Phil-P 105: THINKING AND REASONING (3 credits)

26587 MW 11:30AM-12:45PM Matthew Shockey
(Not open to students who have taken P150)
(Course meets General Ed. Critical Thinking Requirement)
This course aims to help students learn how to identify and assess arguments and to improve their reasoning skills in a variety of areas. Students will study the art of precise expression and will learn how to recognize arguments, to analyze their structure, and to detect hidden assumptions or flaws they might contain. We will study a number of common fallacies (mistakes) in reasoning, along with various techniques for detecting them.

4849 TR 2:30-3:45PM Lyle Zynda
(Not open to students who have taken P150)
(Course meets General Ed. Critical Thinking Requirement)
This course aims to help students learn how to identify and assess arguments and to improve their reasoning skills in a variety of areas. Students will study the art of precise expression and will learn how to recognize arguments, to analyze their structure, and to detect hidden assumptions or flaws they might contain. We will study a number of common fallacies (mistakes) in reasoning, along with various techniques for detecting them. We will discuss basic deductive reasoning (categorical arguments and elementary propositional logic) and several types of inductive reasoning, such as generalization from samples, reasoning about causes, analogies, and elementary statistical reasoning.

Phil-P 110: INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY (3 credits)

4851 TR 11:30AM-12:45PM JR Shrader
4850 TR 5:30-6:45PM JR Shrader
(Course meets General Ed. Critical Thinking Requirement)
(Consent of instructor or honors director required)
This course is an introduction to the methods of philosophy and several persistent philosophical problems.  In the first half of the course, students will learn principles of good reasoning and critical thinking.  These include distinguishing the various roles words and concepts play within a language, analyzing words and concepts to discover their essential meanings, identifying arguments within a text, and critically evaluating arguments.  In concert with learning these basic skills, students will read some classic philosophical texts both to gain an appreciation for the history of philosophy and to see how philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes practice critical thinking.  In the second half of the course, students will be introduced to some of the central problems that have concerned philosophers throughout the ages (and that remain relevant today). These include: (1) The problem of knowledge. Is there an absolute truth to be found, and if so, what can we really know about the world?, (2) The existence of God. What reasons support theism (belief in God)? What reasons support atheism (denial of belief in God)? Where does the preponderance of evidence lie? (3) The mind/body problem. Are humans just material, or do we have a nonphysical part (a soul) responsible for our thoughts? What is the essential part of each of us? (4) The existential problem. What is life all about? Is there an objective standard for living a good life, or are we on our own in defining our purpose? Students should expect not to be given answers to these questions, but to apply the critical thinking skills they have acquired to reach their own conclusions. Students will be evaluated on the basis of several short papers and two or three exams.

Phil-P 140: INTRODUCTION TO ETHICS (3 credits)

4581 M 7:00-9:30PM Jeffrey Langan
This course has three main aims: 1. To improve individual thinking and reasoning about moral issues; 2. To participate constructively in moral debate together; and 3. To learn about the discipline of ethics or moral philosophy. To achieve these aims, we will read and discuss the ideas of classic and contemporary moral philosophers.

4720 TR 10:00-11:15AM Mahesh Ananth
4131 TR 4:00-5:15PM Mahesh Ananth
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the standard ethical theories (ethical relativism, rights, utilitarianism, deontology, and pluralism), including the strengths and weaknesses of these theories. In addition, special attention is given to applying these theories to specific contemporary moral problems (e.g., torture, euthanasia, capital punishment).

Rel-R 152: RELIGIONS OF THE WEST (3 credits)

4202 TR 11:30AM-12:45PM Richard Allen
26590 TR 8:30-9:45AM Richard Allen
(LAS: Western Culture 1)
(LAS: Liberal Education-Western Culture Before 1800)
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—How did they begin? How have they developed over time? What do they have in common? In what ways are they unique? In this course, we will begin to look for answers to such questions. We will study the history of the three Abrahamic faiths. We will also attempt to understand what it means to be Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim from "inside" the religion, that is, from the perspective of believers.

Phil-P200: PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY (1 credit)

4583 ARR ARR Staff
Philosophy Day—Class meets TR 1:00-2:15 Feb. 26, 28, March 4, 6, 18, 20, 25, 27, April 1, 8)
Students in class must attend one of the following two public events:
Public lecture, Thursday, April 3, 7-8:15 pm or Colloquium, Wednesday, April 2, 1-2:15 pm
This one-credit class is discussion-based and taught by the Philosophy faculty. The class focuses on the work of our upcoming Philosophy Day speaker, who will be addressing philosophical aspects of this year's Campus Theme, "Sustainable Communities."

Phil-P 214: MODERN PHILOSOPHY (3 credits)

4132 MW 2:30-3:45PM Matthew Shockey
(LAS: Western Culture 2)
(LAS: Science and Culture)
The sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe were a period of intense creativity and massive change—it was the period of the Scientific Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the Counter-Reformation by the Roman Catholic church, a broad shift towards more secular and representative forms of government, and widespread exploration and exploitation of the lands and peoples around the globe. Philosophers during this time not only reflected on and tried to make sense of the many changes taking place; in many cases they played an active role in bringing the changes about. The resulting body of thought remains the source for many of our own world-views and continues to shape our thinking about some of the most important questions we as humans face: what are the human mind, soul, and body? Do we have freewill? Does God exist? If so, what can we know about God through reason alone and what requires revelation? How does what science teaches about the world relate to our common-sense experience? Does morality require God, or is it grounded in human reason or emotion? What is the source of the authority of the state? In this class we will tackle these questions by reading four groundbreaking works from this period—Rene Descartes's Meditations (1642), David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690), and Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)—along with short supplementary selections from other philosophers to provide context.

Hpsc-X 220: ISSUES IN SCIENCE: HUMANISTIC: PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE (3 credits)

24908 TR 11:30AM-12:45PM Lyle Zynda
(LAS: Science & Culture)
This course is an introduction to cognitive science, a field of inquiry in which researchers from many disciplines (such as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience) work together to answer questions about the mind that have puzzled people for centuries. We will examine the basic concerns, methods, and results of contemporary cognitive science, with respect to things such as: (1) memory, perception, mental concepts and categories, reasoning, and problem solving; (2) language acquisition and understanding, and the nature of meaning; (3) neuroscience and what it can teach us about the nature of the mind; and (4) consciousness and the subjectivity of experience.

Phil-P 311: METAPHYSICS OF PHYSICAL NATURE (3 credits)

24906 MW 10:00-11:15AM JR Shrader
Metaphysics is the philosophical study into the ultimate nature of reality. Whereas physicists investigate the questions "what physical things exist?" and "what is the relationship between these things?", metaphysicians investigate questions like "why do any physical things exist at all?", "when does one physical thing compose another one?" and "what is it for a physical thing to survive from one moment to the next?" Answers to these questions all have a bearing on many questions in physics itself, but also to other sciences like chemistry, biology, and anthropology.

This course is divided into two sections. In the first half of the course we will mainly study the nature of physical things. We will explore various answers to the following questions: 1. What exactly is a physical substance? 2. What is the relationship between a physical substance and its properties? 3. What are the conditions upon which one or more physical substances compose another physical substance? 4. What are the persistence conditions for physical substances (i.e., under what conditions does a physical thing survive from one moment to the next)? 5. Is the physical all that there is, or is there more to reality than physical stuff? In the second half of the course, we will specifically investigate the metaphysics of human persons. Some questions to ask will include: What does it mean to be a human person? Are persons completely physical or is there more to them? Are persons just a collection of features, or is there an underlying substance? What does it mean for a person to exist from one moment to the next? Can there be life after death? How does one's idea on what a human person is relate to ethical issues such as abortion, cloning and euthanasia?

Phil-P 344: CLASSICS IN SOCIAL & POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 2 (3 credits)

26588 MW 4:00-5:15PM Richard Allen
(LAS: Western Culture 2)
Revolution, Order, Liberty, Authority, Freedom, Tyranny, Progress, Tradition, Society, State, the Individual, the Collective—When did people start using these words, and why, and what did they mean? In this course we will examine the origins of modern political and social thought, especially as it emerged before and during the French Revolution. Readings will include John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract, Tom Paine's Rights of Man, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

Phil-P 383: TOPICS IN PHILOSOPHY: ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY (3 credits)

26589 MW 5:30-6:45PM Matthew Shockey
Course may be approved for Campus Gen Ed Phil-T390 core course in literary and intellectual traditions
In the first part of this course we will look at the century-old debate about the purpose of wilderness areas in the U.S. in order to consider whether non-human nature has value apart from whatever uses we humans may find for it. In the second part, we will turn our attention to questions about how we human beings both shape and are shaped by our natural environments, and how our treatment of each other is intimately tied up with our treatment of the natural world. We will focus on the issue of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, reading a novel that brings out the human dimensions of this. Then we will turn to some philosophical work that analyzes the ethical issues involved in resource extraction in impoverished areas. We will spend the last third of the course examining the idea that both a healthy environment and sustainable communities depend on the development of ties to the specific natural places in which we live. As part of this, we will talk about the importance of sustainable agriculture and local food networks, and, to supplement our readings, we will take a field trip to local Prairie Winds Farm. (There may be one or two other "sustainability" outings as well.) Assignments will include two philosophy papers, a reflective essay, and group research projects on local environmental issues, which will be presented in a public forum at the end of the term.

Phil-P 393 BIOMEDICAL ETHICS (3 credits)

4133 F 10:00AM-12:30PM Mahesh Ananth
(Applied Health Care Ethics)
(Prerequisite: P100, P105, P110, P140 or P150)
(Contact Philosophy Department for permission to register)
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the standard ethical theories (ethical relativism, rights, utilitarianism, deontology, and pluralism), including the strengths and weaknesses of these theories. In addition, special attention is given to applying these theories to specific issues (e.g., abortion, euthanasia, nursing care ethics, treatment of animals, informed consent, cloning) related to medicine and the clinical setting.

Phil-P 490: READINGS IN PHILOSOPHY (1-3 credits)

4134 ARR ARR Lyle Zynda
(Consent of instructor required)

Phil-P 495: SENIOR PROSEMINAR IN PHILOSOPHY (3-4 credits)

4135 ARR ARR Lyle Zynda
(LAS: Second Level Writing)
(Consent of instructor required)