Graduate Courses

Instructor: Chris Dorst

This course is designed to familiarize graduate students with some important metalogical results about sentential and predicate calculi. To that end, we will introduce a derivation system (modeled on the one developed by Kalish, Montague, and Marr), learn how to do derivations in that system, and then prove that the system is both sound and complete. We will do this for both sentential and first order predicate logic. Time permitting, we will also look at some related metalogical and mathematical results, including the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem and Cantor’s theorem.

Instructor: Bob Beddor

This advanced survey will cover a range of important topics in contemporary epistemology, including the nature of knowledge, justified belief, and the norms governing rational credence.

Instructor: Duncan Purves

This course surveys ethical concepts related to the design, development, and implementation of novel technologies. Special focus is given to emerging data-driven technologies, especially applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Topics include algorithmic fairness, proxy discrimination, the right to an explanation, and trustworthy artificial intelligence.

Instructor: Greg Ray

[Catalog description: Advanced study of particular topics or themes in the philosophy of language, such as compositionality, pragmatics, speech act theory, semantics of attitude reports or deflationary theories of truth. S/U option available if student admitted to Ph.D. candidacy.]

Instructor: Cameron Buckner

In this class, we will critically explore the debate around “deep learning” and its relevance to human intelligence by linking it to the history of theorizing about the mind by empiricist philosophers like Aristotle, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Sophie de Grouchy, and William James. The current engineering debate between GOFAI and deep learning can be mapped to traditional debates between rationalists like Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz on the one hand and these empiricists on the other. We will explore these topics through a book written by the instructor. Course topics will be structured around the theories historical empiricists have offered about these important cognitive faculties, and philosophical discussions will be linked to current attempts to model these faculties using deep neural networks. In the course of the discussion, we will introduce a number of other epistemological, ethical, and political topics of pressing importance to the development of state-of-the-art AI technology.

Instructor: Bob Beddor

This course is designed to familiarize incoming graduate students with the expectations and standards of graduate level work in philosophy. In particular, it aims to develop the tools necessary to read, write, and converse about philosophy at the graduate level. We will study and discuss a wide range of papers, drawn from different areas of philosophy

Instructor: Molly Gardner

This is an advanced survey of central issues in ethical theory. We will focus specifically on issues in normative ethics. However, in many cases it is difficult to separate normative theories from their practical implications, so this course will also survey some important issues in practical ethics. The course will be organized around various concepts such as consequentialism, deontology, constraints, options, aggregation, causal inefficacy, the non-identity problem, the repugnant conclusion, and moral luck.

Instructor: Nathan Rothschild

This course will be a study of Plato’s Republic. In this ambitious dialogue, Plato embeds a network of ethical, political, and psychological views within an argument that aims to show that being just makes a person’s life go well. We will spend the semester trying to unravel and explicate these views along with the understanding of reality they assume and seek to justify. The course will be structured around a close reading of Republic supplemented by secondary sources. In addition, we will look at contemporary work—primarily in philosophical psychology (e.g., theories of the emotions and non-rational motivation) and metaethics—that takes up and develops views advanced in the dialogue.

Instructor: Lyndal Grant

This course will be concerned with contemporary debates over the nature of desire. Questions we will ask include: what is it to want something? Is desiring a propositional attitude? How do we know what we want? What is the relationship between wanting and other mental states like preferring, believing, and intending?

Instructor: Jaime Ahlberg

This course offers practical guidance for students pursuing a PhD in Philosophy, including both strategies for academic success (making progress on research, preparing effective presentations, identifying opportunities for conferences, fellowships, and grants, and submitting work for publication) and techniques for pursuing both academic and academic-adjacent careers in the current environment, including ways of marketing one’s skill set and experience to different audiences.