Philosophy 101, Introduction to Philosophy: Reflections on the Human Condition (HU)

LEC 402, MW 10:00 – 10:50, LUB N146
LEC 403, MW 12:00 – 12:50, LUB N146
Instructor: Edward Hinchman, hinchman@uwm.edu

Enrollment in one of the large lectures (402/403) requires enrollment in a discussion section.

This course is an introduction to Western Philosophy. Students need not have any background in philosophy, or any plans for further study. The course has three broad aims:
to introduce students to the tradition of philosophical argument in the West via primary texts,
to teach students how in general to make and evaluate philosophical arguments,
to demonstrate to any student who cares to participate actively how exciting and even fun philosophy can be.
Since philosophy is simply informed public reflection on what we’re up to as we try to do and believe what we ought to do and believe – as Socrates put it, “What we are talking about is how one should live” – I hope that by the end of the term the third aim of the course will have taken priority over the other two.

Philosophy 101, Introduction to Philosophy: Selected Topics and Issues (HU)

LEC 001, M 6:30 – 9:10, BOL B79
Instructor: TBA

We will look at a representative selection of topics from the history of philosophy and current philosophical debates: ethics, social and political philosophy, the scope and nature of our knowledge of the world, the nature of the self and mind.

Philosophy 111, Informal Logic – Critical Reasoning (HU)

LEC 001, MW 11:00 – 12:15, CRT 209
LEC 002, MW 2:00 – 3:15, LUB S165
LEC 203, Online Web
Instructor: Matthew Knachel, knachel@uwm.edu

There’s an ancient view, still widely held, that what makes human beings special—what distinguishes us from the “beasts of the field”—is that we are rational. What does rationality consist in? That’s a vexed question, but one possible response goes roughly like this: we manifest our rationality by engaging in certain activities, chief among them the activity of making claims and backing them up with reasons—that is, constructing arguments.

This reasoning activity can be done well and it can be done badly—it can be done correctly and incorrectly. Logic is the discipline that aims to distinguish good reasoning from bad.

Since reasoning is central to all fields of study—indeed, since it’s arguably central to being human—the tools developed in logic are universally applicable. Anyone can benefit from studying logic by becoming a more self-aware, skillful reasoner.

It is possible to approach the study of logic more or less formally. A more formal approach abstracts from natural language and develops sophisticated artificial symbol-languages within which it’s possible precisely to identify the logically relevant features of arguments. This approach has many virtues, but it is only one among many, and it focuses on only one kind of argument (deductive). In this class, we explore a diverse collection of methods and principles for evaluating many different kinds of arguments. We take a very brief look at the formal techniques mentioned above, but spend most of our time studying arguments presented in natural language, as they occur in everyday reasoning.

Philosophy 192: First Year Seminar: Happiness, Meaning, and the Good Life (HU)

SEM 001, MW 12:30 – 1:45, CRT 607
Instructor: Stan Husi, husi@uwm.edu

What is happiness? What makes our lives meaningful and go well? Is it possible to investigate such subjects objectively? In the seminar, we are going to look at some recent work in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and the social sciences to help us better understand these puzzling phenomena. Among the questions we discuss are: which factors leave an enduring impact on our happiness, and which ones do we adjust to so quickly as leaving hardly any trace at all (the so-called hedonic treadmill)? What is pleasure, what explains its fluctuations, and how central a role does it play for overall happiness? Are there universal patterns in what contributes to the meaningfulness of people’s lives? Why do our forecasts about what will make us happy in the future so often turn out poor predictions? What lessons can we draw for how to lead our own lives? The last decade has witnessed a lot of fascinating research answering questions such as these and others, nicely and accessibly presented in some recent bestsellers on the subject. Reading through some fun texts together will give us ample material to talk about in the seminar.

Philosophy 192: First Year Seminar: Should I Eat My Pet? And Other Moral Problems (HU)

SEM 002, MW 9:30 – 10:45, CRT 303
Instructor: Michelle Mahlik, mmahlik@uwm.edu

This course will explore the moral concerns of modern living. What is “the good life” and is there a relationship between happiness and morality? Are there universal moral laws, or should we evaluate moral action only on the basis of the consequences of an action? Is selfishness really so bad, or could it be a virtue? This course will examine traditional moral theories and apply them to contemporary questions of privacy, animal rights, global economics, consumerism, environmental issues, and other concerns. This course will be run in a seminar format and students will be encouraged to openly share their own views and evaluate the foundations of their moral beliefs.

Philosophy 192: First Year Seminar: How to Get a Time Machine: Lessons from Philosophy (HU)

SEM 003, MW 11:00 – 12:15, CRT 103
Instructor: Joshua Spencer, spence48@uwm.edu

One day, while digging around in your backyard, you find some odd mechanical blueprints buried in a box under an old tree. Intrigued, you follow the blueprints and construct what turns out to be a time machine. For your inaugural journey, you take the machine back in time. Realizing that the blueprints might be used to build further time machines, which then might be used to wreak havoc on history, you decide to hide them away—you bury them in a box under a young sapling. There they stay until, sometime in the future, you dig them up to build a time machine. How old are those blueprints? Are they just about the same age as the tree under which you discovered them, or are they infinitely old? If they are infinitely old, why haven’t they crumbled and deteriorated from age? On your way back to the time machine, you encounter a threatening young man who tries to rob you at gun point. A flash of light distracts him and you leap for his gun. After a brief scuffle, you gain the upper hand and hold your would-be robber at gun point. You could pull the trigger and rid the world of this outlaw. Your hand is steady and you have everything it takes to shoot the man. However, unbeknownst to you, that man is your own great-great-grandfather. You can’t shoot him! For, if you did, you wouldn’t exist and hence wouldn’t be around to shoot him. Are you, then, really free? Does this kind of case show us something about our concepts of freedom and moral responsibility?

In this class, we will engage with short fiction to extract and discuss interesting philosophical questions. Some of the fiction we encounter will involve time travel and others not. Robert Heinlein, Ursula LeGuin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Ted Chang are some of the authors we may discuss.

Philosophy 204, Introduction to Asian Religions (HU)

LEC 201, ONLINE WEB
Instructor: Michelle Mahlik, mmahlik@uwm.edu

This course is an introduction to the philosophical traditions of major Asian religious traditions, including Hinduism in India, Taoism and Confucianism in China, and Buddhism as it has evolved in both India and China. Philosophical issues of metaphysics, causality, knowledge, and ethics are emphasized as well as the nature of “reality”, the Divine, and the individual human being engaged in the process of self-realization and enlightenment.

Philosophy 211, Elementary Logic (HU, QLB)

LEC 001, M 6:30 – 9:10, BOL B83
Instructor: TBA
LEC 202, ONLINE WEB
Instructor: Matthew Knachel, knachel@uwm.edu

LEC 403, MW 10:00 – 10:50, CRT 175
LEC 404, MW 12:00 – 12:50, CRT 175
Instructor: Richard Tierney, rtierney@uwm.edu

Enrollment in one of the large lectures (LEC 403/404) also requires enrollment in a corresponding discussion section.

Humans are reasoning animals, and logic is the study of the rules and principles of correct reasoning, the science of what follows from what. Logic know-how is a skill, one of the most important skills you will ever develop, both for your college and later career and for your everyday life. It teaches you how to analyze concepts, ideas, arguments, and break them down into their simplest components. You are then in a position to recognize the relationships between those components, to see how they are connected together (or not), and thereby to understand how and why one thing follows from another. At the same time, it teaches you how to construct ‘paths of reasoning’, how to get from one idea to another, how, for example, to determine what is the best course of action in a particular situation.

Apart from its application in virtually every field of study, the study of logic will help you develop your analytical and quantitative skills, your writing skills, your communication skills, and your day to day reasoning. You’ll become a better thinker and a better reasoner (a better human?). You may not be aware that you are doing so, but you’re using logic now, and you’ll use it every day, for the rest of your life.

This is an introductory course intended for students who have had no previous work in logic. There will be 3 exams and weekly homework assignments. The course satisfies General Education Humanities and QLB requirements. The course also satisfies the L&S Formal Reasoning Requirement for the B.A. degree.

Philosophy 215, Belief, Knowledge, Truth: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (HU)

LEC 001, TR 9:30—10:45, CRT 109
Instructor: Elizabeth Silverstein, silvers2@uwm.edu

This course is an introduction to epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with knowledge. The course will introduce students to discussions of fundamental questions about knowledge including the idea of a theory of knowledge, problems with the philosophical conception of knowledge, and the relation of knowledge to skepticism.

Philosophy 232, Topics in Philosophy: Philosophy and the Sciences for Everyone (HU)

LEC 001, TR 2:00 – 3:15, LUB S233
Instructor: Michael Liston, mnliston@uwm.edu

For most of the history of Western culture science and philosophy have been intertwined – e.g., Aristotle’s philosophical work included physics, biology, and psychology, and Newton’s system of the world was titled Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Separate scientific disciplines emerged only in the 19th century, which led to the burgeoning compartmentalization of scientific disciplines we see today. Unsurprisingly vestiges of its philosophical ancestry can be found in two kinds of questions we can raise about contemporary science. First, there are demarcation questions. In our culture, the sciences properly enjoy a special authority. We trust well-established science – consider, for example, our dependence on expert forensic testimony; the money we spend on drug treatments, space-probes, and telescopes; our confidence that aircraft, bridges, and skyscrapers will not fall down. This naturally invites the questions: What distinguishes science from non-science? What is it about science that justifies the authority and value we accord it? What is the proper scope of scientific authority? Answers that appeal to the scientific method merely push the questions back: what is the scientific method and what makes it valuable and entitled to authoritative status? These demarcation questions are less scientific questions than they are philosophical questions about why we ought to assign value to science and its methods. Second, at the frontiers of nearly every science there are difficult unresolved questions that arise at the juncture of science and philosophy. Examples of such questions are – in astrophysics and physical cosmology: What is the origin of the universe? Is our universe unique or only one universe in a multiverse? in psychology: What is consciousness? How did it evolve? in neuroscience: What is human cognition? What is the relation between minds, brains, and machines? in evolutionary biology: Does natural selection drive adaptation at multiple levels or only at the level of genes? To what extent can human brains/behavior be explained in evolutionary terms? In this course we will explore answers to both kinds of questions in the settings of physics, psychology, neuroscience, and biology: our exploration of answers to demarcation questions will be applied to tackling unresolved questions. No previous knowledge is required; we will explain in non-technical terms the science behind the questions while addressing the philosophical issues they raise. This introductory course is intended for students in the fundamental and applied sciences and in the humanities, and for anyone seeking a better understanding of what science is.

Philosophy 241, Introductory Ethics (HU)

LEC 401, MW 11:00 – 11:50, BOL B46
Instructor: Nataliya Palatnik, palatnik@uwm.edu

Enrollment in Philosophy 241 also requires enrolling in a corresponding discussion section.

Most people agree that morality involves standards that should be taken seriously in guiding conduct and assessing our claims against others. Yet various moral philosophers have offered very different accounts of what morality is and why we should care about it. We will study four basic philosophical approaches to morality and consider how they have shaped the history of ethical thought as well as their influence on moral philosophy today. We will first consider ethical rationalism, which takes moral principles to describe an independent order of values fixed in the nature of things, and the ideal-spectator approach, which takes morally wrong actions to be those an impartial sympathetic observer would disapprove of. We will then turn to Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, which grounds morality in rational principles which all reasonable agents possess in common in virtue of their status as rational beings, and contractualism, according to which the correct moral principles are those which would be agreed to by all reasonable beings as a basis for their community. We shall see how these basic approaches get reflected in theories of social and economic justice.

Philosophy 242, Introduction to Social and Political Philosophy (HU)

LEC 001, TR 3:30 – 4:45, LUB S233
Instructor: Blain Neufeld, neufeld@uwm.edu

The focus of this course will be on rival conceptions of political freedom, democracy, and social justice. We will consider how these ideas have been understood and defended within some of the following traditions of political philosophy: utilitarianism, egalitarian liberalism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, socialism, civic republicanism, and feminism. The role of property with respect to freedom and social justice also will be considered. Readings for the course will include a mix of historical and contemporary sources.

Philosophy 244, Ethical Issues in Health Care: Contemporary Problems (HU)

LEC 001, R 6:00 – 8:40, END 110
LEC 202, ONLINE WEB
Instructor: Kristin Tym, tymk@uwm.edu

This course will provide a general overview of many of the challenging ethical issues faced in health care delivery today. We will begin the course with an introduction of ethical theories and other approaches to moral decision-making. These theories and approaches will then be applied to ethical problems currently confronting health care providers, patients and their families, and society at large. Issues we will consider include informed consent and confidentiality, futility and withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, euthanasia and assisted suicide, assisted reproduction, genetics, allocation of scarce resources and research ethics.

Philosophy 250, Philosophy of Religion (HU)

LEC 001, TR 11:00 – 12:15, CRT 209
Instructor: William Bristow, bristow@uwm.edu

In this course we bring philosophical reasoning to bear on central questions concerning religious doctrine and faith. Some major questions we will address in this course are: What do (or should) we mean by “God”? Can the proposition that God exists be proved on the basis of unaided reason? Or does reason in fact support atheism? What is religious faith? Is faith essentially blind, or can it be based on evidence? What is the relation between the practical demands of religious faith and ethical or moral demands? Is the existence of evil compatible with the existence of an all-powerful, benevolent creator God? Is the hypothesis of an after-life reasonable or intelligible? — We engage these and other related questions by studying and discussing texts from major philosophers and religious thinkers in various traditions.

Philosophy 332, Philosophical Problems: Moral Dilemmas

LEC 201, ONLINE WEB
Instructor: Luca Ferrero, ferrero@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st & 3 cr in philos.

Moral dilemmas are cases where the agents are bound by conflicting moral obligations and cannot resolve the conflict by further deliberation. No matter what these agents do, they will do something wrong and feel guilty. This seems to be the case with tragic characters such as Agamemnon, who is led to sacrifice his daughter to please the gods, and then left with “the painful memory of pain, dripping before the heart”. Ancient philosophers took moral dilemmas very seriously, as signs of human vulnerability to luck, which undermines happiness and shows the fragility of goodness. But moral dilemmas seem to be far more pervasive and ubiquitous than the focus on tragic choices suggests. Some contemporary philosophers argue that dilemmas show that moral values are plural and that moral life is richer than we might have initially thought. Others argue that moral dilemmas threaten the agent’s autonomy and are a sort of contradiction. This course investigates the nature and the philosophical implications of moral dilemmas, with special attention to the issues of the role of coherence and emotions in ethics. Readings include Aristotle, Kant, Williams, Hare, and Nussbaum.

Philosophy 337, Environmental Ethics

LEC 001, TR 11:00 – 12:15, CRT 109
Instructor: Elizabeth Silverstein, silvers2@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st.

Have you ever asked yourself any of the following questions: Why should I care about the environment? What is my relationship to the natural world? What is my responsibility to the environment?

The course will cover major theories of environmental ethics and their practical applications. We will cover various theoretical approaches to environmental ethics including: Animal rights, the Land Ethic; deep ecology; social ecology; ecofeminism; and rethinking the good life. This will include discussions about the moral value of non-human life and nature; human responsibility to the environment; and various contemporary moral issues related to the environment including: wildlife conservation; poverty as an environmental problem; the ecology of property rights; cost-benefit analysis and environmental policy; and environmental activism. By the end of this course you will be acquainted with concepts and methods of philosophical ethics that apply to issues regarding humankind’s dealings with the natural world; be able to critically assess alternative approaches to, and defenses of, a code of responsibility to nature; have a repertory of resources and skills with which to formulate your own environmental ethic; and be able to articulate and defend your own ideas with clarity, consistency and coherence.

Philosophy 341, Modern Ethical Theories

LEC 001, MW 3:30 – 4:45, LUB S233
Instructor: Stan Husi, husi@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st & 3 cr in philos.

In this survey course of contemporary ethical theory, we are going to investigate the nature of ethics, what exactly it demands and values and why, what objective status it enjoys (or does not enjoy), whether and how we could come to acquire ethical knowledge, whether and why we should care about being ethical, what relation ethics bears to religion, and its connection to moral responsibility. We are discussing the major ethical traditions such as consequentialism, the view that the one and only criterion for the moral assessment of actions is the quality of their consequences; deontology, the view that some actions, such as the keeping or breaking of promises, may be right or wrong irrespective of their consequences; contractarianism, the view that moral rules are based on actual or hypothetical agreements regulating basic social arrangements; and virtue ethics, the view that character is key for understanding ethics. We are going to read Russ Shafer-Landau’s wonderfully clear introduction “The Fundamentals of Ethics” together with a sample from the recent literature in ethical theory. In the second half of the course, we are going to look at some recent attempts of understanding ethics naturalistically, including evolutionary approaches (reading Scott James’ ‘An Introduction to Evolutionary Ethics’), as well as approaches drawing on neuroscience (reading Patricia Churchland’s ‘Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality’).

Philosophy 351, Philosophy of Mind

LEC 001, MW 11:00 – 12:15, END 109
Instructor: Robert Schwartz, schwartz@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st & 3 cr in philos.

An examination of some of the basic concepts and approaches used in explaining mind and mental activities. We will attempt to come to a better understanding of such issues as: what is it to have a mind, might computers have minds, what is the relationship between language and thought, do animals have thoughts, what is it to have an emotion, can mental states be unconscious, do we have special knowledge of our own mental life, what is the relationship of our mind to our brain.

Philosophy 430, History of Ancient Philosophy

LEC 001, TR 9:30 – 10:45, LUB S171
Instructor: Nataliya Palatnik, palatnik@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st & 3cr in philos

In the thought of Ancient Greece we uncover a remarkable phenomenon. The Ancient Greeks, starting from an essentially myth-making way of understanding the world and the human place in it, as found in the work of Homer and Hesiod, developed their ideas to a culmination in a theory of the natural world and of human nature and human contact put forward by Aristotle, which dominated human thinking for many hundreds of years and is still said to capture human “common sense” beliefs about the world. How did this transition come about? We will look at the changing questions asked by the Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle, in order to understand how their ideas and theories about the natural world and human nature resulted in the development of natural science, ethics and metaphysics.

Philosophy 511, Symbolic Logic

LEC 001, TR 2:00 – 3:15, CRT 607
Instructor: Stephen Leeds, sleeds@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st, either Philos 212(P) or 6 cr math at the 300-level or above; or grad st.
Jointly-offered w/& counts as repeat of CompSci/Math 511.

The main goal of this course is to prove the famous theorem, discovered by Kurt Gödel in the 1930’s, that any consistent set of axioms for mathematics will be unable to prove or disprove certain mathematical claims, among these the statement that the set of axioms is consistent. On the way to deriving this, we will review some elementary logic and learn something about computability and about the branch of logic known as model theory. Afterwards, we will branch off into related subjects, including as much set theory as we have time for.

Philosophy 516, Language and Meaning

LEC 001, TR 5:00 – 6:15, CRT 607
Instructor: Michael Liston, mnliston@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st & Philos 101(P) or 432(P)

Philosophy of Language is a central area of contemporary philosophy, an area where traditional metaphysical concerns about reality, thought, and objectivity intersect, and an area which has had deep influences on disciplines outside of philosophy – having, for example, helped shape the methodology of such sciences as psychology, linguistics, and sociology, and provided much of the impetus behind fashionable trends in literary studies. The reason for its importance lies in the extreme generality of the questions it addresses: What is the nature of representation and reference? What is the nature of truth? What is the nature of meaning? How do we account for the multifarious ways in which we use language – e.g., to assert literal truths, to talk about fictional objects, to express metaphors? In this course we will examine various theories of meaning, reference, and speech acts that attempt answers to these questions. The readings will include both classic and contemporary works.

Philosophy 532, Philosophical Problems: Mental Representation

LEC 001, MW 2:00 – 3:15, CRT 607
Instructor: Robert Schwartz, schwartz@uwm.edu

Prereq: jr st & 3 cr in philos.

Human thought and action are dependent on and mediated by the knowledge and mental skills we possess. Perhaps the core topic in the study of cognition is to explain how this knowledge and skill base is stored or represented by our mind/brain. This course will explore conceptual and theoretical problems that lie at the heart of current debates in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science over the nature of mentality and mental representations. We will consider such questions as: is there a language of thought?, can we really think in images?, in what way may our behavior be guided by rules?, may a significant part of knowledge base be innate? Issues concerning animal and machine intelligence will be examined in these contexts.

Philosophy 681, Seminar in Advanced Topics: Friedrich Nietzsche

SEM 001, TR 3:30—4:45, CRT 607
Instructor: William Bristow, bristow@uwm.edu

Prereq: sr st & 12 cr in philos at 300-level or above; or grad st.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most provocative and controversial of modern philosophers. In this seminar, we study the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche through a close reading of a few of his most important works, starting with his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and ending with On the Genealogy of Morals, published in 1887, not long before he suffered his incapacitating breakdown in 1889. We will also read portions of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and a couple of his essays. We will discuss Nietzsche’s critique of modern (Christian) morality and, more generally, of the larger culture in which this moral system is embedded. We will discuss whether Nietzsche’s critique of modern European values itself presupposes a set of values, and, if so, the content of those values, as well as whether they have (or need) philosophical grounding. Also, we will discuss whether Nietzsche’s critique of values is founded upon any metaphysical conception, and, if so, how that might be grounded or justified. We will also read important secondary literature on Nietzsche’s writings, by such authors as Maudemarie Clark, James Conant, Alexander Nehamas, and others.

Philosophy 758, Seminar in Major Philosophers: John Rawls

SEM 001, T 11:00 – 1:40, CRT 607
Instructor: Blain Neufeld, neufeld@uwm.edu

Prereq: grad st; cons instr.

John Rawls is widely regarded as the most important political philosopher of the 20th century. Among his contributions are his conception of justice, ‘justice as fairness,’ and his account of ‘political liberalism.’ This seminar will examine critically these two aspects of Rawls’s work and the key ideas associated with them. Our main textual focus will be Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, though we will read extensively from A Theory of Justice (revised edition) and Political Liberalism (expanded edition) as well. We also will discuss some important secondary literature on Rawls’s work, both supportive and critical in nature.

Philosophy 790, Advanced Topics in Philosophy: Graduate Student Writing Workshop

LEC 001, W 3:30 – 6:10, CRT 607
Instructor: Luca Ferrero, ferrero@uwm.edu

Prereq: grad st; add’l prereqs depending on topic.

This workshop offers the opportunity for graduate students to present their work in progress and receive peer comments on their work and writing. Students will learn how to present their work to an audience of non-experts; how to prepare fellowship applications and submissions to conferences and journals.

Philosophy 960, Seminar in Metaphysics: Conceivability and Possibility

SEM 001, M 3:30 – 6:10, CRT 607
Instructor: Joshua Spencer, spence48@uwm.edu

Prereq: grad st & cons instr.

How do we know what’s possible? On one view, the fact that something is conceivable indicates that it is possible. Hence, we can come to know what’s possible through purely conceptual mechanisms. Whether or not this view is plausible depends on the natures of both conceivability and possibility. In this class, we will explore these two notions and the connections, or lack of connections, between them.