Note to current students: links to courses I am now teaching can be found below.

INTRODUCTORY COURSES

Philosophy 102: Introduction to Logic (Summer 2008)

The overall goal is to help students develop and refine their natural ability to reason. More specifically, by the end of the course, students should (1) understand the basic concepts of argument assessment, be able to identify several 'famous' forms of argument, and construct counterexamples to invalid forms of argument; (2) be able to identify arguments in simple English and reconstruct them for assessment; (3) master the technique of using truth-tables to evaluate validity and invalidity; and (4) learn and implement the inference and equivalence rules in a system of natural deduction.

Philosophy 107: Logical Thinking

The overall goal is to help students develop and refine their natural ability to reason. More specifically, by the end of the course, students should (1) understand the basic concepts of argument assessment, be able to identify several 'famous' forms of argument, and construct counterexamples to invalid forms of argument; (2) be able to identify arguments in simple English and reconstruct them for assessment; (3) understand certain relationships between logic and ordinary language, especially the role of definitions in argument assessment; (4) be able to identify a variety of  informal fallacies; and (5) understand different forms of inductive argument and how they are to be assessed. This course supplements Philosophy 102 which focuses on truth-tables and propositional logic.

Philosophy 113: Introduction to Philosophy: Philosophy of Religion

We aim to assess various answers to several questions of perennial concern in the western tradition of philosophy of religion. While these questions are only a sampling of the questions addressed in this tradition, they are central. In the process, we aim to develop our ability to assess arguments, and to understand and apply various philosophical concepts. Our questions are these: Can human concepts apply to God (if there is one)? What attributes must God have (if any)? Can it be shown by philosophical argument that God does not exist? Can it be shown by philosophical argument that God does exist? Supposing there are no good arguments for or against the existence of God, can belief in God nevertheless be rational, justified, warranted?

Philosophy 114: Introduction to Philosophy: Knowledge & Reality

Most of us have a certain picture of ourselves. Among other things, that picture includes the following central theses:

• We can think and feel
• We can know various mundane things about our immediate environment
• We act freely sometimes
• We are sometimes morally responsible for our actions

In this course, we aim to do two things. First, we aim to come to understand, in an introductory fashion, several philosophical implications, challenges, positions, and arguments related to these central theses. Second, we aim to develop our skills with  respect to assessing arguments in the way professional philosophers do. Themes include: mind-body dualism, physicalism, the (in)compatibility of determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility, knowledge, skepticism.

UPPER LEVEL COURSES

EPISTEMOLOGY

Philosophy 310: Theory of Knowledge I

Philosophy 410: Theory of Knowledge II

Foundationalism is, roughly, the thesis that if there are any justified beliefs, then there are justified beliefs whose justification is not derived from any other beliefs or the interrelations of their contents. It was severely criticized in the past century, especially by advocates of coherentism, but more recently by advocates of infinitism. We aim, firstly, to assess what can be said for and against foundationalism, as well as its chief alternatives, coherentism and infinitism. Related themes include: concepts of epistemic justification, the regress problem, reliabilism, internalism, externalism, doxastic voluntarism, epistemic luck, the Sellarsian dilemma, the new evil-demon problem, the meta-incoherence problem, the generality problem, the truth-ratio problem, the degrees-and-completeness problem, the problem of easy knowledge (bootstrapping version).

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Philosophy 335: Advanced Philosophy of Religion

Philosophical theists tend to agree on this much: God exists—an immaterial person who is unsurpassably great in power, moral goodness, and cognitive excellence, and who created the world, permits what happens in it, and intervenes in its affairs. Atheists say that God does not exist; agnostics are in doubt about the matter. There are different ways to be agnostic. One way is to think that available arguments for both theism and atheism are unsuccessful. This is the way in which our agnostic—about whom you’ll be hearing quite a bit—is agnostic. In this course, we aim to do three things:

A. Assess half of this position, the half that says that arguments for atheism are unsuccessful.
B. Assess whether our agnostic is in an intellectually stable position.
C. Investigate whether she might adopt faith in God and live accordingly, assuming that her agnosticism constitutes a viable position with respect to the existence of God.

Philosophy 417: Seminar: Topics in Philosophy of Religion

Three items will be our focus: (1) the rationality or irrationality of the practice of prayer within theistic religions, specifically, petition, praise, and confession; (2) William Alston's Perceiving God; (3) Peter van Inwagen's The Problem of Evil.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Philosophy 425: Philosophy of Mind

The naturalistic project dominates philosophy of mind as it is practiced in the western world today. That is, it presupposes a naturalistic worldview: there are no ghosts or goblins or ghouls, and most certainly there are no souls, no immaterial thinking-feeling things—at any rate, you and I are no such things, not even in part. Our goal is to study, understand, and, if we’re fortunate enough, assess correctly, a wide variety of worries that arise in our attempt to understand how it could be that our universe includes no immaterial things but nevertheless includes us—things with minds, things that exhibit our diverse range of mentality. Themes include: substance dualism and materialism, behaviourism, mind-brain identity theory, functionalism, multiple realizability, property dualism, qualia