Courses

• CAS PH 249: American Philosophical Tradition
  An examination of the work of the inventor of American philosophy, Charles Peirce, and its most famous exponent, John Dewey. Focus on metaphysics and epistemology, e.g., the doctrines of pragmatism and naturalism.
• CAS PH 250: Environmental Ethics
  An examination of the duties of individuals and societies to environments and posterity. Value and safeguards of the survival of the species, as well as ecological corollaries of classical moral and social philosophies, are considered.
• CAS PH 251: Medical Ethics
  Examination of a number of value problems arising within the context of medicine and health care. Particular ethical problems of euthanasia, abortion, human experimentation, reproduction, and allocation of scarce resources; critiques of contemporary medicine as an institution.
• CAS PH 253: Social Philosophy
  A survey of philosophical and sociological analyses of modern Western society, including Rousseau, Marx, Weber, and a number of contemporary writers.
• CAS PH 254: Political Philosophy
  Types of political theory, their key concepts and underlying assumptions; paradoxes in the modern idea of freedom; the concept of property; scientific progress and the understanding of the politics.
• CAS PH 256: Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality
  An analysis of the notions of gender and sexuality, with readings from Plato, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Levinas, Scruton, Bloom. Questions include: are gender and sexuality natural, or are they social constructions? How are they related to love and desire?
• CAS PH 257: Philosophies of Nature
  Philosophical issues concerning the human relationship to the environment, studied in the context of ecology's historical development. Topics include the value of the wilderness, the aesthetics of nature, and the dilemma of taming nature.
• CAS PH 258: Philosophy and Literature
  Examines how literature and philosophy tell us and show us how it is, through an analysis of the sorts of demands they place upon reason, experience, and language. Writers include William James, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot.
• CAS PH 259: Philosophy of the Arts
  Introduction to aesthetics, considering such questions as: What is a work of art? How does one know whether it is good or bad?
• CAS PH 260: Knowledge and Reality
  Introduction to important issues in ancient, modern, and contemporary theories of knowledge; examination of related metaphysical questions, including first principles or foundations; necessity vs contingency; materialism, dualism, idealism; the positivist challenge to metaphysics.
• CAS PH 265: Minds and Machines
  An examination of the efforts of artificial intelligence to model the human mind and explain human thought by means of suitably programmed computers. Attention is given to the historical and mathematical origins of such efforts, as well as the main psychological and philosophical assumptions on which they depend.
• CAS PH 266: Mind, Brain, and Self
  Philosophical introduction to cognitive science. A consideration of the historical and intellectual background from which cognitive science has emerged, as well as the philosophical issues concerning the mind, brain, and self that arise from contemporary scientific research.
• CAS PH 270: Philosophy of Science
  Main features of the scientific enterprise are illustrated by examples in the study of physics, biology, and mind: the aims of scientific activities, the nature of scientific understanding and procedures, the structure and interpretation of scientific theories, and the development of science.
• CAS PH 271: History of Science
  The origin and development of modern science, including Galileo, Newton, and the new physics; Lavoisier and the birth of modern chemistry; Darwin and evolution; Mendel and genetics; Einstein and relativity; and Watson, Crick, and the double helix.
• CAS PH 272: Science, Technology, and Values
  Examination of some of the important ways in which science, technology, society, and human values are interconnected. Includes case studies of the social and ethical challenges posed by computer, military, and biological technology.
• CAS PH 277: Philosophy and Methods in the Human Sciences
  Examination of basic concepts of the social sciences, such as causal and functional explanations, prediction, rationality, reduction, and objectivity. Consideration of philosophical problems of the particular social sciences, such as psychology, economics, archaeology, and history.
• CAS PH 300: History of Ancient Philosophy
  Classical Greek philosophy, with a concentration on the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.
• CAS PH 310: History of Modern Philosophy
  An examination of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy from Descartes to Kant, with emphasis on the nature and extent of knowledge. Readings include Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Berkley, Hume, and Kant.
• CAS PH 350: History of Ethics
  A critical and comparative examination of the ideas of representative moral philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche.
• CAS PH 360: Symbolic Logic
  Study of methods characteristic of modern deductive logic including use of truth tables, Boolean normal forms, models, and indirect and conditional proofs within the theory of truth-functions and quantifiers.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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