Fall 2025 Selected Course Offerings

PHI105: Critical Thinking and Informal Logic
Instructor: Matías Bulnes-Beniscelli
Meeting time: MW from 12:15-1:30 or TTh from 10:50-12:05

This course is a basic introduction to critical reasoning. Focus is on students' developing and applying skills in critical and analytic reading and writing. Topics covered include recognizing arguments, identifying premises and conclusions, clarity and relevance in argumentative language, distinguishing types of arguments, validity and soundness in constructing and evaluating arguments, fallacies, elements of legal reasoning.

PHI201: Philosophy of Art (Satisfies Flex Core: Creative Expression)
Instructors: Justine Borer and Daniel Jove Rosales
Meeting Times: MW from 10:50-12:05 (Borer) and TTh from 12:15-1:30 (Jove Rosales)

This course examines the philosophical questions that arise from the creation, interpretation, and appreciation of art. Through the study of both Western and non-Western philosophies, the course also investigates the importance of truth and meaning in artistic value. The course asks students to consider not only what they mean by "beauty," but also whether good art must be beautiful. Students in some sections will visit an art gallery or museum, and attend a theatrical production, free of cost.

PHI204: Symbolic Logic (Satisfies Flex Core: Scientific World) Instructor: James DiGiovanna
Meeting time: TTh from 3:05-4:20 or TTh 4:30-5:55

Symbolic Logic is a way of converting ordinary language into a set of variables and functions, and then using those functions to test for the values “true” and “false,” and for such relationships as consistency, logical equivalence, validity, contradiction etc. As a formal symbol, it’s fully abstract and algebraic, which makes it a branch of both mathematics and the study of language. In practice, it’s central to contract law, computer science and computer languages, standardized testing, solving puzzles and winning games, and clarity in writing legal, scientific and argumentative texts. This course covers two of the most basic and widely applicable forms of logic, propositional and predicate logic.

PHI210: Ethical Theory (Satisfies Flex Core: Individual and Society) Instructors: Brian Irwin and Dwight Murph
Meeting Times: TTh from 12:15-1:30 (Murph) and Online Asynchronous (Irwin)

This course asks how ethical choices and judgments should be made. It investigates whether ethics should be guided by abstract unchanging principles; by social costs and benefits; by the standards and values of particular cultures; or through the cultivation of individual virtue. The course may include readings from the ancient Greek tradition, the European Enlightenment, feminist ethics, Buddhism, animal rights advocacy, and/or environmental ethics. The course calls into question some of the key assumptions of ethical systems, such as who counts as a morally relevant being and the moral relevance of race, gender and other identities to ethical considerations.

PHI231: The Big Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (Satisfies Flex Core: Individual and Society)
Instructors: Sergio Gallegos, Daniel Jove Rosales, and John Pittman
Meeting Times: TTh from 10:50-12:05 or TTh 12:15-1:30 (Gallegos), TTh from 3:05-4:20 (Jove Rosales), and TTh from 8:00-9:15 (Pittman)

This course introduces some of the big philosophical questions surrounding individual and society: What can I know for certain? Who am I? Is morality relative to culture? Does God exist? What is justice? Why be good? By way of answering these questions, students examine arguments about knowledge and belief, the nature of reality, freedom, ethics, aesthetics, personal identity and social justice.

PHI235: Philosophy of Science (Satisfies Flex Core: Scientific World) Instructor: Matías Bulnes-Beniscelli
Meeting time: TTh from 9:25-10:40

This course focuses on the difference between science, non-science, and pseudoscience. It introduces students to the fundamental features of scientific thinking, including the logic of induction and confirmation, falsification, and statistical generalization. Students will learn how to assess the quality of scientific studies, in particular the way that scientific studies are reported in the media. Students will also consider the role science can and should play in shaping public policy as well as their personal moral beliefs.

PHI238: Philosophy of Comedy (Satisfies Flex Core: Creative Expression) Instructor: Kaci Harrison
Meeting time: M (hybrid) from 4:30-5:55

This course uses a diversity of tools—historical, psychological, philosophical, and more—to consider the nature of comedy as a form of creative expression. Understanding comedy requires considering questions such as: what makes something funny? When is it okay (and not okay) to laugh at a joke? Why do we laugh at all? Can comedy be used as a tool for pursuing social justice?

PHI302: The Philosophy of Rights (Satisfies College Option: Justice in Global Perspective (300-level))
Instructor: Enrique Chavez-Arvizo
Meeting Times: MW from 10:50-12:05

Many legal systems (most obviously the U.S.A.) are founded on the notion of legal and constitutional rights. Analogously, several ethical and political systems are founded on the notion of moral rights. Thus it may seem as if the notion of rights is indispensable. However, according to some philosophers, rights are not indispensable (e.g., one philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, calls the idea of rights ‘nonsense on stilts’). In this course we shall examine the concept of rights, and some of their ontological, moral, legal, and political implications. We shall critically assess some recent (and some older but still powerful) philosophical attempts to construct rights-based theories of ethics. The course is divided into two parts. In the first part we will analyze the philosophical grounding of rights and the social contract tradition as elaborated by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, as well as consequentialist critiques of this tradition put forward by Bentham and Mill. Moreover, we will study recent accounts of the nature and value of rights. Among the topics we will be considering are: the movement of human will or freedom to the center of political thought, the foundations of liberalism, the origin and meaning of rights, the relationship between freedom and equality, the role of democracy, the rise of history, and the belief in human moral progress. In the second part we will discuss several extremely pressing practical rights that encompass discussions of animal, environmental, human, women, refugee, and immigration rights.

Instructor: Mary Ann McClure
Meeting Times: TTh from 9:25-10:40

Rights can be legal, constitutional, contractual, moral, or political. This course will focus on human rights, a type of moral right that we all possess simply by virtue of being human. Because human rights provide a transcultural standard for what is acceptable behavior, they provide criteria for evaluating the actions of nations on the contemporary world stage. This course will trace the historical origins of this concept, delve into the concept of genocide by tracing the history of the phenomena in Rwanda, and explore incidents of human rights transgressions occuring in the world today.

PHI310: Ethics and Law
Instructor: Enrique Chavez-Arvizo
Meeting Times: MW from 9:25-10:40 and MW 12:15-1:30

The present course, entitled ‘Ethics and Law’, is divided into two parts, Ethics and Philosophy of Law. The Ethics component includes lectures on an area of moral philosophy known as ‘Applied Ethics’. This will involve discussions on such issues as: equality and discrimination, euthanasia, abortion, our obligations to poor and starving people, the ways in which we ought to treat animals, and war. We shall be concerned with what ought to be done in situations where people have to make choices about suffering, life, and death. The Philosophy of Law component includes discussions on the principal theories of law, key issues in law—such as, law, rights, obligations, responsibilities, and punishment, and the ethical foundations of the legal system. Thus, the aim of the course as a whole is to evaluate the main philosophical theories of ethics and law, probe central moral and legal issues, examine the practical application of such theories and issues, and analyse the interrelationship between ethics and law.

PHI322: Judicial and Correctional Ethics
Instructor: Daniel Jove Rosales
Meeting Times: TTh from 9:25-10:40

This course raises the question of what it means to say that a punishment is deserved, a concept that is central to the moral issues surrounding institutional responses to crime and wrongdoing in the United States. We begin with a review of the philosophical tradition on the question of desert, through both historical and contemporary moral theory. We will read authors like Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Beccaria, Kant and Kleinig; and cover topics like punishment, policing, imprisonment, prisoner's rights, restorative justice, among others.

PHI/GEN333: Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Amie Macdonald
Meeting Times: TTh from 12:15-1:30

Gender Studies is a field that has been formed in and through theories originating in women's studies, queer theory, masculinity studies and their intersections with race and class. In this course students will learn how gender studies theories have re-conceptualized gender and sexuality as products of the interactions among historical, representational, racial and cultural constructs. Readings and discussions will focus on a series of themes and issues such as rage, bodies, gender performance, family, consumerism and political rights.

Instructor: Jonathan Berk
Meeting Times: MW from 3:05-4:20

This course surveys 19th- and 20th-century North Atlantic philosophy associated with existentialism, an intellectual movement centered on issues of individual responsibility, "radical freedom," and political engagement. Contextualizing it as a critical reaction to the abstract optimism and colonizing tendencies of the 18th-century Enlightenment, we explore existentialism’s focus on concrete situations and worldly problems. Topics include anguish, thrownness, bad faith, humanism, and facticity. Readings are selected from thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Unamuno, Cesaire, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Fanon, Wright, and contemporary commentators.

PHI351: Classical Chinese Philosophy
Instructor: Kyoo Lee
Meeting Times: M from 5:55-8:35

Philosophy flourished during the 'Spring and Autumn' and 'Warring States' periods in China (722-221 B.C.E.), when the "schools" of Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism developed. This course analyzes some of the major works, themes, and concepts of this classical intellectual tradition. Questions of the linguistic and cultural distinctiveness of the terms and of the challenges this raises for "non-Eastern" philosophical paradigms such as the "modern Western," will animate the learning of this ancient material today.

PHI374: Epistemology
Instructor: Michael Brownstein
Meeting Times: TTh from 10:50-12:05

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. This course will consider what knowledge is, how societies and individuals come to know things, contemporary topics related to knowledge (e.g., misinformation), and whether you should believe in Santa Claus.