Schedule

Tuesday & Thursday, 3:45-5:00 in Fischer Hall 4.12

Topic

Philosophical theology, broadly construed, includes the following topics: (1) questions about the nature of God; (2) questions about meaning and coherence of the doctrines of particular religions; and (3) questions about the nature of religious belief. We will discuss some questions under each of these headings. Just which questions we discuss will be largely up to you and the other members of the class. (We'll pick them the first day.)
      One topic we will focus on is diversity of religious views held by different people around the world, and the question of what (if anything) the existence of religious diversity tells us about whether it is reasonable to believe in one religion over another.

Texts

All readings will be made available in PDF form via links from the syllabus.

Assignments

Youy will write three short papers for the course; each paper will be a defense of your view on one of the topics we discuss in the class. You may choose to write about whatever topics you wish, though at least one of the three papers must be completed in the first half of the semester. A guide to the paper assignments is here. In addition, you will be expected to participate in the web forum set up for members of the class. You will be expected to submit questions the day before each class, and be active in commenting on threads in the forum. As part of our exploration of questions of religious diversity, each of you will also be asked to explore the enormous religious diversity to be found in the city of London by visiting religious services of at least three different religious groups. (I will provide you with some options, though you're also free to go off on your own.) You'll present on your findings at the end of the semester. I'll provide you with more details on each of these assignments as the semester goes on.

Grading

Your grade will be determined as follows:

• 20% for each of your three papers
• 15% for your final presentation
• 10% for participation in the web forum
• 15% for participation in class

Each assignment is required, in the sense that failure to complete one or more assignments is sufficient to fail the course.

Notre Dame has no official way of indexing numerical grades to letter grades. This is the system that will be used in this course:

A	94+
A-	90-93
B+	87-89
B	83-86
B-	80-82
C+	77-79
C	73-76
C-	70-72
D	60-69
F	59-

Honor code

In all of their assignments, students are responsible for compliance with the University’s honor code, information about which is available here. You should acquaint yourself with the policies and penalties described there.

Sometimes, it can be hard to know what, exactly, the honor code implies with respect to different disciplines. For this reason, the philosophy department has prepared a document explaining, using examples, what the honor code requires of students when writing a philosophy paper. I strongly recommend that you read this document, which is available here. It is possible to violate the honor code without intending to do so; the best way to avoid this is to carefully read through the philosophy department's guidelines.

If you are in doubt about what the honor code requires of you in a particular case, please ask me.

Contact information

You should feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about the course, or about how you're doing in the course — or if you just want to pursue some of the topics we're discussing further.

You can always get in touch with me by email, and this often the easiest route if you just have a quick question about the readings or assignments. I'm also very happy to meet in person. My office hours this semester are by appointment, so just send me a message and we can set up a time that works for both of us.

Philosophy on the internet

The internet offers a wealth of terrible philosophy. Fortunately, it also offers some very good philosophy.

In my view, the best philosophy resource on the internet is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Another good resource, which occasionally covers topics not covered by the SEP, is the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (which is only accessible if you are on the ND network or that of another subscribing institution).The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy can also be valuable. Wikipedia is much, much less reliable.

Increasingly, journal articles are also available online (though, as above, usually only if you are connected to a university network). JStor is an especially good place to download articles (though usually not articles from the last few years) from a number of leading philosophy journals.

Notre Dame's library also contains links to online resources. If you are searching for an article online, a good place to begin is with the library's QuickSearch for Philosophy.

Philosophy at Notre Dame

Notre Dame offers a few different options for students interested in pursuing a major, minor, or interdisciplinary minor. For an overview of the various options, click here.

There are lots of philosophy-related events at Notre Dame. A useful overview is on the department's event page.

On the department web page you can also view course descriptions for current and upcoming philosophy courses.

Contact information

You should feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about the course, or about how you're doing in the course — or if you just want to pursue some of the topics we're discussing further.

You can always get in touch with me by email, and this often the easiest route if you just have a quick question about the readings or assignments. I'm also very happy to meet in person. My office hours this semester are by appointment, so just send me a message and we can set up a time that works for both of us.

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