The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Fall 2021 were submitted by the course instructors. Exceptions are descriptions in braces {…}, which have been adopted from the Undergraduate Catalogue (students desiring further information regarding the specific content of courses with bracketed descriptions are advised to contact the instructors directly).
Specific information regarding the dates, times, and locations of these courses may be found in the Registrar’s official Schedule of Courses for Fall 2021.
2000 Level Courses
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — Dr. Borges
The goal of this course is to introduce students to some of the main issues in Western Philosophy. We will do this by critically approaching classical and contemporary readings on question such as ‘What is philosophy?’, ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘How should we act?’, and ‘What is the meaning of life?’. A further goal is to introduce students to the methods and tools philosophers use when approaching philosophical questions. This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (4000 words).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — Dr. D. Grant
Does God exist? Do we have free will? What is consciousness? Could a machine be conscious? How do you know that you’re not dreaming right now? Is eating meat morally wrong?
This course will introduce you to the kinds of questions philosophers think about and the tools they use to answer them. It will also help you develop a variety of useful skills, such as writing clearly and persuasively, constructing and evaluating arguments, and breaking down complex ideas to make them easier to understand. Readings will include both historical and contemporary texts.
The course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (6000 words).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — Dr. L. Grant
Does God exist? Do we have free will? Is eating meat morally wrong? How do you know that you’re not dreaming right now? Could you survive the death of your body?
This course will introduce you to the kinds of questions philosophers think about and the tools they use to answer them. It will also help you develop a variety of useful skills, such as writing clearly and persuasively, constructing and evaluating arguments, and breaking down complex ideas to make them easier to understand. Readings will include both historical and contemporary texts.
The course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (6000 words).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — Dr. Pismenny
This course will introduce you to some of the main topics of philosophy. Philosophy addresses some of the most fundamental questions in life. The main tool by which Philosophy addresses these questions is the human capacity to reason. You will find that philosophical answers are based on reasoned arguments, which analyze and seek to justify beliefs. Philosophy, therefore, is a sort of self-examination, in which you discover what you think, and then reflect on whether your opinions are really worth holding. To look critically at your own ideas is the essence of the life of reason.
During this course you will examine your views on several core philosophical topics such as what makes a good argument, the nature of morality, and social justice. You will read philosophical texts, analyze their arguments and evaluate their answers to the questions of the course, see how philosophical concepts can help you understand practical dilemmas, and express your ideas through arguments – both verbal and written – which present your reasons for holding your beliefs.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — Dr. J. Rothschild
Content. In this course we will engage some of the fundamental questions and classical texts in philosophy. Central topics include questions about what human beings are and what we need; questions about the possibility of morality and about the construction of just political arrangements; questions about human understanding and its limits; questions about the being of humans in the world; and questions about the ways we are determined from without and the ways we are free to determine ourselves. We will track our various authors’ approaches to these philosophical concerns, examine their arguments about how these concerns relate to one another, and consider how the course texts make a case for the relevance of these questions to our own human lives.
Method. This course also has significant goals in building skills of philosophical thinking, speaking, and writing.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — Dr. Ross
Over the past year, we have all become intensely aware of the ways in which our lives are both in- and especially *out*- of our control. Our lives have been up-ended, and we are still dealing with massive uncertainty in our world. But is this loss of control really as new as it feels? Is it a genuine change from our pre-Covid world? Or have recent events merely illuminating the uncertainty that has always been there, lying under the surface of the habits and rituals that make up our normal lives?
In this class we will explore several fundamental philosophical questions that are at the core of our lived experience, especially those that have been put center-stage by our current situation.
- How can life be meaningful in time when there seems to be no progress and no purpose?
- Is free will real, or only an illusion? Moral responsibility? Merit?
- In a world full of filter bubbles, “fake news”, and echo chambers, how can we genuinely knowthat what we see- or read- is true?
- To what extent is our perception of the social world an illusion, and can acknowledging this change how we see the world?
A philosophy course cannot give you the answers to these challenging questions, but studying philosophy helps us understand why we shouldn’t expect quick and easy answers. Studying philosophy helps us understand that our world is more complex, nuanced, and uncertain than we may have thought. But it also helps us to live authentically- an “examined life”. When we know what we value, when we see ourselves and our world more clearly, we give ourselves a method for making the best decisions we can in a world with no absolute guarantees.
Learning how to approach problems with a philosophical mindset will help you find and ask better questions, ones that can move a conversation- and a society- forward.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — James Simpson
This course introduces students to philosophy by engaging with various readings and arguments, both classical and contemporary, in the history of philosophy. This course will have a four-part structure. The first part will cover one of the central topics in the philosophy of religion: arguments for and against the existence of God. The second part of the course will cover various topics in epistemology, with specific focus on the Regress Problem, Cartesian skepticism, and the Gettier Problem. The third part of the course will be concerned with metaphysics, with specific focus on personal identity, free will & moral responsibility, and what objects, if any, exist (e.g., do numbers exist? do chairs exist?). The fourth part of the course will mainly focus on discussion of the three standard normative ethical theories (utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, and Aristotelian virtue theory).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy (UFO) — Dr. E. Palmer
Patient and thorough exploration of philosophical questions is an ideal way to develop skills in clear writing and critical thinking. This course introduces the discipline of philosophy with a focus on developing those skills. Most of the semester is devoted three traditional issues: (a) What is knowledge? What can we know? (b) What is free will? Is there reason to think we don’t have any free will? (c) What is morality all about? Are there facts about what is morally right and wrong? At the end of the semester, we will more briefly explore some famous questions about happiness and the meaning of life. The emphasis throughout is on writing clearly about such elusive questions and presenting good reasons to endorse one answer over another.
The course provides 4000 words of credit towards the Writing Requirement at UF as well as satisfying the State Core General Education requirement for Humanities. Assignments include three argumentative essays, four short writing assignments, several short quizzes and tests, and regular activity assignments. For each unit of the class, students are divided into small groups in which they must post their responses to the activity assignments in that unit and select, as a group, the best of those to be submitted for a grade. There are no major exams (no mid-term or final exam). No book purchases are required, as all readings are made available online through the Canvas system.
This is an entirely online course. Because there is no regular meeting time during which we all meet to discuss the material, it is especially important to keep up with all assignments, to participate in discussion boards, and to ask for help when needed. While the structure of assignments is designed to ensure that students challenge themselves, it is also designed so as to minimize the amount of stress placed on any particular assignment. Success requires, instead, regular and serious effort throughout the semester.
PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues — Dr. Rick
Do non-human animals have moral standing, comparable to that of human beings? Is it ever morally permissible to eat animals? What is sexism, and should prostitution be ethically and legally permissible or prohibited? What is racism, and are affirmative action policies morally justified or morally bankrupt? What is the most ethically justified immigration policy – one of largely open or largely closed borders? Given the persistence of vast global poverty in our world, what moral duties do those of us in wealthy nations have to persons in impoverished states? Should private gun ownership be morally permissible or impermissible? Is climate change a significant issue for individual morality? Are individuals morally responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions, despite the fact that individual actions seem to make little difference to climate change?
These are examples of moral questions about which many of us have strong and often opposing opinions. And, just as we disagree on many of these issues, so do many philosophers, political theorists, and economists. In this course, we examine opposing philosophical arguments and points of view on these urgent moral questions. The governing aim of our course will be to come to grips with and critically reflect on the underlying justifications for the various sides of these different debates. This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (4000 words).
IDS 2935 Cultural Animals (Quest) — Dr. Rick
Humans are cultural animals. On the one hand, we are biologically evolved animals – members of nature’s kingdom, bound by its universal laws and norms. On the other hand, we are creatures of culture, variably shaped by the influences and innovations of our particular societies and communities. Given our dual citizenship within these domains, questions and challenges emerge regarding the boundaries and allegiances between human nature and human culture. These limits are especially urgent with respect to understanding the contours and content of human morality. In Cultural Animals, we will examine the interplay between the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ aspects of our lives, with particular emphasis on exploring how these often-coordinating, yet potentially-competing, forces serve to shape our moral practices.
IDS 2935 The Idea of Happiness (Quest) — N. Rothschild
Every person wants to have a good life. But what is it to live well? This is a question about the nature of human well-being and how it may be achieved. It was fundamental to Western philosophy at its inception. Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life is not worth living. In doing so, he was calling for a rigorous and theoretical investigation into our beliefs about what makes a life go well because he thought such an investigation was essential to our lives going well. But was he right? It is easy to say “yes,” and be done with it. But do we really need to think deeply about what we care about in order to have a good life? This course will look at both contemporary and historical attempts to answer this question.
3000 Level Courses
PHH 3100 Ancient Greek Philosophy — N. Rothschild
This course is designed to familiarize students with some of the main ideas of the thinkers who stand at the beginning of the western philosophical tradition: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers of the Hellenistic era. To give a sense of the topics that will be explored, here are two examples of issues that have been taken up in the course’s previous incarnations. Plato famously presents knowledge as a daunting achievement and claims that a life organized around the pursuit of knowledge, i.e., philosophy, is the best life for a human being. Understanding these views depends on what Plato means by knowledge. This course examines Plato’s developing conception of knowledge and its objects (the things known) and the way in which this epistemology and metaphysics entails the view that happiness is a form of love. In contemporary philosophy, Aristotle is probably best known as the inspiration for the ethical theory known as virtue ethics. This course offers an introduction to Aristotle’s ethics that seeks to contextualize it within Aristotle’s metaphysics of activity and account of life. Like Plato, Aristotle believes that to be a “good person” is to be a good human being. Thus, he thinks that figuring out how we should live (ethics), depends on understanding that our way of being is a form of constantly active animal life (metaphysics and biology).
PHH 3400 Modern Philosophy — Dr. Duncan
PHH3400 is an introduction to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy. In the class, we will focus on four prominent works of the period: René Descartes’ 1641 Meditations, G.W. Leibniz’s 1686 Discourse on Metaphysics, John Locke’s 1689 Essay concerning Human Understanding, and David Hume’s 1748 Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. We will also look, more briefly, at the views of some of their contemporaries, including Thomas Hobbes, Nicolas Malebranche, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Shepherd. The course will focus on the philosophers’ views in metaphysics and epistemology, but will also consider views in the physical sciences and in ethics. Assessment will involve two papers, a final exam, and some other smaller items.
This course, together with PHH 3100, aims to give students an understanding of major questions addressed in the history of Western philosophy, the range of answers offered to these questions, and the methods employed in addressing them. As well as meeting requirements for the Philosophy major and minor, PHH3400 counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement.
PHH 3610 Happiness and Well-Being — Dr. L. Grant
What makes our lives go better or worse? According to the hedonist, our lives go better when we experience pleasure and avoid pain. According to desire-based theories, our lives go better when we get what we want. Object list theorists say that a variety of different goods — such as pleasure, friendship, and knowledge — are essential components of a life worth living.
In this course, we will consider these and other theories of the nature of wellbeing in the context of broader philosophical questions about birth, life, death, and the afterlife. These questions will include:
- Would it be better not to have been born?
- Is it always good to get what you want?
- Is death always bad? For whom?
- Can things that happen after we die make our lives go worse?
- Should we want to live forever?
- Is it better to burn out or to fade away?
PHI 3130 Symbolic Logic — Dr. Borges
This course will familiarize students with the syntax, semantics, and some of the metalogical results of first-order propositional and predicate logic. If time permits, we will also look at extensions of those first-order logics (e.g., modal logic), and differences between formal logic and human reasoning.
PHI 3300 Theory of Knowledge — Dr. Borges
This course aims at enabling the student to think critically about some of the central issues in the theory of knowledge. Among other issues, we will discuss (i) the nature of knowledge, (ii) the difference (if any) between knowledge and true belief, (iii) the distinction between perceptual and inferential knowledge, and (iv) whether knowledge is possible in the first place (skepticism). Classical and contemporary readings will be assigned. This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement.
PHI 3400 Philosophy of Natural Science — Dr. Dorst
This course is a general introduction to the philosophy of science. We will focus on both classic and contemporary issues in the field, including questions such as: What is the difference between science and pseudoscience? How do we confirm scientific theories, and what justifies our confidence in their correctness? What is the nature of scientific explanation, and how does it work? What are laws of nature, and why does science seek to discover them? Should we interpret our scientific theories as literally true descriptions of reality, or merely as pragmatic tools meant to improve our capacities for predicting and controlling the world? And lastly, how do the personal values of individual scientists affect the objectivity of science?
PHI 3500 Metaphysics — Dr. Biro
We will be exploring some long-debated questions about the individuation and identity conditions of ordinary material objects: what makes one the object it is, distinct from others, and what makes it the same object over time. Our discussions will be based on recent writings on these topics, which will be made available in a course-pack.
PHI 3633 Bioethics — Dr. Gardner
Bioethics is the study of ethical issues involving the biological and medical sciences. It includes questions about how health care providers ought to treat their patients; how medical researchers ought to set up and carry out their studies; and how everyone ought to treat present and future generations of human and nonhuman life forms. This course will equip you with some of the concepts, skills, and information you will need in order to think critically about these and related questions.
PHI 3650 Moral Philosophy — Dr. Gardner
What do morally wrong actions have in common? What do right and wrong have to do with things that are good and bad? In this course we will explore normative ethics, the branch of philosophy that attempts to systematize and explain our moral judgments. The major theories we will consider include ethical egoism, utilitarianism, Kantianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. We will also briefly consider some problems in metaethics, the field that considers what morality really is and whether moral knowledge is possible; and applied ethics, the field that analyzes specific moral issues like climate change and our treatment of nonhuman animals. This course counts toward the Humanities (H) general education requirement.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — Dr. D. Grant
In this course, we will explore questions about how emerging technologies should be designed and regulated. What does it mean to say that an algorithm is “biased” against members of a particular social group? Should we be concerned about the fact that technology companies such as Facebook gather vast amounts of data about our online activities? What does it mean to say that a machine learning algorithm is a “black box,” and is there something unfair about using such algorithms to decide how to treat people? Should facial recognition technologies be banned? As we investigate these and other questions about emerging technologies, we will draw on concepts and readings from a variety of different fields, including ethics, computer science, economics, law, and public policy.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — Dr. Purves
This course exposes students to important interactions between ethics, economics, and public policy in assessing ethical implications of data driven technologies. Students will grapple with foundational concepts in ethics, data science, and policy-making. Discussion topics include fairness in artificial intelligence, responsibility for harms caused by big data systems, cost-benefit analysis, risk, markets and market failures, economic valuations of technology, and intellectual property rights. We will apply these concepts in assessing emerging technologies like autonomous cars and big data policing algorithms, among others.
PHI 3695 Philosophy and Death — Dr. Purves
Ancient philosopher Epicurus wrote, “Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us…since as long as we exist death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.”
Starting from the plausible claims that our death does not happen during our lives, and that we cease to exist when we die, Epicurus arrives at the unbelievable conclusion that death is “nothing” to us at all. Upon reflection, this startling conclusion is difficult to resist. After all, if death is not bad for us before it happens or after it happens, when could it be bad? This is just one of the puzzling questions we will confront in this class on philosophy and death. Others include:
- What exactly is death? Under what conditions to individuals die?
- What would it take to survive death? Is survival after death possible?
- If death is bad for the person who dies, should we prefer to be immortal? What would be good (or bad) about immortality?
- Can our understanding of death’s badness help to inform our explanation of the wrongness of killing?
- When, if ever, is it morally okay to kill a person? We will consider some controversies about killing, including abortion, euthanasia, and killing in war.
PHI 3930 Latin American Philosophy — Dr. Auxter
In this course, we examine philosophical themes and concepts of Latin American philosophy in context – including historical, geographical, cultural, religious, social, and political contexts. The goal is to evaluate contributions to philosophical debates about reality, knowledge, personal identity, sensibilities, consciousness, values, and commitment.
We will read and discuss works by philosophers who reject an assumption often made in the United States and other Western countries about Latin American philosophers. The assumption is that to enter into significant debate, they must devote their research and writing to commenting on philosophies originally found in European thought.
We will focus our attention on three philosophers in particular; however, we will also read selections from others who offer perspectives on important issues.
(1) Jose Carlos Mariategui writes Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) to show there is a different, and more authentic, way to understand reality within and through the world of the indigenous people of Peru. He shows how reality is constructed according to indigenous values and why the result is more powerful and more profound than Westerners have historically believed or admitted.
(2) Leopoldo Zea commits himself to liberating Latin America from European cultural influences. He argues that these influences merely promote an agenda of European domination of the Latin American continent.
Zea outlines the nature of “The Universalizing Influence of Western Culture” and exposes European efforts to gain hegemony over countries across the continent. We will read two articles that summarize his views: (a) In “The Actual Function of Philosophy in Latin America,” he recasts the mission of philosophy for a world no longer interested in either ignoring or distorting interpretations of reality that come from Latin America; (b) In “Identity: A Latin American Philosophical Problem,” he explores how identities are formed through race and culture and what this means for choices in life.
These philosophers, as well as others we will read, are ready for a radical break from the past. The past they reject is a past filled with a Eurocentric domination that is an effect of colonization – squeezing out independent choices and punishing every form of dissent. They are ready for authentic, pluralistic forms of development in the future – embracing the full range of different cultures in Latin America. They see diversity as a strength, not as a challenge for colonizers who aim to seize power and impose conformity.
Topics:
- What are the historical conditions that give rise to Latin American philosophy as a movement or school of thought?
- Who are the major thinkers receiving the attention of the literary world? Of the philosophical world?
- What are the main themes and approaches?
- How are themes developed in Latin American texts?
- How are Latin American values related to traditional European values?
- How are gender differences regarded in each type of view?
- How do Latin American philosophers connect issues about oppression with ideas of what freedom means?
- Do Latin American philosophies change as we examine them across national boundaries?
- In what ways do they change with time?
Texts:
- Jose Carlos Mariategui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality
- Gracia and Millan-Zaibert, editors, Latin American Philosophy for the 21st Century
Requirements: There will be a midterm essay test and two essays written in a final examination. The essays are take-home exams, with questions given to students at least ten days before essays are due. Each essay will count as one third of the grade.
PHI 3930 Philosophy & Literature — Dr. J. Rothschild
In this course we will think as philosophers about several kinds of productive encounter between philosophy and literature. Our list of readings includes: literary works by philosophers, some of which are designed to be pieces of philosophy in their own right and some which are not; secondary philosophical readings of literature, paired with their sources; papers which use literature as an example for doing philosophy; stories and arguments which are mutually illuminating if read side-by-side, even without explicitly engaging one another; and literature thick with philosophical content. No prior course in philosophy required. Texts by Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Murdoch, Nussbaum, Poe, Melville, Conrad, and others.
PHM 3127 Race and Philosophy — Dr. Pismenny
The goal of this course is to help students gain a thorough understanding of the issues
raised by races and racism. Such understanding can only be gained by taking an interdisciplinary approach. We will draw on biology, history, philosophy, and psychology to investigate issues of race and racism. In particular, we will examine the following questions: Does genetics show that races are real? Where does the concept of race come from? How has it influenced the sciences? What are races? What is racism? Should we be color-blind? How does race contribute to one’s identity? What does race have to do with power? What are racial prejudices? What is racial justice?
4000 Level Courses
PHH 4420 History of Philosophy of Religion — Dr. Duncan
In this class, we will look at the widely varying approaches to religion taken by three prominent seventeenth-century philosophers: Hobbes, Malebranche, and Spinoza. While considering the work of the three philosophers, we will ask a range of questions in the philosophy of religion. Are there any good arguments for the existence of God? What should we think about reports of miracles and visions? If an eternal being exists, what is it like? What views about eternal beings count as theistic, and what as atheistic? If God exists, what is the metaphysical relationship between God and human beings? Is there a special relationship between religious knowledge and happiness or virtue? How should religion relate to politics and the structure of the state? In thinking about these questions, we will first aim to understand the three philosophers’ view and arguments. This project may well also help us as we think about the same questions today.
PHI 4320 Philosophy of Mind — Dr. Biro
There are things that do not think or have sensations, and there are things that do both. What makes some things of the first kind and others of the second? How, in things of the second sort, are thoughts and sensations related to their physical properties, the kind of property they share with non-thinking and non-feeling things? We will begin by looking at some historical writings on these questions but will spend most of the semester exploring recent attempts to grapple with them.
PHI 4930 Philosophy of Sex and Gender — Dr. Pismenny
This course will examine questions about sex, gender, and sexual orientation. We will address questions about sexual dimorphism (or polymorphism) at the biological level (female, male, hermaphrodite) and at the cultural level (feminine, masculine, trans gender, intersex, etc.), and the complicated relationships between the two. Throughout this process we will attempt to flesh out the issues with definitions of each of these categories, and attempt to zoom in on the kinds of definitions needed for different kinds of inquiry, i.e., metaphysical, scientific, moral, and political. While laying out the foundation for understanding these categories, we will also look at social and political issues pertaining to them.
PHP 4784 Analytic Philosophy — Dr. Witmer
Much of contemporary philosophy owes its general approach, its stylistic habits, and its central concerns to a legacy of work from the first half of the twentieth century, a history that is now thought of as the history of analytic philosophy. One way to see the importance of this legacy is to note that many contemporary philosophers continue to call their own work “analytic philosophy,” despite the fact that many of the claims advanced and defended in that period (including the claim that the job of philosophers is to analyze concepts) are very far from a consensus now. This course examines that history with special attention to the philosophy of language, epistemology, and meta-philosophy so as to appreciate how the stage was set for the contemporary scene.
Readings are drawn from the early American pragmatists, the foundational work of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein, the logical positivist movement, critical reactions to that movement, and more recent work reflecting on where things currently stand. Requirements include ungraded writing exercises, unannounced short tests, two short papers (around 500 words) and one longer paper (around 2000 words).