Course Offerings

Analysis and critical evaluation of key socio-political concepts: the state, civil society, power and authority, individual freedom, property, human rights, justice, democracy, liberalism, conservatism, authoritarianism versus totalitarianism. Ideas of theorists like Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, Rawls and others will be discussed.

An introductory study of a fundamental tool of rational thought: deductive logic. The basic concepts, principles, and techniques of formal logic are studied: valid and invalid arguments, the logical structure of statements and arguments, use of a symbolic language to represent arguments and symbolic techniques to facilitate their analysis and assessment.

An examination of one or more themes in existentialist thought. Topics to be investigated will include authenticity, anxiety, being and meaning.

**Please note that this course was previously titled, "The Quest for World Peace". If you have previously taken PP230 under that title, you will not receive additional credit for this one. Please speak to the undergraduate advisor if you have questions.

This course explores issues related to the ethics of war and peace. In includes discussions of just war, ‘the duty to protect’ innocent third parties, the moral claims of combatants and non-combatants, terrorism, civil war, revolution, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, the ethics of post-war reconstruction and reconciliation (including the notion of political forgiveness), the concept of self-defence, the idea of ‘total war,’ the ethics of civil disobedience (violent and non-violent), arms races, and more. These and other issues will be explored against the background of more theoretical topics such as the limits of legitimate political authority, the problem of evil, and the problem of individual responsibility in collectives.

A survey of modern philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche. The Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement, idealism, positivism, utilitarianism, traditionalism and liberalism will be possible topics of discussion.

A survey of themes in 20th century philosophy, including such movements as pragmatism, logical empiricism, ordinary language philosophy, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, deconstruction, and the bridging of the so called analytical/continental divide.

This course explores core questions about the nature and compatibility of freedom, determinism, and responsibility. We will examine competing accounts of compatibilism and incompatibilism, and explore such questions as whether or not freedom and responsibility require alternative possibilities. Our ultimate aim will be to clarify what is necessary for free will and responsibility.

Physicalism is the view that human beings are nothing more than very complex physical creatures. There are, of course, many different ways of articulating this idea. Physicalism is a broad philosophical heading that includes such theories as behaviourism, type-identity theory, token-identity theory, supervenience, eliminative materialism, and—with some provisos—functionalism. Although philosophers continue to disagree about which form of physicalism is correct, the orthodox view in philosophy of mind is that some form of physicalism is true. Despite this broad agreement, there is a pocket of resistance against physicalism. Members of this resistance share the intuition that the subjective features of conscious experience (or “qualia” as they are often called) generate serious problems for any physicalist theory. For instance, they claim that physicalist theories cannot capture what it is like to smell a rose or to see red, in which case physicalism is incomplete in some way. This course explores various articulations of this anti-physicalist intuition and will critically evaluate the effectiveness of physicalists’ replies to them. Topics discussed will include the knowledge argument, epiphenomenalism, inverted qualia, the possibility of zombies, and HOT theory.

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics examines the question of how to live a good human life where the goodness of that life implies that it is intrinsically satisfying to the person living it. While there is broad agreement that a good human life will be a happy life, there remain disagreements about what constitutes a happy life. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle develops an account of the happy or excellent human life as a life of virtuous activity. He rejects the idea that a good or happy life can be achieved by following a list of ethical rules and instead develops an account of the virtuous life which includes, for example, sensitivity to the sort of situation one is in (is it time to be funny, to be courageous, to be generous?), the ability to identify and choose the mean, and the cultivation of appropriate sorts of emotional responses.

In this course, we will engage in close textual analysis of the Nicomachean Ethics; we will focus not only on developing sophisticated philosophical responses to Aristotle’s arguments, but also on the logically prior task of constructing well-supported textual interpretations.

If one grants that our actions flow from our characters—from the kinds of people we are, including our preferences, prejudices, and dispositions—then it seems that we can be responsible for our actions only to the extent that we are responsible for the characters that lead to them. In his infamous “basic argument” Galen Strawson argued that the kind of character one has is beyond one’s control, in which case we cannot be morally responsible for any of our actions. Philosophers have responded to Strawson’s argument in a variety of ways, but one of the most influential replies takes the form of Robert Kane’s libertarian theory of free will. Kane argues that we can interrupt the influence of the past and shape our own characters through the performance of “self-forming actions.” Such actions are the product of undetermined free choices that set new precedents for future action. Because such choices are undetermined, however, many worry they are the product of luck and so cannot serve as the ground for an agent’s moral responsibility. We will assess the resilience of Kane’s theory in the light of several versions of the luck objection, and we will explore some recent suggestions about how to reconceive the role that indeterminism might play in undetermined choices in an effort to avoid this objection.