Instructors' Course Descriptions for Fall 2025

Instructors’ Course Descriptions for Fall 2025

The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Fall 2025 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 2025.

1000-Level Courses

PHI1322 The Idea of Happiness (Quest) — N. Rothschild

Every person wants to live well. What is it, though, to live well? What sorts of things make our lives good? These, and related questions were fundamental to philosophy at its inception. Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life is not worth living, thereby calling attention to the need to think seriously about fundamental matters of value in order to live a genuinely worthwhile life. Nor has there ever been a time when philosophy, art, literature, history—or any other form of human culture—has not been guided by the question of how we ought to live in order to attain genuine happiness.

This Quest 1 course addresses that question which 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. Many texts will be historical, and students will be encouraged to find in these texts material relevant to their own lives, not despite, but because of the fundamentally different assumptions and commitments that animate views which are up to thousands of years old.

PHI1XXX AI, Philosophy, and Society (Quest) — D. Grant

Note: This course currently appears on the schedule as PHI3930 special topics.
It is currently awaiting an official course number (we expect this very soon)
at which point it will appear on the schedule as a 1000-level course and
become open for registration. The course offers both Quest 1 credit and credit
for General Education humanities.

In the past few years, the capabilities of AI-based systems have grown explosively due to the development of a new technology, large language models. These systems, known informally as “chatbots,” are trained on a significant portion of the text and images that humanity has collectively produced over centuries. As a result, they have developed the ability to perform tasks that we normally associate with human-level intelligence, such as writing essays, writing computer programs, and passing graduate-level exams. In this course, we will explore the philosophical and social implications of this powerful new technology. Are chatbots intelligent in the same sense that we are intelligent? Will they take jobs previously held by highly skilled human workers, such as lawyers, doctors, and software engineers? Could we fall in love with chatbots, and could they fall in love with us? Why are so many of the experts developing chatbots concerned that they might destroy humanity? What can we do to stop them from destroying humanity? Will we one day be able to “upload” our minds to computer servers, in effect becoming chatbots ourselves? As we explore these questions, we will engage with research from several academic disciplines, including computer science, psychology, philosophy, and economics. Assignments will focus on original research into existing AI-based technologies as well as critical reflection on how we want AI to shape society going forward.

2000-Level Courses

PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy — B. Beddor

Does God exist? How do you know you are not dreaming right now? What makes you the same person you were five minutes ago? Do we have free will? 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 the ability to analyze complex arguments and evaluate them critically. Readings will include both historical and contemporary texts.

This course is a State Core General Education Humanities (GenEd-H) course in which students are able to earn 6000 words of Writing Requirement credit (WR-6).

PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy — C. Goldhaber

This course introduces some of the fundamental questions of both historical and contemporary philosophy: Do we have free will? Is moral responsibility possible in a deterministic universe? What is virtue, and can it be taught? Are violent feelings, such as anger, ever appropriate? What is knowledge? Can we be certain of anything? By canvasing the breadth of answers philosophers have given to these questions, you will become familiar with common argument forms and learn to construct and defend your own positions on a variety of philosophical issues. The course will also help you develop tools for thinking about what it means to live a happy, significant, and meaningful life.

PHI2010 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.

PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy (online) — J. Simpson and M. Davis

{In this course, students will be introduced to the nature of philosophy, philosophical thinking, and major intellectual movements in the history of philosophy, including topics from the western philosophical tradition, and various problems in philosophy. Students will strengthen their intellectual skills, become more effective learners, and develop broad foundational knowledge.}

PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy — J. Rick

If you’re reading this, you might be doing so because you’re looking for the answer to some questions. That’s good! Asking questions is a very philosophical thing to do! Now, maybe one of your questions is the following: What is this Introduction to Philosophy course going to be about? Well, you know how sometimes people answer a question with a question? Here’s an answer to your question with a series of five questions – ones that we’ll be exploring in this course by way of introducing ourselves to some of philosophy’s urgent and enduring inquiries: Should I believe in God? Should I believe in anything? How should I live? How should we live? The first two questions explore perennial topics in the philosophical subfields of metaphysics and epistemology, while the latter two questions explore perennial topics in the philosophical subfields of ethics and political theory. These four questions will be our touchstones in this course, as we examine both classical and contemporary philosophical texts, but boundless others will surely emerge. This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement.

PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy — M. Robitzsch

This course introduces students to the discipline of philosophy. After an initial discussion of what philosophy is, the course will turn to methods and techniques that are essential for understanding philosophical ideas. The main part of the course will then introduce students to different subdisciplines of philosophy by dealing with select questions philosophers have grappled with. Examples include the following: What is morally right and wrong? How should we live our lives? (Ethics) How do we know that the external world exists? What is knowledge? (Epistemology) Does God exist? What makes it true that a person at one time is identical to a person at another time? (Metaphysics).

PHI2100 Logic — R. Borges

This introductory course in formal logic develops students’ abilities to analyze, evaluate, and construct arguments through systematic study of logical systems. Satisfying the university’s discrete mathematics requirement, the course balances rigorous formal analysis with practical applications.

The course begins with sentence logic (propositional calculus), covering its syntax (formation rules and well-formed formulas), semantics (truth tables and truth-functional analysis), and derivation systems (natural deduction and proof strategies). Students will master translation between natural language and symbolic notation while developing proficiency in formal proof techniques.

Building on this foundation, we introduce predicate logic (first-order logic), focusing on its expanded syntax (quantifiers, variables, and predicates), semantics (interpretations and models), and basic derivation methods. This extension allows for more sophisticated analysis of arguments involving properties, relations, and generalized claims.

The course also explores inductive reasoning, with special attention to probabilistic reasoning and Bayes’ Theorem. Students will learn to apply these principles to assess degrees of confirmation and make rational judgments under uncertainty.

Throughout the semester, we examine informal argumentation, identifying common fallacies and analyzing persuasive techniques. Students will develop critical thinking skills applicable to real-world contexts, including:

Legal reasoning (with applications relevant to the LSAT)
Programming logic and algorithm design
Scientific reasoning and hypothesis evaluation
Analysis of arguments in public discourse

Coursework includes formal proofs, translations between symbolic and natural language, analysis of real-world arguments, and application exercises demonstrating the relevance of logical concepts across disciplines.

By the end of the course, students will be proficient in fundamental logical concepts and techniques while understanding their broader applications. This combination of formal rigor and practical relevance makes the course valuable for students pursuing diverse academic and professional paths.

3000-Level Courses

PHH3100 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, 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).

PHH3400 Modern Philosophy — C. Goldhaber

The early modern era was an exciting time in the history of European thought. Sudden developments in the natural sciences overturned ancient theories of nature and our place in it, calling for radically new approaches. The intellectual atmosphere was full of optimism about rejecting authority and prejudice, and about thinking through things for oneself. Carried by this enthusiasm, philosophers developed novel and competing theories about the nature of mind, matter, morals, and much more. They did so in systematic ways, helping to reveal important links between philosophy’s many topics.

This course introduces you to the history of early modern European philosophy, focusing especially, though not exclusively, on four philosophers from that era: René Descartes, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. The selection of readings balances exposure to the traditional philosophical canon with a new narratives approach, highlighting underrepresented women philosophers and topics in social and practical philosophy. Through interpretation of historical texts, you will develop your writing and argumentative skills, as well as form and defend views on central philosophical topics.

PHI3130 Symbolic Logic — G. Ray

This course is designed to provide the student with a basic working knowledge of first-order logic and semantics, develop a comprehensive skill in systematically proving results, and familiarize the student with some basic metalogical theorems. We will cover basic topics in elementary logic including: propositional, quantificational, and modal logics, formal semantics, soundness and completeness. We will also formulate the philosophical underpinnings of our subject with special care.

More broadly, in terms of its general educational import: logic — a study and a practice that grew out of early philosophy — isolates and systematizes an essential methodology at work in all theoretical disciplines, including philosophy itself, and uncovers the 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.

PHI3300 Theory of Knowledge — B. Beddor

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. Epistemologists want to know what knowledge is, how we acquire it, and how we should respond to arguments for philosophical skepticism, according to which there is very little that we know. We’ll read major attempts to engage with these issues. Along the way, we’ll also discuss related topics having to do with justification, rationality, and the reliability of human reason.

PHI3300 Theory of Knowledge — J. Simpson

{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.}

PHI3650 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?

In exploring these questions, this course will expose students to the terminology, concepts, methodologies and theories used within philosophical ethics. Assignments will emphasize the communication of knowledge, ideas, and reasoning clearly and effectively in written and oral forms appropriate to the discipline. Throughout the course students will analyze information carefully and logically from multiple perspectives, using discipline specific methods, and develop reasoned solutions to problems.

PHI 3650 is required of all Philosophy majors and meets an area requirement for the Philosophy minor. A minimum grade of C is required for credit toward the Philosophy major or minor.

PHI3650 Moral Philosophy — M. 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 study some problems in metaethics, the field that considers what morality really is and whether moral knowledge is possible; and applied ethics, the field that considers specific moral issues.

This course satisfies one of the area distribution requirements for either the philosophy major or the philosophy minor, and it counts toward the Humanities (H) general education requirement.

PHI3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — C. Buckner

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 bias in machine learning, the black box problem for machine learning and interpretability methods designed to confront it, machine learning and privacy, concerns about the reproducibility of machine learning research methods, human work assisted or replaced by AI, copyright and computational creativity in generative AI, principles and strategies for AI regulation and policy, and moral responsibility for autonomous artificial agents.

PHI3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — D. Grant

In this course, we will explore questions about how emerging technologies should be designed and regulated. Should we be concerned about the fact that technology companies 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.

PHI3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — A. Ross

This course will explore philosophical issues surrounding the development and deployment of emerging technologies, focusing especially on technological advances based on “deep learning” techniques in computer science. The primary focus will be on ethical and explanatory questions surrounding the use of these systems, which in just a few years have come to have pervasive effects in our daily lives despite the fact that our understanding of their philosophical implications remaining rudimentary. Questions we will explore are: in what senses are these systems biased, and when is their bias ethically problematic? Can we explain the workings of these vastly complex systems—containing billions of parameters and trained on Internet-scale datasets—in a way that answers to our existing scientific, legal, and ethical practices? Who is responsible when these systems err? And finally: how can humanity adjust to the radical changes these systems are bringing to our social, political, and economic lives without losing our fundamental humanity, and can these systems be designed in a way to align with human values, as opposed to adhering only to alien, machine objectives?

PHI3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology (online) — T. Sturm

[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.]

PHI3930 Topics in Moral Psychology — L. Grant

Moral psychology explores the intersection of moral philosophy and human psychology, examining how our mental states, emotions, and patterns of reasoning shape moral judgment and action. This course focuses on philosophical questions about agency, responsibility, and moral motivation. What makes someone morally responsible for their actions? Can a person be excused for acting out of moral ignorance? Should we defer to those who seem to know better about what’s right? Is it enough to do the right thing, or must we act for the right reasons? And how should we act when we’re uncertain about what morality demands?

4000-Level Courses

PHI4220 Philosophy of Language — G. Ray

Philosophy of language is concerned to examine our concept of language and closely associated notions, including meaning, truth, reference, and representation. The tradition has concerned itself with the relations between language and thought, between language and the world, and the role of language in the conduct of reason. In this course we will carefully examine a generous selection of philosophical essays which have had a profound effect on this area of philosophy. By studying these essays we learn fundamental distinctions which enable us to understand the nature of language and our use of it better. As well, these authors propose various theories about how language functions, how names and predicates and descriptions, for example, contribute to the meanings of sentences, and how these linguistic items come to mean what they do. We will endeavor to understand these proposals and, sometimes, make a preliminary assessment of their merits.

What makes the words I use mean what they do? What is it I know when I understand a language and how could I have come to know it? What is the relation between what I mean when I use a sentence and what the sentence means? What is meaning, anyway? There is a potential infinity of sentences any one of which I might encounter at a given moment and which I could understand without having ever seen it before. How is that even possible? This is a capacity we have that distinguishes us from most if not all other animals on Earth.

As is usual with questions of interest to philosophers, our first-thought answers to these questions run into thorny problems. Other questions in this neighborhood just don’t have obvious-seeming answers at all. What makes some sentences true or false; some sort of relationship between sentences and the things in the world which are the subjects of those sentences, yes, but what relationship? We use language in an incredible variety of ways. How can we systematically conceptualize this dizzying variety? Often when we speak we express ourselves very vaguely. Is this just laziness on our part, is it undesirable, or is there some important role for vagueness, even in, e.g., careful scientific practice? Could we even eliminate vagueness from our forms of expression if we wanted to?

If you are quite unfamiliar with work in philosophy of language, it is important to be clear that philosophy of language is not linguistics. It is not fundamentally an empirical pursuit, it is, rather, concerned to examine certain concepts which we already grasp, yet do not clearly understand. Many of the philosophers in this area are centrally concerned with thought and they are specifically concerned with language in its role as a medium of expressing/communicating thought.

Understanding the developments in philosophy of language in the 20th century is essential study for philosophy majors. As some of the readings in the course will attest, work in this area has also driven and animated the discourse in many other areas, such as philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of logic.

This course could also be of interest to thoughtful individuals in any language-related field of study, such as Linguistics, English, or Romance Languages.

PHI4930 Applied Epistemology: Knowledge in a Complex World — R. Borges

This advanced undergraduate seminar explores how epistemological theories apply to pressing real-world issues and social contexts. Moving beyond abstract theoretical frameworks, we will examine how knowledge functions in complex social environments where disagreement, expertise, autonomy, Artificial Intelligence, and power dynamics shape what we know and how we know it.

The course will investigate real-world disagreements and rational responses when faced with opposing viewpoints from seemingly credible sources. We will also explore the nature of expertise and testimony, questioning when deference to authorities is warranted and how laypeople can navigate specialized knowledge claims. The concept of epistemic autonomy will be critically examined, challenging students to consider the value and limitations of intellectual self-governance in an interconnected world.

A significant portion of the course addresses epistemic injustice—the ways knowledge practices can perpetuate unfairness through testimonial discounting, hermeneutical gaps, and unequal access to epistemic resources. These concepts will be applied to contemporary issues including:

Social media’s impact on information ecosystems
Democratic deliberation and the epistemic foundations of voting
Artificial intelligence and its epistemic implications
LLM hallucinations and synthetic information
The value of truth versus falsehood in public discourse
Free speech and its relationship to knowledge creation
Misinformation, propaganda, and epistemic manipulation
Science communication and public understanding

Special attention will be given to emerging AI technologies and their profound epistemic challenges. We will examine how large language models generate both knowledge and misinformation, the nature of machine “hallucination,” and what these technologies reveal about human knowledge processes. The course will also critically assess the evolving concept of truth in public discourse—exploring when falsehoods might serve social functions and when commitment to truth is non-negotiable for healthy epistemic communities.

Through engagement with both classical and contemporary literature in social epistemology, students will develop sophisticated tools for analyzing knowledge practices within social and political contexts. This course bridges philosophical rigor with practical relevance, making it valuable for philosophy majors and students interested in applying epistemological concepts to contemporary challenges.

PHI4930 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 could 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.

PHI4930 The Problem of Evil — G. Witmer

The problem of evil is one of the oldest and most heavily debated topics in the philosophy of religion. If God exists and is (as traditionally understood) both all-powerful and perfectly good, how is it that the world contains a great deal of suffering and evil? The ancient philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) is reputed to have said:

Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

The problem may be understood as a puzzle or as an argument. As a puzzle, the point is just to try to find an explanation of the evil that exists while taking for granted that God exists. A proposed explanation is known as a “theodicy”: a kind of excuse for the evil that exists. As an argument, the point is that the evil that exists seems to provide evidence that God does not exist. In this class we will be focused mostly on the problem as an argument for atheism. How exactly should the argument be understood? How powerful is it? How important is it to find a plausible theodicy to respond to the argument? What are the most promising theodicies or responses?

Readings will consist of articles or selections made available on Canvas as PDFs. After an introductory overview and setting out key parameters, planned topics include some historical treatments (e.g., Augustine, Leibniz, Hume), a close look at two distinct argumentative strategies (the “logical” and “evidential” versions), responses to those arguments, contemporary proposed theodicies, the “skeptical theist” approach to the problem of evil, the “evil God” challenge, and questions about the practical dimensions of the problem. Exactly which topics we cover will depend on the pace of class discussion and perhaps on student interest.

This is an advanced seminar in which students are expected to participate vigorously. Requirements include frequent, ungraded writing exercises, an argumentative paper of modest size, a presentation handout in which you set out an original argument and several of your peers provide feedback, a paper based on that handout and feedback, and three short expository writing assignments completed in class.

Philosophy