University of California, Santa Barbara | Department of Philosophy

Winter 2010 Schedule

TBA

Required Text(s)

Reader

Critical thinking is the use of reasoning in determining what's true and what's false. We make our reasoning public when we articulate arguments for or against a certain position on an issue. Consider the current debate about abortion. In trying to figure out whether abortion is immoral, we articulate arguments for or against. Someone might say, for example, "Life begins at conception, and one should never destroy an innocent life. Every fetus is innocent (they haven't yet done anything wrong), so we shouldn't ever destroy them." This is an argument. Is it any good? We will work on developing your critical thinking skills by learning to evaluate arguments in general, like this one about abortion. We'll do this in both abstract and concrete ways. The abstract way will involve studying a bit of what is called "formal logic" in which one translates arguments into symbolic form and manipulates the symbols in a precise way to determine whether the form of the argument is any good. The more concrete material will include examining specific arguments from ordinary life and employing informal tools for evaluating them. We will also look at the kinds of errors in reasoning that we all often make in order to avoid them in our own arguments, whether in writing or in speech.

Required Text(s)

Moore and Parker, Critical Thinking, 9th ed. (McGraw-Hill, 2008) ISNB-13: 9780073386676

Instructor:		Staff	\|	Teaching Assistants:		Griffith, McIntyre

Are there moral facts we can discover? If so, just how do we go about figuring out what is good, right and just? If not, why does it seem to me as though murder is wrong and kindness a virtue? What should I do if I want to act morally? If I don't want to act morally, is there still a sense in which I should act morally? Should I try to make everyone as happy as possible or should I primarily concern myself with helping myself, or my friends and family? Do individuals have absolute rights that I must never transgress, or should I always aim at the good of society as a whole? What would a correct moral theory say about such things as abortion, euthanasia and severe global inequality? Is there any way to resolve disputes over whether such things are morally permissible? These are the questions we'll raise and discuss in Philosophy 4.

Required Text(s)

Mill, Utilitarianism, Crisp, ed. (Oxford, 1998) ISBN-13: 9780198751632
Kant, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Wood, ed., 1st ed. (Yale, 2002) ISBN-13: 9780300094879

Instructor:		Zimmerman	\|	Teaching Assistants:	Bundy, Butzer, Clark, Stoody

An examination of philosophical thinking about moral issues raised by the practice of medicine. Traditional ethical theories and problems will serve as background to, and in turn be illuminated by, such issues as informed consent, paternalism, abortion, euthanasia, and genetic engeneering.

Required Text(s)

Reader

This course is survey of medieval and early modern philosophy. Among the topics we will treat are problems about the existence and nature of God, the freedom of the will, the great medieval synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelianism, the scientific revolution, seventeenth century rationalism, and some early modern ideas about the source of the authority of the state.

Required Text(s)

There are no required textbooks for this course.

This course is an introduction to several fundamental topics in contemporary analytic metaphysics, including universals and particulars, necessity and possibility, the nature of time, and personal identity.

Required Text(s)

Loux, ed. Metaphysics, Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2008) ISBN-13: 9780415962384

An examination of the classical theories of meaning and reference: John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke, and the theory of direct reference. Issues to be discussed center on the following: what is the nature of the information content of a declarative sentence, and what do the constituents of the sentence contribute? How is the referent of a term secured? How is the information content of a sentence secured, and how is the contribution of the sentence constituents secured? Solutions to the classical puzzles of meaning and reference are investigated.

Required Text(s)
Garfield, Meaning and Truth (Paragon, 1991) ISBN-13: 9781557783004
Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (Ridgeview, 1991) ISBN-13: 9780924922053

Optional Text(s)
Martinich, Philosophy of Language, 5th ed. (Oxford, 2008) ISBN-13: 9780195188301
Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard, 1980) ISBN-13: 9780674598461
Seech, Writing Philosophy Papers, 5th ed. (Cengage, 2009) ISBN-13: 9780495506843

This course will be about libertarianism.

Required Text(s)

Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Taylor, 2007) ISBN-13: 9780415404242

Quantum mechanics is the study of the very small. It turns out, quite surprisingly, that the dynamics of teeny-tiny things is VERY different from that of the familiar middle-sized world, so much so that it calls into question some of our most fundamental concepts, such as space, time, matter, causation, determinism, etc. In this class, we will learn enough quantum to be able to appreciate the philosophical issues (but don't worry; I'm pretty good at explaining highly technical issues in ways that non-physicists can understand). The primary focus, after we have mastered the basics, will be on the various interpretations of QM, such as Copenhagen, pilot-wave, many-worlds, many-minds, decoherence, consistent histories, retrocausation, etc. We will briefly discuss entanglement and the EPR paper, John Bell's contributions, and end, I hope, by dipping our toes into the deep, murky waters of field theory.

Required Text(s)

Allday, Quantum Reality: Theory and Philosophy, 1st ed. (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2009) ISBN-13: 9781584887034

This course will examine the classical contract theories--Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau.

Required Text(s)

Morgan, ed., Classics and Moral and Political Theory, 4th ed. (Hackett, 2006) ISBN-13: 9780872207769

This course will be about advanced topics in the Philosophy of Law.

Required Text(s)

May and Brown, eds., Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) ISBN-13: 9781405183871

This course concerns the refutation of skepticism about knowledge of the external world. We will look primarily at a priori arguments aimed at showing that the skeptic is mistaken. We will consider Kantian transcendental arguments, recent arguments from Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson, and other arguments proceeding from consideration in the philosophy of mind.

Required Text(s)

There are no required textbooks for this course.

Our topic is the relation between convention and communication. What role does convention play in the foundations of linguistic meaning? How, if at all, do speakers exploit convention to communicate? What exactly is a convention? We will address these questions by studying thewritings of Frege, Grice, Schiffer, Lewis, Davidson, and others.

Required Text(s)

Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Wiley-Blackwell, 2002) ISBN-13: 9780631232575

This course is divided into two parts. In the first part, it provides a general introduction to the philosophy of Aristotle focusing on topics such as Aristotle's analysis of change, the structure of the sciences and the role of explanation in natural science, as well as features of Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology. In the second part, we'll be considering Aristotle's practical philosophy, and in particular his ethics. The requirements for the course include a take mid-term exam and a take-home final exam. There are no prerequisites required for the course.

Required Text(s)

Irwin and Fine, eds., Aristotle: Selections (Hackett, 1995) ISBN-13: 9780915145676
PHIL 153 Course Reader available at Grafikart, 6550 Pardall Road, Isla Vista

We will study the philosophical works of the Scottish Enlightenment thinker David Hume.

Required Text(s)

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects (Oxford, 2000)
ISBN-13: 9780198751724
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford, 1999) ISBN-13: 9780198752486

This course is an introduction to the study of correct reasoning--drawing inferences, distinguishing good arguments from bad ones, seeing one's way from assumptions to their consequences. Reasoning is a cognitive process or activity employed in mathematics and other disciplines, as well as in everyday decision making, problem solving, argumentation, and discussion. We shall study the principles and techniques of correct reasoning by developing an artificial symbolic system of "natural deduction," which closely mirrors, but sharpens and systematizes, the patterns of ordinary reasoning that we engage in every day.

Required Text(s)

Kalish, Logic: Techniques of Formal Reasoning, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1980) ISBN-13: 9780195155044

Our topic will be how a person can (or cannot) create a reason or obligation through a mere expression of will. We will examine promises, decisions, commands, requests, threats, and so on. A reading assignment for the first week will be announced in due course.

Required Text(s)

There are no required textbooks for this course.

In this seminar we will examine Hobbes’s philosophy of mind and human nature, including his account of the passions, human reason, language, and his treatment of individual and corporate personhood. We will also look at his theory of the state of nature and his case for an absolutist contractarian politics, but the main emphasis will be on the building blocks of Hobbes’s politics in his philosophy of human nature, the foundations of his system, not the superstructure.

Required Text(s)

Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) ISBN-13: 9780872201774
Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford University Press, Reissued 2008) ISBN-13: 9780199549702
Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) ISBN-13: 9780691143255