Syllabus
Date |
Topics |
Reading green=optional |
Handouts & assignments |
| Tuesday, August 25 | Philosophy & arguments | none | Introduction to the course Valid or invalid? |
| Does God exist? | |||
| Thursday, August 27 | The cosmological argument, pt 1 | Aquinas, The Five Ways | |
| Tuesday, September 1 | The cosmological argument, pt. 2 | van Inwagen, ch. 7: "Necessary being: the cosmological argument" |
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| Thursday, September 3 | The design argument | van Inwagen, ch. 8 & 9: "What rational beings are there?" & "The place of rational beings in the world: design and purpose" |
Second draft of mini-paper due |
| Tuesday, September 8 | A reply to the design argument | Dawkins, "Why there almost certainly is no God" | |
| Thursday, September 10 | Pascal's wager | Pascal, Pensees (selection) | |
| Tuesday, September 15 | The problem of evil | Mackie, "Evil and omnipotence" | |
| Thursday, September 17 | The free will defense | van Inwagen, "The problem of evil" (excerpt) | |
| What does it mean to say that we have free will? Could we have free will even if God knows in advance what we're going to do? | |||
| Tuesday, September 22 | Free will and determinism | van Inwagen, ch. 12: "The powers of rational beings: freedom of the will" | Final draft of mini-paper due |
| Thursday, September 24 | The problem of free will and foreknowledge & Aquinas' solution | Edwards, Freedom of the Will (excerpt) |
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| Tuesday, September 29 | Fate & freedom | Taylor, "Fate" Chiang, "What's Expected of Us" |
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| Are persons material things, immaterial souls, or something else? Does it make sense to believe in life after death, and is there reason to do so? |
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| Thursday, October 1 | Dualism & the immortality of the soul | Descartes, Meditations (excerpt) Mendelssohn, On the Immortality of the Soul (excerpt) |
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| Tuesday, October 6 | Problems for the dualist | van Inwagen, ch. 10: "The nature of rational beings: dualism and physicalism" | |
| Thursday, October 8 | The psychological theory of persons | Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (excerpt) | |
| Tuesday, October 13 | Psychology and the dissolving self | Parfit, "Divided minds and the nature of persons" Nagel, "Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness" |
First 5-page paper due |
| Thursday, October 15 | Materialist views of persons | van Inwagen, ch. 11: "The nature of rational beings: dualism and personal identity" |
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| October 20 & 22: fall break | |||
| Tuesday, October 27 | Materialism and life after death | Hume, "Of the immortality of the soul" |
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| Is time real? Does time travel make sense? Is only the present moment real? | |||
| Thursday, October 29 | McTaggart's paradox | McTaggart, "Time" from The Nature of Existence |
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| Tuesday, November 3 | Time and space-time | Sider, "Time" | |
| Thursday, November 5 | Defending the present | van Inwagen, ch.4: "Temporality" |
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| Is it ever possible to act altruistically, or are all actions really self-interested? Is there any reason why we ought not to act in a self-interested way? | |||
| Tuesday, November 10 | Psychological egoism | Feinberg, "Psychological egoism" | |
| Thursday, November 12 | Rational egoism | Plato, Republic II (excerpt) |
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| What makes an action right or wrong? Should we judge actions by their consequences, or some other way? | |||
| Tuesday, November 17 | Consequentialism and the theory of value | Mill, Utilitarianism II & IV Nozick, "The experience machine" |
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| Thursday, November 19 | Consequentialism applied | Singer, "Famine, affluence, and morality" | Second 5-page paper due |
| Tuesday, November 24 | Objections to consequentialism | Thomson, "Killing, letting die, and the trolley problem" |
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| November 26 THANKSGIVING |
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| Tuesday, December 1 | Kant's ethics | ||
| Thursday, December 3 | class canceled | ||
| Tuesday, December 8 | Virtue ethics | Anscombe, "Modern moral philosophy" | |
| Thursday, December 10 | Concluding discussion | none | |
| Third 5-7 page paper due on 12/14 | |||