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PHILOSOPHY COURSE DESCRIPTIONS Fall 2010
PHIL 2040 (CRN 2282) Practical Logic Instructor: Candace Upton Email: cupton@du.edu Course Time: Monday, Wednesday 10-11:50 Course Description: A wide body of both public and private figures use influential reasoning to convince others that they should do and believe certain things. Politicians, journalists, religious figures, parents, lovers, and teachers use reasons to try to convince us. This course is a systematic study of the principles of good reasoning that will enable students to assess the quality of reasons given by others. Reasoning skills are learned by actual practice, so a healthy percentage of class time will be devoted actually to working on developing and enhancing these skills. PHIL 2100 (CRN 4060) Philosophy of Mind
Instructor: Bill Anderson Email: wianders@du.edu Course Time: Tuesday, Thursday 4:00-5:50 Course Description: This course studies and critically evaluates leading theories about the nature of the mind and its relation to the body. Special attention is given to these issues: a) What is consciousness? b) Can a computer be conscious? c) What is the connection between cognition and emotion? d) What is the self? e) Is the self knowable?
PHIL 2111 (CRN 4061) Greek Moral Philosophy (Honors Program Students Only)
Instructor: Roscoe Hill Email: rehill@du.edu Course Time: Tuesday, Thursday 12-1:50 Course Description: TBA PHIL 2130 (CRN 2783) Philosophy of Early Modern Age Instructor: Bill Anderson Email: wianders@du.edu Course Time: Monday, Wednesday 4:00 – 5:50 Course Description: We will study the major figures of the Rationalist and Empiricist movements including Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume. We will focus on their epistemological views which both revolutionized epistemological thinking and laid the foundation upon which epistemology rests today.
PHIL 2181 (CRN 4057) Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art Instructor: Jere Surber Email: jsurber@du.edu Course Time: Tuesday, Thursday 10:00 - 11:50 Course Description: Although critical reflection about art goes back at least to Plato, developments both in modern philosophy and in the arts themselves have produced an unprecedented, intense, and ongoing dialogue between artists and philosophers that has deeply affected the practices of both. Just as modern philosophers have come to view the arts as vitally important ways of experiencing and knowing, so modern artists have drawn heavily on philosophical ideas and views in creating their own works. The focus of this course will be upon some of the major ways in which new developments in the arts have influenced philosophical thought and have, in turn, been influenced by it. In particular, we will consider some of the most representative artworks (many contemporary) which have raised the question, “Why is this art?,” together with the major philosophical and critical theories which have attempted to respond to this question. Besides discussing specific works of art, we will read and discuss some of the major statements and theories about them by both classical and contemporary philosophers, art historians and critics, and the artists themselves. This course will be of interest both to students of philosophy interested contemporary developments in the arts as well as to art and art history students interested in a deeper understanding of the philosophical views that underlie so much modern and contemporary art. PHIL 3010 (CRN 4054) Great Thinkers: Aristotle
Instructor: Naomi Reshotko Email: nreshotk@du.edu Course Time: Monday, Wednesday 12:00 – 1:50pm Course Description: We will examine the Logical and Metaphysical works of Aristotle in an effort to understand: (1) Aristotle's criticisms of and variations on Plato's Theory of Forms; (2) Aristotle's metaphysical views themselves; and (3) Aristotle's doctrine of essentialism. During the second half of the course, we will focus on this doctrine of PHIL 3062 (CRN 4056) Kant’s Epistemology and Logic Instructor: Jere Surber
PHIL 3175 (CRN 4055) Morality and the Law
Instructor: Candace Upton Email: cupton@du.edu Course Time: Monday, Wednesday 2:00-3:50 Course Description: This course will systematically study various elements of the relation between law and morality. Are we obligated to obey every law the government enacts? Why? If we do have an obligation to obey the law, are civil disobedients like Martin Luther King, Jr. justified in disobeying the law? Are immoral laws laws at all, or must a law connect up with some higher moral truth to have any authority? To what extent is it morally permissible for the law to restrict our personal freedoms? To what extent is it morally permissible for the law to enforce morality in general? If it is not permissible for the law to enforce morality, do we incur any obligation to obey the law?
PHIL 3215 (CRN 4059) Modern Jewish Philosophy Instructor: Sarah Pessin Email: spessin@du.edu Course Time: Tuesday, Thursday 2:00-3:50 Course Description: In this course, we cover a range of thinkers from the 17th- late 20th centuries in an effort to uncover continuities and revolutions in a range of philosophical and theological themes in the history of Judaism, including: reason and revelation, human anatomy and responsibility, aesthetics, post-Holocaust theology, responses to Kant, responses to Heidegger, ethics, and the quest for authenticity. Thinkers to be covered include: Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Emanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Emil Fackenheim, Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, and Hans Jonas. The course includes readings of secondary sources, as well as key primary texts in translation.
PHIL 3455 (CRN 4058) Philosophy and 9/11: Sovereignty in Traumatic Times
Instructor: Frank Seeburger Email: fseeburg@du.edu Course Time: Tuesday – Thursday 12:00 – 1:50 Course Description: This course will address the intersection of four concepts: philosophy, trauma, time, and sovereignty. We will begin by watching Alain Resnais’ classic film Hiroshima, Mon Amour and reading literary-theorist Cathy Caruth’s recent analysis of it. The conjunction of that film and analysis will provide us with a broader historical context for addressing reflections on 9/11 by four major Continental European thinkers—Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, and Slavoj Zizek. Their remarks, in turn, will provide us with a means of access to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s contemporary critical re-appropriation of political theorist Carl Schmitt’s work on sovereignty in the 1920s. In a famous line, expressive of a direction of thought he would later use to argue for the legitimacy of Hitler’s Third Reich, Schmitt defined sovereignty as follows: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” That definition and Schmitt’s elaboration of it are clearly relevant to the current American suspension of a variety of civil liberties and principles of international law under the justification of the state of emergency or exception of the “war on terror,” as we will next consider. Ultimately, our goal will be to explore trauma—and the responses it engenders—as a basic philosophical trope.
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