This course provides an introduction to the skills necessary for becoming good producers and consumers of psychological research. Students learn to develop research questions, survey related literature, design rigorous and ethically sound studies, and collect, analyze, and interpret quantitative and qualitative data. Students build on their computer skills relevant for psychological research and learn to read and critique original empirical journal articles. The course culminates in an original, collaborative research project, a final paper, and an oral presentation.

How do we make decisions, form attachments, and learn a language? Can we inherit schizophrenia? Why are we fearful of some situations and not others? What factors influence the way we form attitudes or develop prejudices? This course addresses such questions to provide an overview of current research in psychology.

As the study of knowledge and related concepts like justification, rationality, and evidence, epistemology is of central importance, and not just to philosophy. This course provides an introduction to epistemology through a number of epistemological problems or puzzles about skepticism, dogmatism, and humility.

Over the last century, advancements in medical practice have introduced new ethical questions and made old problems more pressing. Given the possibility of painless death, is it wrong for physicians to assist terminally-ill patients who wish to end their life? Should parents exercise control over the genetic makeup of their children? How should we distribute scarce medical resources? This course gives students the tools needed to think critically about these questions and arrive at better and more thoughtful answers to them.

Living in today's world presents distinctive and pressing moral problems. What are the responsibilities of individuals, particularly individuals living in relatively affluent societies, to prevent climate change, or to alleviate the harms caused by it? How should we act to prevent war, and should we ever initiate wars in order to prevent greater evils (such as terrorism)? What responsibilities do citizens of relatively affluent nations have to prevent and ameliorate poverty and global inequality?

The goal of this course is to see how careful philosophical thought can help us with pressing issues that women face. We approach this topic through a distinctly feminist lens, as opposed to a traditional philosophical, queer theoretic, or gender studies lens. We will draw on a variety of philosophical resources, ranging from liberal and feminist political theory, to speech act theory. Possible questions we will consider include: What is objectification? What is consent? Is pornography degrading? How does sexism and bias lead to bad science?

This course develops a symbolic system that can be used as the basis for inference in all fields. It will provide syntax and semantics for the language of this system and investigate its adequacy. It provides the basis for all further work in logic or in the philosophical foundations of mathematics. Much of the course has a mathematical flavor, but no knowledge of mathematics is necessary.

This course examines the development of Western philosophy from the 17th through the 19th centuries by examining selected writings of Descartes, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.