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

Selected topics in philosophy of language, such as truth, meaning, reference, names, descriptions, demonstratives.

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.