Required Texts

All readings made available on Blackboard site for the course.

Course Overview:

The primary objective of this course is to develop your mature reasoning of complex issues at the heart of understanding the world and our place in it.  

The course employs a differentiated curriculum with some aspects of project-based learning.

Topics

Knowledge and Method:

- Selections from

  -  Plato, The Apology

  -  Rene Descartes, Meditations

  -  Jennifer Nagel, 'Epistemic Intuitions: A Defense of the Case Method in Epistemology'

  -  Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

Metaphysics or What there is and what is its nature:

- (baby-steps into Phil Mind) Selections from

  -  Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

  -  Brie Gertler, 'In Defense of Mind-Body Dualism'

- (baby-steps into Phil of Religion) Selections from

  -  Al-Gazali, Revival of the Religious Sciences

  -  William Paley, Natural Theology

  -  Eleonore Stump, 'The Problem of Evil' 

Value and Right Action:

- (baby-steps into The Good Life) Selections from 

  -  Jean Kazez's, The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life

  -  Susan Wolf's, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters

  -  Albert Camus's, The Myth of Sisyphus 

- (baby-steps into Normative Ethics) Selections from

  - Julia Driver's, Ethics: the Fundamentals 

  -  Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia