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The area exam practicum is designed to deepen and test a student's familiarity with the area of philosophy that is the student's proposed area of research for the doctoral dissertation. Students must form a committee, agree with the committee on a reading list, produce a document summarizing the philosophical theses in the reading list, and then take an oral examination regarding the area in question.

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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.

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?

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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.

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