Introductory Courses in Philosophy

Lec 001 - Instructor: Heatherlyn Mayer
tel 414-229-4719
email mayerh@uwm.edu
Lec 002 - Instructor: Elizabeth Scarbrough
tel 414-229-4719
email scarbro2@uwm.edu
Lec 403 & 404 - Instructor: John Koethe
tel 414-229-5216/4719
email koethe@uwm.edu

    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.

     This course involves the study of arguments on social issues and on issues in various academic fields.  The basic goal is to learn how to construct and evaluate such arguments.  Some of the particular topics considered are the structure of arguments, definition, vagueness and ambiguity, informal fallacies, and sufficiency of evidence.

    Emphasis in this course will be upon the philosophy and worldviews—the nature of the universe, human destiny, the problem of evil, etc.—of several forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, though some attention will also be given to Taoism and to a few contemporary Western new religions influenced by Asian religions. From time to time, representatives of these traditions will be invited in to dialog with the class.

    The Island of Knights and Knaves is a place where only Knights and Knaves live.  A Knight is a person who always tells the truth.  Knaves, on the other hand, never tell the truth.  Harry, who lives on the island, says: "If I am a Knight, then I'll eat my hat."  Did you know that you can prove from the above information that Harry will eat his hat?  Did you know: 1) Given that Sarah loves either Jim or Tom and that if she loves Jim then she loves Tom, you can prove that she loves Tom?  2) that if everyone loves a lover and there is even one lover in the world, then everyone loves everyone?  Learn how to solve these and other puzzles in Philosophy 211, where we will study formal deductive logic – the science of what follows from what.

Intermediate and Advanced Courses

    People make all sorts of knowledge claims: “I know who fired the fatal shot,” I know that the universe is about fourteen billion years old,” “I know I should keep my promise to help cut down the tree.”  Such claims are sometimes challenged: “You really don’t know that.”  These everyday disputes lead to a reflective inquiry into knowledge.  In developing a theory of knowledge in which these disputes can be resolved, we address issues such as how we know what we know, what the relation is between knowledge and belief, and what we can reasonably doubt.

  The course deals with the nature of metaphysical thinking and the issues arising from such thinking.  Representative philosophers from ancient, medieval and modern philosophy are dealt with at length, e.g., Plato’s Phaedra, Avicenna’s identity theory and metaphysical scheme, Descartes’ Meditation, and Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

  This course is intended to introduce the student to some perspectives on and assessments of socialism: its definition; various models of socialism both tried and untried, and what it might still promise with respect to a range of fundamental human concerns and practices including freedom, equality, democracy, community, efficiency, religion, science and technology, art and culture; and what new avenues for socialist practice and new conceptions of the socialist project should be considered in light of the socialist experience of the twentieth century and the current capitalist context. 

   In this course we will investigate what philosophy can tell us about our distinctive nature as persons.  What makes us the particular persons that we are and how is this identity preserved in time?  Is the biological death of the body also the death of the person?  Does each of us have something as a unique and unified `self'?  Is this self the object of introspection?  Does our existence amount to the existence of the self?

  In the first part of the course, we will discuss what makes a person the same individual as time goes by.  Does personal identity depend on the continuity of memories, beliefs and psychological traits?  Or does it rather depend on the continuity of the body?  Or is it a matter of the persistence of an immortal and immaterial soul?  In discussing these questions, particular attention will be devoted to the treatment of cases where continued personhood is uncertain (like brain bisection experiments, amnesia, multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia, and science fiction cases like "Star Trek" style teletransporter or body exchanges).  We will then consider the implications of theories of personal identity for understanding what counts as the death of a person.

  In the second part of the course, we will look at the implications of theories of personal identity for the idea of the ‘self’.  We will discuss issues about the unity of the self, self-deception and the nature of self-knowledge.  If time permits, we will consider the implications of theories of personal identity and the self for psychology, morality, law and medicine.  We will read works of contemporary philosophers in the analytic tradition.

    We shall study three basic approaches in moral philosophy: ethical rationalism, which takes moral principles to describe an independent order of values fixed in the nature of things, the ideal-spectator approach, which takes morally wrong actions to be those an impartial sympathetic observer would disapprove of, 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 the second approach leads naturally to utilitarianism, while contractualism has important sources in Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy.  We shall see how the three basic approaches get reflected in theories of social and economic justice.

  In this course we will consider the relationship between human beings, society, and the state.  We will examine several different conceptions of society as a product of human interaction, with special emphasis on the idea that political authority and political obligation are grounded in some form of social contract.  We will also consider, from a variety of perspectives, the idea that human individuals are themselves products of their social environments, and explore the different conceptions of power, liberty, and self-realization that emerge from these contrasting views.  Readings will include selections from Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Foucault, among others.

    This course will provide a general overview of some of the ethical issues in health care.  We will begin the course with an introduction to the basic ethical theories and 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, decision-making capacity, confidentiality, futility and withdrawal of life sustaining treatment, euthanasia and assisted suicide, assisted reproduction, genetics, and research ethics.  

This course is taught off-campus at Whitefish Bay HS, 1200 E. Fairmont, Rm. 252.

    The goals of critical thinking are to instill in the student an understanding of the fundamental principles of analysis, problem solving and construction of an argument. In order to convey these principles, students are taught how to use tort law using legal materials, including but not limited to, the language used by the legal profession and legal resources. It is through the study of law that teachers hope to impart to their students a system for analytical thinking which they may use in their every-day lives. 

This course is taught off-campus at the School of Continuing Education, 161 W. Wisconsin Ave., Room 6000.

   We shall analyze and discuss (a) some of the traditional arguments for the existence of God (the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments), (b) the so-called problem of Evil, (c) the question whether or not God's omniscience and human freedom are mutually consistent, (d) Pascal’s Wager and William James, and (e) the question of human immortality.

   We shall analyze and discuss (a) some of the traditional arguments for the existence of God (especially St. Thomas’ Five Ways and the ontological argument), (b) the so-called problem of Evil (we shall read texts by Leibniz and Hume), (c) the question whether or not God's omniscience and human freedom are mutually consistent, and (d) the problem of miracles.

  Art differs from nature in being a human creation, and as our own creation art has something to say about how we view our selves, our world, and our relationship to the world.  An objective of this course is to examine philosophically the nature of art and its relation to individuals and their environment.

  How do we distinguish works of art from natural objects?  Is art merely an imitation of the natural world?  Do works of art have intrinsic meaning, or do they have no meaning at all?  Is the value of a work of art merely a matter of subjective judgment?  Are there specific criteria by which to judge works of art?  Are we to define art in terms of form, expressiveness, artistic intention, or social role?  Is there a relationship between beauty and moral goodness?

  In this course, we will consider these questions and the answers provided by a variety of philosophers and artists, both ancient and modern.  Although an interest in art is recommended, this course requires no previous experience in art or philosophy.

   A study of selected aspects of Western Great Lakes American Indian Philosophy from the perspective of some traditional Elders.  Ontological and cosmological facets of the Metaphysics, including selected perceptions of the essential nature of “Being,” will be focused upon.  Throughout the course, particular emphasis will be placed on the important and very special role of “Female Beings” in the universe. 

   This course looks at some arguments for and against several skeptical hypotheses.  We'll start with skepticism about the external world and consider an anti-skeptical strategy called 'semantic externalism.'  Semantic externalism holds that thoughts get their content directly from the external objects to which they refer, and thus that the skeptical hypothesis is thinkable only if it's false.  But, in tying thought content so closely to the world, semantic externalism seems to entail that you cannot know by introspection the contents of your own mind.  If we take this approach, we seem forced to choose between skepticism about the world and skepticism about introspective self-knowledge.  We'll thus spend several weeks examining the nature of self-knowledge.  On another approach, called 'contextualism,' skeptical arguments are not about how a mind relates to the world but about how thinkers may relate to each other.  From a contextualist perspective, the interesting question is how high a standard of warrant you must meet to be conversationally entitled to a knowledge claim.  When we ponder this question in the conversational context of a philosophy class, as we'll see, we tend to raise the standard so high that no one counts as knowing anything.  Does that reveal a flaw in the concept of knowledge or a flaw in the practice of philosophy?  In the second half of the term, we'll consider whether skepticism is just an intellectual game, or whether our tendency to raise skeptical questions reveals something important about the habits that these questions cannot quite convince us to abandon.

  This course will explore the nature of scientific inquiry, as well as consider what, if anything, is special about the scientific enterprise.  We will start by trying to get a firm understanding of such core notions of scientific methodology as: explanation, cause laws, and probability.  Next we will explore how concepts and hypotheses of science get their empirical meaning.  This study will lead us to consider questions about the relation of theoretical terms to “reality” and to problems concerning how science can or cannot test its theories.  The last third of the course will focus on recent challenges to both the “objectivity” of science and the “rationality” of scientific practice.

Major themes of moral philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Bentham and Mill, with critical study of the outstanding works. 

    What is a mind?  What is distinctive of mental phenomena?  In this course we will discuss and assess some of the traditional philosophical answers to these questions and the impact of cognitive science in the understanding and the explanation of mental phenomena.  At the beginning of the course we will look at the standard philosophical theories of the mind (dualism, behaviorism and functionalism).  We will then concentrate on the philosophical import of recent developments in the cognitive science.  We will discuss the criticisms of the representational theory of mind, the role of computation in the modeling of the mental, Artificial Intelligence, Connectionism and Artificial Neural Networks, Robotics, Dynamics and Artificial Life.  We will discuss both the standard problems in the philosophy of mind (levels of descriptions, types of explanation, mental causation, the nature and status of folk psychology) and the novel issues raised by cognitive science (in particular, the nature of emergence, the interplay between life and mind, the idea of mind as intrinsically embodied and environmentally embedded).

   In response to recent shocks and turbulences in the art world, contemporary philosophy of art (aesthetics) is re-examining the nature, meaning and future of art.  What are we to make of the controversies around the use of bodily fluids in the making of art works, such as in Serrano’s Piss Christ?  Or of artists who are forcing us to rethink our conception of art, such as Andy Warhol with his carbon copy Brillo Boxes, Jeff Koons with his large scale imitations of vacuum cleaners and balloon dogs, or Richard Long, who offers his extensive walks in barren country as works of art.  Then, there is the apparent erosion of the differences between fine art and mass entertainment, as the music of The Beatles and Tupac, and the films of Quentin Tarantino increasingly acquire credence as legitimate art works.

  For some philosophers and art historians (Cynthia Freeland, Arthur Danto, and Hans Belting) these trends bespeak a major transformation in our concept and understanding of art, and quite possibly are leading to the end of art as we know it.  For others (Elaine Scarry), it signifies more narrowly the waning of modernism and the avant-garde, with it recurrent shocks and rapid fashion changes, to a return to the calm appreciation of beauty.  Pierre Bourdieu has sought to demystify the art world, and particularly the relationship between high and low culture, by examining it through, a sociological lens.

  This course will address these concerns along the lines of the following four topics: (1) But is it art? (2) The end of art. (3) Mass culture and high art. (4) The return of beauty.

    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 Pre-Socratics, 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 political theory.

    We shall study and discuss Duns Scotus’s theory of individuation; his conception of haecceity; Leibniz’s objections to Scotus’s theory and to the notion of haecceity; and Leibniz’s own theory of individuation.

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  Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is generally regarded as the most important philosopher of the modern period.  Certainly one cannot achieve an adequate understanding of developments in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, whether in metaphysics, epistemology, moral or political philosophy, without a grasp of Kant’s ideas.

  This course will provide an introduction to Kant’s system as a whole.  We shall thus study extensive selections from the building blocks of his system: the Critique of Pure Reason, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment.  We shall also read selections from Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone and from his popular political essays. 

  Perception is the apparently straightforward and familiar process by means of which we, as perceivers, are aware of the world around us.  But although undoubtedly familiar, generations of philosophers have not been so sure that the process is as straightforward as it initially appears.  For, as the 17^th century philosopher, Rene Descartes pointed out, when I see, for example, a rabbit, there is no little rabbit-replica winging its way from the rabbit to my mind.  But somehow I must be changed so that I see the rabbit.  What then is seen when I see a rabbit?  Do I see the rabbit directly or is there some process by means of which I indirectly see a rabbit?  What is seen when I see a rainbow, a bent-stick-in-water, blue mountains across the bay, or the sun in the heavens?  This course will explore classic and contemporary answers to questions like these.  We will try to analyze the nature of perceptual experience, the nature of perceptual content and the role of conception in perceptions. 

   Philosophy of Physics is a subject that has a lot of interest to offer both philosophers and physics majors – though I would describe what it offers a little differently to each.

   To a philosopher I’d simply point out the obvious: most of our thinking about metaphysics and epistemology has always been tied in with physics – this was true back in Newton’s time, and is doubly true today, when current physics raises such deep questions about the nature of Reality, and the extent to which we should even expect our theories to be literal descriptions of Reality. This presents a dilemma for philosophers: to do any informed work in philosophy of science or metaphysics you need to know some of the physics, but it’s a huge investment of time to go through the physics sequence in the university – and you don’t get to the really philosophically interesting parts until pretty late in the sequence. This course, ideally, is supposed to carry you some of the way to knowing the physics that philosophers need to know.

  For a Physics Major, probably the easiest way is to tell you what subjects I plan to discuss. (You philosophers might look at this too – though it might mean less to you than to the physics people).

  We’ll start off with the (special) theory of relativity. One of my goals here is simply to formulate the theory accurately – which I take to mean, among other things, that we find a way to state the theory without talking about coordinate systems, but instead as a theory about the geometric structure of the world and how what happens physically ‘obeys’ this structure. I will also want to relate the theory of relativity to an old philosophical issue: namely whether space (or spacetime) has any reality other than as a system of relations between material objects.

   The next topic is Einstein’s theory of gravitation – the General Theory of Relativity (GTR). Unlike the special theory, this theory is almost always formulated geometrically, right from the beginning, so there’ll be little in my presentation that will be different from what you’d see in a physics course; on the other hand, my guess is that most of you will not have seen it already, so it will be helpful to spell it out. We want to relate this theory too to the old questions about the reality of spacetime; we will also be discussing whether this theory is, as Einstein thought, an even more relativistic extension of the special theory.

  After this, we’ll discuss quantum theory. The big philosophical topic here, as you may know, is what to make of the apparently special role of the observer in quantum physics. We’ll be talking a lot about that, but before doing this, my guess (this depends on what you’ve seen already) is that you will learn something by seeing the theory presented with the kind of precision philosophers like. So you’ll be learning about such things as the connection between observables and transformations, pure versus mixed states, the exact content of the Uncertainty Principle, and much else.

  Then we’ll talk about the observer. This will lead us to the weird topic of influence-at-a-distance or pre-established harmony, or whatever it is that the famous theorem of John Bell (and the experiments it inspired) seem to show. The last topic will probably be David Bohm’s reformulation of quantum mechanics, which eliminates all the odd business about the observer at the cost of – perhaps – denying the theory of relativity

This course is a philosophic (critical) study of psychological theory from its inception to modern times.

   Arguably one of the most influential philosophers since World War II, Michel Foucault has significantly shifted the philosophical agenda, which he approaches in a refreshingly multi-disciplinary manner.

  Foucault has revised the Nietzschean claim that all knowledge is an expression of the will-to-power.  Particularly, he has provided detailed historical analyses of the complicity of the modern “human science” with the subtle systems of faceless “disciplinary power” that have evolved during the past two centuries.  In connection with this, he has been especially attentive to the history of the marginalized, excluded, and institutionalized groups of modern society – those deemed insane, chronically sick, criminal, or sexually deviant.

  Foucault is well-known also for his innovative methodologies.  Proceeding on the belief that philosophy must be historically and archivally informed, Foucault first developed what he called an “archaeological” approach, through which one attempts to delineate the structure of “discursive formations.”  Later he turned to a Nietzschean “genealogical” approach, which focuses particularly on the “technologies” of power.

  Though covering his whole career, we will pay special attention to the political work of the 1970s, as exemplified by Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, his manifold interviews, and recent publications of his various lectures at the Collège de France.

  Recently there has been an enormous resurgence of interest in Pragmatism, not only in philosophy, but in political science, sociology, cultural studies, and many other areas of intellectual pursuit.  This seminar will examine main themes, problems, and trends in Pragmatism.  It will focus on the writings of Peirce, James, and Dewey.  The implications of their ideas to current controversies concerning truth, knowledge, relativism, and inquiry will be explored.  Questions will also be raised about the goals and methods of philosophy.

   This seminar will address issues at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind and moral psychology.  The issues fall into three groups: (a) What are the natures of believing and judging as psychological acts or states? (b) What norms govern believing and judging, and how do they work? Can you, or a ‘part’ of you, judge merely at will?  If not, why not? (c) What, more generally, are the natures of these norms?  How do epistemic norms differ from practical norms?  What is distinctive of the norm of truth?  In addition to historical sources (e.g. Kant and Wm. James), we’ll read works by (among others) J. Adler, L.R. Baker, M. Bratman, T. Burge, G.A. Cohen, D. Dennett, R. Foley, G. Harman, K. Lehrer, R. Moran, D. Owens, and J.D. Velleman.

  Elizabeth Anscombe’s paper “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) simultaneously launched an influential critique of the two dominant traditions in moral philosophy at the time (utilitarianism and Kantianism) and ushered in a period of renewed and vigorous interest in the concepts of virtue, vice, and character which continues to the present time.  In this course we will focus primarily on developments in virtue ethics since the publication of Anscombe’s groundbreaking piece, though we will fill in some historical background (especially Aristotle and Hume) as appropriate.  We will begin by considering Anscombe’s and other related criticisms of modern moral philosophy (for example, by Bernard Williams and Michael Stocker), but will spend the bulk of the course exploring work on virtue and related concepts by philosophers such as Alisdair MacIntyre, John McDowell, Philippa Foot, and Michael Thompson.  We will also consider challenges, from a social-psychological perspective, to the usefulness of the very notion of character in ethics, such as that advanced by John Doris in his book Lacking Character (2002).