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Fall 2026 Courses
PHIL 110: Logic and Critical Thinking
Students will develop rational thinking skills through a combination of theory and practice. They will discuss good and bad thinking habits, learning to apply the former and to avoid the latter. This class includes an introduction to truth-tables and rules of inference in symbolic logic. The aim is to improve students' capacity for rational reasoning, question widely held beliefs, resist empty rhetoric and propaganda, distinguish relevant from irrelevant considerations, and construct sound arguments. PHIL 110 satisfies the math requirement for some majors. |
PHIL 112: Philosophy at the Movies
PHIL 130: Sex, Gender & Love: Introduction to Social Philosophy
PHIL 138: Mind-bending Fiction
PHIL 150A1: Free Will, Consciousness & The Meaning of Life
PHIL 150B1: Personal Morality
This course examines fundamental questions about our existence and our place in the universe. Questions such as the following will be examined from a philosophical perspective: Is the mind the same as the brain, or are we something else? Does free-will exist? What, if anything, can we know with certainty? We will explore traditional and contemporary debates about these issues while developing clear, methodical reasoning about how we might go about trying to answer them. |
PHIL 150C1: Freedom, Equality, and Authority
This course examines fundamental questions about the ethical organization of society and social life. These questions include: What is the basis of the state? What is the nature of social justice? What are our obligations to others around the world? We will aim to develop clear thinking about issues that are of great importance to the contemporary world and that each of us will face as a citizen of a modern democratic state. |
PHIL 160D1: Justice and the Good Life
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PHIL 202: Introduction to Symbolic Logic
In this course we study a formal language, the language of first-order logic (FOL). This language allows one to make mathematically precise the concept of logical consequence; that is, one can say what it means for a sentence in the language of FOL to follow validly from other sentences in that language. The aim of this course is the mastery of the language of FOL, mainly in the execution of proofs in that language. |
PHIL 205: The Ethics and Economics of Wealth Creation
We will study the ethics and the economics of such phenomena as market competition, institutions of private and public property, trade restrictions, globalization, and corporate welfare. How do people create wealth? How do societies enable people to create wealth? Are some ways more ethical than others? Why do some societies grow rich while neighboring societies remain poor? People have various ways of creating wealth. Which are ethical and which are not? Why? (PHIL 205 is not an introduction to the principles of Economics and is not a substitute for ECON 200, ECON 201A or ECON201B.) |
PHIL 206: Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
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This course is an introduction to the ethics of artificial intelligence and automated information systems. The recent development of transformer models, including large language models like ChatGPT, has brought to the fore urgent questions about how we must understand, classify, and react to artificially intelligent systems. Learners will learn foundational aspects about AI, including what it means for machines to think and best current understanding of machine abilities to emote, create, imagine, and so on. On the basis of this understanding the course will delve into a critical examination of a range of ethical questions raised by recent developments in AI, including issues pertaining to job losses due to automation, privacy, algorithmic bias and discrimination, transparency, self-driving cars and autonomous drones, copyright infringement, attribution of agency. |
PHIL 210: Moral Thinking
| It is important "to do the right thing." But how can anyone tell what "the right thing" is? What makes some actions right and some wrong? This course is an overview of ethics, which is the field of philosophy that examines these questions. We examine three main ways of thinking about ethics: those that focus one the outcomes of actions, those that focus on the nature of the actions themselves, and those that focus on the character of the one who acts. Students will gain a foundational knowledge that will serve as a solid background for more advanced work in ethics, as a resource for thinking about moral issues, and as a piece of general education valuable for understanding practical aspects of human life. |
PHIL 220: Philosophy of Happiness
| Happiness matters to us; and now it is in the news. There are large numbers of self-help books telling us how to be happy. Some nations are planning to measure the happiness of their citizens to find out how it can be increased. There is a huge new field of `happiness studies', and new focus on happiness in positive psychology as well as fields like politics and law. Much of this material is confusing, since often it is not clear what the authors think that happiness is. Is it feeling good? Is it having a positive attitude to the way you are now? Is it having a positive attitude to your life as a whole? Is it having a happy life? Can some people advise others on how to be happy? Philosophers have been engaged with the search for happiness for two thousand years. They have asked what happiness is, and have explored different answers to the question, including some of the answers now being rediscovered in other fields. In this course we will ask what happiness is, and examine critically the major answers to this question. We'll look at the rich philosophical tradition of thinking about happiness, at contemporary answers, and also at some recent work in the social sciences. We'll examine the contributions being made to the ongoing search to find out what happiness is, and how we can live happy lives. Overall course objectives/expected learning outcomes: This course has two primary objectives: - To introduce students to the theoretical nature of the question of the nature of happiness by presenting a representative sample of the primary historical and contemporary literature - To enable students to think and write critically, logically and objectively about the philosophical issues pertaining to happiness. These objectives will be approached through lectures, discussions and writing assignments informed by the assigned readings. Course outcomes will be assessed through substantial writing assignments, some of which will feature opportunities for students to revise their work in light of advice from the professor. |
PHIL 233: Philosophy of Religion
PHIL 241: Consciousness and Cognition
| This course covers some of the central aspects of the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, and ongoing philosophical and scientific debates about those foundations. Course topics may include: the mind-body problem; the relationship between psychological and biological sciences; the mystery of subjective experience; emotions; innateness; rationality (and irrationality); nonhuman minds; artificial intelligence; and moral cognition. The course is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on both scientific and philosophical sources. |
PHIL 250: The Social Contract
PHIL 260: Ancient Philosophy
PHIL 263: From Hegel to Nietzsche: 19th Century Philosophy
| Survey of influential 19th century philosophers, including Hegel, Marx, J. S. Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Their views on the individual and society, and human nature. |
PHIL 310C: Introduction to the Science of Consciousness
PHIL 321: Medical Ethics
| This course surveys various ethical issues that arise in relation to medicine and healthcare. Issues covered may include (among others) abortion, assisted suicide, doctor-patient confidentiality, informed consent, medical paternalism, bias in medicine, allocation of scarce medical resources, vaccine mandates, and inequity in healthcare access and outcomes. Students will craft and evaluate ethical arguments about these issues from the perspective of a well-informed philosopher. |
PHIL 322: Business Ethics
| This course is designed to teach students about normative ethics in the context of the workplace and the business world. We will discuss ethical questions concerning corporate responsibility, preferential hiring and affirmative action, advertising practices, corporate whistleblowing, and environmental responsibility. |
PHIL 323: Environmental Ethics
| We will investigate and seriously consider how and why we should live as morally responsible members of an ecological community. Students will explore philosophical responses to questions such as: What makes something natural? What value is there to non-human entities? What obligations do we have to each other regarding the environment? Students will investigate social scientific responses to questions such as: How should wilderness be preserved? How should we respond to climate change? How should water resources be allocated? Students will build connections between and reconcile philosophical and social scientific approaches to issues of environmental concern. |
PHIL 324: Law and Morality
| Exploration of classic and contemporary philosophical issues about law and morality. Topics covered will vary but may include, among others, the limits of social interference with individual liberty, legal paternalism and physician-assisted suicide, legal moralism, freedom of speech and expression, legal punishment and capital punishment, and civil disobedience. |
PHIL 344: Issues and Methods in Analytic Philosophy
| Designed to improve ability to think analytically, with emphasis on analytic methodology. Selected readings on the nature of mental states, the analytic/synthetic distinction, personal identity, the concept of knowledge and justified belief, the theory of reference, and the distinction between science and pseudo-science. |
PHIL 345: Philosophical Perspectives on Mental Disorder: From Anxiety to Depression
PHIL 347: Neuroethics
| This course introduces students to neuroethics a burgeoning field in philosophy conducting research in the intersection of neuroscience and ethics. In this course, we'll be asking what ethical questions neuroscience raises and what ethical questions it helps to answer. Students will encounter questions and issue such as the nature of free will, ethical implications of brain manipulation, the relation between moral responsibility and mental disorder, the ethics of moral enhancement, the nature of moral judgement, feminist critique of neuroethical research, the challenges of motivated reasoning, the ethics of brain reading, among others. |
PHIL 401A/501A: Symbolic Logic
PHIL 433/533: Aesthetics
PHIL 434/534: Social and Political Philosophy
PHIL 438: Philosophy of Law
| This course explores important philosophical questions about the law. The topics explored may include (but are not limited to): the nature of law and the determination of legal content, evidence, criminalization, natural rights, causation, fault/negligence, and judicial interpretation. Students will engage with these topics in a mix of lecture and discussion, and in their reading of classic and contemporary texts in philosophy and legal theory. |
PHIL 455/555: Philosophy and AI
PHIL 470: Greek Philosophy
PHIL 596A: Ethics Seminar
| To Be Determined |
PHIL 596F: Social and Political Philosophy Seminar
| To Be Determined |
PHIL 596Y: Research and Professionalization Seminar
The purpose of this course is to train you in the methods and techniques of professional analytic philosophy. These skills include
We will focus on a small number of key papers in the analytic tradition of the last century or so, including both some targets selected by the professor and also others in close consultation with the enrolled students. We will read them to assess them philosophically, of course, but we will do so with a particular eye towards the metaphilosophical skills outlined above. The course will be taught in seminar form, conducted mostly in terms of student presentations and class discussion. |
PHIL 696A: Advanced Topics in Philosophy Seminar
| We will examine the role of coercion in the analysis of legal systems (for example, in the works of Hans Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart, Alf Ross, and Joseph Raz), as a prelude to considering the relevance of such analyses for normative debates about coercion and liberty (for instance, in the work of Robert Nozick and G. A. Cohen). |