The following descriptions of courses being offered by the Philosophy Department in Spring 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 Spring 2024.
1000-Level Courses
PHI 1001 Conflict of Ideas (Quest) — G. Witmer
We live in a time of heated disagreement — over politics, religion, culture, and more. One may be tempted to react to such conflict by disengaging, perhaps deciding that there’s no way to settle these disputes and so no point in arguing about them. There are many drawbacks to disengaging in this way, however, and one of the biggest is that it’s not always even an option to just agree to disagree: sometimes a fight is inevitable. Since we are stuck having to deal with conflicts among our ideas, we should ask what we can do to make the fights fair and productive. In this course we look at work in logic, philosophy, linguistics, and psychology to explore strategies for doing this. Requirements include participation by means of ungraded writing exercises, some regular simple quizzes, a report on an experiential learning activity, a short video presentation, and two essays. Students are expected to attend and be ready to contribute during both lecture and breakout sessions. The course provides 2000 words of WR credit and meets the Quest 1 requirement.
IDS 1114 Ethics and the Public Sphere (Quest) — A. Pismenny
Contemporary public discourse is teeming with issues of urgent moral concern. From the #metoo campaign and associated conversations about sexual violence to the presence of right-wing extremists on campus, and the growing imperatives to respond to economic inequality, we are faced with complex challenges that have ethical problems at their core. It is not always easy, however, to think through these challenges in a responsible and productive way. So, how is one to begin?
This interdisciplinary Quest 1 course explores the how the methods and traditions in the humanities provide resources for approaching publicly relevant ethical issues. The topics we will address include freedom of speech, economic inequality, and sex and gender justice. Philosophical and legal arguments, laws, papal encyclicals, pastoral letters, historical analyses, and news articles will be incorporated into our course readings. The crucial skills we will emphasize throughout the class include identifying the moral dimensions of legal, political, and economic problems; critically evaluating traditions and perspectives; appreciating the diversity of perspectives on these controversial issues; thinking beyond one’s own interests; and approaching disagreement with open-mindedness and a willingness to be rationally persuaded. The class is thus for students from any major who want to explore public moral challenges in rigorous, creative ways. Assignments will include short writings on the ethical topics listed above, and a capstone project in which students address an ethical, public issue of importance to them.
2000-Level Courses
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.
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 — R. Borges
The objective of this course is to introduce students to the main topics of Western Philosophy. We will do this by presenting students with classical readings touching on some of the core questions in this tradition. A further goal is to introduce students to the methods and tools used in this literature. In particular, students will learn how to present and evaluate philosophical and non–philosophical arguments.
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).
PHI 2010 Introduction to Philosophy — J. Palmer
This class is designed to introduce students to philosophy via a combination of historical and contemporary sources focusing on a representative set of problems. After a general introduction to argumentation, the course will be divided into four major sections: on reason and religious belief, with a focus on understanding traditional arguments for the existence of God; on problems in epistemology, centering on skepticism and perception; on the nature of mind and the problem of free will; and on some fundamental issues pertaining to agency and ethics. Assessments will include four papers on assigned topics, a midterm, and a final examination.
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).
PHI 2630 Contemporary Moral Issues — J. Gillespie
Do non-human animals have moral standing, comparable to that of human beings? Is it ever morally permissible to eat animals? What is sexism, and should prostitution be ethically and legally permissible or prohibited? What is racism, and are affirmative action policies morally justified or morally bankrupt? What is the most ethically justified immigration policy – one of largely open or largely closed borders? Given the persistence of vast global poverty in our world, what moral duties do those of us in wealthy nations have to persons in impoverished states? Should private gun ownership be morally permissible or impermissible? Is climate change a significant issue for individual morality? Are individuals morally responsible for their greenhouse gas emissions, despite the fact that individual actions seem to make little difference to climate change?
These are examples of moral questions about which many of us have strong and often opposing opinions. And, just as we disagree on many of these issues, so do many philosophers, political theorists, and economists. In this course, we examine opposing philosophical arguments and points of view on these urgent moral questions. The governing aim of our course will be to come to grips with and critically reflect on the underlying justifications for the various sides of these different debates.
This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement and the Writing (W) requirement (4000 words).
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).
IDS 2935 Philosophy, AI, and Society — A. Ross
Over the past few decades, artificial intelligence has grown increasingly powerful—as well as increasingly ubiquitous. In this Quest 1 course, we will explore the following essential question: how AI is changing society, and how should we, as citizens, respond? We will consider two kinds of social changes: changes that contemporary AI is already bringing about, and changes that AI may bring about in the future.
Focusing on the present, we can see that artificial intelligence is already changing how we live in a multitude of ways. Employers use it to evaluate resumes and interview candidates. Hospitals use it to decide how to treat patients, and to allocate scarce resources. Online dating services use it to match users with potential mates. Drivers use it to navigate—and in some cases, to take over the driving. Social media companies use it to decide what content to show users. These developments raise many pressing questions. Should driverless cars prioritize the safety of their drivers over the safety of others, for example? Is it a problem if online dating platforms are more likely to match users with people of the same race? Do we need stronger protections for the human workers who moderate content on online platforms—much of which is extremely disturbing?
Looking further ahead, how will further advancements in AI reshape the world in the decades to come? Will improvements in automation spell the end of work as we know it? Are we approaching the day when we can build machines that are just as capable and versatile as we are, if not more so? Could we teach such machines to behave morally, as we do with our children? Could we have genuine relationships with machines, and perhaps even fall in love with
them? Will we inadvertently “summon the demon” by creating superintelligent systems that destroy society in the pursuit of their own, alien goals?
As we explore these questions together, we will engage with research from several academic disciplines, including computer science, information science, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology. 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 both Quest 1 and General Education Humanities credit. As a Quest 1 course, it focuses on multidisciplinary exploration of an essential question about the human condition (how AI is changing society, and how should we, as citizens, respond?) and emphasizes both experiential learning and self-reflection. As a General Education Humanities course, it familiarizes students with analytical tools from several humanities disciplines in order to equip them with the ability to approach this question in a rigorous way and from multiple theoretical perspectives.
3000-Level Courses
PHH 3100 Ancient Philosophy — N. Rothschild
This course is designed to familiarize students with some of the main ideas of the thinkers who stand at the beginning of the western philosophical tradition: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers of the Hellenistic era. To give a sense of the topics that will be explored, here are two examples of issues that have been taken up in the course’s previous incarnations. Plato famously presents knowledge as a daunting achievement and claims that a life organized around the pursuit of knowledge, i.e., philosophy, is the best life for a human being. Understanding these views depends on what Plato means by knowledge. This course examines Plato’s developing conception of knowledge and its objects (the things known) and the way in which this epistemology and metaphysics entails the view that happiness is a form of love. In contemporary philosophy, Aristotle is probably best known as the inspiration for the ethical theory known as virtue ethics. This course offers an introduction to Aristotle’s ethics that seeks to contextualize it within Aristotle’s metaphysics of activity and account of life. Like Plato, Aristotle believes that to be a “good person” is to be a good human being. Thus, he thinks that figuring out how we should live (ethics), depends on understanding that our way of being is a form of constantly active animal life (metaphysics and biology).
This course counts towards the Humanities (H) general education requirement.
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 <https://meta.phil.ufl.edu/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.
This course counts toward the general education Math (M) requirement.
PHI 3300 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.
PHH 3400 Modern Philosophy — J. Rick
PHH3400 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, Thomas Hobbes, Elisabeth of Bohemia, John Locke, David Hume, Lady Mary Shepherd, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
PHI 3400 Philosophy of Natural Science — C. Dorst
This course is a general introduction to the philosophy of science. We will focus on both classical and contemporary issues in the field, including questions such as: What is the difference between science and pseudoscience? How do we confirm scientific theories, and what justifies our confidence in their correctness? What is the nature of scientific explanation, and how does it work? What are laws of nature, and why does science seek to discover them? Should we interpret our scientific theories as literally true descriptions of reality, or merely as pragmatic tools meant to improve our capacities for predicting and controlling the world? And lastly, how do the personal values of individual scientists affect the objectivity of science?
PHI 3610 Happiness and Well-Being — L. Grant
What makes our lives go better or worse? According to the hedonist, our lives go better when we experience pleasure and avoid pain. According to desire-based theories, our lives go better when we get what we want. Objective list theorists say that a variety of different goods – such as pleasure, friendship, and knowledge – are essential components of a life worth living.
In this course, we will consider these and other theories of the nature of wellbeing in the context of broader philosophical questions about life, death, and the afterlife. These questions will include:
• Is it always good to get what you want?
• Are things like friendship necessary for a good life?
• Is death always bad? For whom?
• Can things that happen after we die make our lives go better or worse?
The main aim of this course is to have you think about these and related questions in a philosophically rigorous way. This means formulating arguments, articulating opposing views, and above all, thinking critically.
PHI 3641 Ethics and Innovation — J. Simpson
This course is designed to familiarize students with ethics and some of the ethical issues surrounding innovation. We will discuss ethical concerns arising from innovations in data science, bioengineering, modern warfare, and the food industry. We will also discuss the main theories in meta-ethics and normative ethics.
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 — 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.
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 — J. Gillespie, R. Huang
This course exposes students to important interactions between ethics, contemporary data science, and emerging social issues. Students will grapple with foundational concepts in ethics and data science. The course begins with a brief introduction to ethical issues in data science. The course then pairs theoretical discussions of ethics with concrete issues in emerging technologies. Discussion topics include racial bias in machine learning, the black box problem for machine learning, mass surveillance and privacy, technological unemployment, and moral responsibility for autonomous weapons systems.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — D. Purves
This course exposes students to important interactions between ethics, contemporary data science, and emerging social issues. Students will grapple with foundational concepts in ethics and data science. The course begins with a brief introduction to ethical issues in data science. The course then pairs theoretical discussions of ethics with concrete issues in emerging technologies. Discussion topics include racial bias in machine learning, the black box problem for machine learning, mass surveillance and privacy, technological unemployment, and moral responsibility for autonomous weapons systems.
PHI 3681 Ethics, Data, and Technology — 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 and technological issues, such as surveillance capitalism and privacy invasion, algorithmic bias, AI-enhanced predictive policing, and geoengineering, among others.
4000-Level Courses
PHH 4644 Continental Philosophy — N. Rothschild
A study of selected works by 19th and 20th century continental philosophers. Specifically, this course will read texts by Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Foucault. These texts will be used to call into question the view that the individual is the ground of human thought and action. Taken together the course materials challenge the target understanding of the subject along three axes. First, they deny that an individual mind is a unity, contending instead that there are sub-personal sources of action, and that the unity of the individual subject is, if possible, an achievement. Second, these texts argue that human thought and action is possible only insofar as it is located within a wider context of intelligibility such as that provided by a particular social structure or form of life. Third, these texts argue that the subject is historically constituted due to the dependence of subjectivity on shared practices. What it is to be a subject is determined by how we understand ourselves, and the concepts in terms of which we understand ourselves are constituted by shared practices that can and do change.
PHI 4930 Special Topics: Topics in Political Philosophy — 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 social impacts of free market ideology, the value of democratic equality, the importance of educational opportunities and fairness, the imperative of social integration, and the authoritarian structure of workplace. 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.
PHI 4930 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 4930 Special Topics: The 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. 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.