Philosophy Courses

Formal and informal reasoning; introduction to propositional logic; formal and informal fallacies; scientific reasoning.

Classical propositional and first-order predicate logic; syntax and semantics of formal languages; translation between formal languages and English; formal methods of proof.

This is an Integrative Learning Core (ILC) course that awards general education credit. Credit will not be given for this course and PHIL 2050. Classical and recent theories of obligation and value, including works of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume and Nietzsche; topics including freedom, rights, justification of moral judgments. Students should reach out to individual instructors for information about the specific content of each section.

In this course, we will study women's selfhood and agency in relation to race, and disability. We will do so by discussing works of literature such as Lorde's Cancer Journals, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Morrison's Beloved, in conjunction with key feminist texts. We will cover feminist philosophy by Simone de Beauvoir, Kimberle Crenshaw, Judith Butler, and bell hooks, among others. Here are some of the questions we will explore in the course: What is it to be a woman? In what ways is a woman limited in her ability to exercise agency? How is her personhood affected by disability? In what ways does racial oppression affect her agency?

This course provides an in-depth exploration of the central questions and issues in the philosophy of religion. Students will critically examine topics such as the existence of God, the problem of evil, the nature of faith and reason, religious experience, and the possibility of life after death. We will study classical and contemporary arguments for and against the existence of God, including ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments, as well as responses to the problem of evil and divine hiddenness. Through reading, discussion, and debate, students will engage with various perspectives from both theistic and atheistic viewpoints, fostering a deeper understanding of the philosophical foundations and challenges in the study of religion. No prior background in philosophy or religion is required.

Introduction to major themes and areas of philosophy via readings in Modern philosophy (1492-1804). This semester’s theme will be “Freedom: Metaphysical, Moral, and Political.” Readings from, among others, Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Olympe de Gouges, Wollstonecraft, Haynes, Cugoano, and writings on revolts and escapes of enslaved peoples. Temporal focus: 1492 to 1804—from the European invasion of the Americas to the Haitian Revolution. Spatial focus: the “Atlantic Triangle”—Europe, Africa, and North and South America, including the Caribbean. Topics: metaphysics of mind and body as well as free will and determinism; the social contract and the right of revolution; the social status and moral obligations of men and women, and free and enslaved peoples.

This course will explore the philosophical status of paranormal, mystical, and religious experiences by reading works by William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and various contemporary writers on the subject.

Topics in ethics and meta-ethics: egoism, consequentialism, deontology, moral relativism, virtue ethics, values, ethics and religion; naturalistic fallacy, truth and justification, realism and objectivity, motivation and practical reasoning, autonomy and game theory.

Epistemology is concerned with knowledge, with what we know (if we know anything at all) and how we know it. Most of us would agree that we know some things, for instance that Louisiana is smaller than Texas. But what does knowing that Louisiana is smaller than Texas come to? How do things have to be—with us, with the world, and with relations between us and the world—in order for us to know that Louisiana is smaller than Texas? Is the answer to this question different for our knowledge that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen? What about for our knowledge that 2 + 2 = 4? Why care about knowing anyway? What is the value of knowing over, say, believing truly? For that matter, why think that knowing and believing truly are different? These are the types of issues that will concern us in this course. A premium will be placed on in-class discussion.

In this Special Topics course, we will study primary texts that have attempted to answer the question “what is technology?” While in some sense, this question reaches back to Plato’s Protagoras and Xunzi’s theory of artifice, it is thematized explicitly only after the industrial revolution. We will read thinkers such as Marx, Heidegger, Borgman, Arendt, Ellul, Stiegler, and Verbeek.

What is oppression? What harms does it give rise to? What is structural injustice? What role does motivated ignorance play in racial injustice? How does oppression affect what we know as a society and what counts as knowledge? In this course, we will look at important issues raised by social justice movements of the past 50 years. The topics covered fall within the intersection of social philosophy, ethics, and epistemology. We will read texts from bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Miranda Fricker, Charles Mills, Kristie Dotson, and Jose Medina.

“If you kill, you must die,” Immanuel Kant famously writes in his Philosophy of Right. Why is punishment—capital punishment—a categorical imperative? A necessary correlate to the law? Who has the right to punish and how has the State acquired a “monopoly” on punishment? What is the political and social function of punishment and how has this function and its justifications changed over time? How can we account for the rising severity and rates of carceral punishment in the 20th and 21st century? Can we—ought we—imagine a future without punishment? We will ask these questions and more as we work through classic and contemporary philosophical texts related to punishment. We will track the conceptual entailments between blame, guilt and punishment and see when and where justifying punishment becomes an urgent political problem. As part of the HSS "AI-Engaged Classroom" initiative we will look at ways that the development and deployment of "carceral AI" and predictive policing and sentencing have transformed normative assumptions of punishment.

This course brings a philosophical lens to historical and contemporary scientific and medical accounts of gender, sex, sexuality, and race. We consider a long history of controversial and biased science, its epistemological underpinnings and ask:

• What sorts of cultural beliefs (about race, sex, sexuality and gender) have stood in the way of scientific objectivity?

• What ameliorative approaches might ensure more objective science?

• What light can contemporary philosophical accounts of race, gender and sex shed on scientific accounts of the same?

• How best to understand the nature of bias in algorithms and data-driven applications?

We consider the ways cultural beliefs influence scientific/medical knowledge and practice and how technological developments both transform and entrench sources of bias. By critically examining controversial science we consider the dynamic nature of our understandings of who we are, how we differ and how social inequalities and hierarchies are created, perpetuated and challenged.

This graduate course is interested in the evergreen question of violence, including the historical and contemporary understanding of violence, its conceptual development, and the force of violence. This course will consider the following questions: What are the philosophical theories and concepts that form the armature for shared notions of violence and our theories of its limits, margins, and others? Can it be legitimate or illegitimate, just or unjust, sanctioned or unsanctioned, proportional or disproportional, incremental or evental, and by what metrics do we make such determinations? What are the ethical, political, and social statuses of violence? How does it function? What are its effects? Particular attention will be given to the drawing/redrawing and defining/redefining of what falls under the purview of violence and the political power therein. Authors may include Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Richard Bernstein, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Susan Sontag. Note that topics that may be upsetting to students such as genocide, systemic or political violence, sexual and physical violence will be discussed.

This course provides an introduction to philosophy through a survey of a number of figures and themes in western philosophy. We will study major works on such themes as appearance and reality, human nature, nature of knowledge, relation of mind and body, right and good, existence of God, and freedom and determinism. We will discuss figures such as, but not limited to, Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Mill.