Past Classes Taught
270 Free Will | A priori arguments, a posteriori evidence, and the history of the debate. Experimental philosophy results on free will intuitions of the folk. Recent developments in the psychology of free will denial. Free will, transcendence and meaning in life.
240 Introduction to Ethics | Introduces theories about the nature and foundations of moral judgments. Plus applications to contemporary moral issues.
115 Philosophical Issues | Introduces fundamental issues in philosophy considering the views of classical and contemporary philosophers. Emphasis is placed on knowledge and belief, appearance and reality, determinism and free will, faith and reason, and justice and inequality.
150 Introduction to Western Philosophy: Historical Survey | Ancient Greek pre-Socratics; Socrates, Plato, Aristotle; Medieval European philosophy; Early Modern empiricists and rationalists; Hume and Kant; Hegel; Nietzsche; Existentialism; post-modernism and deconstruction.
250 Philosophy of Psychology | A look at the philosophy of science in general, with a focus on the nature of psychological explanations in particular. Geisteswissenschaften versus Naturwissenschaften. Explanation versus understanding.
260 Philosophy of Mind | Dualism, materialism, non-reductive physicalism, anomalous monism. The Mary Argument. The Chinese Room. The Turing Test. Are two physically identical Captain Kirks also mentally identical?
300 Nietzsche | A close reading of On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and Ecce Homo.
400 Islam and secularism | Debrief from Cornell’s Critical Theory Summer Program with Michael Warner, Charles Taylor, Seyla Benhabib.
105 Anti-Procrastination and Study Skills for College Students |
105 Develop a Philosophy of Life |
160 Business Humanities |
201 Western Civilization |
Example Topics
Euthyphro dilemma: A tongue twisting brain teaser | Let’s assume that God approves of all good actions. A question remains. Are the good actions good because God approves of them or does God approve of them because they are good?
Be the most rational person in any room! Deductive logic and philosophical argumentation | Get your feet wet with philosophical logic. Learn about what makes an argument valid and what makes it sound. Learn how to spot fallacies and analyze others’ argument
Explanation | How do explanations work? Is everything completely explainable? Only in principle? What is the difference between metaphysics and epistemology? How do debunking explanations in morality work? And bunking explanations?
Descartes and skepticism | Have you ever had a dreamed that seemed real? If so, then you cannot know that right now is not a dream, since right now seems real but that it is a dream remains a possibility. Hume helps us realize knowledge should not be about possibility but probability.
Plato’s psychology of motivation | Plato said, “To know the good is to do the good.” What did he mean? Socrates said, “No one ever does evil voluntarily.” How do we make sense of this?
The ethics of belief: Can we really believe whatever we want? | A guided tour through Clifford’s classic paper, “The Ethics of Belief,” which contradicts the widely held article of faith that we can believe whatever we want.
Relativism | The widespread argument from difference for relativism is fallacious. Different cultures believe different moral systems are true. Therefore, the truth of moral systems is culturally relative. Learn how to show that that argument is fallacious.
The trolley problem | Phillippa Foot’s and Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous thought experiment. Joshua Greene’s “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” in which he interprets brain scans of utilitarians and Kantians while they think about the trolley problem… in order to make a Nietzschean critique of Kantians’ vaunted rationality as instead being a post-hoc rationalization… on the order of the analysis of that phenomenon (post-hoc rationalization) in Jonathan Haidt’s seminal paper “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail.”
Free Will: What’s it take to be free | Since the addicted, unfree smoker (who is trying to quit) does what he in some sense “wants” when he smokes (it is his desire even if not preferred), we see that people have conflicting first-order desires plus they have some desires they wish they didn’t have. Are you free when you do what you want? Or only when you do what you want to want to do? Two wants. Free will requires the fulfillment of second-order desires, according to this compatibilist view of Harry Frankfurt.
Philosophical implications of dual-process theories in psychology | Some theories in psychology and philosophy argue that free will is an illusion, the causal power of conscious willing is epiphenomenal; that reasoning is post-hoc rationalization, and that experience itself is often a confabulation. How far does that undermine our traditional notion of ourselves?
Danto’s gallery of indiscernible paintings of red squares | Arthur Danto wrote about a number of real and imagined paintings—red paint on a square canvas—in order to think about the role of the non-material conceptual aspects in the meaning of a work of art.
“Only thoughts reached by walking have any value.” —Nietzsche