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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Neuroscience senior thesis. Independent research for two semesters and a winter study under the guidance of one or more neuroscience faculty. After reviewing the literature in a specialized field of neuroscience, students design and conduct an original research project, the results of which are reported in a thesis. Senior thesis work is supervised by the faculty participating in the program.
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3.00 Credits
Neuroscience senior thesis. Independent research for two semesters and a winter study under the guidance of one or more neuroscience faculty. After reviewing the literature in a specialized field of neuroscience, students design and conduct an original research project, the results of which are reported in a thesis. Senior thesis work is supervised by the faculty participating in the program.
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3.00 Credits
What, if anything, makes us human? Are we fundamentally rational or spiritual? Natural or social? Free or determined? Can we change what and how we are? Or is our nature fixed? Are we basically self-interested or other directed? What relevance does knowing our nature have to how we understand and arrange our ethical and political life? Do men and women share one nature? Is there a fundamental purpose to human life? Can philosophers help us answer any of these questions today? Or have philosophical accounts of nature been surpassed by those found in the natural and social sciences? In this course we critically examine influential philosophical accounts of human nature found in the works of figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinas, Hume, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Foucault. Readings from the natural and social sciences may also be included.
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3.00 Credits
Freedom is one of our fundamental values as Americans. It is emphasized in our founding documents, and it remains central in our contemporary political discourse. But do we ask: What is freedom? and Why do we value it? In this course, we will consider these questions by reading Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We will then turn to the question: Do we achieve freedom for all in our society today? We will read G.W.F Hegel and Karl Marx on the issue of whether workers are free, and Simone de Beauvoir on whether women are free.
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3.00 Credits
"Faith is a fine invention," according to Emily Dickinson's poem, "when gentlemen can see; but microscopes are prudent in an emergency." This introduction to philosophy will see how far the microscopes of reason and logic can carry us in traditional arguments about the existence and nature of God. We will closely analyze classical arguments by Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Anselm, Maimonides, Descartes, and others. Pascal's wager is a different approach: it argues that even though proof of the existence of God is unavailable, you will maximize your expected utility by believing. We will examine the wager in its original home of Pascal's Pensees, and look at William James' related article, "The Will to Believe". The millennia old problem of whether human suffering is compatible with God's perfection is called "the problem of evil". We will examine this issue in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, classic sources and contemporary articles. Students should be aware that, in the classic tradition, this class resembles a logic course.
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3.00 Credits
In our everyday lives, we routinely assume that our clocks can tell us the truth about what time it is, that committing murder is wrong, and that there are people, landscapes, and works of art that are beautiful. But we are also aware that people can and often do disagree about what is true, what is good or right, and what is beautiful. Should the fact of such disagreement lead us to conclude that truth, goodness, and beauty are in some basic sense relative to human beings, perhaps as individuals, perhaps as members of societies or cultures? Some philosophers defend such conclusions, but others argue that truth, goodness, and beauty are "objective," in some important sense, despite the fact that people disagree about them. This introductory course addresses these and related issues.
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will examine a number of prominent and controversial social issues, using our study of them both as an opportunity to better understand the moral dimensions of those issues in and of themselves, and to consider the ways in which selected classical and contemporary moral theories characterize and address those moral dimensions. Topics will depend to some extent on student interest, but are likely to include concerns that fall under such headings as euthanasia, famine relief, abortion, capital punishment, terrorism and torture, food ethics, environmental ethics, and the like. Writing assignments will employ a "target essay" approach that involves writing groups in which students share their work with each other. For each issue we cover in class, one student in each group will write a five to seven page "target essay" on an assigned topic; all of the remaining members of each group will then read that essay and write a two page response to it. Depending on the number of students in the class, each person will write either one or two target essays, as well as four or five response essays throughout the course of the term. In addition, students will be required to substantially revise and expand one target essay in light of the peer response papers and written comments from the instructor, and to submit it as a final paper for the course.
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3.00 Credits
It is often claimed that morality is subjective or just a matter of opinion. In this course we'll examine several influential attempts to provide a rational foundation for morality, along with Nietzsche's wholesale rejection of these efforts. Readings will include work by Plato, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, and contemporary authors.
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3.00 Credits
There are three grains of sand on my desk. This is unfortunate, but at least there isn't a heap of sand on my desk. That would be really worrisome. On the other hand, there is a heap of sand in my backyard. I don't know how exactly how many grains of sand are in this heap, but let's say 100,000. My daughter removes one grain of sand. I don't know why, she just does. It seems like there is still a heap of sand in my backyard. In fact, it seems like you can't change a heap of sand into something that isn't a heap of sand by removing one grain of sand. Right? But now we have a problem. By repeated application of the same reasoning, it seems that even after she removes 99,997 grains of sand--I don't know what she wants with all this sand, but I'm starting to worry about that girl--there is still a heap of sand in my backyard. But three grains isn't enough for a heap. So there is not a heap in my backyard. Now I'm confused. Where did my reasoning go wrong? What we have here is an example of the sorites paradox. It is a paradox, because I started with seemingly true statements and used valid reasoning to arrive at contradictory conclusions. We can learn a lot about logic, language, epistemology and metaphysics by thinking through and attempting to resolve paradoxes. In this class, we'll work together to think through some ancient and contemporary paradoxes. We'll also work on writing lucid prose that displays precisely the logical structure of arguments, engages in focused critique of these arguments, and forcefully presents arguments of our own. Other topics could include: Zeno's paradoxes of motion and plurality, the liar's paradox, the surprise exam paradox, paradoxes of material constitution, Newcomb's Problem , and the Prisoner's Dilemma.
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3.00 Credits
Very few people believe that everything is water, that we knew everything before birth, that philosophers ought to rule the state, or that some people are natural slaves. Why then should we spend our time studying people who in addition to having these surprising beliefs have been dead for 2500 years? First of all, Greek thinkers, especially Plato and Aristotle, radically shaped the trajectory of western thought in every area of philosophy. No one can have an adequate understanding of western intellectual history without some familiarity with the Greeks, and we might think that an understanding of our intellectual history can deepen our understanding of our own situation. More importantly, many of the thinkers that we will read in this class are simply excellent philosophers, and it is worthwhile for anyone interested in philosophical problems to read treatments of these problems by excellent philosophers. We will begin the course by looking briefly at some of the Presocratic philosophers active in the Mediterranean world of the seventh through fifth centuries BCE, and some of the sophists active in the fifth century. We will then turn to several of Plato's dialogues, examining Plato's portrayal of Socrates and his development of a new and profoundly powerful philosophical conception. We will then read some of Aristotle's works on metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, considering some of the ways Aristotle's thought responds to that of predecessors.
Prerequisite:
Open to first-year students
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