2014-2015

Recently, a number of best-selling books, by professional philosophers like Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), scientists like Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), and popular writers like Sam Harris (The End of Faith) have argued that modern science shows that religious faith is fundamentally irrational. This argument has not gone unanswered (for example by Francis Collins in The Language of God and by Pope Benedict XVI, in his Regensburg lecture). This course will examine the relationship between religious faith and reason. We will discuss four positions: (1) reason and faith are in conflict, and it is best to abandon science in favor of faith (religious fundamentalism); (2) reason and faith are in conflict, and it is best to abandon faith in favor of science (scientific atheism); (3) reason and faith do not make cognitive contact, and one can freely choose faith without conflict with reason ("non-overlapping magisteria," fideism); (4) reason and faith do make cognitive contact but are mutually supporting, not in conflict (harmonious compatibilism). We will focus on contemporary debates but also consider their historical roots (for example, Aquinas, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, William James). Among the topics to be discussed will be the nature of reason and faith, arguments for and against the existence of God, the problem of evil, evolution and intelligent design, cosmology and the origin of the universe, the rationality of belief in miracles and the supernatural, and evolutionary and neuroscientific explanations of religious belief and religious experience. (B)

In this course we will explore some of the central questions in epistemology and metaphysics. In epistemology, these questions will include: What is knowledge? What facts or states justify a belief? How can the threat of skepticism be adequately answered? How do we know what we (seem to) know about mathematics and morality? In metaphysics, these questions will include: What is time? What is the best account of personal identity across time? Do we have free will? We will also discuss how the construction of a theory of knowledge ought to relate to the construction of a metaphysical theory—roughly speaking, what comes first, epistemology or metaphysics? (B)

This seminar will offer a close reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, one of the great works of ethics.  Among the topics to be considered are: What is a good life?  What is ethics?  What is the relation between ethics and having a good life?  What is it for reason to be practical?  What is human excellence?  What is the non-rational part of the human psyche like?  How does it ever come to listen to reason?  What is human happiness?  What is the place of thought and of action in the happy life? We shall use the new translation by C.D.C. Reeve (Hackett Publishers). (A)

This course will critically survey the various ways in which philosophy curricula are developed and used in different educational contexts and for different age groups.  Considerable attention will be devoted to the growing movement in the U.S. for public educational programs in precollegiate philosophy.