Description not available at this time

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?

Introduction to contemporary methods in philosophical research and writing.

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.

Critical study of recent work in moral philosophy. May include utilitarian, Kantian, or other normative theories, as well as naturalistic, nonnaturalistic, or emotivist theories in metaethics.

This is a course on some of the central topics in the philosophy of art, including (i) The Demarcation Problem (what is art?), (ii) The Existential Problem (what is art for?), (iii) the ontology of art objects (are novels and musical compositions created or discovered?), and (iv) the nature of aesthetic value

Topics may include knowledge, epistemic justification, belief, truth, perception, skepticism.