Teaching Overview
Lecturer, Philosophical Foundations of Explanation. MSc Logic 2024.
Lecturer, Logical Analysis. BA Philosophy 2023 & 2024.
Lecturer, Philosophy of Language. MA Philosophy & MSc Logic 2023. Co-taught with Elsbeth Brouwer.
Lecturer, Causal Inference: Philosophical theory and modern practice. MSc Logic & MA Philosophy 2022.
Lecturer, Hypothetical Reasoning: Its development and impact. MSc Logic 2020.
Supervision Overview
Master Thesis supervisor. Frank Goossens. Co-supervised with Jean Wagemans.
Bachelor Thesis supervisor. Juliette Calf, Puck Voorham.
Individual project supervisor. Flip Lijnzaad.
Project supervisor. Louis Bunt, Flavia Caradonna, Simon Chiu, Sarah Dukic, Arun Ganguly, Swapnil Ghosh, Frank Goossens, Laura Hernández Martín, Ruiting Jiang, Flip Lijnzaad, Mees Lursen, Kirti Singh, Alex Stan, Ștefan Zotescu.
Project supervisor. Billy Chan, Gerson Foks, Angelica Hill, Flavia Nährlich, Nachiket Sakhadeo, Grace Shao, Arie Soeteman, Laura Vetter, Tianwei Zhang.
Teaching 2023–2024
Philosophical Foundations of Explanation
Lecturer. January 2024. Link to project website. Link to ILLC course description.
All humans by nature desire to know why things happen. Children go through a why-phase (and some, it is said, never grow out of it). We seek to explain; to be reasonable, rational animals. What principles underlie our practice of giving and interpreting explanations?
We will approach this question using tools from philosophy, logic and linguistics. In particular, we will discuss what the words 'cause' and 'because' mean, and what information we take into account when we interpret them; that is, what information a causal model should contain. Along the way we will discuss new developments in the semantics of conditionals, evaluating proposals based on similarity, premise semantics, and truthmaker semantics.
Logical Analysis
Lecturer. November–December 2023. Link to course catalogue.
The goal of this course is to teach skills and knowledge that are useful for an analytical approach to philosophy. Essentially this course is about extending one's philosophical toolbox, adding tools that are regularly used in analytical approaches to philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, but also, for instance, analytical ethics. Topics include decision theory, semantic paradoxes, paradoxes of naïve set theory, ordinals and cardinals, proofs by induction, and proofs of metalogical results (e.g. soundness and completeness).
Philosophy of Language
Lecturer, co-taught with Elsbeth Brouwer. September–October 2023. Link to course catalogue.
This course provides an introduction to the contemporary analytical philosophy of language. We will discuss cognitivist, platonist and realist conceptions of meaning, and study a variety of topics, such as semantic externalism, translatability of language, communicative action and language acquisition. These subjects will be studied through primary texts of authors such as Frege, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Grice, Butler, Davidson and Quine.
2022–2023
Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice
Lecturer. November–December 2022. Link to course catalogue.
In the first part of the course we study analyses of causation, both historical and contemporary. We will learn about the substantial progress researchers have recently made analysing causality. Among the questions we will consider are:
How do we build a causal model of a scenario?
What does the word “cause” mean?
How do we imagine hypothetical alternatives to reality?
2021–2022
Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice
Guest lecturer & teaching assistant. Main instructor: Katrin Schulz.
November–December 2021, Link to course catalogue
Philosophical Logic
Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Levin Hornisher.
November–December 2021, Link to course catalogue
2020–2021
Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice
Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Katrin Schulz.
April–May 2021, Link to course catalogue
Philosophical Logic
Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Robert van Rooij.
November-December 2020, Link to course catalogue
Topics:
Three-valued logics
Vagueness
Semantic paradoxes
Semantics and proof theory of conditionals
Probability and non-monotonic logic
2019–2020
Causal Inference: Philosophical Theory and Modern Practice
Guest lecturer and teaching assistant. Main instructor: Katrin Schulz.
April–May 2020, Link to course catalogue
Hypothetical Reasoning: its development and impact
Main instructor, January 2020, Link to course webpage
Four-week Master of Logic project on legal and moral applications of logic and linguistics, with a focus on hypothetical reasoning. Lectures on:
Moral responsiblity
Causation in the law
Case study: discrimination law
Causality & common sense reasoning
Teaching assistant. Main instructor: Robert van Rooij.
November-December 2019, Link to course catalogue.
Syllabus:
Nonmonotonic logic
Probablity theory
Conditionals
Causal models
2018-2019
Causality, Decision Making and Games
Teaching assistant (main instructors: Robert van Rooij & Shane Steinert-Threlkeld), November-December 2018, Link to course catalogue