How do words come to mean things? Frege introduced two aspects of meaning: reference, that is, whatever expressions pick out in the world, and sense, a publicly accessible means by which expressions pick out their references, which must be grasped by all speakers. This course is an extended examination of the concept of sense, the uses to which it has been put, and the criticisms that have been lodged against it. We'll look at Frege's work, the complaints made by Quine and Kripke, Davidson's theory of meaning, and Dummett's defense of sense.

Is life absurd? Do human beings really want to be free? Or do we prefer to sacrifice our freedom for comfort and amusement? Is God dead? Is it possible to live without religious belief? These are among the central questions about human life raised by existentialist thinkers. We will discuss these issues, and many others, through careful reading works of literature and philosophy by such important existentialists as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Fanon, and Samuel Beckett.

This course will focus on topics to which feminist thinking has made important philosophical contributions, such as: pornography, objectification, and consent. We will draw on a variety of philosophical resources, ranging from liberal and feminist political theory, to speech act theory. We will consider questions such as: Is pornography morally problematic? Can sexism or other biases lead to bad science? Is it wrong to choose to be a stay-at-home parent? The goal will be to see how careful philosophical thought can help us with pressing issues of sex and gender.

Mary Lyon said 'When you choose your fields of labor, go where no one else will go.' For most students attending a college like Mount Holyoke, one of the most important questions is: what career should I prepare to pursue after graduation? When most of us think about this question, we tend to think about self-centered considerations: what will make us happy, or express our talents, or provide financial independence. This class examines the ethical aspects of choosing a career.

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.

Investigates the development of Western philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the writings of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. Focus on the apparent conflict between modern natural science and traditional religion as sources of knowledge and belief. Topics include the nature and extent of human knowledge, the nature of the mind, the existence of God, and the possibility of human freedom.

This course will explore topics that philosophers have grappled with for thousands of years, and that still undergird (or sometimes threaten to undermine) our understanding of the world, our knowledge, ourselves, and each other. In historical and modern texts of the Western intellectual tradition, we will discuss questions such as: What exists? What knowledge can we claim? What are people like? What is, or should be, our role in the world? In considering these answers, we will learn to do philosophy ourselves, developing our own careful reflections on these issues.

In this course we go behind the scenes and behind the screens of anthropological films, museum exhibitions, 'small media'; events such as television, and publications such as National Geographic Magazine, to explore the social contexts of image production, distribution, and interpretation. Focusing on visual activism and ethics, we consider how popular portrayals of our own society and of others' both shape and are shaped by hierarchies of value in the material world.

This course examines anthropological fieldwork techniques, including interviewing and participant observation, as well as qualitative approaches to the analysis of cultural data. Topics include cross-cultural field techniques, research design, ethical dilemmas, and the difference between academic and applied research. Research projects are an integral part of this course.

This course will review the key issues and paradigm shifts in the development of anthropology from its foundations in classical thought through its emergence as an independent discipline to its coming-of-age in the 1960s. The readings will include works from the American, British, and Continental traditions.