Contemporary medicine gives rise to a variety of moral and philosophical questions. What are the responsibilities of medical researchers towards their subjects? How can we best understand the nature of disability? What moral duties do we have to those at the beginning of life? Do we have reason to be worried about the growth of technology in medicine> How should limited health care resources be distributed? The goals of this course are to improve our understanding of the best arguments on different sides of these questions and to acquire the tools to evaluate those arguments.

An introduction to ancient Greek philosophy, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the works and ideas of three Athenian philosophers who worked and taught in the period between the Persian Wars and the rule of Alexander the Great, more than 2,300 years ago: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Topics to be discussed include: What is the nature of the self? What is truth, and how can it be known? What kind of life should we live? We will work to understand each philosopher's responses to these questions, but we will also learn to develop our own answers.

What do we owe to ourselves and to others? Which actions are right, which are wrong, and how can we tell the difference? Can we give principled answers to questions like these, or is it just a matter of opinion? We will think critically about such questions and some key theoretical approaches to answering them. We will focus on central traditions of Western moral philosophy, typified by Mill, Kant, and Aristotle. We will also consider vexing contemporary moral issues with an eye to whether these theories can guide our actions.

Philosophers through the ages have asked about the nature of happiness and its contribution to the 'good life.' Happiness is something we all want, but what is it? And why do we all want it so much? What makes us happy and why? Is a 'good life' also a happy one? This course will examine happiness from several different perspectives. We will look at what both ancient and contemporary philosophers have said about the nature and importance of happiness in our lives.

Metaphysics is the study of what world is like. This course will survey of some major topics in metaphysics, with a particular focus on radical metaphysical arguments -- arguments that call into question our most basic beliefs about the world. Examples of questions that we will consider include: Do ordinary objects exist? Is there anything that makes persons distinct from other sorts of objects? Could things have been different than the way they in fact are?

This course focuses on the relationship between minds and bodies (the 'mind-body problem'), and the nature of mental phenomena. We will discuss the nature of mental features such as thoughts, sensations, emotions and consciousness, and consider their relationship to the seemingly unthinking, unfeeling, grey matter of the brain. We will read some historical responses to these issues but will focus on insights provided by contemporary philosophy and sciences of the mind, including neuroscience.

This course looks at the recent flowering of non-classical logics. The most prominent are modal logics concerning necessity and possibility, which have come to dominate work in metaphysics and epistemology. Conditional logics, intuitionist logics, and relevance logics have also become important. These logics are particularly useful in graduate-level classes in philosophy but also are interesting in their own right.

Moral relativism describes a family of views that deny the universality of moral claims. So, for example, some philosophers have claimed that statements like 'Torture is morally wrong' can only be assessed as 'true' or 'false' relative to some social agreement about moral norms. In this course, we will survey some contemporary attempts to develop and defend moral relativism, as well as some criticisms of these relativist approaches. Our goal will be to assess arguments for and against moral relativism. Prior coursework in ethics and logic is recommended.

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 brain cells communicate with each other, and how networks of cells underlie more complex processes such as perception, learning, memory, and behavior.