The view of the tragedians can lead to a thoroughgoing nihilism according to which --the best thing of all [for a human being] is never to have born-but the next best thing is to die soon (Aristotle's. In this course, we will examine some central texts in ancient Greek and Roman moral philosophy. However, few (haters gonna hate) would say that the expression has a referent. Attention to the writing process and developing an authorial voice will be a recurrent focus of our work inside and outside the classroom. The view of the tragedians can lead to a thoroughgoing nihilism according to which --the best thing of all [for a human being] is never to have born-but the next best thing is to die soon (Aristotle's Eudemus as quoted in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy; see also Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus)." These affect not only our particular choices but also, more fundamentally, who we are and what we value. Readings will include work by Plato, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, and contemporary authors. Epistemologists seek answers to the following kinds of questions: When is it rational to have a particular belief? We will then turn to a variety of more recent attempts to give a clear characterization of causation. Other topics could include: Zeno's paradoxes of motion and plurality, the liar's paradox, the surprise-exam paradox, paradoxes of material constitution, Newcomb's Problem , and the Prisoner's Dilemma. For example, we will examine the ethics of disease surveillance, treatment and vaccine research, resource allocation and rationing, compulsion and voluntariness in public health measures, and social determinants of health outcomes, among other topics. [more], Epistemology is one of the core areas of philosophical reflection. Locke is the first great Empiricist Realist, and Leibniz the greatest Rationalist Idealist. We will begin with Washington's classic article "Industrial Education for the Negro" and DuBois' classic "The Talented Tenth". Fanon ushered in the decolonial turn in critical theory, a move calling on those both within and outside of Europe to challenge the coloniality of the age and to forge a new vision of politics in the postcolonial period. And, Existentialists express their thought in philosophical treatises as often as in literary works. Nevertheless, comparatively few people realize that the views we commonly think of as "Platonic" represent only one strand in Plato's thought. The course will present the essential ideas of relativity theory and quantum theory and explore their implications for philosophy. However, this approach is too narrow, since people use language to do a myriad of things: to ask, demand, promise, praise, blame, threaten, command, insinuate, evoke, express feelings, and sometimes just to play. Wilfrid Sellars regarded as uncontroversial the view that it is "an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." Secondly, we will try to make sense of the moral dimensions of our relationship to animals. Our main goal will be to prove things about this logical system rather than to use this system to think about ordinary language arguments. Is it possible to have systematic knowledge of subjective experience? [more], In this course we will examine traditional philosophical approaches to understanding death and related concepts, with a special focus on the ethical concerns surrounding death and care for the dying. For each argument, we will first look at historically important formulations and then turn to contemporary reformulations. "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality." In Language, Metaphysics, and Death. Could we (individually and socially) educate and cultivate them? For that matter, what are logical theorems even about? The first portion of the course will be devoted to developing and understanding four moral principles which have come to be accepted as canonical: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. In addition we'll also look at feminist analyses of topics that traditionally have not been regarded as "gendered," such as resource allocation and end of life issues. Our seminar will have two aims: (1) to reconstruct the single most compelling moral theory from Kant's various ethical writings, and (2) to trace the influence of Kant's ethics in contemporary philosophy. Perhaps, then, economics is not primarily a predictive science, but instead a descriptive, historical, and/or mathematical one. These affect not only our particular choices but also, more fundamentally, who we are and what we value. Nietzsche texts may include selections from: historical traditions. Phil Walsh played 122 games for Collingwood, Richmond and the Brisbane Bears between 1983 and 1990. Could we (individually and socially) educate and cultivate them? See if you can figure out why this is sometimes called a paradox, and then ask yourself what this has to do with our opening questions. We doubt, we point out that no one can be certain in what she believes, and we are suspicious of declarations of transcendent reason or truth (unless they are our own). this fact? The stoics and skeptics both claimed a Socratic imprimatur for their own thought. The philosophical study of what we do in language, and how we understand one another, is called pragmatics; within the analytic tradition, the main philosophical contributions to the study of pragmatics in language came from Peirce, Wittgenstein, Austen, Grice and Searle. In this course we'll examine several influential attempts to provide a rational foundation for morality, along with Nietzsche's wholesale rejection of these efforts. The goals of this course are to improve the critical thinking of the students, to introduce them to sentential and predicate logic, to familiarize them with enough formal logic to enable them to read some of the great works of philosophy, which use formal logic (such as Wittgenstein's Tractatus), and to examine some of the connections between logic and philosophy. His thought influenced the thought of subsequent generations of philosophers. What does it mean to be "philosophical" or to think "theoretically" about politics? Much of the moral philosophy produced in Greece and Rome remains as relevant today as when it was written. philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were among the first thinkers to develop rigorous arguments in response to such musings. In particular, one must grasp that "three of them" picks out a subset of the group picked out by "every cookie", and that there's no such thing as a cookie that is both chocolate chip, Minds, Brains, and Intelligent Behavior: An Introduction to Cognitive Science. Some critical theorists within the Frankfurt School tradition draw from upon ideas about the constitution of the subject developed in the early 19th century German philosophy of Hegel. How much inference goes into interpreting what's said? He died on 30 September 2020. Finally, there are those who do not think philosophy can contribute much at all to answering such questions and others who question its claims to universality given its associations with colonialism, racism, sexism, etc. Although we will attempt to engage the readings on their own terms, we will also ask how the vast differences between the ancient world and our own undercut or enhance the texts' ability to illuminate the dilemmas of political life for us. In addition to examining general accounts of causation, we will examine particular problems that come up in thinking about mental causation and causation in indeterministic contexts. More than this, Existentialists emphasize the subjective relation we bear to our belief systems, moral codes, and personal identities. We will read some representative works from each of these schools of thought to see how each approaches Socrates. The second portion of the course will use feminist philosophy to inform our understanding of the ways in which gender structures the individual's interactions with the health care system. "Near-Death Experiences." In How to Think About Weird Things. More than this, Existentialists emphasize the subjective relation we bear to our belief systems, moral codes, and personal identities. Our focus will be on recent influential work in this area. Right? While engaging these texts, we will continually reflect on their relevance for thinking about the problems facing liberal democracies today, particularly in the U.S. [more], In this tutorial we will examine a number of prominent and controversial social issues, using our study of them both as an opportunity to better understand the moral dimensions of those issues in and of themselves, and to consider the ways in which selected classical and contemporary moral theories characterize and address those moral dimensions. In addressing these substantive questions, we will also consider which methodological approach--if a single one can be privileged--we should adopt for examining emotions. Our tools in this course will be logic and reason, even when we are trying to determine what the limits of reason might be. Safety measures are in place, and campus community members and guests are additionally advised to take personal precautions. We will begin with John Stuart Mill's powerful defense of free speech in On Liberty, but will then investigate challenges to Mill's traditional liberalism from thinkers, such as Catharine MacKinnon, who believe that such rights are never neutral. What makes an individual's life go well? In this course, we will survey the ethics of public health through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating concepts and arguments that are central to the ethics of public health research and practice. Are there metaphysical and ideological assumptions in contemporary psychiatry, and if so, could and should they be avoided? We will examine a variety of philosophical and scientific theories of emotion, as well as some issues concerning normative aspects of emotions: the role of emotions in a good life, and the concept of emotional maturity. What, if anything, justifies our scientific knowledge? of subjectivity, the scope of reflexivity, the nature of perceptual presence, etc. Its probing and intimate reflections on the meaning of human life, the nature of God and mind, time and eternity, will and world, good and evil, love and sexuality have challenged every generation since Augustine's own. We will begin with questions about how to define death, as well as reflections on its meaning and function in human life. Others maintain that these questions will only yield to methods that incorporate our broader insight into the nature of the world including, perhaps, feminist thought or science. To name just a few ways: We treat animals as companions, as food, as objects of wonder in the wild, as resources to be harvested, as testing grounds for science, and as religious sacrifice. Reasoning and Inference: The Philosophy of Logic, and thinking within formal systems and how to prove various things within these systems. We will thus be led to discuss some of the concepts common to epistemology, metaphysics and ethics: reason, justification, objectivity, understanding, reality and truth. Our study will definitely include Frege, Russell, Quine, Searle, and Kripke. Just today (15 February 2022). The first portion of the course will be devoted to considering general theories of justice as well as alternative conceptions of justice specifically within the health care context. Topics will depend to some extent on student interest, but are likely to include concerns that fall under such headings as euthanasia, conscientious eating, abortion, the ethics of protest, and Covid-19. How does film generate meaning? Why do we seek to experience through film fear and anguish that we avoid in our daily lives? Among other things, these critics challenged Rawls' interpretation and defense of the social contract framework, the ideals of freedom and equality, the content of principles of justice, political neutrality about the good, the nature of the self, the division between public and private spheres, and the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory. . And, it's not merely that their answer invokes our freedom to determine our own identities. Frege, Russell, and the Early Wittgenstein. this course, we will consider the relationship between freedom and social order. Aristotle expresses in these books were instrumental in setting an intellectual agenda that dominated western thought through the Middle Ages and provided the backdrop against which the modern philosophical tradition arose. What is the mind? In this tutorial, will read works in critical theory from the 18th century to the present, some from the Frankfurt tradition, and some not. This introduction will be of use to students interested in language from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science. The AFL abandoned the Crows' game against Geelong on Sunday, the club called the tragedy an unprecedented crisis and a family has been torn apart. We will discuss the importance of specific genre conventions and broader contextual matters to the interpretation of literary texts (along the lines suggested by Quentin Skinner); the possibility of using intention to rule out mistaken and arrive at acceptable interpretations, if not a single correct interpretation (a possibility denied by such relativists as Stanley Fish); the use and meaning of metaphors; and the host of questions surrounding the intentional fallacy (the alleged result of invoking authorial intention to determine textual meaning). We will spend the balance of the semester coming to grips with Plato's arguments in the later dialogues. Unsurprisingly, philosophers have proffered a variety of answers to these questions, prompting one philosopher to remark, half-jokingly, that "there are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers." [more], This course will explore the themes of alienation, fetishism, ideology, dialectic, sociality, and freedom in the philosophical writings of G.W.F. Or is it a supreme illusion, a dream-like escape, the domain in which the viewer's unconscious wishes are magically fulfilled? Safety measures are in place, and campus community members and guests are additionally advised to take personal precautions. His depiction of the trial and death of Socrates is one of the classics of western literature, and his views on ethics and politics continue to occupy a central place in our discussions 2400 years after they were written. Ms. Sydney Walsh-Wilcox 83 P23 (Sibling), Mr. John C. Walsh (decd) 54 P99 85 83 (Parent). 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