three months. Believing he'll survive will maximizes his chances at survival. Can such a person rationally believe that he will survive? Some say yes, others say no. Can the patient's epistemic reasons and practical reasons be weighed against each other? Are they commensurable? Again, some say yes, some say no. Relevant literature: various papers by Richard Feldman, Cohen 2016b and Kelly 2002, as well as a lot of additional papers. Also relevant in this context: the question of whether we have voluntary control over our beliefs. I've written about a half dozen papers defending doxastic voluntarism, and there are lots of papers rejecting the voluntaristic view.
5. The New Pragmatism
According to Rinard 2015, 2017, 2019, the rationality of actions and the rationality of beliefs is to be fixed in exactly the same way. That's her Equal Treatment thesis. Schleifer McCormick 2014 defends a similar theory. Do such approaches abandon a hefty distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic reasons? Why couldn't evidentialist agree that there are two kinds of practical reasons: epistemic and non-epistemic ones? Roderick Chisholm at one point held that, in the end, epistemic reasons are moral reasons.
6. Epistemic Dilemmas
Can your total evidence re a proposition p be such that, no matter what attitude towards p you take (belief, disbelief, suspension), it will not be rational or justified? Relevant literature: Conee 1987, 1994, Huemer 2010, Weatherson 2019, Worship 2018, plus literature on moral dilemmas.
7. The Ontology of Epistemic Reasons
The traditional approach is that epistemic reasons are mental states such as experiences, seemings, memories, intuitions, or beliefs. Advocates of the Knowledge First approach reject such mentalism. Instead, they defend non-mentalism: the view that epistemic reasons are non-mental entities such as facts or true propositions. Relevant Literature: Littlejohn 2002, Williamson 2002, Sylvan 2016a and Sylvan 2016b.
Additional Topics:
Internalism vs. externalism, the nature of suspension, pragmatic encroachment (which is different from Rinard's new pragmatism), and moral encroachment.

Literature

• Alston, William. 1985. "Concepts of Epistemic Justification." The Monist 68, no. 1: 57-89.
• Berker, Selim. 2013a. "The Rejection of Epistemic Consequentialism." Philosophical Issues 23: 363-87.
• Berker, Selim. 2013b. "Epistemic Teleology and the Separateness of Propositions." Philosophical Review 122: 337-393.
• Berker, Selim. 2015. "Reply to Goldman: Cutting Up the One to Save the Five in Epistemology." Episteme 12: 145-53.
• Cohen, Stewart. 2016a "Theorizing about the Epistemic." Inquiry 59: 839-57.
• Cohen, Stewart. 2016b. "Reasons to Believe and Reasons to Act." Episteme 13, no. 4: 427-438.
• Conee, Earl. 1987. "Evident, but Rationally Unacceptable." Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65: 316-26.
• Conee, Earl. 1994. "Against an Epistemic Dilemma." Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72: 475-81.
• Conee, Earl. 2016. "The Epistemic." ˆ59: 858-66.
• Goldman, Alvin. 2015. "Reliabilism, Veritism, and Epistemic Consequentialism." Episteme 12: 131-43.
• Huemer, Michael. 2010. "The Puzzle of Metacoherence." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82: 1-21.
• Kelly, Thomas. 2002. "The Rationality of Belief and Some Other Propositional Attitudes." Philosophical Studies 110: 163-196.
• Kelly, Thomas. 2003. "Epistemic Rationality as Instrumental Rationality: A Critique." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66: 612-640.
• Kelly, Thomas. 2008. "Evidence: Fundamental Concepts and the Phenomenal Conception." Philosophy Compass 3/5: 933-955.
• Littlejohn, Clayton. 2012. Justification and the Truth-Connection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rinard, Susanna. 2015. "Against the New Evidentialists." Philosophical Issues 25: 208-223.
• Rinard, Susanna. 2017. "No Exception for Belief." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94, no. 1: 121-143.
• Rinard, Susanna. 2019. "Equal Treatment for Belief." Philosophical Studies 176, no. 7: 1923-1950.
• Schleifer McCormick, Miriam. 2014. "Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief." Routledge.
• Sylvan, Kurt. 2016a. "Epistemic Reasons I: Normativity." Philosophy Compass 11: 364-76.
• Sylvan, Kurt. 2016b. "Epistemic Reasons II: Basing." Philosophy Compass 11: 377-89.
• Sylvan, Kurt. Forthcoming a, "An Epistemic Non-Consequentialism." The Philosophical Review.
• Sylvan, Kurt. Forthcoming b. "Reliabilism without Epistemic Consequentialism." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, first online: doi:10.1111/phpr.12560.
• Turri, John, 2009, "The Ontology of Epistemic Reasons", Noûs, 43(3): 490-512.
• Weatherson, Brian. Normative Externalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Williamson, Timothy, 2002, Knowledge and Its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Worsnip, Alex. 2018. "The Conflict of Evidence and Coherence." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96: 3-44.

PHIL 4020/5020: Hellenistic Philosophy
Professor Bailey
SEC 001 TR 2:00-3:15 HLMS 196
Fulfills the Ancient Philosophy History requirement for the Ph.D. program and the History of Philosophy requirement for the M.A. program. 

The aim of this course is to provide both a broad overview of the three schools of Hellenistic Philosophy – the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Academic Sceptics – but with a decided focus on issues in modality, including: free will; determinism; the Master argument of Diodorus Cronus and Chrysippus’s response; the necessity of the past versus whatever openness can be expected of the future; the possibility of eternal recurrence. The course will draw from, but not require those enrolled to read, the collection of A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge 1987).

PHIL 5030 Greek Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
SEC 001 W 3-4pm 

Plato, Euthydemus 

PHIL 5040 Latin Philosophical Texts
Professor Zachary Herz
SEC 001 F 1:00-2:00

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae(on the law)

Aquinas (tent.)

PHIL 4150/5150: Topics in Applied Ethics
Professor Boonin
SEC 001 TR 3:30-4:45 Hellems 196
Counts towards the Values requirement for the Ph.D. program; fulfills the Values requirement for the M.A. program.

This seminar will focus on ethical issues involving sex and procreation. The unit on sex will primarily deal with questions about sexual consent. Examples include: Can the threat of emotional harm suffice to render consent to sex invalid? (e.g. “if you don’t agree to have sex with me, I’ll reveal an embarrassing secret of yours”).  Does the threat of physical harm suffice to render consent given to a third party invalid? (e.g. if a pimp says to a prostitute “if you don’t agree to have sex with this customer, I’ll beat you up,” is the prostitute’s consent to have sex with the customer valid?).  Can deception about relatively minor matters suffice to render sexual consent invalid? (e.g., lying about one’s job to get someone to agree to sex). Under what conditions, if any, is it permissible to have sex with someone whose consent is given while they are moderately intoxicated?  Does a young child’s inability to give valid consent to sex suffice to justify prohibitions on pedophilia?  Is it permissible to continue having sex with a long-term partner if they develop severe dementia and are no longer able to provide valid consent?  Do certain kinds of power asymmetries (e.g., between therapist and patient) undermine the validity of sexual consent? Can some offers be so irresistible that they render consent to sex invalid? (e.g., “I’ll give you ten million dollars if you have sex with me”). Time permitting, we will also consider a few other topics in sexual ethics, including issues involving monogamy, promiscuity, sadomasochism, and computer-generated child pornography. The unit on procreation will be shorter and will focus primarily on David Benatar’s anti-natalism and Derek Parfit’s mere addition paradox and non-identity problem.  Time permitting, we will also look at parts of Samuel Scheffler’s recent book, Why Worry ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Future Generations?

PHIL 4800/5800: Open Topics: Logic and Metaphysics of Values
Professor Oddie
SEC 001 TR 12:30-1:45 HLMS 196
Counts towards the Values requirement for the Ph.D. program; fulfills the Values requirement for the M.A. program.

The nature and logic of value
There is an astonishing variety of value phenomena. We attribute evaluative traits (properties, relations and magnitudes) to objects of just about every ontological type. In addition to the thin evaluative attributes (e.g. good, bad and better-than) there are thick evaluative traits (e.g. courageous, compassionate, callous, kind, boring, delightful) which we apply to persons, character traits, dispositions, actions, states of affairs, institutions, artifacts, performances, paintings, poems, proofs and practices. The value phenomena suggest that just about any type of entity is bearer of value features. In addition to this plethora of different kinds of value bearers, we entertain radically different kinds of value attributes. Some bearers of value (such as pleasure, happiness, knowledge, and a good will) are claimed to be good simpliciter. Others are said to be good for some beings but not others. Others are said to be good of a kind. Cutting across these categories we often distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic goodness. Pleasure is claimed by hedonists to be intrinsically good while things which conduce to pleasure-such as health or wealth-are claimed to be of extrinsic value. Traditionally intrinsic value has been identified with what has final value-i.e. what is to be valued for its own sake. Recently some philosophers have argued that final and intrinsic value come apart. Kant made a (possibly related) distinction between conditional and unconditional value. Coolness, courage and even happiness may all be good in some manner, but they are good only conditional upon the presence of a good will, and a good will, Kant claimed, is the only thing of unconditional value. This connects to a long debate about the additivity of value . Do values add up or does value exhibit organic unity? The aggregation of value lies at the heart of many problems, such as various population paradoxes, the validity of bare-difference reasoning, and value particularism. It is the aim of the course to try to examine this range of issues and their bearing both on the ontology and logical structure of value-and to determine whether, underlying the bewildering complexity of value phenomena there might be lurking a plausible unified theory.

Phil 5800: Open Topics: Varieties of Testimony 
Professor Fileva
SEC 002 R 5:00-7:30 HLMS 196
Can count towards either the Values or the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program (student’s choice); and can fulfill either the Values or the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the M.A. program (student’s choice). Students taking this course should notify Karen Sites as to which requirement they want the course to fulfill for them.

We form many of our factual beliefs on the basis of testimony. You believe some river passes through a town you've never been to, because the map says so. I believe there will be 12 candidates on stage at the next presidential debate, because that's what I heard on the news. These cases are common and uncontroversial. But other cases are more philosophically puzzling.

Aesthetics
Suppose you read a novel that you find pretentious and quite tedious. You later learn that leading literary critics consider it outstanding. The novel has received a Pulitzer Prize. Should you defer to the experts' judgment even though it contradicts your own aesthetic response? If you oughtn't defer, what justifies your trusting your own judgment? Do you secretly believe that you are better qualified to judge than the leading critics? Or do you think that they are better qualified to judge but that your judgment is nonetheless more likely to be true than theirs is?

Ethics & Metaethics  
Now consider the moral case. Suppose you hear that buying and selling kidneys is wrong, and you believe it, because you heard it from a trusted person. You yourself see nothing wrong with kidney sales, but you defer. In addition, you have all the non-normative information that the other person has. You defer to the other's judgment not because you think he know facts you don't know but because you think the other's normative judgment is superior to your own. Is this belief justified? Can it count as moral knowledge?

Epistemology
Suppose 80% of healthcare professionals believe treatment A is better than treatment B, while 20% believe the converse. What is a reasonable heuristic for you to adopt here? Should you go with the majority view? Or suspend judgment? Or go along with the judgment of an otherwise trusted expert - say, your own doctor - regardless of whether the trusted person's view is the majority view?

These are some of the questions we will explore in this course. As you will see, there is no consensus view with regard to any of them. And even if there were, you wouldn't be able to simply adopt that view on the basis of testimony without a sacrifice of your autonomy. Or would you?

PHIL 6200: Seminar in Social and Political Philosophy: Power and Political Power
Professor Wingo
SEC 001 M 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Counts towards the Values requirement for the Ph.D. program; fulfills the Values requirement for the M.A. program.

PHIL 6300: Philosophy of Mind
Professor Rupert
SEC 001 W 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Counts towards the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program; fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the M.A. program.

This course consists of three portions. The first is oriented toward methodology; it explores and motivates a naturalistic approach to the understanding of the human mind. The second focuses on the structure of the human mind, sometimes called the 'cognitive architecture'. Topics covered include the personal-subpersonal distinction, the contrast between System 1 and System 2 processing, and the distinction between implicit and explicit attitudes. The final portion of the course surveys error-theoretic, or "illusionist," proposals about consciousness, particularly as these are connected to the preceding discussion of cognitive architecture. 

To come at matters from a different angle, the course addresses the following questions, among others:

• "What is philosophical naturalism?"
• "How is philosophy of mind related to the sciences of the mind?"
• "Do our most successful sciences of the mind presuppose or otherwise entail the existence of what philosophers call a 'personal level'?
• "To what extent is human behavior driven by processes that the subject cannot accurately report on?"
• "How substantive is the distinction between conscious states and processes, on the one hand, and subconscious states and processes, on the other?"
• "Does 'consciousness' designate a natural kind or natural property?"

Assigned reading for the course includes papers by W.V.O. Quine, Jaegwon Kim, Zoe Drayson, Tamar Gendler, Peter Carruthers, Jenann Ismael, Dan Dennett, Elizabeth Irvine, Francois Kammerer, and the course instructor, as well as some of the relevant empirical work.

PHIL 6380: Seminar in Metaphysics: Limning the qualitative structure of reality 
Professor Saucedo
SEC 001 T 5:00-7:30 HLMS 196
Counts towards the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program; fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the M.A. program.

In this seminar, we'll explore various interconnected questions about the qualitative structure of reality in light of certain key developments in the recent literature. We'll delve into older and newer debates about particulars, universals, and states of affairs while being sensitive to issues about ground, metaphysical explanation, fundamentality. Metaphysically speaking, are universals just abstractions from particulars, or do particulars somehow arise from universals and their own properties and relations? Perhaps particulars and universals are metaphysically on par? Similarly: are states of affairs somehow made out of particulars and universals, or are states of affairs prior to particulars and universals? Perhaps they are independent? Taking a step back: how to think about these questions, how to adjudicate them, and what's at stake?

We'll devote special attention to questions about sparse vs abundant as well as structured vs unstructured theories of both universals and states of affairs. We'll be especially sensitive to recent debates on issues about individuation and fineness of grain and their bearing on questions about fundamentality, reduction, and realism. We'll spend a good chunk of the seminar parsing through bits and pieces of three books: Armstrong's Universals, Bealer's Quality and Concept, and Jason Turner's Facts in Logical Space. Other main readings from (among others) Cian Dorr, Jessica Wilson, David Lewis, Kit Fine, Alyssa Ney, Cody Gilmore, Chris Swoyer, Maya Eddon, Jonathan Schaffer, Karen Bennett, Shamik Dasgupta, Daniel Nolan, Jennifer Wang, Tim Williamson, and Fraser MacBride.

PHIL 5020/4020: Topics in the History of Philosophy: Early Modern Metaphysics
Professor Kaufman
SEC 001 TR 2:00-3:15 HLMS 196
Fulfills the Modern Philosophy History requirement for the Ph.D. program and the History of Philosophy requirement for the M.A. program. 

This course will focus on a number of issues surrounding early-modern theories of matter and corporeal substance: e.g. the nature of corporeal substance, individuation, composition, constitution, the ontological status of parts and wholes, persistence over time (including stuff on personal identity), infinite divisibility vs. atoms, monism vs. pluralism, and location/place.

Among the philosophers we will read are Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, More, Conway, Cavendish, Spinoza, Bayle, Charleton, and Leibniz. We will also be reading recent-ish secondary literature.

Requirements: TBD, but at least a substantial paper and an annotated bibliography.

PHIL 5030: Greek Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
Contact Professor Lee for meeting times/place

PHIL 5040: Latin Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
Contact Professor Lee for meeting times/place

PHIL 5100: Proseminar in Values
Professor Boonin et al.
SEC 001 T 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Fulfills the Values requirement for both the Ph.D. and M.A. programs; restricted to first-year Philosophy graduate students only.

PHIL 5110/4110: Contemporary Moral Theory
Dr. Perl
SEC 001 TR 3:30-4:45 HLMS 196
Fulfills the Values requirement for both the Ph.D. and M.A. programs.

This seminar is an advanced seminar on topics in consequentialist moral theory. Its goal will be to put you in a position to make your own contributions to the field. Our time will be roughly split between act consequentialism and rule consequentialism. We’ll focus on several different versions of act consequentialism: in addition to standard versions, we’ll consider satisfying consequentialism, agent-relative consequentialism, and scalar consequentialism. We’ll also consider `consequentializing’ results — results that show that for any plausible nonconsequentialist theory, there is an extensionally equivalent consequentialist theory — and ask what we can learn from those results. When discussing rule consequentialism, we’ll explore whether every reason for accepting rule consequentialism is an even stronger reason for accepting act consequentialism. And we’ll discuss the `ideal worlds’ problem for rule consequentialism — roughly, the problem that the sort of idealization that distinguishes rule consequentialism from act consequentialism always leads to implausible results.

PHIL 5240/ENVS 5240: Seminar in Environmental Philosophy
Professor Hale
SEC 002 M 4:00-6:30 ECCR 118

This seminar is structured to bring practical environmental issues into the range of view of philosophers, as well as to help environmental scientists and policy analysts more readily recognize theoretical debates that may be informing their research. As such, it aims to strike a balance between the abstract and the practical. Because of its unique student composition -- approximately one third environmental scientists, one third environmental policy and law students, and one third philosophers -- discussions tend toward “on the ground” issues. Nevertheless, they remain firmly rooted in the growing body of work published in what is widely called “environmental philosophy.”

Structurally the course cuts a path between informing students of historically significant work in environmental theory, covering approaches such as land ethics and deep ecology, and engaging practical policy questions to see how they might inform analytic philosophy.  We begin in the first third of the semester by raising questions about the origins and future of environmental philosophy. A third of the way through the semester we then turn from these broad-brush theoretical questions to focus on two central application areas: climate change and species conservation. At the end of the semester, we examine and criticize some of the more market-oriented approaches to environmental conservation.

Philosophy students working in applied ethics with find much of interest in this class, but any student who anticipates writing or teaching in the area will also benefit. Again, due to the unusual student composition, drawing sometimes from different units and schools, written assignments are tailored to the needs of each student, generally in consultation with each student.

PHIL 5460/4460: Modal Logic
Professor Forbes
SEC 001 TR 12:30-1:45 HLMS 177

Many of the central problems of philosophy crucially involve the modal concepts of possibility and necessity. For example, the problem of free will is the problem whether it was in any sense possible to have acted differently from the way one did; the problem of causation is whether there is any sense in which a cause necessitates its effect; various issues about reducibility turn on whether facts of one kind could have been different without there being any difference in facts of some other kind; and so on.

Nowadays, proper discussion of these and other issues requires some familiarity with the logic of possibility and necessity, or modal logic, as it is known. This course imparts the required familiarity. After a review of non-modal sentential logic, we will begin with the standard system of sentential modal logic, S5. Following a review of non-modal first-order logic, we will then investigate other systems of sentential modal logic. In the second part of the course we extend sentential S5 to first-order S5, and we will investigate a number of topics of philosophical interest, such as quantification and existence, possibilist quantifiers, the actuality operator, the de re/de dicto distinction, and counterpart theory.

PHIL 6100: Seminar in Ethics: Moral Epistemology
Professor Jaggar
SEC 001 MW 3:00-4:15 HLMS 177
Fulfills the Values requirement for both the Ph.D. and M.A. programs.

This is a course in moral epistemology and methodology. We will inquire how people might reason together fairly about justice when they are committed to divergent moral traditions and/or are in situations of different epistemic privilege. We will study various methods of moral reasoning proposed by analytic philosophers in the late twentieth century, including thinking from the original position, seeking a reflective equilibrium, interpreting shared traditions, and postulating an ideal speech situation. We will also consider some proposed universal values, such as human rights and human capabilities. Other topics include ideal and non-ideal theory, experimental philosophy, and the recent revival of pragmatism.

Students will write six reading responses and a final paper.

PHIL 6380: Seminar in Metaphysics

Professor Huemer
SEC 001 R 5:00-7:30 HLMS 196
Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for both the Ph.D. and M.A. programs.

This course will explore a large number of paradoxes, including: the liar paradox, the Sorites paradox, Newcomb's paradox, Zeno's paradox, and about 20 other, less famous ones. We will consider the solutions to these paradoxes appearing in a couple of amazing recent books by an important philosopher. Note: though the course is labelled "seminar in metaphysics," the paradoxes and their solutions implicate important issues in metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics, and philosophy of mathematics, perhaps among other fields.

PHIL 6400: Seminar in Philosophy of Science: Natural Kinds and Scientific Theories
Professor Cleland
SEC 001 W 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for both the Ph.D. and M.A. programs.

Paradigmatic examples of natural kinds, which tend to occur in hierarchies, include bear, mammal, hydrogen, water, acid, quartz, marble, metamorphic rock, glacier, planet, star, and electromagnetic force. Natural kinds allegedly cut nature at its joints.  In contrast, non-natural or artificial kinds, such as widow, chair, money, and garbage, depend upon human interests and conventions; if there were no humans these categories wouldn't exist. In recent years, however, the idea that natural kinds reflect objective, mind-independent divisions in nature has come under attack. This course explores different philosophical accounts of natural kinds (realist and nominalist, pluralist and monist) in the context of the role that natural kinds play in successful scientific theories. We will explore issues such as (i) the role that natural kinds play in facilitating induction, prediction, and explanation, (ii) the extent to which the naturalness of a kind is theory relative, (iii) how science "discovers" and theorizes natural kinds, and (iv) the dependency of natural kind categorizations on social practices for their scientific success.

Spring 2019

PHIL 4020/5020: British Ethical Theories from Sidgwick to Ewing
Professor Heathwood
MW 3:00-4:15
Can fulfill EITHER the Open History requirement OR the Value Theory requirement for the Ph.D. program (student’s choice), but not both.  Students who enroll should let Karen know which requirement they would like the course to fulfill. Fulfills the Ethics and Social or Political Philosophy requirement for the M.A. program.

A study of the important doctrines, arguments, and themes advanced among a group of British moral philosophers active in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century.  The most well-known and influential thinkers in the group are Henry Sidgwick, G.E. Moore, and W.D. Ross.  Other central figures include Hastings Rashdall, J.M.E. McTaggart, H.A. Prichard, E.F. Carritt, C.D. Broad, and A.C. Ewing.

Their primary contributions were in theoretical ethics, and in particular in the normative ethics of behavior, axiology, and metaethics.  In normative theory, they didn't form an entirely unified school: in the ethics of behavior, some were consequentialists, others deontologists; in axiology, some were hedonists, others pluralists.  They agreed more in metaethics: they were all non-naturalists and intuitionists.  They shared other commitments as well, such as about which moral concepts are central and a commitment to the idea of underivative moral truths.  As Thomas Hurka writes in his recent book on this school, "these shared views make the group a distinctive school in the history of moral philosophy, pursuing the subject differently than earlier writers such as Aristotle, Hobbes, and Kant and than many present-day ones."

Our main aim in the course is to understand and evalute the school's views and arguments.  We will also be interested in understanding the relations and influences among the members and among their ideas.  The course will be structured around Thomas Hurka's recent book, British Ethical Theorists from Sidgwick to Ewing, the organization of which is topical rather than by figure.  We will read Hurka's book chapter-by-chapter all the way through alongside relevant excerpts from the primary sources.

PHIL 5030: Greek Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
Contact Professor Lee for meeting times/place

Selected readings in classical philosophy, with a focus on achieving fluency in reading philosophical Greek. May enroll in multiple selections in the same term. Repeatable for up to 8 total credit hours.

PHIL 5040: Latin Philosophical Texts
Professor Pasnau
Contact Professor Pasnau for meeting times/place

Selected readings in classical and medieval authors, in the original language. The focus is on achieving fluency in reading philosophical Latin. Repeatable for up to 7 credit hours.

PHIL 4260/5260: Philosophy of Law
Professor Talbot
TR 3:30-4:45
Fulfills the Value Theory requirement for the Ph.D. program and the Ethics and Social or Political Philosophy requirement for the M.A. program. 

First topic:  The ethics of collective activity in the legal context

The justification of legal practices often depends on goals that can only be achieved by collective or group activity

• Often, typical acts of individual participation, taken by themselves, make no difference to the goals of the group activity, and can do serious harm in the individual case
• We see this, e.g., in the justification of punishment:  the overall policy of legal punishment of general types of acts does have an effect on crime (although that connection is complicated), but typical individual acts of punishment won't have any effect on crime, and will be costly to the criminal
• We also see this in discussions of judicial adherence ("correct" application of the law):  consistent adherence creates an effective, predictable system, and systematic deviation would be potentially very harmful; but a particular act of adherence will have little to no effect on the systematic goals and may be very costly to those involved in a case

Topic two:  The ethics of collective harm in the legal context

Collective legal activities can create harms to which individual activities don't make a significant causal difference

• For example, individual sentences, or individual arrests, or individual uses of testimony in a particular case can be a piece of a systematic pattern of injustice without clearly making any significant difference to that larger pattern

We may also talk about how the law should deal with actions that create collective harm

• E.g. should individual acts which, as a group, create marginalization be punished more stringently, even when the action itself does not make a noticeable contribution to marginalization? 

The course will cover issues connected to collective action and collective harm, which might include:

• Do groups or collectives have moral obligations themselves?
• When do individuals have obligations to participate in collective activity, or to avoid participating in the harms caused by collectives?
• Do legal agents have special obligations to participate in collective activity, or to remedy collective harms?
• When these obligations exist, how strong are they?

Second topic:

What should legal agents (judges, jurors, police officers, lawyers, etc) do when they think their legal requirements conflict with their moral requirements?

• Note that they may be incorrect about this conflict.
• This is especially interesting in the legal context, because almost everyone agrees that even ideal laws can't fully conform to moral requirements.  And everyone agrees that our actual laws are not ideal laws.
• Possible examples we might discuss: jury nullification, judicial deviation from seemingly unjust laws

We'll likely discuss:

• Under what conditions should we see the law as more reliable about moral matters than we are?
• Do legal jobs create moral obligations to set aside one's own moral views?
• How do moral uncertainty and moral ignorance affect moral reasons/obligations?
• Does democracy sometimes require deference to the law (if so, under what conditions, and how strong is this requirement)?

PHIL 5550: Metaphysics and Epistemology Proseminar
Professor Forbes et al.
R 5:00-7:30
Restricted to first year Philosophy graduate students only; fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program and the M.A. program.

The M&E Proseminar, PHIL 5550, is designed to allow graduate students to acquire some background in M&E topics before taking specific M&E courses. It's team taught, in S19 by Cleland, Forbes, Pasnau and Saucedo. Each of these will present material on their chosen topic, as follows:

Cleland: Philosophical thought about scientific methodology:  Logical empiricism, proof, and probability; Popper's falsificationism and its woes; Kuhn's radical rethinking of scientific methodology; the post-Kuhnian world of philosophy of science (overhauling traditional ideas about scientific justification and objectivity)

Forbes: Modal logic for philosophy: I will cover sentential systems of modal logic, quantified S5 and counterfactuals.

Pasnau: Recent developments in epistemology, focusing especially on contextualism and pragmatic encroachment.

Saucedo: More logic for philosophy: an introduction to advanced topics in predication and quantification, and selected themes in non-classical systems.

Work associated with the modules will be in the form of either problems-sets or a short paper.

PHIL 5800: Epistemology
Professor Staffel
TR 2:00-3:15
Fulfills the Metaphysics and Epistemology requirement for the Ph.D. program and the M.A. program.

This class is intended to be an introduction to some central topics in formal epistemology. Formal epistemology is a relatively recent branch of epistemology, which uses formal tools such as logic and probability theory in order to answer questions about the nature of rational belief. An important feature that distinguishes formal epistemology from traditional epistemology is not just its use of formal tools, but also its understanding of the nature of belief. Traditional epistemology tends to focus almost exclusively on what is called ‘outright belief’, where the options considered are just belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment. By contrast, it is widely accepted among formal epistemologists that this conception of belief is too coarse-grained to capture the rich nature of our doxastic attitudes. They posit that humans also have degrees of belief, or credences, which can take any value between full certainty that something is true, and certainty that it is false. To see why this makes sense, consider the fact that we can have outright beliefs in various propositions, but still have varying degrees of certainty in them. For example, I believe that 2+2=4, and that Freddy Mercury was born in Zanzibar, but I am much more certain of the former than the latter. This can be captured elegantly in a framework that allows for both outright and graded belief.

The shift in focus towards degrees of belief has generated a rich research program, parts of which integrate with issues in traditional epistemology, and parts of which are specific to the debate about degrees of belief. Important questions in the field are for example: How are degrees of belief related to outright beliefs? What constraints are there on rational degrees of belief, and how can they be defended? How can we adequately represent degrees of belief in a formal framework? How do ideal epistemological norms bear on what non-ideal agents like us ought to believe? The results of these debates are relevant for many areas of philosophy besides epistemology, such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and practical reasoning.

No special prior knowledge of formal methods is required that goes beyond familiarity with propositional logic.

PHIL 6000: Seminar in History of Philosophy: Plato's Theaetetus and Philebus
Professor Lee
M 5:00-7:30
Fulfills the Classical Philosophy History requirement for the Ph.D. program and the History of Philosophy requirement for the M.A. program. 

This seminar will focus on two quite different Platonic dialogues, the Theaetetus and the Philebus, to show how Plato in his mature thinking moved beyond some of the more familiar ideas in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology of his earlier period.
 
The Theaetetus is the only dialogue devoted to the question of knowledge (epistêmê) in Plato. It revisits and revises numerous ideas about knowledge in earlier works such as the Meno, Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus. In the Theaetetus, Socrates and his interlocutors develop —and then reject — three main answers to the question ‘what is knowedge?’: (i) knowledge is perception, (ii) knowledge is true belief or judgment, (iii) knowledge is true belief with an account (logos).

The Philebus is another late Platonic dialogue, this one focused on the question of which life is the best: the life of pleasure or the life of knowledge. Famously, Socrates answers that neither one is best for humans—rather, you need to a blend or mix of the two. This important but difficult dialogue contains numerous influential ideas, including a new approach to the metaphysics of forms, the seeds of the idea of eudaimonism (which would have an enormous influence on Aristotle), as well as a rethinking of Plato’s earlier and overly simplistic ideas about the merits of pleasure as well as contemplation.

PHIL 6100: Seminar in Ethics: Metaethics: Internalism versus Externalism about Moral Motivation, and the Structure of Normative Reasons
Professor Norcross
T 5:00-7:30
Fulfills the Value Theory requirement for the Ph.D. program and the Ethics and Social or Political Philosophy requirement for the M.A. program.

This seminar will cover two topics in metaethics. In the first half of the semester, we will examine the debate over the relation between moral judgment and moral motivation. We will read Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem, and various articles. In the second half of the semester, we will focus on the structure of moral reasons, by working through the manuscript of my forthcoming book Morality By Degrees: Reasons Without Demands.

Fall 2018

PHIL 5100: Proseminar in Values
Professor Jaggar et al.
SEC 001 W 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Restricted to first year Philosophy graduate students only.

PHIL 5030: Greek Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
Contact Professor Lee for meeting times/place

PHIL 5040: Latin Philosophical Texts
Professor Pasnau
Contact Professor Pasnau for meeting times/place

PHIL 4030/5020: Topics in the History of Philosophy: Medieval Philosophy 
Professor Pasnau
SEC 001 TR 3:30-4:45 HUMN 125

This course will be a survey of medieval philosophy, ranging over ethics, mind, and metaphysics, and covering both the Latin and the Arabic traditions. It will be mainly aimed at undergraduate majors (as PHIL 4030), but might be suitable for graduate students who have not previously had the chance to get an overview of medieval philosophy.

PHIL 4200/5200: Political Philosophy: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Global Justice
Professor Jaggar
SEC 001 MW 3:00-4:15 MCOL E155

This course will study the tensions between the global regime of international law and human rights, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the rise of contemporary nationalisms. New forms of global governance seem to be required by the ever-increasing integration of the global economy and the recognition that many environmental problems cross national borders. Yet today we see a resurgence of xenophobia and nationalism, with calls to guard our borders and ways of life.

The tensions between these two approaches to global governance emerge in many conflicts over land, language, and culture. We will study the philosophical aspects of a tangle of related issues including: moral bases for territorial claims, cultural integrity, migration, responsibility for global inequality, military humanitarian intervention, and reparations for colonialism.

PHIL 5360: Metaphysics: Metaphysics of Time
Professor Demarest
SEC 001 T 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177

What does it mean for time to flow, and what does the direction of time have to do with flow? What do special and general relativity imply about time, and does quantum entanglement have any implications for time (or time-ordering of events). We will cover the 'Mentaculus' thesis that time can be derived from nothing more than statistical mechanics and the big bang. We will also discuss what time has to do with personal identity. We’ll read current articles on these topics, as well as a few classics, and there will be a term paper.

PHIL 4440/5440: Topics in Logic
Professor Forbes
SEC 001 TR 11:00-12:15 HLMS 177

The course is designed mainly with the needs of philosophy majors/ minors and graduates in mind. For philosophy majors or minors, a grade of at least B+ in Phil 2440 (Symbolic Logic) or some equivalent is recommended. Any undergraduate who doesn’t satisfy this condition but who plans to enroll should first seek the advice of the instructor.

Course Description: The aim of the course is to present proofs of soundness and completeness results for sentential and first-order systems of natural deduction of the kind commonly taught in Phil 2440. The particular focus will be the Gentzen-style systems of my Phil 2440 textbook Modern Logic (OUP 1994). As time permits, we will look at some first-order model theory beyond the completeness proofs, up to and including properties of non-standard models of arithmetic.

Textbook: Logic and Metalogic for Philosophers, by Graeme Forbes (available in the bookstore in late summer).

Homework assignments will be set on a regular basis and graded, course grades being based on these. The assignments for those taking the course at the 4440 level may sometimes be different from those for the 5440 level.

PHIL 4800/5800: Open Topics: The Epistemology of Testimony
Professor Steup
SEC 001 TR 3:30-4:45 HLMS 245

There are interesting parallels between the epistemology of perception and the epistemology of testimony. When the liquid in a cup tastes like coffee, you have a perceptual experience. Under which conditions does such an experience give you justification for believing that there is coffee in the cup? Dogmatists say: Perceptual experiences are necessarily a source of (defeasible) justification. There are no conditions under which the liquid’s tasting like coffee fails to give you a reason to believe there is coffee in the cup. Conservatives say: Perceptual experiences are a source of justification provided you have no reason to distrust them. On that view, the liquid’s tasting like coffee gives you justification for believing there is coffee in the cup as long as you have no negative reason to think the experience is deceptive. Credentialists say: Perceptual experiences are a source of justification only if you have reasons to trust them. According to them, the liquid’s tasting like coffee gives you justification for believing there is coffee in the cup only if you have positive reasons to consider this experience trustworthy or reliable.

In the epistemology of testimony, we find the same dialectic. Suppose Jane tells you that the liquid in the cup is coffee. Under which conditions does the Jane’s assertion give you justification for believing there is coffee in the cup? Dogmatists say: Testimony is always a source of (defeasible) justification. There are no conditions under which Jane’s assertion fails to give you a (defeasible) reason to believe the liquid in the cup is coffee. Conservatives say: Testimony is a source of justification as long as there is no negative reason to consider it untrustworthy. Jane’s assertion is a reason to believe there is coffee in the cup provided you have no negative reasons for not trusting what she told you. Credentialists say: Testimony is a source of justification only if you have evidence of its reliability. Jane’s assertion is a reason to believe the liquid in the cup is coffee only if you have positive reasons to consider her testimony trustworthy.

In this course/seminar, we will examine the reasons for and against each of these theories about testimony, and also discuss various other issues that arise in the epistemology of testimony. Readings: Paul Faulkner: Knowledge on Trust (). Jennifer Lackey: Learning from Words (). Lackey & Sosa (eds.): The Epistemology of Testimony ().

PHIL 4260/5260: Philosophy of Law
MWF 2:00-2:50 HLMS 177
Professor Wingo

"Philosophy of Law" can refer to a wide range of philosophical topics related to the law.  In this course we will be especially concerned with the moral foundations of law and moral questions that arise when thinking about the law, especially the constitutional law of the United States.

Some Topics we will cover include:

1. Natural Law Theory
2. Legal Positivism
3. Legal Realism
4. Law and the Limits of Individual Liberty
5. Human Dignity and the Law
6. American Constitution: The original Intent and the Constitution as a living Document  
7. Civic Education and the Law

PHIL 5290: Topics in Values and Social Policy
T 5:00-7:30, HLMS 177
Professor Boonin

This seminar will focus on topics in sexual ethics that have an important bearing on social policy.  A significant portion of the course will be devoted to questions about sexual consent.  Examples include: Can the threat of emotional harm suffice to render consent invalid? (e.g. “if you don’t agree to have sex with me, I’ll break up with you”).  Does the threat of physical harm suffice to render consent given to a third party invalid? (e.g. if A says to B “if you don’t agree to have sex with C, I’ll beat you up,” and if B agrees to have sex with C as a result, is the consent to sex that B gives to C valid?).  Can deception about relatively minor matters suffice to render consent invalid? (e.g., lying about one’s job to get someone to agree to sex).  Under what conditions, if any, is it permissible to have sex with someone whose consent is given while they are moderately intoxicated?  Does a young child’s inability to give valid consent to sex suffice to justify prohibitions on pedophilia?  Is it permissible to continue having sex with a long-term partner if they develop severe dementia and are no longer able to provide valid consent?  Are people who have severe cognitive disabilities from birth morally precluded from having sex if they never develop the competence to consent to it?  Do certain kinds of power asymmetries (e.g., between therapist and patient, or between clergy person and congregant) undermine the validity of sexual consent?  Can some offers be so irresistible that they render consent invalid? (e.g., “I’ll give you ten million dollars if you have sex with me”).

Other topics in sexual ethics to be covered include sadomasochism, “virtual” child pornography (made with computer images or with young adults posing as children), voyeurism, necrophilia, and prostitution.  Time permitting, we will also consider a few issues in procreative ethics, including abortion, anti-natalism, and commercial surrogacy.  Readings for the unit on sexual consent will include works by Alan Wertheimer, Sarah Conly, Tom Dougherty, Heidi Hurd, Joel Feinberg, Hallie Liberto, and Igor Primoratz.  Readings on other topics to be covered include works by Elizabeth Anderson, David Benatar, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Don Marquis, Debra Satz, John Corvino, and Rivka Weinberg.

PHIL 4340/5340: Epistemology
TR 3:30-4:45
Professor Huemer

PHIL 4490/5490: Philosophy of Language
MW 3:00-4:15, HLMS 177
Professor Forbes

The course will focus on semantic and pragmatic aspects of linguistic meaning, and the difference between the two.

Example: you are serving on a search committee in the Department of Mathematics. The appointment is to be at the Assistant Professor level, for a specialist in differential geometry. Dr. Y has applied, and you await a letter of reference from Professor X, Y’s Ph.D. supervisor. X’s letter arrives. It reads in its entirety: Dr. Y is always polite and well-dressed, and has very neat handwriting. You conclude that X’s opinion is that Dr. Y is not a great differential geometer. Semantics tells us what the literal meaning of X’s letter is. The literal meaning concerns Dr. Y’s personal manner, tailoring, and legibility of writing. But pragmatics enriches this meaning to “Dr. Y would be a really bad choice for your position.” Somehow, the irrelevance of the literal meaning in the context (it wouldn’t be so irrelevant if we run the clock back a thousand years and suppose Y is applying for a position transcribing manuscripts in a monastery) combines with general principles about conversation to generate a total message about something — Y’s ability as a differential geometer — that the letter never even mentions.

Semantics explains how the literal meaning is arrived at. Pragmatics explains how the total message is generated from the literal meaning.

The central concept of semantics is that of compositionality, which goes back to Frege: the meaning of a complex phrase is derived in a systematic way from the meanings of its syntactic constituents. In the first part of the course we will work through an elementary version of a compositional semantic theory, known as type-logical semantics (TLG). The text for this is an introduction to semantics, Formal Models of Fregean Compositionality, by the instructor, and will be available in the campus bookstore in January.

The central concept of pragmatics is that of conversational implicature, due to Grice. Grice’s original paper, Logic and Conversation, will be distributed during the semester, as will several other readings.

The course grade will be based on homework problems set in the first part of the course, and a paper set at the end of the second.

Most of the course will be unintelligible to students who haven’t taken PHIL 2440 (Symbolic Logic) or an equivalent.

PHIL 5550: Proseminar in Metaphysics and Epistemology
R 5:00-7:30 HLMS 177
Professor Pasnau et al.
Open to first-year Philosophy graduate students only.

PHIL 6000: Seminar in History of Philosophy: Early-Modern Metaphysics
TR 2:00-3:15 HLMS 177
Professor Kaufman

Topics: Individuation/Identity, Free Will and Necessity.
Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Bramhall, Cavendish, Locke, Leibniz, Boyle, Cordemoy, Conway, More, Digby, (maybe) Cudworth, and perhaps some currently lesser-known authors.

Requirements:

• 1 seminar presentation
• 1 short (2-4 pages) paper, on an assigned topic or question. Due mid-semester.
• 1 term paper (roughly 15-25 pages)
• Annotated bibliography

PHIL 5010: Advanced Topics in Aristotle
Professor Lee
MWF 1:00-1:50, HLMS 255
This course will be an advanced survey course on Aristotle. We will cover the following topics in Aristotle: (i) Aristotle’s theory of dialectic and argument, (ii) what is distinctive about his syllogistic and theory of deductive argument? (iii) Aristotle’s concept of proof and his epistemology, (iv) Aristotle’s early ontology, (v) did Aristotle recognize the principle of bivalence or any other principle as a “logical principle”? (vi) Aristotle’s metaphysics—his concept of explanation and cause, his concept of ‘metaphysics’, what kind of principle is the principle of non-contradiction and how does Aristotle argue for it?, his theory of substance, matter and form, his concepts of potentiality and actuality, his theology, with his theory of unmoved movers and of God; (vii) Aristotle’s philosophy of science and biology, (viii) Aristotle’s psychology, (ix) Aristotle’s ethics and politics. This course is designed for advanced philosophy majors and for philosophy graduate students. Prerequisites: Undergraduates should not take this before taking PHIL 3000, and should have taken 4 philosophy courses before taking this course. If you have questions, please contact mitzi.lee@colorado.edu. The required text for this course is J.L. Ackrill’s  A New Aristotle Reader (Princeton 1987).

PHIL 5030: Greek Philosophical Texts
Professor Lee
SEC 001
Contact Professor Lee for meeting information.

PHIL 5040: Latin Philosophical Texts
Professor Pasnau
SEC 001
Contact Professor Pasnau for meeting information.

PHIL 5100 Values Proseminar
Professor Jaggar; Professor Norcross; Professor Boonin
W 5:00-7:30, HLMS 177
Restricted to incoming Philosophy graduate students only.

PHIL 5120: Philosophy and Animals
Professor Norcross
TR 12:30-1:45, HLMS 196
This course will focus on ethical issues arising out of humans’ treatment of nonhuman animals. We will begin with a consideration of the ethics of eating animals, and then move on to discuss issues arising in connection with the use of animals in research. We will conclude with a variety of issues connected with Tom Regan’s rights-based approach to animal ethics.
Graduate students, who sign up for PHIL 5120, will also read Peter Carruthers’ Book The Animals Issue, and take part in extra graduate-only weekly meetings.

PHIL 5240/ENVS 5240: Seminar in Environmental Philosophy
Professor Hale
M 2:30-5:00, SEEC S125
This course is structured to address underlying theoretical concerns of environmental scientists and policy analysts, as well as to bring environmental philosophers “back down to earth.”  As such, it aims to strike a balance between the abstract and the practical. Because of its unique student composition -- approximately one third environmental scientists, one third environmental policy and law students, and one third philosophers -- discussions tend toward “on the ground” issues.  They follow a trajectory away from big picture views toward more nuanced analytical philosophy.  Nevertheless, all of the readings are firmly rooted in environmental philosophy. 

PHIL 5460: Modal Logic
Professor Forbes
TR 3:30-4:45, HLMS 263
Many of the central problems of philosophy crucially involve the modal concepts of possibility and necessity. For example, the problem of free will is the problem whether it was in any sense possible to have acted differently from the way one did; the problem of causation is whether there is any sense in which a cause necessitates its effect; various issues about reducibility turn on whether facts of one kind could have been different without there being any difference in facts of some other kind; and so on.

Nowadays, proper discussion of these and other issues requires some familiarity with the logic of possibility and necessity, or modal logic, as it is known. This course imparts the required familiarity. After a review of non-modal sentential logic, we will begin with the standard system of sentential modal logic, S5. Following a review of non-modal first-order logic, we will then investigate other systems of sentential modal logic. In the second part of the course we extend sentential S5 to first-order S5, and we will investigate a number of topics of philosophical interest, including quantification and existence, possibilist quantifiers, the actuality operator, the de re/de dicto distinction, and counterpart theory.

Grades will be based on homework assignments set at the end of each class.

PHIL 5800: Open Topics in Philosophy:  Studies in 20^th-Century Analytic Philosophy
Professor Saucedo
TR 9:30-10:45, MCOL E155
The course will be an in-depth study of a few core themes in the intersection of logic and metaphysics throughout the 20th century. Readings from Boole, Cantor, Frege, McTaggart, Bradley, Moore, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke, Boolos, Lewis, and Fine. Restricted to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Prerequisites: must have gotten a grade of B+ or better in PHIL 2440. Highly advisable to have taken PHIL 3480 and at least one of the following: PHIL 4300, PHIL 4340, PHIL 4360, PHIL 4400, PHIL 4440, PHIL 4450, PHIL 4460, PHIL 4490.

PHIL 6400: Seminar in Philosophy of Science
Professor Cleland
T 5:00-7:30, SEEC N128

"The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life"
This course is designed for graduate students in both philosophy and the sciences. It presupposes no background in either science or philosophy. The purpose is to get science and philosophy graduate students discussing issues about life that cross disciplinary boundaries. The class is based upon my forthcoming book, The Quest for a Universal Theory of Life (under contract with Cambridge University Press), chapters of which will be assigned, along with readings by other authors, for class discussion.  The first half of the course will focus on philosophical issues such as the influence of Aristotelian ideas about life on contemporary scientific thought about the origin and nature of life, the nature of definition, the structure, function and development of scientific theories, and the 'N=1 problem' of biology.  The second half of the course brings these philosophical issues to bear on contemporary scientific issues about life, ranging from the status of artificial (soft, hard, and wet) life, the scientific plausibility of a shadow biosphere (microbial Earth life descended from an alternative origin of life), searching for extraterrestrial life, and prospects for rethinking the foundations of biology from a more microbial perspective.

Evaluation
A term paper (10-20 pages in length) will be due at the end of the semester. Students will be asked to write a 5-page prospectus for their term paper, which will be returned with extensive comments, and provide a short class presentation relating to material in their term paper; prospectuses and presentations will be distributed across the semester depending upon the focus of a student's interests.

Spring 2017

Courses at the 5000 and 6000 levels require graduate standing in philosophy unless otherwise indicated.

PHIL 5030: Greek Philosophical Texts
SEC 001
TBA

PHIL 5040: Latin Philosophical Texts
SEC 001
TBA

PHIL 5110: Contemporary Moral Theory
SEC 001, TR 3:30-4:45, HLMS 237
Prof. Fileva
We will begin this course with a central problem in metaethics, that of the role of reason versus emotion in moral judgment: Do emotions cause moral judgments? Are emotions themselves moral judgments? Is moral understanding possible without moral emotions?

In the second part of the course, we will focus on contemporary work by deontologists and consequentialists. As we will see, the debate over the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment has implications for the deonotlogy-consequentialism debate. For instance, it has been argued that deontology is based on emotion while consequentialism is based on at least partly emotion-independent reasoning.

In part three, we will discuss virtue and moral goodness and the relationship between these two, on the one hand, and and moral rightness, on the other. We will begin this part by asking what makes certain character traits virtues and whether virtue ethics is an alternative to deontology and consequentialism as has been traditionally held. Here, we will draw on work on virtue not only by contemporary virtue ethicists but by Kantians and consequentialists as well. After getting a handle on virtue's relationship to deontology and consequentialism, we will ask whether being a virtuous person is the same as being a good person as ordinarily understood, and if not, how the two are different.  

In the fourth and last part of the course, we will take a careful look at the so-called  unvirtuous emotions: envy, jealousy, anger, and so on. We will inquire into their nature and causes, their fittingness from the viewpoint of practical rationality, and the  moral assessment appropriate to them and the agents who feel them.   

PHIL 5300: Philosophy of Mind
SEC 001, TR 2:00-3:15, HLMS 237
Prof. Rupert
In this course, we will address three families of questions. The first pertains to mental content: How do our thoughts get their meaning? Do we have direct access to the contents of our thoughts? Is thought-content essentially normative? The second concerns the relation between the mental domain and the universe as it’s depicted by contemporary natural science: How could a mental state cause physical behavior? Could distinctively mental phenomena appear in a world composed ultimately of nothing more than “atoms in the void”? The third focuses on consciousness in particular: How could conscious experiences appear in a physical world? Do conscious experiences have irreducible qualitative character? How is conscious experience connected to the self? We’ll read one to two essays per week, according to a schedule to be announced in class as we move along.
Textbook: B. McLaughlin and J. Cohen (Eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007)

PHIL 5450: History and Philosophy of Physics
SEC 001, TR 11:00-12:15, DUAN G2B41
Prof. Franklin

PHIL 5550: M&E Proseminar
Restricted to first-year Philosophy graduate students only.
SEC 001, R 5:00-7:30, HLMS 177
Prof. Saucedo

PHIL 6000: Seminar in the History of Philosophy: Epistemology from Descartes to Hume
SEC 001, W 5:00-7:30, HLMS 177
Prof. Pasnau
This seminar will look closely at some of the most famous episodes in epistemology after the decline of scholasticism. We will spend roughly
four weeks each on Descartes, Locke, and Hume, and devote a bit of time to some lesser known figures from that era. Topics of particular
interest will be the structure of skeptical arguments, strategies for responding to skepticism, the role of evidence, the status of probability as an alternative to certainty, and the place of 'knowledge', 'science', and other epistemic terms.

Note that this is not intended as an overview of this familiar subject. We will be looking carefully at selected texts, and going deeply into the secondary literature. The class will take for granted a solid background familiarity with the core texts from this period. (Students unsure whether they have sufficient background should consult with the instructor about preparatory readings over winter break.)

PHIL 6100: Seminar in Ethics: Metaethics
SEC 001, T 5:00-7:30, HLMS 177
Prof. Norcross
This is a seminar on some of the central issues in metaethics. We will be looking at some of the debate over realism, expressivism, practical reason, normativity, and the meanings of moral terms. In slightly more detail, this means that we will be considering the following questions: Are moral claims straightforwardly true or false, in the same sense that descriptive claims about the physical world are (e.g. “the table is rectangular”, “The Rock of Gibraltar is larger than Dwayne ’The Rock’ Johnson”). Do moral claims attribute mind-independent properties to features of the natural world (e.g. moral agents, actions, etc.), and, if so, are any of them non-trivially true or false? Do moral claims express attitudes of approval or disapproval of the speakers? Are moral claims essentially prescriptive? Are moral judgments essentially motivating? Do moral facts, if they exist, provide reasons for action? Are there other kinds of reasons for action? Can different kinds of reasons for action (if there is more than one kind) be compared with each other? This is state-of-the-art cutting-edge metaethics. It also kicks ass (and takes names).

PHIL 6340: Seminar in Epistemology
SEC 002, M 5:00-7:30, HLMS 177
Prof. Steup
This seminar will focus on perceptual knowledge and skepticism. We will discuss the following theories: (i) the relevant alternative theory and closure denial (Dretske, Stine), (ii) contextualism (Cohen, DeRose vs. Conee and Brown as a critics), dogmatism and phenomenal conservatism (Huemer, Pryor), anti-dogmatic non-evidential conservatism (Wright), and holism (Cohen). We will also focus on the problem of easy knowledge (Cohen, Markie, Pryor). Some of the papers we will discuss can be found in two recent collections: Chris Tucker: Seemings and Justification. New Essays on Dogmatism and Phenomenal Conservatism (Oxford 2013), and Dylan Dodd & Elia Zardini: Sceptism and Perceptual Justification (Oxford, 2014).

Fall 2016

Courses at the 5000 and 6000 levels require graduate standing in philosophy unless otherwise indicated.

• PHIL 5010: Advanced Topics in Plato
  TR 2:00-3:45, HLMS 245
  Prof. Lee
  This course will concentrate on the issues of law and virtue in Plato's Crito, Statesman, and the Laws. The course presupposes the equivalent of PHIL 3000 History of Ancient Greek Philosophy, and in particular, a basic acquaintance with Plato.
   
• PHIL 5040: Latin Philosophical Texts
   
• PHIL 5100: Ethics Proseminar
  Restricted to incoming graduate students only; required for all incoming PhDs
  R 5:00-7:30, HLMS 177
  Prof. Jaggar et al.
• PHIL 5360: Metaphysics
  MWF 2:00-2:50, MCOL E155
  Prof. Oddie
  Metaphysics concerns the elements of being and their nature -- including (amongst other entities) properties, particulars, sets, relations, states of affairs, events, actions, numbers, functions, procedures, proofs, possibilities, connections and values. Different metaphysical theories posit different fundamental elements and attempt to construct a complete account of what is in terms of the fundaments. We will begin with the problem of universals and particulars and investigate a range of realist and nominalist theories. This will lead on naturally to an investigation of the nature of existence, wholes and parts, modality, causation and value.
• PHIL 5440 Topics in Logic: Mathematical Logic
  TR 3:30-4:45, HLMS 177
  Prof. Forbes
  The course is designed mainly with the needs of philosophy majors/minors and graduates in mind. For philosophy majors or minors, a grade of at least B+ in Phil 2440 (Symbolic Logic) or some equivalent is recommended. Any other undergraduate who plans to enroll should seek the advice of the instructor.
  
  Course Description: The aim of the course is to present proofs of soundness and completeness results for sentential and first-order systems of natural deduction of the kind commonly taught in Phil 2440. The particular focus will be the Gentzen-style systems of my Phil 2440 textbook Modern Logic (OUP 1994). As time permits, we will look at some first-order model theory beyond the completeness proofs, up to and including properties of non-standard models of arithmetic.
   
• PHIL 5450: History and Philosophy of Physics
  MWF 11:00-11:50, DUAN G2B21
  Dr. Vistarini
   

• PHIL 6100: Seminar in Ethics
  MW 5:00-6:15, HLMS 177
  Prof. Jaggar

  This is a course in moral methodology. It will examine contemporary accounts of public reasoning, with special attention to the possibility of cross-cultural moral discussion in contexts of diversity and inequality. How can moral criticism of social practices be validated, especially the practices of other cultures? Do universal moral standards exist? If so, how can they be known? Who has the standing to criticize which social practices? Are practices of reasoning themselves culturally biased? Is it possible to avoid both cultural relativism and cultural imperialism?

  We will discuss a variety of topics and models proposed for adjudicating moral claims. They include but are not limited to:

• Thinking from the original position
• Communitarianism
• Discourse ethics
• The ethics of care
• Liberal reasonableness
• Human rights
• Capabilities theory
• Ideal and non-ideal theory
• Intuitionism, trolley problems and experimental philosophy
• Naturalizing moral philosophy
• The revival of pragmatism

 Students will write five reading responses and a final paper.

Spring 2016

Courses at the 5000 and 6000 levels require graduate standing in philosophy unless otherwise indicated.

• 5040 Latin Philosophical Texts
   
• 5100 Proseminar in Values
  5:00-7:30 R HLMS 196
  Profs. Boonin, Heathwood, Hosein, Jaggar, Norcross
  This team-taught proseminar will consist of a study of five important books in the analytic tradition:
  • Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874/1907) [Norcross]
  • W.D. Ross' The Right and the Good (1930) [Heathwood]
  • John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) [Hosein]
  • Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) [Boonin].
  • Elizabeth Anderson's The Imperative of Integration (2010) [Jaggar]
  • Closed admission proseminar course. Required of all first-year PhD students; recommended for all first-year MAs.
     
• 5290 Topics in Values and Social Policy
  2:00-3:15 TR HLMS 196
  Prof. Wingo
  This Seminar will concentrate on freedom as a normative as well as an operative concept. We shall examine the cross-cultural conceptions of freedom by way of its philosophical and historical bases. The essence of the seminar will be to use this political kernel, freedom, as a place holder to make sense of other associated central political concepts such as democracy, happiness, justice, equality and human rights.
   
• 6000 Seminar in the History of Philosophy
  5:00-7:30 W HLMS 177
  Prof. Bailey
   
• 6100 Seminar in Ethics: Happiness
  5:00-7:30 M HLMS 177
  Prof. Heathwood
  An ongoing concern of the course will be the extent to which a theory of the nature happiness makes plausible the view that happiness is a fundamental intrinsic good. Another concern will be whether there is even a single phenomenon that we are inquiring into, or whether 'happy' is importantly ambiguous. If there is time, we may look at two further topics. One is evaluative: Is a happiness theory of well-being plausible? The other concerns the empirical study of happiness: Can empirical science shed light on the nature of happiness?; What assumptions about the nature of happiness are implicit in the ways in which psychologists measure happiness?; How do these assumptions affect the significance of the results of empirical studies of happiness?
   
• 6380 Metaphysics
  5:00-7:30 T HLMS 196
  Prof. Huemer
  This course will examine puzzles surrounding the infinite and related matters. Seventeen paradoxes of the infinite will be discussed, and we will attempt to resolve each of them. Theoretical questions to be considered include: why are some infinite series completable and others not? Is anything actually infinite, or are there only "potential infinities"? Are there such things as infinite numbers? What are numbers anyway? What are sets? Do geometric points really exist? Readings will include a forthcoming book on the infinite authored by the instructor.

Fall 2015

• Single Philosophy: Kant
• Greek Philosophical Texts
• Latin Philosophical Texts
• Topics in Values and Social Policy
• Modal Logic
• Metaphysics and Epistemology Proseminar
• Metaphysics

Spring 2015

• Single Philosopher: Leibniz
• Philosophy and Animals
• Aristotle's Ethics
• Moral Psychology and the Self
• Philosophy of Mind
• Metaphysics

Fall 2014

• Contemporary Political Philosophy
• Environmental Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• 17th Century Philosophy
• Metaphysics

Spring 2014

• Single Philosopher: Nietzsche
• Single Philosopher: Plato
• Contemporary Moral Theory
• Political Freedom
• Metaphysics
• Mathematical Logic
• M&E Proseminar
• 17th Century Philosophy
• Philosophy, Economics, and the Environment

Fall 2013

• Single Philosopher: Rousseau
• Ethics
• Contemporary Political Philosophy
• Bioethics and Public Policy
• Environmental Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Science
• Modal Logic
• Aristotle M&E

Spring 2013

• Descartes and 17th-Century Metaphysics
• Hellenistic Philosophy
• Philosophy of Law
• M&E Proseminar
• Aristotle's Ethics
• Democratic Theory
• Philosophy of Mind

Fall 2012

• Single Philosopher: Plato
• Single Philospher: Hobbes
• Classic Texts in Analytic Ethics
• Probability and Rational Choice
• Philosophy of Language
• Medieval Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Race
• Reduction, Supervenience, and Emergence

Spring 2012

• Kant
• Philosophy and Animals
• Environmental Philosophy
• God, Freedom, and Evil
• Aristotle's M&E
• Justice and Institutions
• Issues and Methods in Cognitive Science
• Truth and Truthmakers

Fall 2011

• Plato
• Classic Texts in Analytic Ethics
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Science
• Modal Logic
• Seminar in Ethics: Welfare

Spring 2011

• Kant
• Aquinas
• Contemporary Moral Theory
• Race, Ethnicity, and Empire
• Environmental Philosophy
• Philosopy of Mind
• Metaethics
• Philosophy of Language: Identity

Fall 2010

• Plato
• Nietzsche
• Classic Texts in Analytic Ethics
• Philosophy of Law
• History and Philosophy of Physics
• Seminar on the Nature of Life
• Philosophy of Language