Course Descriptions

Course Description: As one might come out of a music appreciation class able to hear melodies and harmonies that had previously been hidden to one's ear, this course will also be an appreciation class of sorts. The subject matter of philosophy, however, is life and the interpretive veil through which we see it. So, in studying philosophy one gains entry to dimensions of one's world that were previously unexplored. ||This course will introduce you to the work of philosophical reasoning and reflection by foregrounding philosophical questions in six different branches of philosophy: ||Epistemology: What is the criteria for truth? What sorts of things can we know to be true? |Metaphysics: What constitutes reality? |Philosophy of Science: To what extent can science be used to obtain the truth? |Ethics: How can we determine what the right thing to do is? |Social Philosophy: How does the social world impact our personal identities and how we experience the world? |Political Philosophy: What forms of freedom are most meaningful?||We will begin the course by exploring how philosophical reasoning works. The course will then be divided into six sections: Epistemology & Metaphysics (Descartes, Locke); Philosophy of Science (Olser); Political Philosophy (Marcuse); Social Philosophy (Lugones); Ethics (Aristotle).|

Course Description: We will begin this course with an introduction to philosophical thinking and what it means to engage an issue in an ethical manner. We will be studying a combination of philosophical schools of thought and specific ethical issues. The first ethical system we will study this semester will be Utilitarianism, and we will be reading Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Next, we will look at a duty-based ethical system of the German Enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Students will then take the first exam and work on the argument building skills that are essential to philosophy. After that, we will swing back to the world of ancient Greece to examine the virtue ethics of Aristotle (367 BC-347 BC), followed by Stoicism. Last, we will look at Care Ethics, noting how it contrasts with justice-based ethical systems. Along the way, we will be using these systems to think through contemporary ethical issues, applying the ideas to things that you have encountered in your every day lives.