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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.

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.

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.

Propositional and predicate logic; emphasis is on translating English sentences into logical symbols and constructing derivations of valid arguments.

This course examines the ethical issues that surround the decision to have a child. These issues are both private and public. For example, should we even have children knowing the environmental impacts of doing so? What kinds of population policies can the state legitimately enforce? Can it legitimately forbid parents from having more than one child? Can it adopt policies to promote a larger population? Other questions the course will consider include: Is the genetic engineering of children acceptable? Can it be permissible to use abortion as a means of sex selection? If one does have children, who ought pay the costs of supporting them?

Central topics in philosophy emphasizing development of analytical writing skills. What are human beings? Are human beings free? How do human minds and bodies interact? What does it all mean? Prerequisite: introductory philosophy course.

Major figures in early modern philosophy in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. Writings by Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

In this course, we shall examine the views of some central Greek philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the Stoics) on the irrational and non-rational aspects of human life. What makes something irrational and what roles (negative and perhaps positive as well) does the irrational play in our lives? We shall examine their views on anger, fear, madness, love, pleasure and pain, sexual desire and so on. We shall also consider more briefly some depictions of these psychic items in ancient Greek literature.

Examine Aristotle's introduction of a distinction between potential being and actual being, and his arguments for the priority and superiority of actual being. This distinction is employed by Aristotle in a wide variety of contexts, including his definitions of soul and psychological properties, the definition of change in his physics, the relation of matter and form in natural objects, and the causes and principles of being in his ontology. Topics to be covered include powers, change, possibility, modes of being, activity and actuality, and priority (in being, in time, in definition). The primary text for this course will be Metaphysics Theta, 1-9.