Easter 2005

Note: All 100- and 200-level courses except Logic (Phil. 201) meet the general distribution requirement in Philosophy.

PHILOSOPHY 101: INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY

We typically suppose that there are some things we ought to do, other things we ought not to do; that some people, characters, and actions deserve our praise while others do not; and that some lives are better or more meaningful than others. These are all suppositions about ethical demands and ideals operating in our lives. But what gives these demands and ideals their authority? Why should we take them seriously? In other words, why be moral? We'll look at various ways of making sense of that question, as well as various attempts, classical and contemporary, to address it. Readings will include Plato's Republic, Kant's Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, and Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals. Students will be expected to engage critically with the views we discuss in several short papers and writing assignments.

PHILOSOPHY 101 B: THE SELF, THE WORLD, AND THE OTHER (SIMMONS)

This course will be guided by three questions: Who am I? Who are you? Where are we? Dividing our time evenly between the three concerns, we will begin by looking at various conceptions of selfhood, consciousness, the soul and the body. Moving from the interior to the exterior, we will wrestle with philosophical issues that surround the existence of other people: the problem of other minds, the ethical standing of arguments from analogy, political consequences of how we construe others, etc. Finally, we will move on to consider the space in which we find both ourselves and others. Is the world an objective reality "out there"? Is it a space of engagement only possible as a result of human life? Having worked through these three overarching questions, we will conclude the semester by reflecting on some meta-philosophical questions such as the relationship of ontology to ethics, and metaphysics to politics. Readings will include works by such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, Leibniz, Descartes, Camus, Kierkegaard, Rorty, and Levinas, and will be supplemented by films such as Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, and The Life of David Gale. Course requirements will consist of two exams and two papers.

PHILOSOPHY 201. LOGIC (MOSER)

This course is concerned with reasoning--good and bad, correct and incorrect, valid and invalid. By learning to apply a few general rules of logic, students acquire competence in distinguishing between correct and incorrect reasoning. Most of the course is devoted to the logic used in everyday life and discourse, which was first formulated by Aristotle and later modified by Venn and Boole. Students are also given an introduction to modern symbolic logic. There will be daily homework assignments designed to show how the concepts of logic can be used to solve specific problems.

PHILOSOPHY 204. MODERN PHILOSOPHY FROM DESCRATES TO KANT (CONN)

An introduction to Western Philosophy during the 17th and 18th Centuries, through an examination of works by René Descartes, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Reid and Immanuel Kant. The following themes will be most prominent: the nature of knowledge and perception, the existence and nature of God, the existence of the material world, the origin of linguistic meaning, the mind/body problem, and the problem of personal identity. We will start with Descartes' Meditations, in which he employs radical skeptical hypotheses to prove that he exists, that God exists, that the empirical world exists (and hence that his body exists), and finally, that his mind and body must be two distinct things. We will subsequently examine Locke's answer to Cartesian rationalism. On his view, many of Descartes' philosophical positions are either meaningless or unknowable. Armed with his empiricist conceptions of knowledge and meaning, he subsequently attempts to give better arguments for the existence of God and the material world. Berkeley attempts to show that the latter objective is itself inconsistent with this empiricist agenda. On his view, it makes no sense to affirm the existence of mind-independent, physical objects; he instead argues that reality includes only two sorts of things: spirits (God and souls) and ideas. Hume takes this empiricist agenda one step further: he argues, first, that any talk about selves or spirits or substances is incoherent; second, that only ideas exist (since minds are nothing more than collections of ideas); and third, that we don't know anything beyond our past and present mental states. In the final phase of the course we will examine two radically different responses to Humean skepticism. In particular, we will examine Thomas Reid's defense of direct realism, and Immanuel Kant's defense of transcendental idealism. Although Reid and Kant agree that we can know a great deal about the empirical world, Reid contends that we are directly aware of this world (and hence that it exists independently of this awareness), while Kant maintains that the empirical world is merely an appearance of some deeper, underlying reality which cannot itself be known or experienced..

PHILOSOPHY 215. CHINESE PHILOSOPHY (PETERMAN)

In this course, we will examine the fundamental texts of classical Chinese Confucianism ( Analects , Mencius, and Xunzi) in order to clarify the fundamental character of Confucianism as a framework of ethics. In addition to paying special attention to the fundamental notion of dao and the various practices of ethical self-cultivation central to Confucianism, we will also investigate how contemporary Confucianism addresses ethical issues in medical ethics, feminist theory, and environmental ethics. The class will be discussion-oriented. Required work: occasoanl reading responses, one evaluative essay on one of the texts of classical Confucianism, a presentation with a follow-up essay on a Confucian approach to a contemporary ethical problem, and a final essay evaluating Confucianism as an ethical framework.

PHILOSOPHY 235. MEDICAL ETHICS (PETERMAN)

This introduction to medical ethics will be focused on end of life issues and will focus on problems in policy and practice confronted by Tennesseeans at the end of life. This class will be focused on a service-learning project. We will start by examining the basic principles of medical ethics and recent evaluations of Tennessee's approach to these issues. In order to clarify these problems as they show up in in Sewanee and Franklin County, Tennessee, the class will meet early in the semester to interview adult parishioners of Otey Parish to determine what problems they confront in thinking about end of life issues. Using these interviews as a jumping for the work in the class, we will organize research on these problems and interviews with local physicians, clergy, and hospice workers that will culminate in an end of life workshop for these parishioners. The goal of the workshop will be to provide information and materials that will help these parishioners to understand and address the problems (or some subset of them) that we identify in the initial interviews. Student work in the class will be assessed in terms of contribution to the interviews, the consequent research and the workshop.

PHILOSOPHY 235: MARKETPLACE MORALITY: ISSUES IN BUSINESS ETHICS (GARLAND)

We will explore the moral dimensions of business activity, especially within the context of a democratic society. Topics will include social and economic justice, the nature of corporations, corporate accountability, social responsibility, the morality of hiring and firing, employee rights and duties, advertising and product safety, and the environment. Class will be conducted as a seminar that combines lectures and class discussion, and students will present class reports from time to time. There will be two hour exams, two short papers, and a final exam, and students will be asked to hand in weekly journals.

PHILOSOPHY 312: SYMBOLIC LOGIC (CONN)

Logic is the study of arguments and argument forms. One of the main goals of logic is to represent and evaluate the form of ordinary language arguments. In other words, we use logic to determine how a given argument is supposed to work, and whether it does work. For our purposes, at least, an argument works only if the truth of its premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion; an argument that works in this sense is said to be valid. The problem is that there are many, equally legitimate ways of representing the structure of a given argument. So while an argument is valid in virtue of its logical form, there is no such thing as the form of an argument. As a result, there are intuitively valid arguments which are valid on some accounts of its form, and invalid on others. Over the course of the semester you will master three increasingly powerful ways of systems of logic: sentential logic (SL), monadic predicate logic (MPL), and first-order logic with identity (FOL). Each of the latter systems is an extension of the first, which is solely concerned with the logical relationships between whole sentences. While some intuitively valid arguments are valid in virtue of the relationships between their constituent sentences, many others are not. Here is one which is, followed by two which are not. (1) Bill is a Democrat; therefore, Bill is either a Democrat or a Republican. (2) Bill is a Democrat; therefore, someone is a Democrat. (3) Bill is a Democrat, and Bill is the tallest person in the room; therefore, the tallest person in the room is a Democrat. Although each of these arguments is intuitively valid, SL does not enable us to account for validity of (2) or (3). We need MPL to account for the validity of (2), and FOL to account for the validity of (3). The latter two systems of logic enable us to better capture the logical structure of ordinary language arguments, because they enable us to represent the internal logical structure of the sentences themselves. They do this through the use of quantifier expressions for 'some' and 'all', variables and proper names for individuals, and predicate letters for their properties and relations. In each of these three systems, you will master techniques both (a) for representing an argument's structure in this system, and (b) for showing arguments to be either valid and invalid in this system. There will a mid-term exam and a comprehensive final.

PHILOSOPHY 325: PLATO (GARLAND)

We will study the ethical views of Socrates and the theories of knowledge, reality, and value that Plato develops and defends primarily in his middle dialogues. We will read many of the early Socratic dialogues, all the middle dialogues in which Plato develops his mature philosophical positions (especially the Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Republic), and selected later dialogues. We will also consider the criticisms of Plato advanced by Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Richard Rorty. Class will be conducted as a seminar that combines lectures and class discussions, and students will present class reports from time to time. There will be three short papers and a take-home final, and students will be asked to hand in weekly journals on the readings.

PHILOSOPHY 451: SENIOR TUTORIAL (GARLAND)

This seminar will assist senior philosophy majors in writing their senior essays by providing them with a forum for the development, discussion, and criticism of their interpretations and arguments. Seniors will also be asked to read and review submissions to our undergraduate electronic philosophical journal, Interlocutor: The Sewanee Undergraduate Philosophical Review. In the course of the semester, students will report on their individual research, present early versions of their essays, and comment on the work of their fellow students. The tutorial will conclude with each senior giving a public presentation of a summary of his or her senior essay and with a presentation of the new volume of the journal.