Courses

Current Courses

Here are descriptions of the courses I have developed and offered, sometimes quite regularly.

Introduction to Logic

The course introduces you to some basic concepts and methods employed to analyze and evaluate arguments. We will look at several logical systems (e.g., syllogistic logic, propositional logic and predicate logic), and will examine their relative strengths and weaknesses. We will practice employing these formal tools to identify, analyze and evaluate a wide variety of arguments. Although time constraints will not allow us to focus on standardized tests such as the LSAT, GMAT or GRE, the skills acquired by studying logic do help candidates get good scores on such tests. More generally, developing one’s ability to think logically is a precondition of success in most domains of inquiry, as well as in everyday communication.

Introduction to Philosophy

Puzzled in the delightful sense of aporia we learn from the Ancient Greeks, in this course we ask many, many questions. As we discuss possible answers to the puzzles, we discover further, deeper, and frequently more perplexing puzzles. Thus our puzzles in this course lead one to the other in rapid, perhaps dizzying, succession. For consider,

1. We begin the course considering in what sense Socrates could be wisest man of Athens, since he knows nothing. Yet knowing nothing, he knows he knows nothing. Therein lies his wisdom: He alone of all the supposedly wise of Athens knows that he does not know, whereas they think they know, but in wrongly believing they know, deceive themselves. Socrates came to grasp this point by inquiring, critically, of the wisdom of the wise, who eventually convicted and executed him for it. To be sure, Socrates shies away from defending himself from what he himself deems the most serious charge, that he makes the weaker argument appear the stronger, and presumably the stronger the weaker. He had not the tools, you see, since it was his pupil's pupil, Aristotle, who would eventually come to develop the science of reasoning we call Logic, which leads us to ask,

2. What is the nature of truth-tropic language, such that language in certain forms (and not others) helps us to draw conclusions from true premises which are either likely true, in the case of (strong) inductive arguments, or guaranteed to be true, in the case of (sound) deductive arguments? How does the logical structure of an argument bear on its (deductive) validity, such that having certain structural features suffices for validity, regardless of the content of the propositions so structured? What, precisely and in short, is the distinction between an argument's formal correctness and its factual correctness? To answer these and other questions we developed a modest logic, the Propositional Calculus, and along with it two definitions of validity, which also serve as tests of validity: Truth Tables and Analytic Tableaux. We discovered we can rigorously analyze arguments for their truth-tropic properties, which leads us to ask,

3. What is the nature of truth-phobic language, such that in some argumentative contexts language can seem truth-tropic, but in fact it leads us--deliberately or not--astray? Here we considered a number of the kinds of confusions the malicious or the incautious can drop into language which only serve to mislead us, cloud our reason, or otherwise foil our earnest attempts to get at the truth. These fallacies, as we called them, were frustratingly ambiguous. In some contexts they lead us towards the truth, as when an expert's authority is germane, while in other contexts they lead us away from the truth, as when it is not. With our newly developed sophistication in logical analysis, abilities Socrates himself surely would have relished, we next eagerly took up the kinds of problems to which we might apply them, which leads us to ask,

4. Arguably the most fundamental question one can ask, the riddle of existence: Why is there something and not nothing? Looking around the world, we find only contingent beings--that is, beings whose explanation for being invokes other beings. What explains you? Your parents! What explains them? Their parents! And so on and so forth... but for how long? Surely the series of contingent beings cannot go on forever. There must be a necessary being whose existence is explained not by reference to some other being, but by reference to itself alone. Or, even if there could be an infinite series of contingent beings, what explains the series itself? And there we hit a wall, because either the series explains itself, or there is a necessary being whose existence explains the series' existence. In either case, we face the difficulty of explaining how a being (the series, or the necessary being) can be self-explanatory. Yet drawing on a necessary being to explain why there is something and not nothing invites (obviously) speculation about God's existence, which leads us to ask,

5. Does God exist? Here we considered two arguments for the existence of God and one against. The Teleological Argument for the existence of God finds in the astonishing complexity and wonder of nature a level of function or purpose that seems to escape explanation by purely mechanical processes. Thus the complexities we encounter seem designed to us, which leads one naturally to wonder about a designer. Unlike the Cosmological Argument and the Teleological Argument (both of which we say are a posteriori, or depend on observable phenomena we find in the world), the Ontological Argument is a priori, requiring no experience of the world, but only a careful consideration of the idea of God as the being than which none greater can be conceived--and surely, the argument goes, such a being must exist, since if it were merely a concept, it would not be the being than which none greater can be conceived! Closely examining the presumed qualities of God (omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence) resulted, however, in a rather daunting argument against the existence of God: The Problem of Evil. For if God exists and is all of those things, then evil could not exist. Yet evil surely exists. To be sure, we found cogent responses to all of these arguments. That is, we could extract valid arguments in each case, so our question in each case was: Is it sound? Are all the premises true? Invariably we found questionable premises. Our investigation into the existence of God was left an unsolved puzzle, particularly if we consider the Teleological Argument. After all, is the complexity we experience in the world entirely explicable in terms of evolutionary theory and the mechanics of chemistry and biology? Our doubts about how best to account for the astonishing complexity of the beings we encounter including, crucially, ourselves leads us to ask,

6. Should intelligent design as the Teleological Argument infers be taught alongside evolutionary theory in schools as a scientific alternative? Which question immediately leads us to ask,

6*. What is a science? That is, how do we discriminate between genuine sciences like physics and biology, pseudo-sciences like astrology and palmistry, and (apparently) proto-sciences like alchemy and geo-centrism? We pointed to the logic of scientific theory, noting that a theory connects its laws to its empirically testable hypotheses via deductively valid arguments of the sort we have been studying in developing the tools of logical analysis. Since a valid argument can have a true conclusion and one or more false premises, a hypotheses confirmed by experimentation tells us nothing about the truth of the theory. No scientist can ever prove a scientific theory true! Yet since a valid argument cannot have a false conclusion without also having at least one false premise, a disconfirmed hypothesis serves to show us the theory (or, at least, some part of it) is false. The upshot is that scientists are never trying to prove their theories true--they cannot!--when they conduct experiments. Instead, they seek to prove them false. Should every attempt to prove a theory false to date fail, we do not say the theory is true. Instead, we say it is well-confirmed, which is frankly the most we can hope for with science. Following this line of reasoning, we reject as pseudo-scientific those endeavors which cannot be falsified. Genuine sciences always admit of falsification, of test by the tribunal of experience, to paraphrase the philosopher W.V.O. Quine. So we shouldn't teach intelligent design alongside evolutionary theory in schools since the former fails the test of being a science, going back to our original question, which leads us to ask,

7. Why are people so insistent on involving God in school? Our charitable answer was that they fear pupils will have no moral compass with which to guide their lives, which quickly leads us to ask,

7*. Can we be good without God? If one says otherwise, then (generally speaking) one is adopting a very common view of what it is to be good. Namely, to be good is to conduct oneself according to God's commands. This seems simple enough, predicated as it is on the proposition that God's will determines morality. In making this assumption, however, we confront a devilish dilemma: Is it good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? If the former, being good could amount to anything, since in any case God commands, He, She, or It could have commanded otherwise. Morever, the fact that God didn't happen to command otherwise tells us nothing unless we insist on God being perfectly good, yet God being perfectly good on this alternative just amounts to God doing what God says, which is meaningless. If the latter, and God commands thus and so because it is good, then God's will has nothing to do with morality, and we can be good (indeed, must be good!) without God. Yet the conclusion that we can be good without God says nothing about our motivation for being good at all, which leads us to ask,

8. Why should we be good? The usual story is that being good itself is merely an instrumental good. There's nothing good in itself about being good! What's good about being good is the rewards one hopes to receive and the punishments one hopes to avoid. Being good is merely useful as a way to seek rewards and avoid punishments. This, naturally, is a very old story. The very idea of heaven and hell is a way of holding out the prospect of eternal reward and eternal punishment, for example. As we saw with the Ring of Gyges, however, it is possible to reverse rewards and punishments. We imagine a very bad man who, using the ring, is perceived as good and enjoys all that comes from being bad and the rewards due goodness. We imagine a very good man, perceived as bad, who suffers all of the punishments of badness and none of the rewards his goodness merits. So what could be intrinsically or essentially good about being good, regardless of rewards expected or punishments avoided? Complicating matters is the fact that goodness (or badness) seems not to be entirely a matter of choice or even character. Instead, circumstance has a lot to do with whether ordinarily decent, unexceptional people become moral monsters, on the on hand, or moral heroes, on the other, which leads us to ask,

9. Can we be morally responsible at all? That is, being held morally responsible (praiseworthy or blameworthy, as the case may be) seems to presuppose (among many other things) the capacity to have done otherwise. Yet as we saw in considering the problem of freedom of will, either we're caused to act as we do, in which case we could not have done otherwise, or we're not, in which case our actions are random and inexplicable. In either case, it seems we could not have done otherwise, for we are either the neuro-mechanical clock ticking away, or the jack-in-the-box leaping out at random intervals for no rhyme nor reason whatsoever, surprising even ourselves. Whether the universe is fundamentally deterministic or not, it appears plainly irrational to hold one another morally responsible inasmuch as there seems no room in the universe for us to have capacity to have done otherwise and yet of our own accord, which, finally, leads us to ask today,

10. Are we simply the sum of our neurological mechanisms, or is there more to the mind than simply the body and its central nervous system?

We must grant that the mind and the body appear to be very different kinds of things having very different kinds of properties. Descartes, impressed by such considerations, argued that the mind and the body are distinct, but causally interacting, substances. That is, he claimed that mind is an entirely different kind of substance than body, and he bridges the chasm between the two by asserting that physical events cause mental events and mental events cause physical events. Nevertheless, mind and body are distinct substances as, he thinks, they must be given the utterly distinct kinds of properties each has. How, then, do these different substances interact? Solving this problem leads Descartes to do a lot of hand-waiving, some of which involves the pineal gland. In the end it is not at all clear that Descartes has a solution to the problem of how mind and body, conceived as distinct substances, causally interact.

An alternative to dualism is physicalism, the view that every mental state is some physical state. There are different ways to understand physicalism, but the one that has come to dominate modern cognitive science we shall call computationalism, or the view that the mind is to body as the software is to the hardware in a computer. The mind is properly understood, on this view, as the functioning of the neural mechanisms that together constitute the central nervous system. According to this view, we really are (in a way) the sum of our neural mechanisms.

Yet just as a mechanical watch, a digital watch, a klepsydra, a sundial, a sand-timer, and an atomic clock can all serve the same function and tell time, surely we ought to be able to construct out of other parts (maybe computer parts themselves!) a device with a mind--an artificial intelligence, if you will, which leads us to ask, next time,

11. Is genuine, human-level artificial intelligence possible, and if it is, how will we know when we've achieved it?

In order to answer this question, we have ask, on the one hand, what is intelligence, and how shall we test for it? Answering these questions leads us to consider the justly famous Turing Test for machine intelligence and its limitations. In particular, we visit the philosophical challenge that the Turing Test is too weak in the sense that a machine could pass the Turing Test without understanding any part of the conversation in which it seemingly engages, which leads us to ask, are there other features of human intelligence which are necessary but indiscernible by the Turing Test?

12. What is the peculiar nature of subjective experience such that it is apparently inexplicable within any physicalist framework (including computationalism) and ultimately untestable?

Consider that my subjective experience of smelling the freshly brewed coffee has a qualitative character--what it is like for me to smell the coffee--and a subjective character--what it is like for me to smell the coffee. The conscious state I am in while enjoying the subjective experience of smelling the coffee is the state it is because of the distinctive qualitative character of the experience, but it is my conscious state in the first place in virtue of my having it. We say that my capacity for having subjective experiences is grounded in my capacity to enjoy phenomenal consciousness and that the qualitative character of my phenomenal consciousness is in turn a result of the bits and pieces of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, touches--all the raw feels, in short--out of which my subjective experience of the world is constructed, which we call qualia.

Thus far some more-or-less handwaiving terminology: so what is the problem?

The problem posed by subjective experience is that there seems to be no physical basis for it to which we can point. All of which leads us to ask, given the spectacularly personal nature of subjective experience, what am I?

13. Surely I am a person, but what then is a person? Investigating this question leads us into a variety of related questions, including what are the features something must have to be a person, but also what makes me the same person today I was yesterday or last year? Yet all the alternative solutions we can propose are met with seemingly decisive counter-examples and thought experiments. Our embarrassing inability to shed light on this question in turn leads us to conclude the course by asking a pair of deeply personally important and related questions.

14. What does it matter when I began?

15. What does it matter when I end?

For very different reasons, the answers in both cases is that it matters a great deal.

Introduction to Ethics

We begin by studying the nature of moral dilemmas and explain why the pose the particular challenge they do for our understanding of morality. We discover in particular that moral dilemmas present us with forced, exclusive, and highly consequential alternative courses of action all of which have seemingly equally good reasons on their behalf. Yet if that is so, we must investigate the reasons for and against the reasons that might be offered on behalf of the alternative courses of action.

This investigation leads us to develop standards of evaluation which very helpfully enable us to steer a course between the Scylla of moral relativism and the Charybdis of moral theology. What is left then is a search for the grounds of universal moral truth unbound by any particular theological conception. The focus of the course turns to three moral normative theories which in some ways agree and in others disagree about the nature of morality. From there we develop moral principles entailed by each of the moral normative theories (and, thus, which are over-determined by them) for application to moral dilemmas and their resolution.

Philosophy of Love and Sex

This course is a study of the philosophical and ethical dimensions of human social and sexual relationships. Since before Socrates, philosophers have had a keen interest in understanding the personal dimension of human relationships, a dimension which is essential to any sense of human flourishing. Following this long tradition of philosophical inquiry, the course pursues discussions of these and other questions.

• What is love?
• What is lust?
• What kinds of personal relationships ought a person seek?
• What ethical issues enter into personal relationships?
• How does one make wise decisions about personal relationships?
• Does romantic love require sex? Does sex require romantic love?
• Is lust a vice or a virtue?
• What is 'natural' and what is 'perverse'?
• Why are love and sex so often the targets of social control?

Medical Ethics

We begin with an examination of the nature of morality and of various moral theories and principles effective in moral deliberations. In the remainder of the course, we put this background to use and draw upon what is arguably the best literature in the many domains of applied ethics to explore various moral dilemmas and issues that arise in medicine, including abortion, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, genetic technology, medical research, and the distribution of scarce medical resources.

Minds and Machines

Early projections at the dawn of computing technology that computers would soon match and exceed humans in intelligence are now seen as quaint, if not ridiculous. Despite enormous gains in computing power, genuine artificial intelligence has proven entirely elusive. To be sure, computer scientists have had some modest successes. Yet capturing human-level intelligence in a machine has thus far proven to be an intractable problem. At best, we seem to have achieved insect-level intelligence in some of our more complicated robots. The fact that projections about Artificial Intelligence have proven false begs an important question:

What is it about human intelligence that makes the creation of human-level artificial intelligence so problematic?

This question is especially important in light of the fact that modern neuropsychology assumes the human brain is itself a kind of biological computer. That is, researchers operate on the assumption that we are meat machines. In light of this assumption, we consider some of the most important questions in Philosophy, Psychology, and Computer Science:

• What is the place of the mental in a physical universe?
• How does the human brain underwrite the human mind, if it does?
• Are artificial minds possible, and if so, how?
• Are computational models of perception, intention, and action useful or deceptive?
• Is intentionality compatible with mechanism?
• Is autonomy compatible with mechanism?
• Is consciousness compatible with mechanism?
• Is identity compatible with mechanism?
• Are emotions compatible with mechanism?

It is not our goal in this course to argue that Artificial Intelligence is impossible. Rather, it is our goal to understand what makes human intelligence such an extraordinary and astonishing phenomenon by carefully considering some of the more important skeptical challenges to the possibility of artificial intelligence. Along the way, we learn a great deal about machines, on the one hand, and human minds, on the other.

Topics include:

• Dualism, Idealism, and Materialism
• Functionalism and Computational Psychology
• The Turing Test for Machine Intelligence
• Computability and the Church/Turing Thesis
• Searle's Chinese Room Thought Experiment
• The Frame Problem
• Representationalism and Connectionism
• Mechanism and Autonomy
• Robot Intentionality
• Personhood and Personal Identity
• Consciousness

Ancient Philosophy

This course is a reading and discussion seminar devoted to the two major figures of Ancient Western Philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. Our focus is a close reading of some of their major texts, including Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" in their entirety. The course concludes with a discussion of the range of philosophical problems discovered by Ancient Western Philosophy.

Contemporary Philosophy

Ostensibly a survey of major post-Fregean themes emerging in philosophy in the 20th century, we take a different approach in this course. Instead of a survey of philosophers, themes, and arguments, this course consists entirely of a close reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) and Philosophical Investigations (PI)--the 'early' and 'late' Wittgenstein, respectively. Using this 'post-hole' method of digging deeply into a seminal figure's contributions to contemporary philosophy, we expand out to highlight the many problems with which philosophy now concerns itself and the many tools it has developed to understand them.

Philosophy and History of Science and Technology

Plato pointed out that the world is notoriously not what we perceive it to be: A straight straw appears bent in a glass of water; A bucket of tepid water feels hot to a cold hand and cold to a hot hand; A red flower looks gray in moonlight. (Indeed, the world is radically different than what we perceive it to be if our best physics is correct!) What, then, is the nature of reality, how can we have knowledge of it, and what use can we make of that knowledge? The audacious enterprise of science is to discover answers to these questions.

Every culture has made significant contributions to our understanding of the world and our capacity to change it to better suit our needs. Yet the history of science and technology raises a number of fundamental questions we examine in this course:

• Why should we expect the world tomorrow to be anything remotely like it was today?
• What is a scientific theory, and how do scientific theories from different disciplines relate to one another?
• What is the nature and justification of a law of nature?
• Is the notion of a completed science coherent?
• Can science ever be completed?
• What is a scientific explanation, and how does it differ from other kinds of explanations?
• Does science reveal the fundamental nature of reality, and is revealing the fundamental nature a goal humans should expect to achieve?
• What are the characteristics of scientific progress and what factors contribute to it or detract from it?
• What are the scope and limits of technological progress?
• What is a scientific revolution, and how does a scientific revolution change the technical and cultural aspects of the society in which it occurs?
• How does a technological advance change the scientific and cultural aspects of the society in which it occurs?
• Should science and technology always be pursued, or is there a point at which we ought not go further?
• Why is Evolutionary Theory a scientific theory but not Creationism?
• How are scientific explanations justified?
• How do we adjudicate between competing scientific theories?
• Can all sciences be reduced to physics?
• Is it legitimate for a scientific theory to postulate the existence of unobservable entities?
• Does scientific knowledge make technology possible, or does improvement in technology make scientific inquiry possible?
• What distinguishes a scientific discipline like chemistry or psychology from a pseudo-science like alchemy or para-psychology?
• Why is Evolutionary Theory a scientific theory but not Creationism or Intelligent Design?
• Are psychology and the so-called social sciences legitimate sciences?
• How is it that mathematics, a largely arm-chair discipline, works so well in scientific explanation and prediction as to be indispensable?

Genocide (with colleagues in English and Psychology)

This course explores the literature, philosophy, and psychology of genocide to comprehend the origins and nature of this monstrous, yet common, human wrong. Topics include the literary and artistic expressions of the impact of genocide on victims, perpetrators, and bystanders alike, the problems of evil and responsibility, and the psycho-social dimensions of mass-murder and mass-passivity.

Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram summarizes his landmark 1961 study prompted by the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as follows:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

It is not just our eagerness to blindly follow authority but our apparently common capacity for cruelty and atrocity that begs for explanation. This course explores the contributions of literature, philosophy, and psychology in seeking explanations for mass-murders and genocide in the recent history of Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Rwanda, and the Holocaust. Although the three disciplinary perspectives of the course will not, and likely cannot, be treated in isolation from one another, the questions they raise may be framed as follows:

Questions from Philosophy:

• What is the nature of human evil?
• How is the problem of evil posed by genocide, and can it be solved in light of genocide?
• How is the moral responsibility for genocide properly assigned?
• What are our responsibilities of in terms of past and present genocidal events?

Questions from Psychology:

• What are the psychological issues involved in the creation of a national weltangshaunng that allows, justifies and enshrines genocide?
• Is there truth to the argument that any person is capable and willing to commit atrocities given the right circumstance in time and history?
• What are the psychological boundaries that allow people to commit atrocities as part of their societal role and change personas to that of “everyman” after work?

Questions from Literature:

• Are there “unspeakable” evils, ones so monstrous they escape all expression?
• In what does the value of communicating and representing atrocity consist?
• What are the responsibilities of artists and authors to their subjects in exploring genocide?
• Is there such a thing as an “authentic” or “legitimate” voice of victims? Who can or should speak for the sake of the dead?

Elementary Formal Logic

The difference between EFL and a first-course in logic or critical thinking (AKA "baby logic', in a non-perjorative sense) is substantial.

Instead of treating logic as a set of tools for the analysis of informal argumentation, the ALG takes logic itself to be the subject of investigation. Thus we develop logical systems so as to prove results *about* them. It is a further and very important level of abstraction over what students of philosophy and logic have thus far seen, if you have had an introductory course in logic. (Because EFL operates at such a different level than introductory logic, having had intro to logic is helpful but frankly not necessary.)

Think of it as the difference between learning how to use a tool and learning how to make the tool itself, or maybe the difference between learning how to drive a car and learning how to build the car--such analogies having their limitations, of course.

Our topics for the semester include:

• The Propositional Calculus (PC).
• PC syntax and semantics.
• Axiomatic and Natural Deduction (Fitch-Rule) treatments of PC.
• Analytic Tableaux for PC.
• Consistency, Completeness, Soundness, and Decidability for PC.
• The Lower Predicate Calculus (LPC).
• LPC syntax and semantics.
• LPC Proof Theory.
• Analytic Tableaux for LPC.
• Consistency, Completeness, Soundness, and Undecidability for LPC.
• Axiomatic Theories.
• The Theory of Relations.
• Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory w/o the Axiom of Choice.
• First-Order (Peano-Axiomatic) Arithmetic.
• The Gödelian Incompleteness Results for First-Order Arithmetic.

In this course we encounter the philosophically profound (eg, quantification theory, model theory, and the ontological commitments of interpreted formal languages), the philosophically astonishing (eg, Russell's Paradox, his one-sentence proof of the impossibility of the unrestricted axiom of abstraction, and therewith the catastrophic collapse of Fregean Logicism), and the philosophically momentous (eg, the foundations of computation).

Our development of Axiomatic Theories, the Theory of Relations, ZF-Set Theory, and Peano Arithmetic is, of course, be abbreviated for want of time. A second semester would have to be added to the ALG to do full justice to those topics.

Because of the extremely difficult nature of Gödel's proof, we rely on Nagel and Newman's superb non-technical exposition in "Gödel's Proof". (It has been said that when Gödel published his proof there were only about 5 people in the world who correctly grasped what he had accomplished, among them the great John von Neumann, who is reputed to have left the room after Gödel's presentation, saying, cryptically, "So, it is over." To this day, it is more usual to hear Gödel's result articulated incorrectly than correctly.) It is neither a long nor an expensive book. If you want to buy it, try to get hold of the *first* edition. The second edition has been edited by Doug Hofstadter, with unfortunate results. I will supply copies of the first edition, along with any other readings, notes, and handouts. I also supply Gödel's original paper and various other original sources for the sake of their historical importance.