TeachingBelief, Truth, and ReasonDescription This course (taught Fall 2011) surveyed major topics in recent analytic epistemology. The topics all are connected by being seen as competing answers to the central epistemological questions: what do we know and how do we know it? The texts used were What is This Thing Called Knowledge? and Arguing about Knowledge. Objectives Introduction to PhilosophyDescription Philosophy seeks answers to questions about the fundamental nature of reality and our knowledge of it using distinctive methods. This course investigates answers to some of those questions and as well as various methods of philosophical reasoning. This course explores logic; skepticism and knowledge about the external world; perception and the nature of physical reality; the nature of the mind and its relation to the body; personal identity; freewill and determinism; moral relativism; the good life; the relation between morality and religion; cosmological arguments for the existence of God; and the problem that occurrence of evil events presents for traditional theism. The final three weeks will be a close reading of one of the most famous books in the Western philosophical tradition: Plato's Republic. See the website for the course. Objectives Moral Theory and PracticeDescription This course addresses both moral theory and contemporary moral problems. The moral theory component consists of an investigation three general areas, which correspond to three general philosophical questions about morality: (1) value theory: what is worth doing for its own sake?; (2) metaethics: do moral facts exist and, if so, are they constituted by individual attitudes and societal practices or something else?; (3) normative ethics: is moral evaluation of an action entirely a function of its consequences? Theories surveyed include hedonism, desire satisfaction theories, objective list theories, subjectivism, relativism, divine command theory, objectivism, egoism, utilitarianism, deontology (Kantian ethics as well as Ross's prima facie duty approach), and virtue theory. The moral issues explored include some of the following: war, genetic enhancement, responsibility of corporations, the purpose of work and business, advertising, famine and affluence, obligations to family and friends, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment. I use The Fundamentals of Ethics and The Ethical Life. Recently, I have recently been experimental supplementing these texts with short stories and excerpts from plays and novels. See the website for the course. |
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