Courses
Home Courses Early Modern Logic Recent papers

 

Course Content and Objectives

Over a two-year cycle I teach seven courses in the philosophy department.  On this page there is a brief description of the content and and goals of each of these courses.  Syllabi of a couple of current courses can be found by using the links at the left.

 

Introduction to Philosophy: Knowledge and Reality
(Phil 132)

Content:  At Randolph College we teach two courses designed to introduce students to broad areas of philosophy.  This course introduces the student to epistemology and metaphysics.  Epistemology is the study of evidence, belief, and knowledge.  How do we get evidence for various types of belief and knowledge?  When is evidence sufficient for belief or knowledge?   Metaphysics is the study of the fundamental content and structure of reality.   What basic kinds of things are there?   How are these kinds of things distinguished, related, and connected?  Typical topics of interest are mind/body, God, and free will.  Needless to say, issues of epistemology persist throughout.

Objectives:  Everyone is necessarily a philosopher.  Each person has standards of evidence and beliefs about what kinds of things there are.  The purpose of this course is to make the student explicitly conscious of philosophical beliefs and capable of developing, revising, and justifying her own philosophical positions.  To this end, the student studies classical and contemporary philosophical essays and writes brief philosophical essays that develop and defend her own views.

 

Practical Reasoning
(Phil 175 or Comm 175)

Content:  This is a beginning, informal course in logic.  Its subject is the understanding and evaluation of reasoning.  The focus is on typical sorts of reasoning offered everyday in support of various claims about what is the case or what should be done.  What is the exact structure of the reasoning behind claim?  To what extent does the reasoning support the claim?  Is there a way to find other evidence for or against the claim?

Objectives:  We depend on information as much as we depend on food.  We cannot live without either.  We cannot live well if either is of low quality.  This is a course to enable the student to be discriminating about the quality of  information that she consumes.   It is a course in nutrition for "informavores."

 

Logic
(Phil 230)

Content:  A modern, formal theory of reasoning (inference) has become highly developed during the past century.  This course teaches the student truth-functional (propositional) logic and first-order quantifier (predicate) logic.  These are the basic elements of formal logic and constitute the foundation for all the subsequent expansions of formal logic.

Objectives:  Knowledge of formal logic is requisite for advanced study in philosophy.  It is greatly beneficial in the study of law, computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and mathematics.  Every student will develop valuable acuity in logic and language.

 

Early Modern Philosophy
(Phil 122)

Content:  Modern, or early modern, philosophy is seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy.  Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is the first modern philosopher.  He initiated an approach to epistemology and metaphysics based on reason, which was responsive to the emerging modern science rather than to the authority of established tradition.  Descartes' efforts provided the impetus for groundbreaking developments in philosophy over the next 150 years.  Other philosophers studied are Benedict Spinoza, Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant.

Objectives:  The student will come to appreciate the ways in which current thought has been shaped by these enormously influential philosophers.  Furthermore, class study, supplemented by individual research and writing, on the work of these philosophers will deepen the student's understanding important philosophical issues.

 

Philosophy in Literature
(Phil 207)

Content:  Philosophy is everywhere, but literature is one of the richest lodes of philosophical thought.   In this course we read novels, plays, poetry, essays, and short stories as sources of philosophical ideas.  Among the writers studied are Samuel Butler, Jorge Luis Borges, Martin Amis, John Barth, Walker Percy, and Rebecca Goldstein.

Objectives:  The student learns to recognize and evaluate philosophical thought in contexts that are not exclusively philosophical.

 

Philosophy of Language
(Phil 375 or Comm 375)

  Content:  Language is transparent and opaque.  We can use language without conscious thought, but when we turn our attention to language, it proves surprisingly difficult to explain.  Philosophers of language are especially interested in how language has meaning.  Meaning somehow makes possible connections between speakers as well as connections between speakers and that of which they speak.   The philosopher wants a theory of language that will explain what meaning is, how it is mutually grasped by speakers, and how it makes words be about something.

Objectives:  The student will become more knowledgeable about language.  She will gain understanding of the power and resiliency of the world's natural languages.  This understanding will alert her to misrepresentations of the effects of language and enable her to detect and analyze common linguistic confusions.   

 

Senior Seminar
(Phil 493)

Content:  The content of this course is determined by the seniors each year.  They choose a topic that they want to pursue in depth during the semester.  After they have chosen, I take the lead in formulating a course of readings that will satisfy their aims.

Objectives:  As a capstone to the major in philosophy, this course works to hone the student's capacities for analytic comprehension and effective communication of philosophical topics.  Each student presents seminar papers and writes a term paper.

Top of Page

Courses Early Modern Logic Recent papers