What does morality demand of us in the real world? How does ethical reflection inform our social, economic, and personal lives? Every informed citizen must ask these questions.

Topics course: This course will survey the life and work of Angela Davis. It will explore her upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama, her study in France and background in Marxism, her work on the aesthetic and political significance of Blues legacy in Black Feminism, her involvement with the incarcerated and her continuing work for prison abolition.

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mind, drawing from cognitive psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics and human neuroscience. The class will cover five key problems: vision and imagery, classes and concepts, language, logic and reasoning, and beliefs. We will look at both classic work and contemporary work highlighting the interesting questions. Students will be active participants in trying out classic experiments, exploring new ideas and arguing about the meaning and future of work.

Topics course: What is Ignorance? Is it simply lack of knowledge? What is its relation to illusion, deception, self-deception? What is the difference between being ignorant of something and ignoring it? Is ignorance something for which one can be held responsible? Something for which one can be punished? Something for which one can be rewarded? To what social and political ends has ignorance been put, and how?

Introduction to the issues and methods of modern linguistics, including morphology, syntax, semantics, phonology and pragmatics. The focus is on the revolution in linguistics introduced by Noam Chomsky, and the profound questions it raises for human nature, linguistic universals and language acquisition.

Among the most important and philosophically intriguing results in 20th-century logic are the limitative theorems such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Tarski’s demonstration of the indefinability of truth in certain languages. A wide variety of approaches to resolving fundamental mathematical and semantical paradoxes have emerged in the wake of these results, as well as a variety of alternative logics including paraconsistent logics in which contradictions are tolerated.

Design is one of the most pervasive human activities. Its effects—intended or unintended—permeate our lives. Questions abound about the role of design and the significance of being able to exercise it and of being subject to it. For example: Are there particular pleasures, as well as special responsibilities, characteristic of designing? What is the nature of deprivation imposed upon people when they lack the opportunity or the knowledge to share in the design of their living or working conditions? How much control do designers actually have over the meaning and use of what they design?

Intensive practice in writing and discussing philosophy and in applying philosophical methods to key problems raised in essays written by members of the philosophy department. The spring semester course must be taken by the end of the student's sophomore year unless the department grants a deferral or the student declares the major itself during the spring of her sophomore year. Minors are encouraged but not required to take the class. Prerequisite: Two college courses in philosophy, one of which may be taken concurrently, or permission of the instructor.

The course provides an introduction to deductive and inductive logic. It introduces classical Aristotelian and modern truth-functional logic; explains the relationship between truth-functional logic, information science and probability; and it introduces basic features of statistical and causal reasoning in the sciences. This course is designed for students who are uncomfortable with symbolic systems. It is not a follow-up to LOG 100. Students who have taken LOG 100 cannot receive credit for taking PHI 101 subsequently.