Course Catalog

How should I live? How can I determine whether an action is right or just? These are perennial questions that philosophers have long considered and attempted to answer. Explores the ethical writings of several philosophers, including Plato, Hobbes, and Mill, in order to help us clarify and articulate our own values as well as discover the nature of philosophy.

This course offers an overview of ancient and medieval philosophy. Beginning with the earliest Greek philosophers and ending with the late medieval founding fathers of modern scientific thought, we will read and discuss various answers these thinkers gave to questions such as: 'What is a good life?' or 'How can I reconcile my faith with what reason tells me?' Readings include Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Seneca, Plotinus, Anselm, Avicenna, Abelard, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Nicolaus of Autrecourt.

You will understand better why you and why others hold the beliefs they do. The course combines a complete introduction to propositional and predicate logic with an overview of types of causal reasoning. You will apply these new skills to analyze and engage with natural language arguments about philosophical topics and other controversial themes of the day.

Political philosophy forms that branch of philosophy that reflects on the specificity of the political. Why are humans, as Aristotle argued, political animals? How are they political? What are the means and ends of the political, and how best does one organize the political with such questions in mind? The course offers a topic-oriented approach to the fundamental problems underlying political theory and practice.