Instructor-specific Course Descriptions
Please See Banner/Timetable for Further Information about Sections, Times, Locations, and Instructors for Multiple Section Courses.
Fall 2019
Upper Division and Graduate Courses
PHIL 441 GLOBAL JUSTICE/HUMAN RIGHTS :: REIDY
This is an upper-division philosophy course focused on recent work concerning the norms, if any, that govern and/or ought to govern the international and global order. These norms include state sovereignty, non-intervention, the rule of law, jus cogens, the voluntarist nature of international law, just war theory, fair and free trade, human rights, humanitarian intervention and R2P (responsibility to protect), and much else. This is not a class focused on international or global politics or institutions, though of course both will be relevant. Nor is it a class on particular problems such as global climate change, though again such problems will be relevant. It is a philosophy class, though perhaps a bit more interdisciplinary than other philosophy classes, the aim of which is to move students closer to understanding the possibilities for and merits of a defensible normative order international or global in reach and scope. Class meetings will be devoted to lecture and discussion. I will not merely summarize readings during course lectures; you are expected to have read assigned readings in advance of attending lecture. Required readings will include John Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Harvard UP, 1999; Jim Nickel, Making Sense of Human Rights, 2nd Ed., Blackwell, 2007; and David Held and Pietro Maffetone, eds., Global Political Theory, Polity, 2016. Students wanting to get a feel for course material in advance may find it helpful to consult either Jon Mandle, Global Justice, Polity, 2006; or Mathias Risse, Global Political Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; but these are not required texts. Required assessments will include exams and papers.
445-545 Long-Term Environmental Ethics :: NOLT
Environmental ethics is the attempt to expand ethical thinking in two directions: into the distant future and beyond the human species to the natural world. This course will survey current work in both directions, with particular attention to two interrelated problems: anthropogenic climate change and humanity’s potential to precipitate Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Grades will be based on three short critical papers, a final term paper, and (for graduate students only) a seminar presentation on a current journal article or book chapter.
PHIL 480/574 Social Epistemology :: GARDINER
This course surveys topics in social epistemology. We begin with our reliance on others. We examine the epistemic significance of testimony and deference, focusing on whether there are distinctive challenges for moral and aesthetic testimony. We then turn to the ethics of belief. We investigate whether we should be epistemically partial towards our friends, and whether and how ethical considerations bear on the epistemic properties of beliefs. Finally, we consider topics in legal epistemology, including the epistemic significance of profiling and the epistemic contours of the rules of evidence.
PHIL 480/574 EPISTEMIC DIMENSIONS OF AGENCY :: COFFMAN
This course will introduce you to important current debates at the intersection of Epistemology and Philosophy of Action. Topics covered will include the nature of factual knowledge and rational belief; the nature of intentional, free, and morally appraisable action; epistemic requirements for morally appraisable action; knowledge of intentional action; and knowledge of free and morally appraisable action.
445-545 Long-Term Environmental Ethics :: NOLT
Environmental ethics is the attempt to expand ethical thinking in two directions: into the distant future and beyond the human species to the natural world. This course will survey current work in both directions, with particular attention to two interrelated problems: anthropogenic climate change and humanity’s potential to precipitate Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Grades will be based on three short critical papers, a final term paper, and (for graduate students only) a seminar presentation on a current journal article or book chapter.
PHIL 480/574 Social Epistemology :: GARDINER
This course surveys topics in social epistemology. We begin with our reliance on others. We examine the epistemic significance of testimony and deference, focusing on whether there are distinctive challenges for moral and aesthetic testimony. We then turn to the ethics of belief. We investigate whether we should be epistemically partial towards our friends, and whether and how ethical considerations bear on the epistemic properties of beliefs. Finally, we consider topics in legal epistemology, including the epistemic significance of profiling and the epistemic contours of the rules of evidence.
PHIL 480/574 EPISTEMIC DIMENSIONS OF AGENCY :: COFFMAN
This course will introduce you to important current debates at the intersection of Epistemology and Philosophy of Action. Topics covered will include the nature of factual knowledge and rational belief; the nature of intentional, free, and morally appraisable action; epistemic requirements for morally appraisable action; knowledge of intentional action; and knowledge of free and morally appraisable action.
PHIL 601/626 Naming and Necessity :: GARTHOFF
This seminar is a graduate-level survey of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, using Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity as a principal text. We begin by explaining this book’s background in the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, including the evolution of conceptions of apriority, analyticity, necessity, and essence. We then consider a series of topics, including names, descriptions, reference, propositional attitudes, sensation, perception, memory, and personhood. We will seek to unify this array by exploring each topic with an eye to the relationship between mind and body.