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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences University of Florida

Instructors’ Course Descriptions for Fall 2026

The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Fall 2026 were submitted by the course instructors (unless specified as catalog description). Specific information regarding the dates, times, and locations of these courses may be found in the Registrar’s official Schedule of Courses for Fall 2026.

1000-Level Courses

PHI1001 Conflict of Ideas — R. Borges

t’s been suggested that war is the continuation of politics by different means (Klaus von Clausewitz). Some took that suggestion to mean that politics was the continuation of war by other means (Lenin). But, if war and politics are simply different ways in which we handle disagreement between people, within nations, and between nations, the analogy seems reasonable. War and politics sit at different ends of the same spectrum – ways in which we disagree. But, if the choice between the conflict of ideas and real conflict is so obvious (politics harm ideas, while wars harm real people), why do real conflicts keep happening? How can we understand what happens when people disagree-especially when they disagree about important or emotionally powerful issues? How can we resolve our disagreements in a principled fashion? Since the issues are important, we cannot just agree to disagree: we must learn how to have a fair fight. But how do we fight fair on the battleground of ideas? 

The focus of the course will be on the conflict of ideas, and on how students can make a positive and lasting impact on the conflicts they will encounter in their own lives. To that end, students will learn about multiple aspects of intellectual conflict: psychological aspects of conflict that stand in the way of conscientious dialogue, questions about rhetoric and its role in manipulation, facing and working with our own cognitive limitations, and structuring debate and dialogue in a way that should help us make progress without simply compromising for the sake of peace. They will also practice and witness intellectual disagreements as they debate their fellow students and observe others engage in intellectual disagreement. In virtue of the complexity of the social phenomenon that is intellectual disagreement, students will be exposed to readings in multiple disciplines. Those include the disciplines of economics, statistics, history, feminist ethics, psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, biology, and theology. Assignments include short argumentative essays, reports on observed conflicts, and practicing and evaluating in-class debates.

PHI1680 AI, Philosophy & Society — D. Grant

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. This course provides Quest, Gen Ed: Humanities, and AI credit.

2000-Level Courses

PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy — A. Ross

Philosophy explores questions that are central to the human experience. In this class we will explore a handful of the most interesting and fundamental philosophical questions. Some of these questions have been part of philosophy since anyone began thinking philosophically. Other questions– just as important– have emerged only recently, as rapidly advancing technology has started to reshape foundational features of our world.      

  • What is the relationship between God and morality? Can there be morality without God?
  • In a digital world of bots, deep fakes, and echo chambers, how can we genuinely know that what we see—or read—is true?
  • What makes you you? How do you remain the same person from birth until death though every cell of your body will have been replaced several times throughout your life?
  • What makes life meaningful, and how can life be meaningful in even in times when there seems to be no progress and no purpose?

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 an uncertain world. 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.

This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (4000 words).

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. The course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (4000 words).

PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy (MW4 and MW7) — J. Simpson

This course introduces students to philosophy by engaging with philosophical arguments, both classical and contemporary. In this course, we will cover some topics in the philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, action theory, aesthetics, and ethics. This course will also introduce students to the basics of good reasoning and writing.

PHI2100 Logic (MW5 and MW7) — R. Borges

This course explores the foundational logic that underpins computer programming, legal reasoning, and advanced problem-solving. Students will learn to translate natural language into symbolic logic, construct rigorous formal proofs, and navigate abstract systems. Ideal for first-year students seeking to fulfill their discrete mathematics requirement, this course builds the essential, rigorous critical thinking skills required for disciplines such as computer science, engineering, mathematics, and law.

3000-Level Courses

PHH3100 Ancient Greek Philosophy — J. Palmer

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: the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This course is the first part of the Philosophy Department’s history of philosophy sequence. Together with PHH 3400: Modern Philosophy, PHH 3100 aims to give students an understanding of the major questions addressed in the history of Western philosophy, the range of answers offered to these questions, and the methods employed in addressing them. PHH 3100 is required of all philosophy majors and meets an area requirement for the philosophy minor.

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. This course is the first part of the Philosophy Department’s history of philosophy sequence. Together with PHH 3400: Modern Philosophy, it aims to give students an understanding of the major questions addressed in the history of Western philosophy, the range of answers offered to these questions, and the methods employed in addressing them. PHH 3100 is required of all philosophy majors and meets an area requirement for the philosophy minor. To give a sense of the topics that will be explored, here are two examples of issues that will be taken up in the course. 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, i.e., happiness. 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 his 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 — J. Rick

Modern Philosophy is an introduction to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy. In the first half of the term, we will focus on Early Modern-to-Modern theories of metaphysics and epistemology.  In the second half of the term, we will turn our attention towards Early Modern-to-Modern theories of ethics and political philosophy.  The thinkers we will cover will include René Descartes, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Baruch Spinoza, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Galileo Galilei, John Locke, David Hume, and Lady Mary Shepherd.

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.

PHI3300 Theory of Knowledge — R. 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 explore major attempts to engage with these issues. Along the way, we’ll also discuss related topics having to do with justification, rationality, probability, and the reliability of human reason.

PHI3500 Metaphysics — G. Witmer

(Catalog description) Studies the problems of first philosophy: the concepts of existence, essence, object, property, and event; universals and particulars; the nature of change, possibility, causation, space, and time. Discusses traditional philosophical issues such as free will, the mind/body problem, personal identity, and the existence of abstract entities (e.g., numbers), as well as views of realism, idealism, materialism, and relativism.

PHI3650 Moral Philosophy — M. Robitzsch

Imagine that a friend calls you. Because you are watching a movie and do not want to be disturbed, you decide not to answer. The next day the friend asks you where you were and what you were doing. Knowing that the friend would be upset that you did not take the call because you watched a movie, is it permissible to tell the friend that your phone died? And generally, is it ever permissible to tell a lie? The area of philosophy that deals with this question and others pertaining to right or wrong moral conduct (as well as more broadly how we ought to live our lives) is moral philosophy or ethics. It is the topic of this course where we will discuss in detail the three main theories of normative ethics (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics), drawing both on historical and contemporary sources.

PHI3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — D. Purves

In this course, students will come to understand how ethics and machine learning collide. Through real-world examples and case studies, students will learn how to explain how four features of machine learning applications give rise to ethical questions: bias, scale, opacity, and autonomy. Applications of machine learning discussed in the course include criminal risk assessment, targeted advertising, lethal autonomous weapon systems, and generative artificial intelligence. Students will leave the class with a more holistic, ethically sensitive, approach to evaluating novel machine learning technologies.

PHI3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — D. Grant

In this course, we will explore questions about how emerging technologies should be designed and regulated. Why do AI systems often behave in unexpected (and sometimes harmful) ways? Should we be concerned about the fact that technology companies such as Meta 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. This course provides AI credit.

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.

PHI3695 Philosophy of Death — D. Purves

This course explores puzzling philosophical questions about the nature of death, the badness of death, immortality, and the ethics of killing, including: What exactly is death? Under what conditions to individuals die? Is survival after death possible? If so, what would it take to survive death? 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.

PHM3202 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, including works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. We will also examine contemporary applications of these historical ideas. 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.

PHM3400 Philosophy of Law — M. Gardner

In this course we will explore questions about what the law is, what it does, and how the law specifically relates to morality. We will begin by considering foundational questions about the nature of law: Is the concept of law an essentially moral concept or an entirely social concept? We will then consider some questions at the normative level: What principles determine whether a law or a system of laws is just? What should we do when we think the law is unjust? Finally, we will consider some applied questions about particular laws and justifications for laws. We will consider whether we have too much criminal law, how punishment might be justified, and whether some laws are objectionably paternalistic.

4000-Level Courses

PHH4141 Seminar in Ancient Philosophy — J. Palmer

The philosophy of Socrates will be the focus of this course. Socrates is at once the patron saint of philosophy, an historical figure and a mythic character, a propounder of profound paradoxes, and an inspiring example of what it means to live the philosophical life. His unflinching commitment to rational inquiry and interrogation of the traditional values of his society made him the most popular intellectual of his day and yet ultimately led to his prosecution and execution by the citizens of the world’s first democratic state. His commitment to pursuing philosophical questions in direct one-on-one conversations was such that he wrote no works of philosophy. As a result, all our knowledge of Socrates comes from the works of authors who undertook to provide a portrait of his character and activity. Socrates was fortunate that one of his portraitists—his pupil Plato—was also one of the greatest philosophers and writers ever to live. This course will explore the problem of our knowledge of the historical Socrates by comparing the portraits of Socrates in Aristophanes’ Clouds, in Xenophon’s Recollections of Socrates and Apology of Socrates, in Plato’s own Apology of Socrates, and in certain of Plato’s “Socratic” dialogues. The course will consider such prominent features of Socratic philosophy as his disavowal of knowledge, his distinctive method of inquiry by examine the views of others, and his apparently paradoxical views that no one does wrong willingly. More broadly, the course will explore the Socratic view that virtue is knowledge of what is good for humans as such and will consider how this view closes the perceived gap between an ethical life and a life of self-interest.

PHI4930 Philosophy of Action — G. Ray

A close study of some core readings in philosophy of action — which is concerned with the nature of actions and human agency, and such things as intending, planning and trying, the giving of reasons for action and action explanations, theoretical and practical reason, choosing, weakness of the will, and the nature of collective action (i.e., cases where we speak of a groups or organizations of people doing things). In addition to individual and collective action, we will seek to understand the roles of theoretical and practical reason in action.

  • What do you do when you do? Some philosophers have thought all you can ever do is move your body. Or that maybe all we really ever do is try to do things and the rest is up to the world.
  • We are happy to think of some things that happen when we act as expressions of our agency, but want to think of other things as merely consequences. And we think sometimes this makes a moral difference. But what is the real difference between what you do and what else happens — and does that difference fall in line with the moral distinctions we wanted to make?
  • We seem often to suffer failures of will. We mean well and intend to do one thing (eat well), but then we end up doing something else (cake!) that we ourselves think less good. What is going on in such cases? Are we just out of control? Or are we really doing what we really wanted all along? And doesn’t that make us sort of crummy? (Cake!)
  • It has been thought that we have a special kind of access to or knowledge of our own actions. What does this come to?
  • We think of actions as fundamentally explicable. But what should we say about our practice of giving explanations of our actions? How do such explanations (when we are not just making excuses for ourselves) actually relate to the doing of the things we do?

The concerns in philosophy of action are relevant to many other areas of philosophy — to the discourse on freedom of the will in metaphysics, discussions of rationality in epistemology, questions of moral responsibility in ethics, as well fundamental questions about collective will, collective action and the standing of social institutions in social and political philosophy, and, for example, the question of animal minds in philosophy of mind, and the role of the emotions in moral psychology.

PHI4930 Animal Minds — A. Ross

How do animals experience the world, and how are their experiences similar to and different from our own? 

We need to be able to answer this question for many practical and theoretical purposes- what are the limits, both scientific and philosophical, of our ability to answer it? In this course we will address questions such as: 

  • What is a mind? Which animals have minds? How can we learn about them? 
  • What kinds of emotions and thoughts do nonhuman animals have? 
  • Is language required for thought? 
  • Who is self-conscious? 
  • Can animals have moral agency?

The course is an examination of the philosophy of animal minds, and also draws from natural and social sciences: cognitive ethology and psychology. We will use a philosophical approach to examine several empirical examples and case studies, including: Cheney and Seyfarth’s ververt monkey research, Thorndike’s cat puzzle boxes, Jensen’s research into humans and chimpanzees and the ultimatum game, Pankseep and Burgdorf’s research on rat laughter, and Clayton and Emery’s research on memory and metamemory in scrub-jays.

PHI4930 Philosophy & Film — M. Robitzsch

This course is dedicated to the relationship between philosophy and film. This relationship can be understood in two ways, both of which will be addressed in the course. First, in the philosophy of film, a relatively recent subdiscipline of aesthetics, philosophers have reflected on philosophical questions raised by the medium film, such as ‘What is the nature of film?’ and ‘Why do viewers feel an emotional response to the fictional characters they see in a film? What explains why we laugh or feel scared?’ Second, philosophers have pointed out that certain films themselves convey philosophical ideas. The classical example of this is the science fiction movie The Matrix (USA 1999)that is often taken to be an illustration of skeptical thought experiment that what we perceive to be real is just a computer simulation. Readings in the course will be drawn from important philosophers of film such as Stanley Cavell, Noël Caroll, and Thomas Wartenberg and supplemented by classical and contemporary movies such as Strike (Soviet Union 1925), The Apartment (USA 1960), and Perfect Days (Japan/Germany 2023).