Instructors' Course Descriptions for Fall 2024

The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Fall 2024 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 2024.

1000-Level Courses

PHI 1001 Conflict of Ideas — R. Borges

{Examination of conflict in the realm of ideas, including both factors (psychological, social, logical) that make conflicts difficult and methods that may help us engage in them in a principled an effective way. Readings are drawn from multiple disciplines, which may include philosophy, history, linguistics, sociology, and cognitive science.}

PHI 1322 The Idea of Happiness — N. Rothschild

{Examination of the concept of happiness as explored in philosophy, literature, art, and other products of human culture. Readings drawn from both historical and contemporary sources are used both to articulate theories of happiness and to help students think about what kinds of lives they want to live.}

PHI 1643 Cultural Animals — 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

PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — B. Beddor

{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.}

PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — R. Borges

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 — N. Rothschild

PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — A. Ross

PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — J. Wetzel

This course is a general introduction to some of the major questions and methods of the discipline of philosophy. It presumes no background in the discipline. We will be surveying several of the more significant topics in the subfields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Some examples of questions we will be addressing are: What evidence is there for or against the existence of God? How can we be certain that what we take to be the external world actually exists and is at all like what we believe it to be? What can we be said to know and how can we be certain that we actually know it? Is the mind distinct from the brain? What is the self? Do we have free will? What makes an action morally permissible or impermissible? Throughout the course, there will be a heavy emphasis on learning to discuss and write about philosophical issues, so in-class discussion will be an important component, both of student learning and of the grade. Given the centrality of discussion, reading, and writing to the discipline of philosophy in general and this course in particular, a certain amount of class time will be dedicated to learning how to both read and write philosophical works effectively.

Introduction to Philosophy is a Humanities subject area course within the UF General Education Program and also a UF Writing Requirement (WR4) course. A minimum grade of “C” is required for credit toward the Philosophy major or minor, as well as for general education credit.

PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues — A. Pismenny

This course serves as an introduction to philosophical thinking about contemporary moral topics. In addition to briefly exploring frameworks for ethical thinking, we will tackle the following topics: abortion, ethics of technology, and ethics of intimate relationships: sexual, romantic, and friendship. Students should expect several short writing assignments as well as some longer writing assignments in fulfillment of the Gordon Rule requirement (4000 words).

3000-Level Courses

PHH 3100 Ancient Greek Philosophy — TBA

{Sustained study of Plato and Aristotle with some consideration of pre-Socratic antecedents and Hellenistic successors. (H) (WR)}

PHH 3400 Modern Philosophy — TBA

{Surveys the work of major philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries, from Descartes to Kant, in the primary texts.}

PHH 3610 Happiness and Well-Being — N. Rothschild

{Examines major philosophical theories of human happiness and well-being from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Topics may include self-interest, pleasure, subjective vs. objective conceptions of happiness, autonomy and the relation between morality and happiness.}

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.

The learning goals for PHI 3130 are broadly spelled out in the relevant section of the Undergraduate Catalog <catalog.ufl.edu/ugrad/current/liberalarts/alc/philosophy.aspx>.

More broadly, in terms of its general educational import: logic — a study and a practice that grew out of ancient philosophy — isolates and systematizes an essential methodology at work in all theoretical disciplines, including philosophy itself, and uncovers a central core of what it is to reason well. The skills of analysis and deduction learned in this course are fundamental to all science and systematic human endeavors generally, and to any pursuit which involves reasoning in any substantial way

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 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 — A. Pismenny

This course provides an introduction to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. It may include some of the following questions: 1. Where does morality come from? 2. What do we do when we make a moral judgment? 3. What should morality be like? 4. What does morality do for us? 5. Why should we be moral? In attempting to answer these questions, we will examine and scrutinize various views, theories, and arguments. For instance, we will look at the popular view of Cultural Relativism (“What’s right is whatever my culture says is right”), examine the role of religion in morality (e.g., “What’s right is just what God says is right”), and, most importantly, attempt to understand the role of reason in morality with views like Social Contract Theory, Kantian Ethics, Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, as well as Feminist Ethics and Ethics of Care. We will work with historical as well as contemporary texts and look at the ways in which they do and do not provide systematic procedures for answering questions about right and wrong. In addition, we will discuss a variety of specific moral issues to flesh out some of the issue pertaining to these theories.

PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — M. Gardner

In this course we will use philosophical methodology to understand various ethical issues at the intersection of technology studies and data science. Some of those issues include the reliance on artificial intelligence to make policing and sentencing decisions in the criminal justice system; mass surveillance and privacy; technological unemployment; and the use of autonomous weapons in war.

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, pairing theoretical discussions of ethics with concrete issues in emerging data-driven technologies. Discussion topics include racial bias in machine learning, the black box problem for machine learning, mass surveillance and privacy, technological unemployment, and autonomous weapons systems.

PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — A. Ross

{Addresses ethical issues related to data science, algorithmic decision-making, and artificial intelligence. Pairs theoretical discussions of ethics, economics, and policy-making with concrete issues in emerging technologies.}

PHI 3695 Philosophy and Death — D. Purves

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. – Epicurus

Starting from the plausible claims that our death does not happen during our lives, and that we cease to exist when we die, Epicurus reaches the unbelievable conclusion that death is something we should not care about. Upon reflection, the reasoning is hard 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?
What is wrong with killing?
When, if ever, is it morally okay to kill a human being? Why is it worse to kill a human being than an animal, and what general lesson can that us about the badness of killing?
We will also consider some controversies about killing, including abortion, euthanasia, the death penalty, and killing in war.

PHI 3700 Philosophy of Religion — G. Witmer

The philosophy of religion can range over many different areas, including issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Instead of a broad survey, however, in this course we focus on what is arguably the most fundamental question in this area, namely, whether or not God exists. The course is structured around a fictional dialogue between a theist, an atheist, and an agnostic as well as supplementary papers (from a coursepack) that expand on parts of the dialogue. Topics include the relationship between God, value and morality; arguments from design (teleological arguments), including both classical biological and more contemporary “fine-tuning” arguments; cosmological or “first cause” arguments; the infamous ontological argument (which aims to show just from the definition of God that he must exist); the significance of religious experience and claims about miracles; the problem of evil as a reason to be an atheist; the idea that we might ”bet” on God’s existence as per Pascal’s Wager; and the nature of faith. By the end of the course you should have a substantial understanding of the most important lines of argument concerning the existence of God.

Requirements include two argumentative papers, unannounced short tests scattered throughout the semester, and regular writing exercises. There is no mid-term or final exam.

There are two required texts. The first is The God Dialogues by Torin Alter and Robert J. Howell (Oxford University Press, 2011) which will be available at the UF bookstore. The second is a customized coursepack edited by myself and published by Cognella; both print and electronic versions are available, and you will be able to order those through the course’s Canvas site.

PHM 3202 Political Philosophy — J. Rick

In this course, we will examine several of the most enduring and influential texts in the history of Western Political, Social, and Economic Thought: works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. We will also examine contemporary applications of these historical ideas in the work of Carol Pateman and Charles Mills. By focusing on the relationships between rulers and the ruled, between legislation and law abidingness, and between competing and cooperating individuals, our close and critical readings of the arguments made in these historical classics will help us to reflect on topics such as the following: the nature and origin of law, the basis of political authority and legitimacy, the fixity or flexibility of human nature, the nature of economic relations and interpersonal relationships, and the dynamics of social power.

4000-Level Courses

PHI 4220 Philosophy of Language — B. Beddor

{Variable topics study the major topics and concepts of the philosophy of language, including truth and meaning, speech act theory, reference and descriptions, names and demonstratives, propositional attitudes and indirect discourse, the nature of language and metaphor.}

PHI 4542 Philosophy of Space and Time — C. Dorst

This course will be an exploration of some philosophical questions about the nature of space and time informed by contemporary physics. We’ll start by surveying some of the main positions in debates about the metaphysics of time, namely presentism, the growing block, and eternalism. We’ll then try to evaluate to what extent this philosophical debate, and others, can be answered by physics. Some of the main questions we will consider include: (1) What does relativity suggest about the nature of space and time? (2) What makes time different than space? (3) Is time travel metaphysically possible? Is it physically possible? (4) Does statistical mechanics account for the manifest direction of time? No prior background in physics will be presupposed, but students should be willing to learn about the basic conceptual structure of theories like relativity and statistical mechanics as part of the course content.

PHI 4930 Ethics of Identity — A. Pismenny

This course will explore various ethical issues pertaining to our social identities. After examining several accounts of social and political constructionism, we will think about the following questions among others: (1) if gender and race are inherently about domination and subordination, should they be eliminated for the sake of a more egalitarian world? (2) who if anyone should be compensated by reparations for the wrongs of the past?, (3) what if anything is problematic about the ‘person first’ approach when it comes to disability?, (4) what kind of duties do allies have that stem from their allyship?

PHI 4930 Truth — G. Ray

In this course we will explore several strands of the philosophical discourse on truth. What is truth and why does it matter? What philosophical problems concern truth, and what do philosophers say about them?

The notion of truth is thought to be a central semantic aspect of language — a fundamental feature of how language relates to the world we wish to speak of. Yet, there are various challenges to spelling out just what truth comes to.

Things people say, believe and think, sentences on a chalk board, are all sorts of things that are spoken of as true/false. From the very very specific to the most abstract of these can be thought of in terms of truth and falsity. Our reliance on a notion of truth could not be more prevalent or basic.

Yet, there are well-known paradoxes associated with the notion of truth that suggest that we do not well-understand this concept.

In addition, some very common ways we use language present challenges to any account of truth. For example, much of our talk about the world is more or less vague and while this seems perfectly acceptable practice, it is hard to say why some vagaries would be true and others false — without paradox. Much of our talk is also more or less metaphoric and this too creates questions about the role of truth/falsity in language and thought. We even make true/false distinctions when talking about the purely fictional persons and situations presented to us in books and movies and games. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to give a systematic grounding for the distinction we are making.

Philosophy