This comprehensive survey course explores the brain and the biological basis of behavior. We will examine the anatomy of the nervous system and the unique properties of the cells that make up the brain. We will discuss the mechanisms by which individual brains cells communicate with each other, and how small networks of cells underlie more complex processes such as perception, learning, and behavior. In labs, students will perform experiments that expand upon and reinforce these ideas through hands-on exercises.

This course is an introduction to and survey of the biological bases of behavior, including physiological, biochemical, and neurophysiological determinants of sensation, motor control, sleep, eating and drinking, learning and memory, language, and mental disorders.

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.

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 is an introduction to the central topics in epistemology (theory of knowledge) and metaphysics (theory of reality). It will look at questions such as: How is knowledge possible? What is knowledge? Do we know anything? Is time real? What makes you the same person now and in ten years? Could things be otherwise than they are?

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 will focus on three topics to which feminist thinking has made important philosophical contributions: 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'll be looking at work by Simone deBeauvoir, Ronald Dworkin, Sally Haslanger, Rae Langton, Catharine MacKinnon, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The goal will be to see how careful philosophical thought can help us with pressing issues of gender.

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the discussion of public health issues. The class will be co-led by a philosopher and a biologist, with additional guest experts offering a variety of disciplinary and professional perspectives on some of the most complex and vexing current public health issues.