The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Spring 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 Spring 2023.
1000-Level Courses
IDS 1114 Ethics and the Public Sphere (Quest) — J. Rothschild
In this course, we will consider what it means to build and maintain an ethical public sphere, where ‘public sphere’ includes our public spaces, actions, and discourse, as well as our institutions, leaders, media, and more. Our primary ethical lens will be a set of virtue concepts: honesty, justice, courage, and humility. Using these concepts as anchors, we will explore such questions as: how do we find honest media? What work do we need to do to bring justice to our public institutions and spaces? Why is courage so important for good public leadership? What is the place of humility in learning, or in effective political discourse? Our source materials will be multi-disciplinary, and our methods will be drawn from traditions in the humanities and anchored in philosophical ethics.
2000-Level Courses
IDS2935 Quest 1: Conflict of Ideas — G. Witmer
We live in a time of heated disagreement — over politics, religion, culture, and more. We would prefer these not become violent conflicts. Often, however, we cannot just agree to disagree; a fight of some sort is inevitable. But can we make it a fair fight? We look to work in logic, language, and psychology to explore our options for engaging in the conflict of ideas in a way that is both fair and productive.
As a Quest 1 course, this course aims to address certain essential questions — questions that we cannot void but which are not straightforward to answer. In particular, this course falls under the “War and Peace” theme for Quest 1; see a description of the various themes and questions here.
PHI2010 Introduction to Philosophy — S. Duncan
This class is a general introduction to philosophy, and will be divided into three main sections. In the first, we will look at the philosophy of religion, focusing on arguments for and against the existence of God. The second section will consider meaning, value, and the self. We will discuss how pleasure, morality, and the possibility of immortality relate to the value and meaning of life as a whole. The third section will look at a work from the history of political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Throughout our discussions, we will have two main aims. The first is to understand some views that philosophers have had on these topics. The second is to develop your own ability to read carefully, think critically, and write clearly.
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — M. Gardner
Is it rational to believe in God? Do you really know what you think you know? How is your mind related to your brain? What is the right thing to do? This course will equip you with some philosophical methodology and some background information you can use to try to answer these and similar questions. We will survey some of the main topics in philosophy, including topics in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. Through class discussions and writing assignments, we will also practice using philosophical methods like logical argumentation and thought experiments. Students in this course can earn 4000 words towards the UF writing requirement (WR). This course also provides 3 credits towards the philosophy major or minor and is a general education – humanities (H) course. Since this is an introductory course, it presumes no background in philosophy.
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 (6000 words).
PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues (Online) — 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).
PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues — L. Grant
This course serves as an introduction to philosophical thinking about contemporary moral topics. In addition to exploring frameworks for ethical thinking, we will consider the following questions: Is abortion morally permissible? Is it okay to eat meat produced on factory farms? Is it ever permissible to spend disposable income on ourselves when that money could save the lives of those who are desperately poor? Is taxation ever morally justifiable? What is the right to free speech, and why is it important? Students should expect several writing assignments of increasing length over the course of the semester.
3000-Level Courses
PHH 3100 Ancient Greek Philosophy — J. Palmer
This course is designed to familiarize students with some of the most important thinkers who stand at the beginning of the western philosophical tradition: the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. 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, of 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. It also counts towards the Humanities (H) General Education Requirement.
PHH 3111 Ancient Greek Ethical and Political Philosophy — N. Rothschild
This course will be a study of Plato’s Republic. In this ambitious dialogue, Plato embeds a constellation of ethical, political and psychological views within an argument that being a good person is the best life for a human being. We will spend the semester trying to unravel and explicate these views, along with the understanding of reality they assume.
PHH3400 Modern Philosophy — S. Duncan
PHH3400 is an introduction to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy. The class will be divided into three main sections. In the first, we will look at René Descartes’s 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy and the views of some of Descartes’s contemporary critics, including Thomas Hobbes and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. The second section will focus on John Locke’s 1689 Essay concerning Human Understanding. In the third section we will look at David Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and the work of some of Hume’s critics, including Thomas Reid and Lady Mary Shepherd. The class will focus on the philosophers’ views in metaphysics and epistemology, but will also consider views in the physical sciences and in ethics.
PHI 3114 Reasoning — G. Ray
Philosophy is especially concerned with bringing reason to bear on tough questions. Philosophical texts and discourse are rich in reasoned case-making in the form of argumentation and dialogic disputation. In this course, we will develop our skill in the identification and extraction of arguments from philosophical texts. This is primarily a skill-building class. We focus on practical techniques that help us understand, and will make central use of diagrammatic techniques for representing the structure of arguments. We will learn strategies for understanding challenging arguments and developing clear, defensible interpretations/criticisms of them. Finally, we will turn things around and show how these very same techniques make writing a thesis-defense essay dramatically easy. (You will never look on a paper assignment the same way again!) The skills gained in this class will improve your own reasoning skills and critical discernment. The content of this course will be of value to every student. Note: This is not a course in logic and no training in logic is presupposed. Students of logic will learn a fundamental complementary skill. For more information <http://users.clas.ufl.edu/gregray/class/reasoning-promo>.
PHI 3130 Symbolic Logic — R. Borges
This course will familiarize students with the syntax, semantics, and some of the metalogical results of first-order propositional and predicate logic. If time permits, we will also look at extensions of those first-order logics (e.g., modal logic), and differences between formal logic and human reasoning.
PHI 3300 Theory of Knowledge — R. Borges
This course aims at enabling the student to think critically about some of the central issues in the theory of knowledge. Among other issues, we will discuss (i) the nature of knowledge, (ii) the difference (if any) between knowledge and true belief, (iii) the distinction between perceptual and inferential knowledge, and (iv) whether knowledge is possible (skepticism). Classical and contemporary readings will be assigned. This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement.
PHI 3641 Ethics and Innovation — E. Palmer
This course is designed to familiarize students with some of the ethical issues surrounding innovation as well as some of the psychological and social obstacles to acting ethically. We will discuss ethical concerns arising from innovations in bioengineering and the use of Artificial Intelligence by social media platforms and consider how best to resolve them. We will also discuss how psychological and social factors inhibit ethical behavior, with an eye towards identifying strategies to combat them.
This course provides 2000 words of credit towards the UF Writing Requirement, satisfies the Ethics requirement for the Innovation minor, and satisfies the State Core General Education requirement for Humanities.
PHI 3650 Moral Philosophy — A. Pismenny
This course provides an introduction to meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. It considers 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 — D. Purves
This course offers an introduction to ethical issues in data science and data driven technology. Theoretical discussions of ethics are paired with concrete issues emerging from the use of data driven technologies to make real-world decisions. 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 — A. Ross
This course exposes students to important interactions between ethics, economics, and public policy in assessing the social value of emerging technologies. Students will grapple with foundational concepts in ethics, economics, and policy-making. The course pairs theoretical discussions of the philosophical dimensions of economics and policy-making with concrete issues in emerging technologies. Discussion topics include: cost-benefit analysis, risk, markets and market failures, economic valuations of technology, justice and fairness, and property rights. We will apply these concepts in assessing emerging technologies like deep learning, autonomous cars, big data policing algorithms, and geoengineering, among others.
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 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 there exists something deserving of the title “God.” 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.
PHI 3930 The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence — D. Grant
In this course, we will explore fundamental questions about the nature, possibility, and consequences of artificial intelligence. What is intelligence, and could a computer be intelligent in the same way you and I are intelligent? What about consciousness—could something made out of computer chips know what it is like to see the color red, or hear beautiful music? Do we have moral obligations to machines? What do computer scientists mean when they describe a machine learning system as a “black box”? (Are humans “black boxes” in the same sense?) Why do many people believe that it is morally wrong to deploy lethal autonomous weapons in war, and are they right? As we discuss these questions, we will engage with both classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of artificial intelligence.
PHI 3930 Philosophy of Emotion — A. Pismenny
This course has two central aims. One is to understand how a philosophical approach to emotions differs from, but can benefit from scientific studies. The other is to understand the centrality of emotion in our practical, moral and aesthetic experience. We will attempt to shed light on the following questions: What exactly are emotions? How are they like and unlike other mental states and processes? Are they shaped mostly by our genes, or by culture and society? How do they relate to beliefs and desires? Do emotions apprehend values in the world, or do they create values by being projected onto the world? Are emotions rational, irrational or arational? Can they be shaped, defended, and justified? What role do they play in morality? Are there specifically “moral emotions”? How are emotions involved in our experience of movies, music, art and literature?
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. 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
PHH 4930 Special Topics: Heidegger — N. Rothschild
This is a course on the 20th Century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. We will read a large portion of Being and Time, Heidegger’s most well known work, as well as some of his shorter writings such as: “The Origin of the Work of Art, “Letter on Humanism,” and “The Question Concerning Technology.” There will be a small selection of secondary material. However, for the most part, we will keep to Heidegger’s work, turning to other texts by Heidegger in order to understand Heidegger. Over the course of the semester, we will touch upon a range of topics, among them: the thought that our conception of knowledge—and of things in general—is distorted by a misguidedly theoretical ontology, an account of the subject, of animal life, of the holism of our ways of making sense, and a distinctive attempt to understand human possibilities as historical, and therefore the kind of thing for which we are responsible.
PHI 4930 Special Topics: Ethics & Humanity’s Future — M. Gardner
Each of our lives makes a comparatively miniscule contribution to the massive and continually unfolding story of humanity. What is the significance of the rest of that story? This course will focus on the future of humanity: we will consider whether or how it matters that people continue to inhabit the Earth (or other planets) after we are gone. We will also consider what moral obligations we have, if any, to future people. Finally, we will consider existential risks, or risks that threaten the continued existence of our species, as well as global catastrophic risks, which threaten civilization, and we will discuss the strength and nature of our obligations to avert them
PHI 4930 Special Topics: Animal Minds — A. Ross
How do animals experience the world, and how are their experiences similar to or different from our own?
We want 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.
PHI 4930 Special Topics: The Challenge of Pluralism — J. Rick
Democratic societies aim to structure their institutions and to frame their social policies and practices such that individuals from different backgrounds with diverse values are able to live together as equals on mutually agreeable terms. Yet, reflecting on the inequality and polarization that characterizes many of our contemporary democratic states makes salient just how elusive this laudable aim is in practice. Over the past three decades, the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has devoted her incredibly rich and incisive body of research to examining ways of rendering these goals of democratic justice and equality available – indeed achievable – against a background of value pluralism. In this seminar, we will explore urgent topics that lie at the intersections of contemporary Political, Social, and Economic Philosophy, through the lens of Anderson’s wide-ranging and influential work as well as that of her commentators and critics. Issues covered will include the following: the nature of value pluralism, the value of democratic equality, the social impacts of free market ideology, the importance of educational opportunities and fairness, the imperative of social integration, the authoritarian structure of workplace, and the moral standing of nonhuman animals. Beyond the importance that these topics bear in their own right, investigating them through the works of Anderson will provide us with the excellent opportunity to see how the thought of an engaging and exceptional contemporary philosopher has evolved through the course of her career.