Undergraduate Courses:
Big Data, Bigger Questions
Spring 18. It is now a truism that Big Data shapes our lives. The products we buy, the news we read, our social networks, even the prison terms we are likely to serve if we run afoul of the law are all determined by algorithms we can neither control nor (for the most part) understand. In this course, we will survey the fundamentals of data and data analysis and investigate their implications for how we make knowledge, our nature and well-being as humans, and the future prospects of education and democracy. Big Data, we’ll discover, is dwarfed by the questions it raises. The course will be devoted to a philosophical exploration of these questions and to their hands-on implications. We’ll work with a local organization to take an analytics project from beginning to end. We will divide into groups according to our disciplinary interests, and those groups will: identify our partner organization’s concerns, determine sources of data that can help address them, formulate mechanisms for collecting that data, analyze the data, present our results visually, and make recommendations. Our goal will be to see how the philosophical problems we discuss abstractly become concrete in the implementation of any analytics project. The progress and outcome of the project will be reported in an online portfolio and presented to the local organization. |
The Good Life, and How to Live It (PHIL 3093)
Fall 17. All of us dream of living “the good life,” though the mental images we have of it may differ. Likewise, many of us have carefully thought-out strategies for achieving the good life as we understand it and work hard to implement those strategies. But what is the good life and what do we need to do to be sure that our own life is a good one? From the dawn of civilization, philosophers, theologians and poets have conceptualized the good life and recommended ways to achieve it. They have tried to teach us how to live happily and well. In this course, we encounter some of the most influential thinkers in Western societies who have dealt with the questions surrounding happiness and good living over more than two millennia. We read and discuss their thoughts as a way to help us develop our own philosophy of happiness and good living – a philosophy that will inform our personal life choices, console us when we encounter life’s difficulties, and guide us in our roles as friends and engaged citizens who care about the happiness of others. |
Science, Magic, and the Occult (PHIL 2042)
Spring 17. How do Talismans work? What are Astral Bodies? What is Kabbalah and who is a Magi? Is the universe like a machine, an animal, or book of spells? Does everything flow from The One, and what does that mean? And what does this have to do with modern science? Well… a lot. This course is about the roots of modern science in magical, mystical, and medicinal practices, and the contemporary chasm between science and religion in light of their past relationships. The primary mode of analysis is historical: we investigate how ideas develop over time, and how beliefs and concepts that seem natural, even obvious, today arose from the complex interaction of agents, movements in particular social, cultural and material environments. |
Philosophy and the Physical Sciences
Fall 11. This course will explore the philosophical issues surrounding modern physics. We will spend the first few sessions of the course discussing what makes a theory "scientific": is it a theory's success in making predictions? its ability to explain physical phenomena? its confirmation by empirical evidence? its fit with the remainder of human knowledge? etc. For the remainder of the course, we will discuss the particular issues that are raised by modern physics once modern physics is accepted as properly "scientific": what is the nature of physical action? is action limited by space and time? What is time? Is time travel possible? What is spacetime? how many dimensions are there? and others. |
Moral and Political Ideas
Winter 11. What’s the right thing to do? Is it wrong for a mother to steal in order to feed her starving children? Is it wrong for Robin Hood to rob from the rich and give to the poor? Is it wrong for a government to tax the rich and give to the poor? Can one person be killed in order to save the lives of hundreds? Can one person be tortured for the possibility of saving the lives of hundreds? What principles do we use to justify our answers to these question? We will examine these, and similar questions. Our goal will not just be to address moral questions abstracted from everyday life, but to understand how moral decisions are actually made in our legal and political system, and how legal and political systems generally reflect commitments to ideas regarding what is right and wrong. |
How Science Works (PHIL 1032)
Fall12, Spring 13, Fall 13, Spring 13. Like a car, an airplane, or any other tool, science works in a particular way, for a particular purpose. So we can ask: what makes it go? What are its parts, and how do they fit together? What are they for? We will explore these questions by looking at real-life scientific and technological innovations that shed light on the methods, procedures, and concepts of science. We will investigate types of experimental procedures and the evidence they can yield, the role of statistics, the relation between scientific "models" and reality, and the values and starting assumptions that influence scientific theories. This course will prepare students for more focused work in particular sciences and help non-science majors become more sophisticated consumers of scientific information. |
Empiricism
Spring 2016. This course explores the historical origins and development of Empiricism as a philosophical framework for ethics, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, and science in the 17th Century. The core of Empiricism is the idea that experience is the main source of knowledge. However, we shall see that this idea takes any forms. It may be semantic (concerning the origin of mental contents or the ultimate sources of justification), methodological (concerning the proper methods of discovery and invention), or technological and practical (concerning procedures for manipulating real-world experiments or real-world goal like promoting health). We will pay great attention to the scientific context of 17th century philosophy, and the ways in which it encouraged the rise of Empiricism. |
Rationalism (PHIL 3062)
Fall 12, Spring 17. To what extent can the human mind grasp the nature of reality? The great rationalists studied in this course -- Descartes and Spinoza -- thought that the human minds can grasp quite a bit. We will study why they thought we can have access to ultimate reality, and how they thought that reality was structured. Only primary source readings will be used. |
Philosophy of Science (PHIL 3550)
Spring 2008, Fall 2008, Spring 2009, Spring 2010, Summer 2010. Western Michigan University. Science appears to be extraordinarily successful is two crucial respects. First, science apparently serves as an extremely reliable vehicle for arriving at the truth (as contrasted with astrology or palm reading). Second, the methodology of science seems eminently rational (again as opposed to the methodologies of astrology or palm reading). Some philosophers think that the two virtues are illusory and that, upon reflection, science is not significantly superior to astrology or palm reading. Our basic goal is to survey 20th century philosophy of science as centered upon this idea. To this end, our focus will be upon the following question: are truth and rationality genuine features of scientific inquiry, or are they mere illusions? We will discuss topics such as: confirmation and disconfirmation of theories, falsifiability and pseudo-science, induction, probability and statistical inference, prediction, explanation, empirical equivalence, holism, relativism, and realism. |
History of Modern Philosophy (PHIL 3010)
Fall 2008, Spring 2009, Fall 2009. Western Michigan University As philosophy entered the modern period, significant advances in scientific understanding and experimental method gave rise to increased concern about the epistemological and metaphysical foundations and implications of the new science. In the first part of this course, we will study the scientific revolution and the epistemological and metaphysical views of the rationalists such as René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. In the second part of the modern period, empiricism emerged as a tradition to rival rationalism; the pioneers of this empiricist tradition in philosophy were John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. After investigating the transition from rationalism to empiricism, we will study the metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language of these British Empiricists. |
Foundation of the Modern Worldview (PHIL 3500)
Fall 2007. Western Michigan University. Contemporary science attempts to understand nature and its inner workings from a particular perspective, sometimes termed ‘the scientific world-view.’ This perspective is associated with a particular method of research involving physical experimentation and the extensive use of mathematics. In this course, we will examine the evolution of the scientific perspective from Greek antiquity to the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. We will see that modern science emerged from the interactions of several traditions of thought, some of which, like the magical tradition, seem at odds with modern science. We will begin with an overview of ancient Greek ideas in philosophy, medicine, and cosmology. We will then look at how these Greek ideas were recovered and adapted, almost 2000 years later, during the Renaissance. The last portion of the course will focus on the profound intellectual transformations in Europe during the 17th century. |
Introduction to Philosophy (PHIL 2000)
Fall 09, Spring 11, Summer 11. Western Michigan University This course serves as a general introduction to philosophy as a method and as a collection of subjects. We will study the nature of argument and rational deliberation and use such deliberation to better understand the issues surrounding the relationship of the mind to the body, free-will and determinism, the nature and possibility of knowledge, morality and relativism, as well as the problem of evil and the existence of god. This course satisfies the General Education II requirement . |