Introductory Courses in Philosophy

Straight thinking and sloppy thinking about religion and science.  It turns out that a conservative evangelical theologian who urges Christians to return to their Biblical roots (Karl Barth) is one of the straight thinkers, and an eminent philosopher and historian of science (Norwood Russell Hanson) proves himself one of the sloppiest.  And a well-known advocate of the so-called “identity” theory of the mind-body relation (J. J. C. Smart), writing on the question of survival after death and presuming a conflict between science and religion on that issue, reveals that he hasn’t read the relevant literature.  Picking and choosing from the Bible exactly what one wants to believe:  Creationists reject evolution but allow that the earth moves like a planet; Conservatives quote Leviticus against gay rights but ignore Isaiah’s insistent call for justice.  We are obliged to look at the general question of the role of authority in moral decision-making.  An entry-level course (no prerequisites).  Topics and readings chosen for minimal overlap with other existing courses and maximal relevance for the pressing issues of our time.  David Hull on the nature of science. Malinowski’s Magic Science and Religion.  Aquinas versus Locke on revelation. The character of Mohammed’s revelatory experiences and a few verses from the Qur’an.  Kierkegaard’s concept of subjective truth illustrated by 10th-century devotional poetry from the Hindu Shaivite tradition.  Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern illustrated by first-person accounts of spiritual crises (Gandhi, King, Woolman, Bonhoeffer).  And of course, the Galileo affair, Leibniz’ dispute with Newton, the concept of “natural religion” and much more.

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. 

The concepts and techniques encountered in the study of deductive logic are of central importance to any analysis of argument and inference.  They reflect fundamental patterns of proof found in science and mathematics, they underlie the programs that enable computers to “reason” logically, and they provide tools for characterizing the formal structures of language.  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.

Intermediate and Advanced Courses

The task of the first logic course – Philosophy 211 – was to develop a means for evaluating deductive arguments.  This task involved the use of a formal language for expressing the logical structure of English sentences and the use of various formal techniques, including truth tables and deductions, for evaluating arguments.  Once an English argument was translated into the formal language, formal techniques were used to solve an apparently informal problem, i.e., the problem of finding out whether it is possible for the conclusion of the argument to be false while all its premises are true. 

In Philosophy 212 we will continue this inquiry into the evaluation of deductive arguments.  We will concentrate on two central areas.  First, we will deal with statements and arguments that are more quantificationally complex than those studied in Philosophy 211.  Second, we will address the issue of the adequacy of the formal system.  Explicit definitions of validity of arguments and formal systems will be used for the investigation, via informal reasoning and proof, of what can be achieved by a deductive system.  Philosophy 211 with a grade of ‘C’ or better is a prerequisite for this class.

736-241  Introductory Ethics
Lec 401
3 credits, U, HU
MW  11:00 – 11:50am
Professor Sensat
tel 414-229-4669/4719
email sensat@uwm.edu
http://www.uwm.edu/~sensat

736-244  Ethical Issues in Health Care:  Contemporary Problems
Lec 001
3 credits, U, HU
M  6:30 – 9:10pm
Professor Tym
tel 456-4299/229-4719
email ktym@earthlink.net

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 U.C.C.E., 161 W. Wisconsin Ave., Room 6000.

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 contract 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.  Texts used will include Murphy, Speidel and Ayres’ Studies in Contract Law, 5th Edition, and Restatement of Contracts (Second) and case law.  This course is taught off-campus at U.C.C.E., 161 W. Wisconsin Ave., Room 6000.

  272-001  The Life and Death of Socrates 
           5 WKS. BEGINNING WEEK OF 1/21

  272-002 Descartes’ Meditations
            6 WKS. BEGINNING WEEK OF 2/24

  272-003  Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion
            5 WKS. BEGINNING WEEK OF 4/7

Lec 001
The Life and Death of Socrates
1 credit, U
TR  2:00-3:15pm

5 WKS. BEGINNING WEEK OF 1/21

Socrates’ life and teachings were immortalized by his great pupil, Plato and in his own right, Socrates has been accorded an honored place in the history of philosophy.  Yet he remains an enigmatic figure.  What sort of a teacher was this man who insisted he was the wisest of all because he knew nothing?  Why did the Athenians find his teachings so threatening that they put him to death?  In this course we will seek to uncover the puzzle that was Socrates through a reading of Plato’s account of his last days.  

Lec 002
Descartes’ Meditations
1 credit, U
TR  2:00-3:15pm

6 WKS. BEGINNING WEEK OF 2/24

If we sometimes dream, then perhaps the world we perceive when awake has no more reality than the world we dream about.  How can you be sure that you do not believe that 2+2=4 because an evil demon has tricked you into so believing?  With speculations like these, Descartes took his figure of a meditator into an understanding of the underlying nature of reality, where minds are firmly distinct from bodies and our knowledge of the nature of reality is saved from skepticism through a proof for the existence of God.  We will follow the thoughts of the meditator through the steps Descartes laid out for him or her, and see why Descartes ushered in a new era of philosophical endeavor.

Lec 003
Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion
1 credit, U
TR  2:00-3:15pm

5 WKS. BEGINNING WEEK OF 4/7

Through the mouths of his various characters, Hume recorded the struggles of his age, as thinkers tried to reconcile the discoveries of the great scientists, such a Isaac Newton, with the truths of religion that were supposed to be equally available to rational inspection.  One mystery remains for Hume’s readers:  Who speaks for Hume?  Was Hume himself an agnostic or a believer?

Miles Davis was a major force in virtually all the great movements of modern jazz, which include bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion.  He was the consummate modernist, in constant search for the new, incessantly going beyond the boundaries imposed by the jazz tradition.   Davis’s outstanding ensembles have included leading musicians of the era (e.g., Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk) as well as future greats who honed their skills in his bands (e.g., Cannonball Adderley, Herbie Hancock).  Davis’s career is truly a microcosm of the history of modern jazz, its strengths and weaknesses, its triumphant breakthroughs and its dead ends.

John Coltrane is the most celebrated of the former Davis sidemen who left to develop a career of his own.  Coltrane was both close to and yet very far from Davis musically, the ideal complement.  His hard-edged  cascading sounds opposed themselves fruitfully to Davis’s lighter and sparer tones.  Coltrane was the unrelenting solo experimentalist, Davis, the radical ensemble conceptualist.  They remain the two most popular jazz musicians.   Through a close study of their work, we will be able to entertain broader questions, such as: Is there a jazz aesthetic?  How have racial matters affected the music?  Has jazz modernism come to an end?  Was it a mistake to attempt to fuse jazz with rock?

Texts: John Zswed, So What (on Davis); Eric Nisenson, Ascension (on Coltrane); class reader.

“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. 

Philosophy of Language is one of the most central areas of philosophy.  It is, in a sense, both the place where traditional metaphysical concerns about reality, thought and objectivity have come to roost in the twentieth century, and the area which has had the deepest influence on disciplines outside of philosophy – having, for example, helped shape the methodology of such sciences as psychology and sociology, and provided much of the impetus behind fashionable current trends in literary studies.  The reason for its importance lies in the extreme generality of the question it addresses:  What is the nature of representation and reference?  What is the nature of truth?  The sort of approach one takes to these questions is often virtually definitive of one’s general intellectual temperament.  

This course will examine various current theories of reference, truth and meaning.  The readings will include works by Locke, Frege, Russell, Kripke, Tarski, Davidson and Quine.

Heidegger thinks that the long tradition of Western metaphysics, originating in Plato, must be overcome and left behind.  For Heidegger, Nietzsche is the last great Western metaphysician, insofar as he tried to destroy Western metaphysics but failed, remaining stuck in that tradition while bringing it to its ultimate crisis.  Between 1937-40, Heidegger taught four lecture courses on Nietzsche and the crisis of Western metaphysics, based primarily on a reading of Nietzsche’s Will to Power, a collection of texts from Nietzsche’s notebooks published posthumously by his sister.  Along with the Will to Power, we will read two of Heidegger’s lecture series on Nietzsche, one focusing on art (Vol. I of Heidegger, Nietzsche) and the other on knowledge and truth (Vol. III).  The reason is the following.  

Both Nietzsche and Plato (according to Heidegger) agree that art (as mere semblance) is in conflict with truth.  Plato thus privileges truth over art.  In his hostile attempt to overturn Platonism, Nietzsche privileges art over truth, which he expresses in such enigmatic statements as “We have art in order not to perish from the truth” and  “Truth is the kind of error without which a certain kind of being could not live.”  In a brilliant reading of this and other texts, Heidegger tries to explain how Nietzsche can rationally make such apparently perverse and possibly incoherent statements.  Ultimately, according to Heidegger, even with such a radical move, Nietzsche fails to free himself from the overall metaphysical framework set in place by Plato.  Heidegger’s own answer to the alleged truth-art dichotomy is in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which we shall also read.

In this seminar we shall study and discuss Aristotle’s conception of (a) nature, both with a view to understanding that conception and with a view to determining its relevance to certain current issues in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Mind.  Specifically, we shall be considering nature in its relation to living substances - i.e. their form or soul - and address such questions as:  “What is a substance?,” “How is change possible?,” “How does a natural substance come into being?,” and “How does its nature underlie the behavior of a substance?”  We shall be reading significant portions of the Physics, Posterior Analytics, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, On the Soul, and Generation of Animals, as well as selections from the Metaphysics, Ethics, and other works.  No knowledge of Greek is required or expected.