printer friendly pagePHIL 1: Introduction to Philosophy
Is there one truth or many? Does science tell us everything there is to know? Can our minds be purely physical? Do we have free will? Is faith rational? Should we always be rational? What is the meaning of life? Are there moral truths? What are truth, reality, rationality, and knowledge? How can such questions be answered? Intensive introduction to theories and techniques in philosophy from various contemporary traditions.
Terms: Aut
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Units: 5
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UG Reqs: GER:DBHum
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Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit
Instructors:
Hussain, N. (PI)
;
Rudy Hiller, F. (TA)
;
Tulipana, P. (TA)
PHIL 2: Introduction to Moral Philosophy (ETHICSOC 20)
A survey of moral philosophy in the Western tradition. What makes right actions right and wrong actions wrong? What is it to have a virtuous rather than a vicious character? What is the basis of these distinctions? Why should we care about morality at all? Our aim is to understand how some of the most influential philosophers (including Aristotle, Kant, and Mill) have addressed these questions, and by so doing, to better formulate our own views. No prior familiarity with philosophy required. Fulfills the Ethical Reasoning requirement.
Terms: Win
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Units: 5
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UG Reqs: GER:ECEthicReas, GER:DBHum
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Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit
Instructors:
Schapiro, T. (PI)
PHIL 6N: Pictures and the Imagination
Paintings, drawings, and photographs often function as pictures or images of the preexisting things they take as subjects. They represent these subjects from specific spatial vantage points in ways that may be more or less definite, more or less detailed, and more or less faithful to what the subjects are actually like. One longs to know how this works: how vision, imagination, and background knowledge come together when we experience a picture as a picture. Certain forms of imagining and remembering involve mental picturing, mental imagery. Sometimes we imagine or remember things in visual terms from a specific spatial vantage point, with the result that we feel brought face to face with the things imagined or remembered, however far away they may actually be. How is the physical picturing that goes on in paintings, drawings, and photographs both like and unlike the mental picturing that goes on when things swim before the mind's eye? What role does mental picturing play in physical picturing? What kinds of artistic value and interest attach to paintings, drawings, and photographs in virtue of what they picture and how they picture it?
Terms: Spr
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Units: 3
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UG Reqs: GER:DBHum
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Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit
Instructors:
Hills, D. (PI)
PHIL 8N: Free Will and Responsibility
In what sense are we, or might we be free agents? Is our freedom compatible with our being fully a part of the same natural, causal order that includes other physical and biological systems? What assumptions about freedom do we make when we hold people accountable morally and/or legally? When we hold people accountable, and so responsible, can we also see them as part of the natural, causal order? Or is there a deep incompatibility between these two ways of understanding ourselves? What assumptions about our freedom do we make when we deliberate about what to do? Are these assumptions in conflict with seeing ourselves as part of the natural, causal order? We will explore these and related questions primarily by way of careful study of recent and contemporary philosophical research on these matters.
Terms: not given this year
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Units: 4
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UG Reqs: GER:DBHum
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Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP)
PHIL 9N: Philosophical Classics of the 20th Century
Last century's best and most influential philosophical writings. Topics include ethics (what is the nature of right and wrong?), language (how do meaning, reference, and truth arise in the natural world?), science (can science claim objectively accurate descriptions of reality?), existence (are there things that don't exist?), and the mind (could robots ever be conscious?). Authors include Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Willard Quine, Thomas Kuhn, John Rawls, and Saul Kripke. The lay of the land in contemporary philosophy.
Terms: not given this year
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Units: 4
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UG Reqs: GER:DBHum
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Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit
PHIL 10N: Traveling Through Time
Is time travel possible? Yes. We do it every day, at the rate of one minute per minute. Relativity theory even suggests a sense in which we could travel to the distant future. But could we travel to the past? If so, why aren't there any time travelers around? If not, is that because of some law of physics or because the very idea of time travel is incoherent? Suppose I were to go back in time and try to save JFK. Would I be bound to fail? What would stop me? Couldn't I just try again? If I eventually succeeded, would I thereby create a new branch in time? Or can we make sense of the idea of changing the past? What would happen if I tried to prevent my parents from having kids? What went on in the last season of Lost? We'll try to answer questions like these by looking at classic and contemporary work in the physics and philosophy of time, as well as pertinent case studies in fiction and film. Special guest speakers from the future are hereby invited.
Terms: not given this year
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Units: 3
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Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP)
PHIL 15N: Freedom, Community, and Morality
Preference to freshmen. Does the freedom of the individual conflict with the demands of human community and morality? Or, as some philosophers have maintained, does the freedom of the individual find its highest expression in a moral community of other human beings? Readings include Camus, Mill, Rousseau, and Kant.
Terms: Aut
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Units: 3
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UG Reqs: GER:ECEthicReas
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Grading: Letter (ABCD/NP)
Instructors:
Friedman, M. (PI)
PHIL 20S: Introduction to Moral Philosophy
What makes right actions right and wrong actions wrong? Must right actions promote some further good? What is the role of consequences in the evaluation of actions as right or good? Focus is on traditional attempts to account for what determines which actions are right, what is worth promoting, and what kind of person one ought to be. Readings from primarily historical figures such as Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, and others.
Terms: not given this year
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Units: 3
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Grading: Letter or Credit/No Credit
PHIL 23A: The Applicability of Mathematics in Natural Sciences: a Philosophical Problem
Why does mathematics work so well in describing some parts of the world? Can we give an explanation for its effectiveness or is it a completely ¿unreasonable¿ phenomenon? The purpose of this tutorial is to examine two class of questions concerning the effectiveness and the reasonableness of the widespread employment of mathematics in the study of nature (e.g. chemistry, biology, and esp. physics). We will start our discussion by Eugene Wigner¿s seminal paper, ¿The unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in Natural Sciences¿ (1960), in which he suggests that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences borders on a ¿mystery¿ and a ¿miracle¿. Following that, we will read Hamming¿s (1980) much cited rejoinder to Wigner, where he attempts to give a more clear philosophical formulation of the phenomenon. Neither Wigner , nor Hamming, claimed to have done much to resolve the problem but rather to give illustration to the phenomenon. The issue remains intriguing, controversial, and instructive. In recent years Mark Colyvan (2009) and Penelope Maddy (2009) have made substantial contributions to Wigner¿s problem, drawing attention to interdisciplinary nature of the problem and the need for further study of relevant history (Quantum mechanics, Maxwell equations etc).
Terms: Spr
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Units: 2
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Grading: Satisfactory/No Credit
PHIL 23B: Truth and Paradox
Philosophical investigation of the concept of truth is often divided along two dimensions: investigation of the nature of truth and investigation of the semantics of truth claims. This tutorial will focus on the second kind of concern. One key impetus for a philosophical interest in the semantics and definability of truth is the challenge posed by semantic paradoxes such as the Liar paradox and Curry¿s paradox. Despite each having the initial appearance of a parlor trick, philosophers and logicians have come to appreciate the deep implications of these paradoxes. The main goal of this tutorial is to gain an appreciation of the philosophical issues - both with respect to formal and natural languages ¿ which arise from consideration of the paradoxes. To this end, we will study some of the classic contributions to this area including Tarski¿s famous result that, in an important sense, the semantic paradoxes render truth indefinable, and Kripke¿s much later attempt to provide a definition of truth in the face of Tarski¿s limitative result. Further topics include the debate between paracomplete and paraconsistent solutions to the semantic paradoxes (notably defended by, respectively, Field and Priest); the relationship between deflationism about truth and the paradoxes; and the notion of ¿revenge problems¿ (roughly, the claim that any solution to the paradoxes can be used to construct a further paradox). The tutorial will avoid excessive technical discussions, but will aim to engender appreciation for some philosophical interesting technical points and will assume a logic background of PHIL150 level.
Terms: Aut
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Units: 2
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Grading: Satisfactory/No Credit
Instructors:
Hawke, P. (PI)
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