The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Fall 2023 were submitted by the course instructors (with the exception of bracketed descriptions “{ }” which are from the course catalog). Specific information regarding the dates, times, and locations of these courses may be found in the Registrar’s official Schedule of Courses for Fall 2023.
1000-Level Courses
PHI 1322 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 happiness and well-being and how they may be achieved, and 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 Quest 1 course addresses the question that we cannot help but ask ourselves, “How should I live?” Drawing primarily on the disciplines of Philosophy and Classics, in conjunction with close analysis of works of literature, drama, and film, this course will expose students to both historical and contemporary perspectives on well-being and happiness. The readings have been selected to represent a number of distinct perspectives, both philosophical and non-philosophical, and to help students think for themselves about the kind of lives they want to live. Students will be encouraged to find in historical texts material relevant to their own lives, not despite, but because of the fundamentally different assumptions and commitments that animate views which are thousands of years old.
PHI 1643 Cultural Animals (Quest) — J. Rick
Humans are cultural animals. On the one hand, we are biologically evolved animals – members of nature’s kingdom, bound by its universal laws or 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 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 both within the human community and beyond the human community – specifically with respect to our interactions with and treatment of nonhuman animals.
2000-Level Courses
IDS 2935 Philosophy, and Society (Quest) — D. Grant
This course explores the question of how artificial intelligence is changing society and how we, as citizens, should respond. The course examines the present and future impacts of AI on various aspects of society, including employment, healthcare, communications, transportation, and dating. The course provides Quest 1 and General Education Humanities credit and emphasizes multidisciplinary exploration, experiential learning, and self-reflection.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — A. 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. (H) (WR 4000)
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy (UF Online) — A. 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. (H) (4000)
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — A. Ross
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 recent global events.
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 know that what we see—or read—is true? Do we have core social values? Is free speech valuable for its own sake or can its value be outweighed by other considerations? 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 questions like these, but studying philosophy can help us understand why we shouldn’t expect quick and easy answers to such questions. Philosophy helps us see that our world is more complex, nuanced, and uncertain than it may first appear. In this way, it also helps us 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—or a society—forward.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — B. Beddor
Philosophy explores fundamental questions about the nature of the world and our place within it. This course provides an overview of some of the major questions in philosophy. Potential topics include: Can we know with certainty whether anything exists outside of our own minds? What evidence (if any) is there for or against the existence of God? If it turns out that all of our actions are causally determined by events outside of our control, would that deprive us of free will? What makes an action morally right or wrong? This course will not presuppose any previous familiarity with philosophy. Readings will be drawn from both historical and contemporary sources. Throughout the course, emphasis will be placed on class discussion and the development of philosophical writing abilities. (H) (4000)
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — C. Dorst
This course is a general introduction to philosophical questions, methods, discussion, reading, and writing. It presumes no background in philosophy. We will be surveying various philosophical topics in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Some examples of questions we will be addressing are: What evidence is there for or against the existence of God? How can we be sure that there is an external world? Is the mind distinct from the brain? What is the self? Do we have free will? What makes an action morally right or wrong? What distribution of social goods is demanded by justice? Throughout the course, there will be a heavy emphasis on learning to discuss and write about philosophical issues, so class discussion will be an important component.
This course is a Humanities (H) subject area course in the UF General Education Program. (W 4000)
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — 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 (4000 words).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — M. Davis
{Variable topics introduction to philosophy through study of traditional questions about the existence of God, the nature of the mind, the definition of good, freedom of the will, and criteria of truth and knowledge.} (H) (WR)
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — R. Borges
The objective of this course is to introduce students to the main topics of Western Philosophy. We will do this by presenting students with classical readings touching on some of the core questions in this tradition. A further goal is to introduce students to the methods and tools used in this literature. In particular, students will learn how to present and evaluate philosophical and non–philosophical arguments.
PHI 2100 Logic — J. Gillespie
Introductory-level survey of different methods of formal and informal analysis of the logical structure of propositions and arguments. Topics include argument identification and reconstruction, informal logic and fallacies, propositional logic, proofs and natural deductions, inductive and abductive reasoning, and the application of these concepts to philosophical arguments.
PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues — M. Gardner
The goal of this course is to equip you with the philosophical methodology and the information you will need in order to make informed decisions about moral issues. We will begin with some of the basics of analytical reasoning and some of the fundamental concepts in ethical theory. We will then critically examine a variety of issues including punishment and the death penalty, poverty, business ethics, consumer ethics, and animal ethics. This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) Requirement (4000 words).
PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues — J. 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).
3000-Level Courses
PHH 3100 Ancient 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 — J. Biro
The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the central doctrines of the most important philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will read and discuss works (or parts thereof) by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
PHI 3130 Symbolic Logic — G. Ray
The course is designed to provide the student with a basic working knowledge of first-order logic and semantics, and familiarize him or her with some basic metalogical results. We will cover basic topics in elementary logic including: propositional, quantificational, identity, free, and modal logics, formal semantics, soundness and completeness. We will also formulate the philosophical underpinnings of our subject with special care.
PHI 3300 Theory of Knowledge — R. Borges
Studies the central topics and concepts of the theory of knowledge, including the analysis of the concepts of knowledge, truth, justification and related concepts, the nature of empirical knowledge, the problem of skepticism, the nature of a priori knowledge, and the structure of the justification of our beliefs.
PHI 3500 Metaphysics — J. 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 papers on these topics which will be made available in a course-pack.
PHI 3633 Bioethics — M. 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 — J. Rothschild
This course is an introduction to some of the foundational issues and influential theories in Western moral philosophy. We will concentrate most of our efforts on a few ethical theories: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and Aristotle’s virtue ethics. The main goal of our engagement with these few is to understand what resources the theories have to help us describe and assess what is good in human motivations, actions, activities, and even complete human beings and human lives. We will also attend to some of the framing issues of moral theory, such as the potential for objectivity of some sort in moral thinking, the extent to which moral theory is relevant to everyday living, and the potential for things beyond our control to limit our possibilities for doing and being good.
PHI 3650 Moral Philosophy — J. Ahlberg
In this course we will read some of the influential theories, classical texts, and contemporary reflections in the field of moral philosophy. Our exploration will primarily focus on the questions of normative ethics, such as: What fundamental principles, if any, should govern our ethical decisions? What constitutes a good life, or makes a human being good? What kinds of human relationships are worth having or striving for? But we will also briefly address some questions regarding the relationship between moral theory and lived human experience. The bulk of the requirements for the course will include take-home essays, and in addition students will be asked to complete several short writing assignments throughout the semester.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — D. Purves
This course exposes students to important interactions between ethics, contemporary data science, and emerging social issues. Students will grapple with foundational concepts in ethics and data science. The course begins with a brief introduction to ethical issues in data science. The course then pairs theoretical discussions of ethics with concrete issues in emerging technologies. Discussion topics include racial bias in machine learning, the black box problem for machine learning, mass surveillance and privacy, technological unemployment, and moral responsibility for autonomous weapons systems.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — 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? As we investigate these and other questions about emerging technologies, we will draw on concepts and readings from a variety of different fields, including philosophy, economics, computer science, data science, and law.
PHI 3695 Philosophy and Death — J. Gillespie
Death is simultaneously familiar and foreign to us; it is something we all know occurs, but––at the same time––it is something we hardly understand. In addition to this pair of attitudes, death is something we seem to care and think about quite a lot: we fear death, we try to understand death, and we wonder whether death is the end. Given our complicated stance towards it, death is ripe for philosophizing, and in this course, we are dedicated to acknowledging, clarifying, and addressing the puzzling family of questions concerning death. In particular, we will confront the following questions concerning philosophy and death:
- What exactly is death? How do we know when something dies?
- What would it mean to survive after death?
- Is there an afterlife?
- Should we worry about death?
- Is death bad? If so, in what way? If not, why is it not?
- Is it better to have been born or to have never been born?
- Why is killing wrong?
- When, if ever, is it morally okay to kill a living thing? Is it worse to kill a human than a non-human animal?
PHI 3930 Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics — C. Dorst
Quantum mechanics provides us with a spectacularly successful recipe for making predictions about the outcomes of a wide variety of physical experiments. While the intricacies of this recipe are well understood, the implications of its success for the nature of physical reality are not. What must the world be like such that the quantum recipe generates such accurate and reliable predictions of it? To answer this question is to provide an “interpretation” of quantum mechanics, and it will be our central concern in this course. We will begin by examining the basics of quantum mechanics, with an emphasis on its general structure as opposed to the mathematical details. Then we will explore its possible ontological implications, examining interpretations such as spontaneous collapse theories, the Many Worlds Interpretation, and Bohmian Mechanics. No prior background in physics is required, though students should be willing to engage with some formalism.
PHI 3930 Hannah Arendt — J. Rothschild
In this course we will study the cultural critic, philosopher, political theorist, and sometimes historian Hannah Arendt. Arendt is a complicated thinker, but we will do our best to trace her most important themes through a few of her essays and several of her major books. Such themes include, among others: what it means to be a human being capable of good thought, speech, and action in the world; the place of human beings in the political and social; how we should understand the darkness that comes when human moral and political activity is undermined, slowed, or in some other way fails; and what we can learn by mining tradition for historical and philosophical lessons worth considering again in our contemporary political moment about authority, freedom, revolution, totalitarianism, racism, hope, labor, activity, fanaticism, lies, equality, and much more.
PHM 3123 Feminist Philosophy — A. Pismenny
This course will explore some of the influential theories and texts in the field of Feminist Philosophy. Feminist Philosophy encompasses a broad range of inquiry, from familiar political issues to foundational metaphysical and epistemological problems (e.g. what is a woman, and does one’s sex and/or gender provide special access to certain kinds of knowledge?). Our exploration will primarily focus on contemporary engagement with four central questions: What is sexism? What is gender? What is sexual orientation? What does liberation involve?
This course counts towards the Humanities (H) General Education Requirement and the Diversity (D) General Education Requirement. A minimum grade of C is required for credit toward the Philosophy major or minor and for general education credit.
4000-Level Courses
PHI 4220 Philosophy of Language — B. Beddor
Language plays an integral part in our daily lives. But it raises all sorts of puzzling philosophical questions. We’ll consider topics such as:
- The Nature of Meaning. Humans have a remarkable ability to invest noises and written marks with meaning. How is this possible? What makes a particular word – say, my use of the word “cats” – mean what it does (namely, cats), rather than something else (e.g., dogs), or, for that matter, nothing at all?
- The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction. Sometimes we mean something without directly saying it (e.g. sarcasm). What is the relationship between what is said and what is meant but not said?
- Language, Verification and Truth. Are all meaningful sentences verifiable? Are they all true or false? If so, how should we analyze moral sentences (e.g., ‘Murder is wrong’) and judgments of taste (e.g., ‘escargot is delicious’)?
- Language Acquisition. At any early age, humans acquire the ability to produce and understand a potentially infinite variety of new sentences – that is, sentences they’ve never previously encountered. How is this possible? What’s the best explanation for this extraordinary ability?
Readings will primarily be drawn from philosophy, but we will also explore connections with linguistics and psychology when relevant.
PHI 4320 Philosophy of Mind — L. Grant
Psychology and cognitive science are concerned primarily with how the mind operates. Philosophy of Mind, in contrast, is concerned primarily with what the mind is. This course introduces students to some of the central, classic problems in the philosophy of mind, focusing on issues concerning the relationship between the mental and the physical, and the nature of consciousness. We will ask questions like: Could there be minds without brains? What does it take to have a mind? Can science fully explain how it feels to have experiences, like being hungry or seeing red?
The main aim of this course is to have you think about these and related questions in a philosophically rigorous way. This means formulating arguments, articulating opposing views, and above all, thinking critically.
Though this course will serve as an introduction to these issues, it is nonetheless only suitable for advanced undergraduates with a few philosophy courses under their belt; this is conceptually very difficult material. However, with effort, this course should also be deeply rewarding, and equip you with many new conceptual tools that will be valuable in any area of philosophy.
PHI 4930 Skepticism — R. Borges
We will take a critical look at several arguments for skepticism and the philosophical principles behind them.
PHP 4784 Analytic Philosophy — G. Witmer
Much of contemporary philosophy owes its general approach, its stylistic habits, and its central concerns to a legacy of philosophical work from the first half of the twentieth century stemming from a number of revolutionary movements aimed at putting the discipline on a secure footing. 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, famously, 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 shorter papers (around 1000 words) and one longer paper (around 2000 words).