Course Descriptions

Ethics

This course addresses selected topics of moral philosophy. After delineating the sphere of morality and discussing threats to ethics we will examine the issue of moral motivation and then focus on equality. We will wrap up the course with a consideration of possibility of moral knowledge and stringency of morality.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is sometimes defined as the branch of philosophy that addresses fundamental questions about the nature of reality. In this course, we will consider two main topics: (1) the problem of freedom and determinism, and (2) the nature of time. The aim of the course will be to educate students about some of the main issues, theses, and arguments concerning these topics.

Philosophy of Language & Philosophy of Art

In this course we will focus on some topics in philosophy of art and philosophy of language, including (i) The Demarcation Problem (what is art?); (ii) The Existential Problem (what is art for?); (iii) the metaphysics of art objects (what exactly are novels, paintings, musical works, dance performances, etc.?); and (v) fictions and fictional characters (did J.K. Rowling create Harry Potter or did she discover him?).

The Problem of Relativism

This course examines, in some detail, the perennial problem of relativism, the various forms it takes, its appeal and failures.

Week 1 of the course focuses on chapters from a new book entitled The New Problem of Relativism (forthcoming in 2018 and published by Routledge) co-authored by Professor Maria Baghramian (UCD) and Professor Annalisa Coliva (UC Irvine). A summary of the book is available from the shared course Dropbox. Sections from the manuscript will be circulated for discussion in class. The hope is to involve the students in a discussion of a book that is still in the process of completion.

In week two, Professor Boghossian will join the course and will discuss topics from epistemic and moral relativism based on his well-known work in the area. The course will conclude with a critical discussion of the material the students have covered over the two weeks.

Reading, Week 1: Articles by Professor Baghramian and some additional material can be found in the Dropbox Relativism folder labelled Week 1. A more extensive reading list is also available in the same location.

Reading, Week 2. Articles by Professor Boghossian have been uploaded to the Relativism shared Dropbox in the folder labelled Week 2.

Students are strongly advised to familiarise themselves with the reading.

Syntax & Discourse

Linguistics, Computation, and Social Media

Social Media have played an instrumental role in creating a new forum for discussion for people, allowing researchers to access information that didn't readily exist before and to ask new questions that may not have been available in the past. This course provides an introduction to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing by exploring the technology used in social media analysis. The course will present an overview of the recent technological approaches that allow researchers to automatically extract meaning from social data. We will explore technology to identify social groups in online networks, detect emerging topics and trends, determine the author's characteristics such as age and gender, and perform sentiment analysis. Students will have an opportunity to apply some of these analyses to the content of Twitter through hands-on applications in the classroom. Computer skills are not required for this course.

Semantics

This course is an introduction to a scientific approach to meaning. Just like any scientist, a semanticist doesn't pursue the object of inquiry (i.e. meaning) directly, but rather focuses on related phenomena. We will focus on composition: the idea that the meaning of a whole (e.g. "spotted butterfly") is composite of the meanings of its parts (e.g. the meaning of "spotted" and the meaning of "butterfly"). We also focus on truth: the idea that we understand the meaning of a sentence by understanding what the world would have to be like for the sentence in question to be true (e.g. you understand the meaning of "It is sunny in Yerevan" because you know what the world would have to be like for that sentence to be true). These two phenomena allow us to analyze the meanings of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, quantifiers, tense, aspect and the sentences that contain these expressions.

Mental States Discourse Representation Theory