PHIL 101 - INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

Essential philosophical questions in ethics, way of life, science, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, political theory, and religion. The most compelling and thoughtful answers to be found in writings of classic and contemporary philosophers.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

PHIL 102 - PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE

This course is a lively mix of philosophy and psychology. We will consider various ways of life and discuss happiness, meaningfulness, completeness, unity, memory, the experience of time, awareness of mortality, and vividness of experience.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

PHIL 103 - HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

We will go on a tour of the most influential ideas of beauty, knowledge, morality, and truth. The course ranges from the ancient world through the 20th century.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

PHIL 130 - JUSTICE, LIBERTY, EQUALITY

This course covers contemporary problems and theoretical reflections drawn from ancient, modern and contemporary sources about justice, liberty and equality.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

PHIL 203 - THE ARABIAN NIGHTS

Arabian Nights, or as it is sometimes called, One Thousand and One Nights, is one of the great works of world literature. Its influence in both the Arabic world and the west has been immense. But do the many stories that make it up have a common theme? Those stories are told by a young woman, Scheherazade, to keep herself alive. If the king loses interest in the stories she tells each night, he will have her executed; every night is thus a test she must pass. The imaginative stories range over themes that are of the utmost importance in thinking about what the nature of human beings is, ranging from justice to liberty to equality to knowledge to happiness. But if there is one theme that dominates the work it is despotism, and how to combat it. The stories are relatively short, and a joy to read.

Credits: 3

Course Notes: Open to first-year students.Philosophy majors or minors should register for the course as PHIL 203.

PHIL 204 - PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

This course is an exploration from many angles of ideas about God, faith and reason, religious experience, the problem of evil, and the connection (or lack thereof) between religion and morality.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Non-western Culture, Social Science

Prerequisites: ENG 102 (may be taken concurrently)

PHIL 206 - PHILOSOPHY IN LITERATURE

Philosophical problems found in selected novels, short stories, plays, poems, and essays.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: ENG 102 (may be taken concurrently)

PHIL 210 - LOGIC

As a subject, the overall purpose of logic is to distinguish between valid and invalid arguments, i.e. good reasoning which could prove something and bad reasoning which cannot. This course will introduce you to methods for telling the difference. Includes deductive and inductive logic; analysis of propositions and arguments and fallacies of reasoning.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Legal Studies, Social Science

PHIL 219 - WORLD RELIGIONS

A survey of the histories and beliefs of the major world religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Satisfies non-Western requirement.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, International Studies, Non-western Culture, Social Science

PHIL 220 - BUDDHISM

Origins of Buddhism in ancient India. Major schools of Buddhist thought in contrast to Western philosophy. Contemporary Buddhism in the West.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Non-western Culture

PHIL 230 - ETHICS

We will consider morality and ethics in their relation to science, society, and happiness. We will take a look at classical ethical systems such (as those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche), but also Eastern classics and contemporary innovations and challenges.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Course Notes: Sophomore standing

PHIL 233 - BIOMEDICAL ETHICS

The age of biotechnology is upon us. In this course we will explore issues such as: the ethics of experimentation, cloning and organ generation; the use of genetic information; euthanasia; psychopharmacology and memory/character manipulation; the patient's rights and dignity (including questions of identity and individuality, body and mind, birth and death, sex and procreation).

Credits: 3

Course Notes: Must have completed one course in Biology, Chemistry, or Philosophy. Both students in the College of Humanities, Education and the Social Sciences and the College of Science, Health and Pharmacy are encouraged to enroll.

PHIL 240 - THE ENLIGHTENMENT

This course will examine philosophical and political texts, along with works of drama, music, and art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These investigations will serve a larger mission of answering the dominant question of this unique period of history: What is Enlightenment?

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, International Studies, Social Science

PHIL 250 - ON HAPPINESS

A consideration of alternative conceptions of human fulfillment; among other themes, we will examine the relation of happiness to love, morality, and mortality.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

PHIL 251 - PHILOSOPHY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

We will study the scientific, ethical, and political implications of artificial intelligence. Questions will include: the meaning of intelligence, reasoning, and deliberation; the problem of the relation between image and language; digitization vs. embodiment; the political promise and peril of AI.

Credits: 3

Course Notes: Must have completed one course in Biology, Chemistry, or Philosophy. Students majoring in both the sciences and the humanities are encouraged to enroll.

PHIL 323 - PERSIAN LETTERS

A study of Montesquieu's eighteenth-century epistolary novel, Persian Letters. We will search for deep and abiding thoughts about human nature, human diversity, human passions, human depravity, religion, war, tyranny, the oppression of women, liberty, glory, science, human possibility, and human happiness. An extraordinary philosophical, literary, and political journey.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Course Notes: One course in Philosophy or one in Literature required.

PHIL 324 - POLITICS & LITERATURE

A philosophical understanding of political life through the reading of literature. Topics may include oppression, tyranny, compromise, jealousy, friendship, equality, liberty, and justice.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: 3 Credit Hours of Philosophy or 3 Credit Hours of Political Sci. or ENG 102

Course Notes: Students must have completed either a) a philosophy or a political science or an English literature course; or b) ENG 102.

PHIL 326 - PANDEMICS PHILOSOPHERS & POETS

Viruses that cause large numbers of deaths world-wide and spread relatively unabated are more common historically than one might have thought. Pandemic diseases have led philosophers and poets, among others, to reflect on human fragility, mortality, the bonds of human society, pain and anguish, caring, trust, and commitment to others, etc. This course will think through questions about pandemic diseases through readings from Thucydides, Lucretius, Boccaccio's Decameron, Samuel Pepys, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and Hannah Arendt on loneliness and solitude.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: 3 Credit Hours of Philosophy

Course Notes: One course in PHIL with a minimum grade of C required d or consent of instructor.

PHIL 330 - PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE

A philosophical examination of the fundamental differences between the natural world and the human world and between the world of necessity and the world of artifice.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Course Notes: One course in philosophy.

PHIL 331 - PHILOSOPHY OF TECHNOLOGY

Social and ethical implications of new technology; problems in contemporary environmental ethics.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Course Notes: 3 SH of PHIL with a min grade of C required or consent of instructor.

PHIL 342 - POLITICS AND SOCIETY

A philosophical study of the nature of politics and the nature of society. What is the relationship between society and culture? What is the role of art in society? What is politics? Is it a necessary feature of modern life? Why does it take the forms that it does? Why are politics and conflict so tightly knitted together? We will consider these questions through readings drawn from philosophy, sociology, political science, and economics and authors such as Georg Simmel, Hans Speier, Alfred Schutz, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edward Shils, F.A. Hayek, Annette Baier, Judith Shklar, and Karl Marx.

Credits: 3

PHIL 343 - PHILOSOPHY & TYRANNY

A philosophical study of tyranny through the writings of Sophocles, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, Montesquieu, Marx and Hannah Arendt.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: 3 Credit Hours of Philosophy

PHIL 350 - PHILOSOPHY IN FILM

Every film presents to its audience a world and a way of sensing and thinking about that world. Cinema possesses what we might call a thought-function: cinema incites us to think, to think through and with the diverse worlds presented in films. To the extent that philosophy consists in an effort to think clearly and rigorously about the world and the problems it comprises, it follows that there is much of philosophical interest in cinema. In this class, then, we will attend to cinema’s thought-function, endeavoring to think philosophically about cinema—and even, perhaps, to think cinematically about philosophy.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

PHIL 355 - EXISTENTIALISM

We will explore issues of human freedom, commitment, vulnerability, and authenticity by reading authors such as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Camus

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: 3 Credit Hours of Philosophy

Course Notes: 1 course in PHIL.

PHIL 361 - METAPHYSICS ANCIENT AND MODERN

Metaphysics Ancient and Modern. We will explore the greatest questions of metaphysics: the relation between speech, being, and soul, between the visible and the intelligible, and between the perishable and the imperishable.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Course Notes: Prerequisites: 3 hrs of PHIL w/min grade of C.

PHIL 371 - HERODOTUS

This is a one book course on Herodotus's 'Histories' a work which is at the same time historical, literary, and philosophical. The themes of the 'Histories' are timely because they are timeless: freedom, slavery, tyranny, oppression, diversity, national character, the power of speech and the power of deed, and eros and its perversions.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Course Notes: 1 course in Philosophy required.

PHIL 372 - PLATO ON LOVE

This course is devoted to Plato’s dialogue, The Symposium, the subject of which is love.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: 3 Credit Hours of Philosophy

PHIL 374 - UTOPIAS

A study of literary and philosophical utopias, imaginary best societies, and fictional perfect communities. Dystopian considerations will be raised as well. Books considered may include: Thomas More's Utopia, Lucian’s True Story, Alfarabi's Virtuous Regime, Aristophanes' Birds, Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora, Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth, Bogdanov’s Red Star, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, etc

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: 3 Credit Hours of Philosophy

PHIL 384 - PHILOSOPHICAL PSYCHOLOGY

An examination of fundamental psychological concepts (e.g., perception, consciousness, memory, shame, emotions and rationality) from a philosophical perspective.

Credits: 3

Attributes: Humanities, Social Science

Prerequisites: 3 Credit Hours of Philosophy

PHIL 395 - INDEPENDENT STUDY

Study of a particular philosopher, movement, or problem.

Credits: 1-4

Course Notes: Consent

PHIL 399 - SENIOR RESEARCH PROJECT

A research project in the student's area of concentration done under the direction of the area advisor or another appropriate faculty member.

Credits: 1-3

Course Notes: Sr.stand. consent