Self-Knowledge: Honors Seminar (HN 32)
Dorit Bar-On

We ordinarily assume that people have privileged knowledge of their own present states of mind. (So, if I say: 'I have a headache" or "I wish the rain would stop" then, assumign I'm sincere, my audience will not presume to challenge or correct what I say.) But if, as modern science suggests, our minds are nothing more than our brains and central nervous system, it becomes difficult to see how we could have such special knowledge. In this course, we will examine whether our commonsense belief in privileged self-knowledge is challenged by contemporary scientific findings about the mind.

This course meets Thursday from 2 - 4:30

Sports and Competition: Freshman Seminar (Phil 6F)
Jan Boxill

Many issues play a significant role in our lives. This course is designed to look at two such issues: sports and competition. Sports play a significant role in the lives of millions of people throughout the world, as participants, fans, spectators, and critics. Even those who are uninvolved, bored or critical of sports are often affected by them. Because sports are significant forms of social activities, they raise a wide range of issues, some factual, some explanatory. E.g. sociologists may be concerned with whether or not sports affect society; psychologists may be concerned with personality features which contribute to success or failure in sport.

In addition to these questions, sports also raise philosophical issues that are conceptual and ethical in nature. Conceptual questions ask how we understand the concepts and ideas that apply to the world of sports. What are sports? What is involved in competition? Ethical questions raise moral concerns many of us have about sports. Is there too much emphasis on winning and competition? Are college sports getting out of hand? Indeed do competitive athletics belong on campus?

This course will examine these and other ethical issues, including, but not limited to, Title IX, gender equity, racism, sexism, cheating, violence, and drug use. My concern will be to gain an understanding of the moral significance of sport through readings and class discussion. We may not be able to resolve the issues, but we should at least gain a greater understanding of the issues, which should serve as beginnings to resolutions.

This course meets Tuesday from 2 - 4:30.

Freshman Seminar (Phil 6F)
John Roberts

What is time? Do the past and the future exist, or only the present? Is the "flow of time" an objective feature of reality, or is it just an illusion created by the way we humans experience a static and changeless world? Is it possible to change the past, and if not, then why not? Is time travel a logical possibility? In this course, we will examine both historical and contemporary attempts to grapple with these problems (and related ones), and will do some grappling on our own. We will consider philosophical literature from 2500 years ago to the present day, and we will briefly consider the impact of Einstein's theories of relativity on these problems (at a very introductory level). Students will analyze historical arguments concerning these problems, produce arguments of their own, and collaborate in writing philosophical dialogues.

This course meets Wednesday from 2 - 4:30.

Main Problems (Phil 20)
David Landy

As the title of this course indicates, we will be examining some of the most prominent questions that philosophy has attempted to answer. Questions such as: Why should we be moral? How do we know what the moral thing to do is? What is knowledge? Do we actually know anything at all? Can we know that our beliefs about the world are true? Can we know that God exists? Can we know that other people have minds, and are not mere automatons? We will explore the answers that are given to these and other questions by Plato (in the Republic), Rene Descartes (in the Meditations on First Philosophy), David Hume (in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion), Bertrand Russell (in his article Analogy), and Norman Malcom (in his article Knowledge of Other Minds). Classwork will include reading assignments, papers, and quizzes.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 11:00.

Main Problems (Phil 20)
Ram Neta

What is philosophy? What do philosophers do, and how do they do it? This course will attempt to answer these questions. We will begin by reading Leo Tolstoy's story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". We will try to understand what it is that the main character of that story is missing in his life. Whatever that missing thing is, we will call it "philosophy". But what is it? The rest of the course will be devoted to trying to understand what this thing is that's missing from Ivan Ilyich's life. In order to figure that out, we will read Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Jean-Jacques Rouseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

This course meets Monday and Wednesday at 10:00, with recitations Friday at 10:00 and 1:00.

Main Problems -- Honors (Phil 20H)
Thomas Hofweber

This course is a first course in philosophy covering several different classic philosophical problems. We will read both classic texts as well as contemporary authors. Among the topics to be discussed are: the theory of knowledge, the question whether religious belief can be rationally supported or refuted, personal identity and the immortality of the soul, ethics and morality, and political philosophy, in particular the question what the source and extend of the authority of the state is.

This course meets Thursday from 2 - 4:30.

Introduction to Symbolic Logic (Phil 21)
John Roberts

This course is an introduction to the theory of deductive reasoning. We will learn to use formal, symbolic methods for representing patterns of reasoning and evaluating that reasoning. Topics covered will include propositional logic and first-order predicate logic.

This course meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00.

Introduction to Symbolic Logic (Phil 21)
Grant Dowell

“In a republican nation, whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of the first importance”
--Thomas Jefferson

Logic is the study of reasoning and argument. Throughout the course, we will be learning to use a formal language of symbols and a method of proof that can be thought of as representing valid reasoning. In part, we will use that formal method to evaluate arguments. We will be using the eleventh edition of Introduction to Logic edited by Irving Copi and Carl Cohen.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 8:00.

Introduction to Ethics (Phil 22/ Phil 22E)
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

This course is an introduction to moral theory. We will be going straight to the classics -- a few of the best books ever written on moral theory: Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and Mill's Utilitarianism.

We will be concerned primarily with two questions: (1) What really matters? and (2) What is involved in answering (1)? In general, worries about the second question arise from worries about the first; and answers to the second usually commit us to answers to the first. In fact, the questions are really far more entangled than they are distinct. So we won't be taking the questions in order; instead we will jump back and forth between the two. In coming to grips with these two very general questions we will focus on three fundamental, but slightly more specific, questions: (i) What does morality demand? (ii) Under what conditions are we responsible for our success or failure in living up to these demands? and (iii) What connection is there between our being moral and our living a good (satisfying, fulfilling) life? The first calls for a theory of morality, the second requires a theory of moral responsibility, and the third asks for an answer to an age old question: why should I be moral? We will, pretty much, be taking them in reverse order.

Initially, spaces in the course will be held for freshman. After freshman have had a chance to enroll, registration will be open to all.

This course meets Monday and Wednesday at 10:00, with recitations on Friday at 10:00 and 12:00.

Making Sense of Ourselves (Phil 26)
Matthew Chrisman

In our lives we use many different stories to make sense of our lives. For example, we have stories about where we come from, what our purpose is, how we relate to nature, what's the best way to live in community, how our country should interact with other countries, etc. Often these stories are only vaguely in the background of our day to day lives. In this introductory level class, we will explore the philosophical sources of many of these stories, in order to bring them to the fore for closer examination. We will read authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Matthew, Nietzsche, Kafka, Marx, Rand, Borges, and Singer. All of these authors have influenced the ways we make sense of ourselves by telling difficult and revolutionary stories. So, students should come both with an open mind and a critical eye.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30.

Applied Ethics (Phil 30)
Douglas MacLean

This course meets Monday and Wednesday at 12:00, with recitations on Friday at 12:00 or 1:00.

Philosophy of Religion (Phil 32)
Dean Pettit

This course will be concerned primarily with a single question: Does God exist? Drawing on both historical and contemporary sources, we will address this question by a careful and critical examination of the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God. This project will confront us with fundamental issues about the grounds for knowledge, the scope of reason, the nature of God, the nature of reality, the basis of morality, and the meaning of life. In short, the course will introduce students to the enterprise of philosophy. Another central aim of the course is to help students develop the ability to clarify difficult conceptual problems and reason about them, to present their reasoning and critically assess the reasoning of others. No previous exposure to either philosophy or religious studies will be presupposed.

Note: This course is not intended to provide a survey of world religions. The central issue of the course presupposes monotheism and most of the relevant philosophical literature (from which readings for the course are drawn) is in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This is not meant to exclude other religious perspectives, but to give students a clearer idea of what they can expect from the course. Other religious perspectives that students might bring to class discussion will be both welcome and valued, since how we conceive of God may make a difference to our conclusion about whether God exists.

This course meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 12:00.

Bioethics (Phil 34)
Heather Gert

This course will begin with an introduction to a general system of morality. In the first half of the course we will see how this system helps us to better understand some of the most basic issues in bioethics--issues about providing information, consent, confidentiality, and competency, for instance. In the second half of the course we will apply what we have learned about these general topics to some of the more specific issues of the day: genetic engineering and testing, cloning, stem cell research, etc.

This course meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11:00.

Bioethics -- Honors (Phil 34H)
Douglas Long

We will explore ethical questions that arise in the health care professions, concerning patients' rights to information and to refuse treatment, confidentiality, informed consent, abortion, euthanasia, physician assisted suicide, genetic screening, stem cell research, cloning, and experimentation with human subjects. Major ethical >theories will be used as a framework for the discussion. We will read and discuss a variety of points of view on both the ethical and legal issues. Written work will include three brief papers and a final examination.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30.

Language and Communication (Phil 35/ Ling 35)
Dean Pettit

The importance of language is obvious. It is the principal means by which we communicate with other people and our principal source of information about the world beyond our immediate surroundings. Yet only relatively recently has the nature and complexity of human language come to be appreciated. We naturally tend to think of language – like the automobile or the light bulb – as a human invention, a conventional system created by us for the purpose of communication. This natural view has been challenged by the linguist Noam Chomsky who has argued that language should instead be thought of – like vision and hearing – as a faculty of the human mind, part of the hardware of our brains. Though many of Chomsky's central claims are hotly disputed, the challenge he posed has precipitated a revolution in our thinking about human language.

This course is a philosophical introduction to current thinking about language and the fallout of Chomsky's revolution. We will survey some of the key areas in the study of language – syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language development, and psycholinguistics – with an eye to philosophical issues that arise about the nature of language, the science of language, knowledge and meaning. This course will be of particular interest to students in philosophy, linguistics, psychology and cognitive science. However, no previous familiarity with these areas will be presupposed by this course.

This course meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9:00.

Social Ethics/ Political Thought (Phil 37)
Thomas Hill, Jr.

We will examine classic works in the modern period of social and political philosophy. Selections from Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, J. J. Rousseau, David Hume, and J. S. Mill. Recurring themes include: Are we by nature entirely self-interested, or benevolent, or a mixture of these? Are fundamental moral and political principles dependent on theology? What would life be like in the absence of civil law and government? If rational people in such a condition made a social agreement to set up a civil order, what sort of agreement would they make? Why does this matter to us today? What is justice, and what limits, if any, does it place on what governments may do? What grounds are there for insisting on individual liberties even when contrary to majority preferences? Lecture, class discussion, and student presentations. Assignments include written responses to class questions, a mid-term, a paper, and a final.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 11:00.

Experience and Reality (Phil 38)
Mark Bauer

The central concern of the course will be to understand how the mental fits, or fails to fit, into the more general picture of the world presented by science. Initially, we will be concerned to answer the question, “Is it possible that mentality is just a feature of the physical world?” Given our answer to that question, we will investigate the nature of psychological generalizations, e.g., can there be psychological laws akin to the laws of physics or chemistry, is it possible to dispense with the language of psychology (“belief”, “desire”, etc.) and explain cognition in purely physicalistic terms, etc. Last, given time, we will turn to worries raised in the literature that consciousness presents a special kind of problem for psychological explanation.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 2:00.

Experience and Reality (Phil 38)
Marc Lange

Metaphysics is the study of the ultimate nature of reality. What the heck does that mean? Well, here are a few metaphysical questions, all of which we will discuss in this class: What does it mean to say that something that does not exist nevertheless could have existed? What is the difference between a round square's being impossible, a perpetual- motion machine's being impossible (since it would violate the law of energy conservation), and its being impossible for me to speak to you now in Dutch (since I don't know Dutch)? Is time-travel possible? Would it then be possible to change the past? Is there a sense in which you could not possibly have had different (biological) parents -- else you would not have been you? What is the connection between a cause (such as little Timmy throwing a ball at Mrs. Jones's window) and its effect (the window's shattering)? Is there a sense in which a cause makes the effect happen? What does it mean to say that had the cause not happened, the effect would not (could not?) have happened? Are there events that just happen for no reason, or facts that could have been otherwise but where there is no explanation of why they hold? In this course, you will become acquainted with some metaphysical concepts, ideas, and arguments regarding these and other questions. There will be an open-book midterm, a final, a short paper, and occasional in-class exercises.

This course meets Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 10:00.

Experience and Reality (Phil 38)
Ted Parent

The course is ostensibly an introduction to metaphysics, but since metaphysics is too broad to survey in a semester, we will focus exclusively on metaphysical problems concerning mental representation. Thoughts, perceptions, experiences, and concepts are able to "represent" things in the world. But how can they do that? And how do they represent the particular things that they do? Moreover, how are we to understand this representational capacity of the mind as part of the biological and physical order of things? The course will require three 5-page papers and a few in-class written assignments.

This course meets Monday and Wednesday from 6:00 - 7:15.

Morality and Business (Phil 39)
Jennifer Baker

In this course we will eschew the typical case-based approach to business ethics and instead attempt to answer a few (only seemingly simple) questions: What is the nature of business? Is profit ethical? Can the good person succeed in business? What are the social responsibilities of business? To develop answers we need to first come to terms with the how the market works. We will approach this topic historically, by looking to the accounts of Aristotle, Mandeville, Smith, and Marx before turning to articles by contemporary economists. Once we understand what we mean by "business" what we mean by "ethics" will have to be decided. Eventually we will look to ethical theories to determine if they are useful for clarifying what it is in (or about) business that is ethical. We will end the semester by applying our reasoning to particular issues in business ethics, including the recent rash of corporate malfeasance. Email jabaker@email.unc.edu for a complete syllabus.

This course meets Monday and Wednesday at 9:00, with recitations Friday at 9:00 and 12:00.

Morality and Law (Phil 41)
Gerald Postema

What is law and why think it is important? Does law tend to serve justice and liberty, or it is a major obstacle in the way of achieving them? Suppose law and justice pull in opposite directions—imagine you are a judge and the law arguably requires that you send a fugitive slave back to her owners—does law or does justice prevail? What are justice and liberty in the first place? Is it appropriate or just to use the law to enforce moral standards? Are there moral limits to the use of law for this purpose? Is it possible to justify the law’s threat and use of punishment? Does it matter whether a person is responsible for the deeds for which he is held criminally liable? How is responsibility to be understood? Does fault play a role? The law seems to prohibit the use of violence, why is self-defense an exception? May a person who has been physically abused by her partner for a long time, claim self-defense when she kills him in his sleep? These questions are among those we will consider as we explore in this course some of the relations between law and morality.

This course meets Monday and Wednesday at 11:00, with recitations on Fridays.

Peace, War, and Defense (Phil 42/ Pwad 68/ Poli 68)
Bernard Boxill

The course falls into two main parts. In the first part we analyze the Liberal and Realist responses to the problems of war and peace. Hobbes and Rousseau are our representative Realists and Locke and Kant are our representative Liberals. In the second part we take up the problem of terrorism and the claim that democracies do not make war on each other.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30.

Feminism (Phil 46)
Ingra Schellenberg

In this class we will consider a number of stereotypical representations of women, ask whether or not these representations are harmful to women, and if so, in what way. Regular attendance and active participation are required and I expect all students to be e-mail accessible. I also expect that all students will have done all of the reading for every class. Most of the course grade will be for reading journals that will be submitted for EVERY class meeting. Class time will be used for lecture, discussion and small group work. The questions we will discuss include (but are not limited to) the following: What does it mean to claim that women are oppressed? What is the role of gender stereotypes and images in the oppression of women? Who (if anyone) is responsible for women's oppression?

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 11:00.

Ancient Philosophy (Phil 56)
Patrick Miller

This course offers an introduction to Greek Philosophy, from its origins in the Archaic period of Greece (6th century B.C.), through its flourishing in the Classical period (5th and 4th century B.C.), and ending with its denouement in the Hellenistic period (roughly the next five-hundred years). As a result, this course demands much reading, lest our survey become mere tourism. Moreover, these texts are often difficult, and at times even obscure. That said, they reward the efforts of the diligent.

More than half the semester is spent with the two main philosophers of the middle period: Plato and Aristotle. Needless to say, these two are among the great philosophers of any period; they both deserve the intense work we will invest in them. Of Plato's writings we will read the following: Euthyphro, Apology, Meno, Phaedo, Republic, and Parmenides; of Aristotle's, substantial excerpts from: Categories, De Interpretatione, Posterior Analytics, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics.

Before coming to Plato and Aristotle, we read fragments of all of the major pre-Socratic natural philosophers: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Hippocrates, and Democritus. Since the course aims to introduce not only the Greek philosophies, but also the Greek philosophers, we will read some biographical testimonies about these thinkers from Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch. We will then turn to some of the 5th century Sophists: Protagoras, Critias, Antphon, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus. In order to enrich our understanding of the period, we also read a few para-philosophical texts of tragedy and history: Euripides, Thucydides, and Herodotus. All of these thinkers make the transition to Socrates -- who otherwise appears to come out of nowhere -- more natural. In order to gain a fuller picture of this peculiar thinker, we will read not only Plato's account, but also those of Aristophanes and Xenophon.

After spending the bulk of our time with Socrates' student, Plato, and Plato's student, Aristotle, we will finish the course with an all-too-brief survey of Hellenistic philosophy, sampling texts of the Stoics, Epicurus, and Sextus Empiricus. Regrettably, there will not be enough time to reach Neoplatonism, the last great pagan philosophy of antiquity; however, Neoplatonism can be read just as legitimately as a seguw to medieval philosophy. We will cover as many topics as this dazzling group of thinkers covered themselves -- which is to say nearly all the major topics of philosophy: change, causation, being, knowledge, language, goodness, justice, art, the soul, pleasure, fate, freedom, immortality, and the divine. In this way, our course can serve as an introduction to the subject of Philosophy itself: most of these topics are still debated, they are sometimes debated in terms set originally by the Greeks, and some of the answers they supplied are still seriously entertained.

Students will be expected to acquire along the way a number of informal logical tools and a comfort with both the Greek alphabet and a few dozen Greek philosophical terms. These rote skills facilitate close reading of our texts; frequent quizzes or assignments will thus ensure that these skills have been assimilated. Beyond these regular evaluations, grades will be assigned based upon two short papers (5-8 pages), a midterm, and a final exam.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 12:30.

Modern Philosophy (Phil 58)
Susanne Sreedhar

Since the seventeenth century, many philosophers have been interested in understanding how we can achieve knowledge of things that exist outside our own minds. Why did philosophers become interested in this project? How did they attempt to pursue it? What can we learn from their efforts? In this course, we will attempt to answer these questions. We will read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy,Berkeley's Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, and Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30.

Theory of Knowledge (Phil 73)
Jay Rosenberg

Since a lucky guess or hunch can produce a true belief, clearly something more than such true belief is required in order to have genuine knowledge, but it has turned out to be remarkably difficult to say just what more is needed. One traditional answer is that one's beliefs must be suitably justified, but the concept of justification has proved to be as elusive as that of knowledge--and some philosophers, skeptics, have even been led to conclude that we have no genuine knowledge at all. In this course, we explore a variety of contemporary proposals on all of these fronts--how to distinguish what someone actually knows from what he merely happens to get right, what might constitute the requisite sort of justification, and whether, all things considered, we can in fact attain genuine and reliable objective knowledge of the world. Our text will be a recent anthology: Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology, edited by Sven Bernecker & Fred Dretske. This is not an introductory course. Prior work in philosophy is presupposed.

This course meets Tuesday from 12:30 - 3:00.

Cognitive Science (Phil 77)
Dorit Bar-On

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to philosophical issues connected with the study of cognitive science. We will be examining a number of philosophical issues that set the agenda for the empirical study of mind, such as the relationship between mind and body and the nature of intentionality and mental representation. We will also be studying a sample of scientific approaches designed to address these issues. In the course of doing so, we will examine the character of psychological explanations of behavior and the relation between cognitive science and other sciences. As this is a philosophy course, we will emphasize the need for cogent reasons and arguments for any given position or approach and examine possible objections to them. Basic familiarity with both philosophy and cognitive psychology will be expected.

This course meets Tuesday and Thursday at 11:00.

Virtue Ethics (Phil 102)
Jennifer Baker

In this course we will read from ancient (Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca) and contemporary (Slote, Swanton, Hursthouse, Foot) virtue ethicists in order to strike a contrast. Three aspects of ancient virtue theory are commonly left out of accounts of contemporary virtue theory: the notion of a final end, the structure or psychological status of virtue, and the transformative role of virtue in a life. We will attempt to assess the benefits (and detriments) of including these elements in an account of virtue by, among other things, looking to Lawrence Becker's A New Stoicism as an example of ancient theory made modern. For a copy of the syllabus email: jabaker@email.unc.edu

This course meets Monday from 12:30 - 3:00.

Political Philosophy (Phil 105)
Gerald Postema

This course is intended as a broad survey of the roots of modern political philosophy. The main figures covered will be Hobbes and Hume. But we will begin with a little work on Grotius who set Natural Law theory, and to an extent the Social Contract tradition, on its modern course. We will then focus a good bit of time on Hobbes, looking at his account of authority of the state, rooted in his account of human nature and rationality. We may also look at key features of his theory of law and his critique of the Common Law theory of his day. We may then take up Locke's critique and revision of Hobbes's contract argument. A key concern will be the role of consent in his theory, and the challenge posed by Hume's devastating critique of consent theories. This will lead to an exploration of Hume's nuanced account of the conventional foundations of property, contract, and the state. If we have time we will look at Rousseau's very different version of the idea of social contract, or at least look at his critique of the Hobbesian and Humean traditions in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. The course will proceed largely through lecture-discussion. One or two small papers plus a term paper will be required.

This course meets Wednesday from 3:30 - 6:00.

Theory and Anti-Theory in Ethics (Phil 112)
Rebecca Walker

A good deal of the history of philosophical approaches to ethics is devoted to the development of normative ethical theories and subsequent debates between proponents of these various theories (and subsequent modifications of the theories and so on). Anti-theory in ethics is a relatively new development (at least in its’ current form) critiquing not just some ethical theory or other, but theory as the proper approach to ethics. This course will focus on the ethical theory v. anti-theory debate in meta-ethics. Anti-theorists offer a number of critiques of ethical theories including, to name a few: a failure of theoretical principles to yield concrete conclusions, the gap between theoretical accounts of morality and proper moral education, and the conflicting nature of moral experience. We will spend much of the course addressing these and related issues. Related questions include: what constitutes an ethical theory and what is the relationship is between theory in ethics and theory in science (does one teach us something about the other)? One of the core issues that comes out of the theory v. anti-theory debate is whether theories are useful in helping us think through practical moral problems and about how to live our moral lives. Since the anti-theorists tend to argue that they are not, we will also look at methods in bioethics as a case study. A variety of methods in bioethics may be looked at through the lense of the anti-theory v. theory approaches to ethics generally including (as anti-theory) ‘narrative’ and ‘case-based’ approaches, (as a ‘mixed’ approach) principle based views (here it will be useful to ask whether ‘principle-ism’ in bioethics is a theory), and theory-constructing approaches. One of the purposes of the course it to bridge the ‘meta-ethics’/‘applied ethics’ divide by dealing with a debate in meta-ethics that ‘goes all the way down’ to questions about how we ‘use’ (or do not use) ethical theory. The course will assume background knowledge of utilitarian and deontological ethical theories (knowledge of virtue theory would be nice, but won’t be assumed). This course will include graduate students and will be aimed a fairly high level. It is recommended for undergraduates with an advanced understanding of ethics and of philosophical discourse.

This course meets Tuesday from 12:30 - 3:00.

Wittgenstein (Phil 114)
Heather Gert

Ludwig Wittgenstein is among the most influential philosophers in Western philosophy. His writings have influenced what philosophers have had to say in areas as diverse as epistemology and aesthetics, philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. This wide influence is in part due to the fact that Wittgenstein directly discusses so many topics of philosophical interest. But at least as important is the fact that many of the issues he raises are relevant to philosophical investigation in general. One of the most well-known of these issues is rule-following. How often do philosophers cite rules as explanations? Wittgenstein makes us question whether such explanations can ever be well-grounded. With his discussions of ostensive definition and language-games Wittgenstein also forces us to consider whether real people could ever come to have the concepts philosophers attribute to them. And, among other things, his discussion of private language reminds us that the very fact that we communicate has a bearing on what we can mean by what we say and think.

The primary text for this course with be Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We will also be reading related selections from his writings on philosophy of psychology. In addition to the topics mentioned, we will discuss: meaning-as-use, analysis, family resemblances, forms-of-life, understanding, knowing, “the inner” v. “the outer”, sensations, criteria, consciousness, intentional states and their objects, descriptions versus explanations, and seeing-as.

This course meets Monday from 3:30 - 6:00.