Graduate level seminar in a specific topic in Normative Ethics. See UMass Philosophy Department's homepage (Graduate Courses tab) for further information about the topic of this course.

Selected topic in the philosophy of mind, such as intentionality of the mental, relation between the mental and the physical, connection between thought and action, and ways of verifying the existence of various mental states.

Selected topics in the philosophy of science, such as confirmation, laws, causation, explanation, and scientific realism.

Critical survey of basic issues concerning knowledge. Representative questions include What is knowledge? Can knowledge be purely a priori? Is there a defensible distinction between the analytic and the synthetic? What is the nature of empirical evidence? Is it possible to justify inductive inference? How can we confirm beliefs about unobservable entities?

This is a seminar on the metaphysics of free will. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the idea that agent causation plays a crucial role in solving the problem of freedom and determinism, and some writers have been exploring the possibility of combining agent causation with compatibilism. In this course we will examine some of the recent literature on these and related topics.

Introduction to contemporary methods in philosophical research and writing.

Not available at this time

The goal of this course to develop a piece of philosophical writing from an initial draft into a polished piece of philosophical work. The instructor and student must agree on the paper to work on at the beginning of the practicum, which in many cases will be a past term paper written for another course which the student has received good feedback on, but still requires improvement. The student and faculty member will meet to discuss drafts of the paper and ways to improve it, including doing additional research, refining the philosophical argumentation, and improving the writing.

Not available at this time

We usually understand novel sentences - e.g., this one - with little or no hesitation. How do we accomplish this? According to the received opinion, our linguistic knowledge divides into two modules - roughly, words and rules - which in turn correspond respectively to Lexical Grammar and Compositional Grammar. The present course concerns Compositional Grammar, more specifically Compositional Semantics -the study of how the meanings of compound expressions are derived from the meanings of their parts.