Current Course Offerings in Philosophy
3 credit hours
Basic philosophical problems suggested by everyday experience integrated into a coherent philosophy of life through comparison with solutions offered by prominent philosophers. TBR Common Course: PHIL 1030
3 credit hours
Principles of deductive and inductive reasoning, problem solving, and the analysis of arguments in everyday language.
3 credit hours
Readings, discussions, and activities associated with history and philosophy of science and mathematics.
3 credit hours
Examines major ethical theories, the moral nature of human beings, and the meaning of good and right and applies ethical theories to resolving moral problems in personal and professional lives.
3 credit hours
Examines the concept of human happiness and its application in everyday living as discussed since antiquity by philosophers, psychologists, writers, spiritual leaders, and contributors to popular culture.
3 credit hours
Exposes students to the fundamentals of ethical theory and familiarizes them with some of the practical, ethical, and legal issues with which they would have to deal as computer scientists.
3 credit hours
The origins, development, essence, and implications of leading philosophical-religious traditions originating in Asia.
3 credit hours
Examines issues of religious experience, religious knowledge, faith and reason, the existence and nature of God, evil, religious diversity, life after death.
3 credit hours
Examines various philosophical perspectives on atheism, understood as the belief that no transcendent creator deity exists, and that there are no supernatural causes of natural events. Compares and contrasts this belief with familiar alternatives (including theism, agnosticism, and humanism), considers the spiritual significance of atheism, and explores implications for ethics and religion.
3 credit hours
Examines the relation of humans to the rest of nature, clarifying the relevant ethical issues and exploring from various perspectives their application to present and future ecological concerns.
3 credit hours
Explores ethical issues arising from the practice of medical therapeutics, from the development of new biomedical technologies, and more largely from reflections on life's meaning and prospects in the face of changing modalities of intervention fostered particularly by the various life sciences.
3 credit hours
Explores the living legacy of ancient peripatetic pedagogy as expressed in American Pragmatist and British Empiricist philosophies of experience.
3 credit hours
Examines sociopolitical and existential concerns of African Americans, especially in respect to issues of justice, equality, and the very meaning of life in a world of anti-black racism, against the backdrop of "enlightenment" philosophical discourse on race and personhood.
3 credit hours
Examination of the cinematic expression of philosophical issues and development of philosophical issues in cinema.
3 credit hours
The main problems of social philosophy are surveyed: the distinctive nature of social reality and the nature of social knowledge and how they relate to value theory.
3 credit hours
Prerequisite: PHIL 1030 or permission of instructor. The development of philosophical thought from Thales to Occam. Offered fall only.
3 credit hours
The development of philosophical thought from Hobbes to Hegel. Offered spring only.
3 credit hours
Emphasis on movements such as German idealism, the rise of the philosophy of the social sciences, historical materialism, utilitarianism, and early critiques of modernism.
3 credit hours
The nature of art, aesthetic experience, and artistic creation.
3 credit hours
Explores philosophical questions about literature, philosophical themes in literature, and differing assessments of the relation of philosophical to literary texts.
3 credit hours
The nature and methods of formal deductive logic, truth functional logic, quantification theory, identity relations, propositional calculus.
3 credit hours
The nature, significance, and application of the teachings of several outstanding existential thinkers.
3 credit hours
The critical examination of various movements and key figures in recent European philosophy.
3 credit hours
Examines major work in contemporary feminist philosophy and feminist theory, with particular emphasis on the relation of sex and gender, feminist accounts of inquiry, feminist ethical issues, and feminist aesthetics.
3 credit hours
Development of American thought with emphasis on naturalism, idealism, and pragmatism.
3 credit hours
Prerequisite: PHIL 2110 recommended. Introduces students to the most influential analyses of meaning, reference, and truth of early twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy; explores how the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein transforms canonical accounts of language; considers the role of metaphor in human communication and understanding.
3 credit hours
Examines twentieth-century analytic movement including logical atomism, logical positivism, indeterminacy semantics, ordinary language philosophy.
3 credit hours
An examination of the development of Marxist philosophy up to and including the present.
3 credit hours
The methods, problems, and presuppositions of scientific inquiry.
3 credit hours
Classical philosophy of mind (emphases: the mind-body problem, theories of consciousness) and contemporary applications of philosophy to psychology (emphases: logic and cognition, emotion and reason, artificial intelligence).
3 credit hours
Examines issues in both traditional philosophies of music and contemporary philosophies of music making and musical perception.
3 credit hours
Nature of historical knowledge and problems of historical inquiry; meaning and value of history; reality of the past; historical determinism and human freedom.
3 credit hours
Prerequisite: Permission of instructor. Directed study concerning a particular philosophical problem or thinker.
