College is a time when people figure out what to do with their lives. It is a time when you can set yourself on a course that determines what kind of life you'll live and what kind of person you'll be. In this course we make room to think about questions that have to do with how to live your life in the broadest possible sense. We do not focus on particular career decisions or life choices, though what we learn in the course can help you with these personal questions. Rather, we focus on questions about the very nature of happiness and a morally decent life, the very definition of a good and happy person. We begin with theories of well-being and happiness that span from Ancient philosophy to contemporary psychology, and we end by expanding our horizons to the wider community, asking questions about our moral obligations and the relationship between a happy life and a moral life.

This course is designed to help you develop these skills:

How to identify an ethical argument

How to raise a good objection to an ethical argument

How to distinguish between different kinds of ethical reasons and perspectives

How to have respectful discussions with people whose ethical perspectives differ from yours

How to reflect on your own life goals and ideas about what it is to live good life

What is the ideal form of a state? Is it democracy? Should there be a state at all? What is justice? These questions that different thinkers have answered in various ways. We will use philosophical analysis and argument to understand the theoretical grounding for different theories of government, views of the state, and ideals of justice. We will examine skeptics about the state, consequentialists, feminist, libertarian, communitarian, and egalitarian answers to these questions.

As a writing intensive course, you will gain experience in exegetical analysis, critical writing, and formulating novel arguments. Evaluation will be based upon written assignments, including revised work, as well as in class exams (midterm and final).

Textbook: Matt Zwolinski, ed. Arguing about Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. ISBN: 9780415535823

We will also use iClicker2 - available in the UMN bookstore

What is the ideal form of a state? Is it democracy? Should there be a state at all? What is justice? These questions that different thinkers have answered in various ways. We will use philosophical analysis and argument to understand the theoretical grounding for different theories of government, views of the state, and ideals of justice. We will examine skeptics about the state, consequentialists, feminist, libertarian, communitarian, and egalitarian answers to these questions.

As a writing intensive course, you will gain experience in exegetical analysis, critical writing, and formulating novel arguments. Evaluation will be based upon written assignments, including revised work, as well as in class exams (midterm and final).

Textbook: Matt Zwolinski, ed. Arguing about Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. ISBN: 9780415535823

We will also use iClicker2 - available in the UMN bookstore

What is the ideal form of a state? Is it democracy? Should there be a state at all? What is justice? These questions that different thinkers have answered in various ways. We will use philosophical analysis and argument to understand the theoretical grounding for different theories of government, views of the state, and ideals of justice. We will examine skeptics about the state, consequentialists, feminist, libertarian, communitarian, and egalitarian answers to these questions.

As a writing intensive course, you will gain experience in exegetical analysis, critical writing, and formulating novel arguments. Evaluation will be based upon written assignments, including revised work, as well as in class exams (midterm and final).

Textbook: Matt Zwolinski, ed. Arguing about Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. ISBN: 9780415535823

We will also use iClicker2 - available in the UMN bookstore

What is the ideal form of a state? Is it democracy? Should there be a state at all? What is justice? These questions that different thinkers have answered in various ways. We will use philosophical analysis and argument to understand the theoretical grounding for different theories of government, views of the state, and ideals of justice. We will examine skeptics about the state, consequentialists, feminist, libertarian, communitarian, and egalitarian answers to these questions.

As a writing intensive course, you will gain experience in exegetical analysis, critical writing, and formulating novel arguments. Evaluation will be based upon written assignments, including revised work, as well as in class exams (midterm and final).

Textbook: Matt Zwolinski, ed. Arguing about Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. ISBN: 9780415535823

We will also use iClicker2 - available in the UMN bookstore

What is the ideal form of a state? Is it democracy? Should there be a state at all? What is justice? These questions that different thinkers have answered in various ways. We will use philosophical analysis and argument to understand the theoretical grounding for different theories of government, views of the state, and ideals of justice. We will examine skeptics about the state, consequentialists, feminist, libertarian, communitarian, and egalitarian answers to these questions.

As a writing intensive course, you will gain experience in exegetical analysis, critical writing, and formulating novel arguments. Evaluation will be based upon written assignments, including revised work, as well as in class exams (midterm and final).

Textbook: Matt Zwolinski, ed. Arguing about Political Philosophy, 2nd ed. ISBN: 9780415535823

We will also use iClicker2 - available in the UMN bookstore

In this course, we will consider some of the numerous questions long-debated within the history of philosophy, in addition to some questions raised only recently. These include: What can we know? How do we know it? Is there a God? How ought we to act? What is gender?
What is race? How do gender and race shape our lives? To think through these questions, we will read texts authored by a diverse cross-section of philosophers, with the express purpose of regularly engaging students with perspectives relevantly unlike their own.

The goal of this course is not for students to come to steadfast conclusions about these important philosophical topics, but to leave with an understanding of, and appreciation for, both the kinds of questions asked, and the range of answers given, within the discipline of philosophy. The expectation is that students will have a safe space to consider critically topics they might not have had the chance to ponder before. The hope is that students will see this brief introduction to philosophy as just the beginning of philosophical exploration.

In this course, we will consider some of the numerous questions long-debated within the history of philosophy, in addition to some questions raised only recently. These include: What can we know? How do we know it? Is there a God? How ought we to act? What is gender?
What is race? How do gender and race shape our lives? To think through these questions, we will read texts authored by a diverse cross-section of philosophers, with the express purpose of regularly engaging students with perspectives relevantly unlike their own.

The goal of this course is not for students to come to steadfast conclusions about these important philosophical topics, but to leave with an understanding of, and appreciation for, both the kinds of questions asked, and the range of answers given, within the discipline of philosophy. The expectation is that students will have a safe space to consider critically topics they might not have had the chance to ponder before. The hope is that students will see this brief introduction to philosophy as just the beginning of philosophical exploration.

In this course, we will consider some of the numerous questions long-debated within the history of philosophy, in addition to some questions raised only recently. These include: What can we know? How do we know it? Is there a God? How ought we to act? What is gender?
What is race? How do gender and race shape our lives? To think through these questions, we will read texts authored by a diverse cross-section of philosophers, with the express purpose of regularly engaging students with perspectives relevantly unlike their own.

The goal of this course is not for students to come to steadfast conclusions about these important philosophical topics, but to leave with an understanding of, and appreciation for, both the kinds of questions asked, and the range of answers given, within the discipline of philosophy. The expectation is that students will have a safe space to consider critically topics they might not have had the chance to ponder before. The hope is that students will see this brief introduction to philosophy as just the beginning of philosophical exploration.

In this course, we will consider some of the numerous questions long-debated within the history of philosophy, in addition to some questions raised only recently. These include: What can we know? How do we know it? Is there a God? How ought we to act? What is gender?
What is race? How do gender and race shape our lives? To think through these questions, we will read texts authored by a diverse cross-section of philosophers, with the express purpose of regularly engaging students with perspectives relevantly unlike their own.

The goal of this course is not for students to come to steadfast conclusions about these important philosophical topics, but to leave with an understanding of, and appreciation for, both the kinds of questions asked, and the range of answers given, within the discipline of philosophy. The expectation is that students will have a safe space to consider critically topics they might not have had the chance to ponder before. The hope is that students will see this brief introduction to philosophy as just the beginning of philosophical exploration.

Is an action good or bad because of its anticipated results or regardless of these results? Is it ever right to kill one person to save five? Is relativism true?
Is abortion wrong?

This course is an introduction to philosophical ethics, the part of philosophy that is concerned with right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice. We will focus on those historical philosophical theories of these topics that have been most influential in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, as well as consider their relevance to practical ethical problems in contemporary life.

The major portion of the course will examine three influential historical traditions in normative ethical theory and their implications for applied ethical problems:

(1) Aristotle and contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethics;

(2) Immanuel Kant and contemporary Kantian ethics; and

(3) John Stuart Mill and contemporary utilitarian consequentialism.

Finally we will touch on some topics in meta-ethics.

The goals of the course are to provide students with an introduction to philosophical ethics and to equip them to critically read, evaluate, discuss, and write philosophical prose, as well as to engage in the activity of philosophy themselves. Within the context of these goals, our specific objectives will be to:

1. Understand the historical sources and main features of three traditions of ethical theory:
   Aristotelian, Kantian, and Utilitarian


2. Think, discuss, and write critically about the contributions of each of these traditions to our understanding of ourselves as moral beings


3. Think, discuss, and write critically about the application of each of the traditions to some specific ethical problems


4. Familiarize ourselves with some key meta-ethical questions, as they pertain to the theories we study

The early modern debate over personal identity is one of the most vibrant and important debates within the history of philosophy. Almost every philosopher of the period asked, what is a person? What makes a person different from other kinds of beings? And what makes anyone the same person over time? Nevertheless, many who contributed to this debate are left out of our contemporary discussions of it. In this course, we will consider not only the canonical thinkers, including Descartes, Locke, and Hume, but also the often-ignored figures, including Conway, Cavendish, and Amo. The goal of this course is to bring women, and philosophers of color back into the fold, to recover an accurate understanding of the early modern debate over personal identity, and the different ontological, metaphysical, epistemological, theological, political, and scientific considerations that shaped it.

Seminar in Philosophy of Language: Deflationism

What is it for a sentence to be true? What is it for a thought to represent a certain state of affairs? What is it for a word to refer to a particular object? Traditional answers to these questions presuppose that we can give informative analyses or reductions of the relevant representational properties (truth is "correspondence with reality"; reference is a certain causal/historical relation; etc.). However, an increasingly popular position in the philosophy of language and representation denies that these properties - truth, reference and the like - have any substantial nature to be analyzed at all. According to semantic deflationism, as I'll call it, there is nothing more to truth than what is contained in the schema ‘S' is true iff S; there is nothing more to reference than what is contained in the schema ‘t' refers to t; and similarly for other representational notions. Semantic deflationism promises to demystify the properties of truth and reference precisely by showing that they have no substantial nature to be mystified about.

Semantic deflationism - its content, its plausibility, its implications - has been investigated from many angles. But one aspect of this view that has received relatively little attention is its relation to matters of ontology. It is this, then, that will be our focus in this seminar. In particular, I'd like to think about whether semantic deflationism entails a certain type of ontological deflationism - roughly, the view that answers to questions about what exists are themselves "insubstantial" or "easy" or able to be simply "read off of our language" in some important sense. And if so, does this sort of ontological deflationism entail a sort of ontological or conceptual relativity? My suspicion is that the answer to both of these question is "yes": semantic deflationism inevitably leads to a sort of ontological deflationism and thus conceptual relativity. But this is just a suspicion, and it is one of my goals in this seminar to determine whether this suspicion is sound.

We will begin with background on theories of truth and reference generally, paying special attention to the contrast between traditional and deflationary views. We'll then investigate semantic deflationism further. Our goal here will be to try and determine exactly what the deflationary position amounts to and begin to assess its plausibility. During this time we will pay specific attention to whether or not semantic deflationism is compatible with the mainstream, truth-conditional/representational approach to theories of meaning (as practiced in both philosophy and linguistic departments). Finally, in the second half of the semester, we will consider a number of recent articulations of ontological deflationism and try and determine which, if any, are implied by semantic deflationism.

Primary figures to be discussed: Paul Horwich, Hartry Field, Amie Thomasson, Claire Horisk, Augustine Rayo, Bob Hale.

This course I hope will be of interest to anyone interested in philosophy of language, metaphysics, the metaphysics of language, meta-ontology, neo-logicism (in philosophy of math), realism/anti-realism, or the general relationship between mind and world.