Philosophy comes from the Greek word philosophia, which means, “love of wisdom.” Accordingly, philosophy is a diverse field of study that explores and celebrates different ways of thinking about things like knowledge, ethics, logic, aesthetics, religion, and politics, among many others. Yet, you cannot have “love of wisdom” without having a lover of wisdom, or a thing that loves wisdom. Who is this “thing” that is capable of finding, acquiring, and loving wisdom? In this Introduction to Philosophy class, you will encounter a broad range of philosophical perspectives on the topic of human subjectivity. We will confront and attempt to answer questions like: What is the difference between the soul and the body? Is the soul composed of parts, or is the soul a unified thing? What divides the human from the natural world? What is the relationship between an individual and collective society? To tackle these questions, we will begin in the ancient world, reading selections from the work of Plato, Aristotle and Nagasena. Next, we will move to the modern era, reading selections from Descartes, Spinoza and Hume. Finally, we will transition to the 19^th and 20th centuries, reading selections from Hegel, Marx, Freud and Fanon.  Course assignments will consist of weekly readings, discussions, 5 reading responses, 2 short papers, a midterm exam, and a final paper.

***First Half Term***

This course is an introduction to philosophy. We will survey the fundamental areas of philosophy including the following: philosophy of religion, ethics, freedom of the will, personal identity, and philosophy of mind. Our focus will be on arguments, their analysis and evaluation. Our approach will also be a historical one. We will begin with Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, then we will consider medieval philosophy, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. Turning out attention to modern philosophy we will examine Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. We will discuss nineteenth century philosophy in Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. An examination of twentieth and twenty first century philosophy will round out the course.

Most, if not all of us, have spent time in our lives asking philosophical questions: Are you and I seeing the same blue when we look at the sky? What is the meaning of life? What does it mean to be a good person? While many people view these philosophical questions as just pointless musings which don't really have any answer beyond one's opinion, in this course, we will take seriously the idea that philosophy relies on rigorous, well-reasoned arguments. The goal of this course is not to answer all our philosophical questions once and for all. The goal is simply to engage with some of the important philosophers of the past in order to determine what philosophy is, how we do it, and why we ought to do it at all. We're all born as philosophers who repeatedly ask our parents "Why?" over and over until we are met with the frustrated "Because I said so!" Throughout the rest of our lives, we are often told by other authorities "this is simply the way things have to be" or "it's just common sense." Our goal is to revive that child-like wonder and questioning - philosophy is about giving actual reasons where others simply want to appeal to authority or say "it's just obvious."  

We will begin with ancient philosophy and continue all the way to the 21st century, picking out a variety of important texts throughout history. All readings will be available on Learn. Grades will primarily be determined by argumentative papers and reading responses.  

This class aims at developing your skills in writing, argumentation, argument analysis, reasoning, and critical thinking. We will study the structures of argumentative texts and of different types of arguments (deduction and induction, descriptive vs normative arguments, etc.) as well as the elements of meaning and language that convey those arguments. We will also consider what constitutes a flawed argument, or logical fallacy. Throughout the class, we will practice our skills at spotting and analyzing arguments by reading texts on philosophical and ethical themes. Students will also practice their own argumentative skills by writing short essays in response to some of these texts. The logical and analytical tools acquired in this class will be highly useful to students in their future coursework by enabling them to read and analyze material efficiently and to write strong and well-structured papers. 

This course aims to help you improve your critical thinking ability by understanding basic concepts of informal logic and applying them to your reading and writing tasks. As a result, this course will provide you with some academic skills that you may need for your future study. 

For this, you will primarily learn some essential concepts and tools for critical thinking and argument analysis in the first half of the course. Specifically, this course will mainly focus on the concepts of argument, language, various kinds of arguments, and fallacies that lead to undermining arguments. The second half of the course is designed to apply your conceptual understandings to analyzing and assessing others’ arguments and making your own. In doing so, you will finally write your paper on a specific topic. For this project, we will read some philosophical writings in class.

How can you tell if an argument makes sense? What separates a good argument from a bad one? In this online course, students will learn the skills necessary to construct, analyze, and critically assess arguments.  Beginning with the basic principles of reason and logic, students will acquire the abilities necessary to extract arguments from philosophical texts, evaluate the strength of these arguments, and craft written responses to them.  We will also be analyzing classic philosophical texts that have profoundly influenced the structure and development of Western civilization.

Required text:  

Critical Thinking, An Introduction to the Basic Skills (7^th Edition), by William Hughes, Jonathan Lavery, Katheryn Doran (Broadview Press). ( ISBN-13: 978-1554811977 ISBN-10: 155481197X) 

***Second Half Course***

Most intellectual endeavors involve argumentation. From short letters to the editor to complex philosophical essays, from everyday discussions to legal debates, arguments are constantly created and invoked to support or criticize points of view. The purpose of the course is to help you learn how to argue well so that you can analyze, critique, and construct arguments. 

This online course focuses on some of the ethical issues that arise in the context of professional life.  Beginning with an overview of three major ethical theories, we will consider how these theories, which traditionally concern personal morality, apply to life in a professional setting.  We will also examine the roles and obligations associated with professional life. What is the relationship between personal and professional codes of conduct? What distinguishes professions from other occupations?  Through the lens of various professions, we will look at issues such as lying and truth-telling, whistleblowing, confidentiality, and the obligations of professionals toward the public.  Using a combination of readings, case studies, and online discussion groups, we will explore these ideas in a philosophical manner, looking to understand the ethical principles at work.  This course will give students a solid introduction to ethical reasoning and will help to develop the tools necessary to apply ethical principles to real-world settings. 

Required text: 

Ethics Across the Professions: A Reader for Professional Ethics, 2^nd ed, Clancy Martin, Wayne Vaught, and Robert C. Solomon, editors. OUP. (ISBN-13: 978-0190298708/ISBN-10: 0190298707) 

The only required text is Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins (eds.), Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources (third edition), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2019, ISBN-13: 978-1624668050.  It is important to have the third edition. All other readings will be made available on Learn

Philosophy in the western tradition begins with the ancient Greeks and there is no better introduction to philosophy than to study their thought and writing. In this course, we will attempt to develop an original path of questioning in critical dialogue with the Greeks, with the aim of locating ourselves and the problems of contemporary life more centrally within the problematics that they already pursued.  Issues to be discussed include, among others: the nature of thought, reason and the soul; the structure of time and space; language, meaning, and truth; being, change and becoming; ethics and the good; democracy, equality, and social transformation; life and death.   Readings are from various Pre-Socratic philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Course requirements: weekly short reading responses, three short tests (in class), and final examination.

***Second Half Course***

One great thing about the human mind is its ability to draw inferences.  Better still is to do this well.  In this course, you will learn two new languages developed to clarify the notion of logical entailment, which will help you understand the nature of valid inference.  The course is good preparation for further work in logic or mathematics, but you can also take the tools you will acquire into any academic or professional discipline that requires clarity of thought.  No prerequisites.  Grades based on quizzes, homework, and exams.  Text: Bergmann, Moor, and Nelson, The Logic Book 6/e (McGraw-Hill).  Consider renting the book.  It’s one of the best available, but the most recent addition has a significant number of typos and is quite expensive.

This course explores the rich and vibrant work of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). In his time, as in ours, Thoreau has been cast in dichotomies. He is criticized as a narcissist and misanthropist who cared little about his fellow humans. He is praised for this eloquence in articulating a philosophy of life as well as an exuberant relationship with nature. In this course, we will move beyond these dichotomies to explore the complex work of Thoreau-from his praise of deliberate living in Walden, to his social activism expressed in his essays, to his natural history writing. We will investigate his influences, such Asian philosophy, as well as his influence on others, such as on Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  

This course is interdisciplinary and reflects the comprehensiveness of Thoreau’s work. Through the lens of philosophy, we explore his philosophy as a way of life and ethical imperatives such as civil disobedience. Through the lens of sustainability, we consider ideas about simplicity, the value of other species, and the preservation of nature. Though the lens of religion, we explore the impact of Asian religions on Thoreau as well as his daily life as a spiritual practice. And through the lens of literature, we explore his experimentation as a writer. 

This course is discussion-based, interactive, and dynamic. You are expected to attend and participate in all classes.  

Required Texts 

Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 

Thoreau, Henry David, Essays of Henry David Thoreau, Lewis Hyde, Editor (North Point Press, 2002 

Course Packet from UNM Copy Center

What is a universal? When we talk about “justice,” “human being,” “the nature of a cow,” do we actually mean anything? Are universals no more than concepts or abstractions? Are they real? Do they manifest through particulars? Are universals more real than their particulars, or the reverse? Do we think only with universals? If language is constituted by universals and universals are not real, does language ever access reality? These are the kinds of questions this course will address through a study of different texts written by Western and Indian authors on the question of universals. In the West, the debates surrounding that question took shape during the Middle Ages (we will read texts from realist and nominalist thinkers both in the Islamic and Latin scholastic traditions), but grew from an interpretation of Greek philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, and Porphyry). They have continued throughout the 20^th century and we will explore some of the creative solutions that were proposed. In India, the question emerged from debates between Buddhist and non-Buddhist thinkers on epistemological and ontological controversies. We will study how Indian philosophers discussed whether perception gave us access to particulars only or to universals as well, and whether reasoning can allow us to know reality if it uses universals. We will also address the issue of the status of language and whether words refer to particulars or universals, a question we will investigate from the Buddhist theory of exclusion (apoha) and some of its Nyāya’s responses. The question of universals also picked on ontological considerations regarding the ultimate constituents of reality and whether we can talk of essences or natures of things (svabhāva), including our own self (ātman). This will occupy the last part of the course.

The course will adopt a historical approach, situating each of the debates within its own intellectual context, with the goal of developing a critical reflection regarding these questions, which are at the center of epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of language.

The course will differentiate expectations and assessments between undergraduate and graduate students. Students should expect to write weekly short responses and a final paper.

This seminar will aim to open an inquiry into the meaning of education, under contemporary conditions, as it intersects and interrelates with philosophy as a range of practices and modes of the conduct of life.   Our inquiry will not be confined to “philosophy of education” in a narrow sense but will aim to interrogate some of the multiple dimensions (for instance political, ideological, ethical, technological) in which education in philosophy and philosophical conceptions of education inform, and are informed by, the contemporary problems of an individual or collective life. What are the roles of philosophy and philosophical education in the understanding, communication, and transmission of prevalent conceptions of meaning, practice, belief, culture, or value? How does philosophical education interact with the functions of power or authority in preserving and enforcing conformity and collective belief in, or the reproduction of, existing structures of authority, dominance, ideology, or technology, including in schools? In what way, if any, can philosophical education or a philosophy of education be liberating or emancipatory and how does a philosophical practice of education offer to provide or promote distinctive terms, bases, or forms for the pursuit of modes of social and political critique and the potential for transformation? We will pursue these questions, among others, with a view to interpreting and reflecting on the temporalities of life, thought, and experience that are practiced and pursued in various philosophical projects and the specific methods, conceptions, and relationships of education they suggest, entail, or demand.

Readings likely to include texts by: Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Emerson, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Montessori, Rancière, Friere, Arendt, Althusser, Nussbaum.

What is the relationship between philosophy and literature?  How should we understand the border between these two domains?  In order to answer those questions rigorously, we would first need to know both:  What is “philosophy”? and:  What is “literature”?  Hasn’t “philosophy” been understood, since Plato, as that discipline (or meta-discipline) responsible for asking questions of the form, “What is X?” — including not only “What is literature?” but also “What is philosophy?”?  If so, then wouldn’t it be a kind of philosophical apostasy to imagine that literature could illuminate philosophy about itself?  Is it obvious, however, that the question “What is philosophy?” can be answered from entirely within philosophy?  If not, if addressing this “purest” of philosophical questions actually requires stepping outside or beyond philosophy, would not “literature” be one of the names for this outside?  And what form would the answer take?  Would it be literary?  Or philosophical?  Or, would it not rather be — in some yet to be clarified sense — both?  Of course, those philosophers who like to imagine philosophy as a science rather than an art will tend to envision the domains of philosophy and literature as dichotomous categories or complementary sets (sharing no intersection).  Such philosophers may admit that literature can be philosophically interesting, but they will also suspect that a work which attempts to be both philosophy and literature is likely to succeed at neither.  Any yet, didn’t the first philosopher to exclude the poets from his philosophical realm do so while writing in the literary form of a dialogue?  Plato was not himself blind to the paradoxes entailed by his literary-philosophical exclusion of literary philosophy.  It is, rather, as if Plato realized that literature could only be banished from philosophy by a literary philosophy, a philosophy which implicitly undermines the very exclusion which helps define it by establishing its borders (and thereby also opening them to policing, crossing, undermining, and so on).  As if externalizing this struggle, the recent history of philosophy — from Kierkegaard to Derrida — is full of important philosophical works written in a seemingly “literary” style (whatever that might be, or not be), coexisting unhappily alongside the persistent suspicion that literary philosophy remains hopelessly dilettante, if not simply oxymoronic.  In order to question this philosophical prejudice from the side of philosophy (but without thereby taking philosophy’s side), to explore it by seeking to understand one of its most powerful (and undeniably dangerous) answers, our course will focus on the self-described greatest work of the most influential philosopher between Hegel and Heidegger, namely Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche self-consciously situates his greatest work, ­Thus Spoke Zarathustra:  A Book for All and None, at the intersection of the philosophical and the literary, and thereby calls this border profoundly into question — and with it the entire post-Platonic philosophical (or metaphysical) order it both presupposes and reinforces.  Our simple yet ambitious goal will be to learn to read this book, a book which seeks to teach its (real or true) readers how to read it (by requiring us to learn what Nietzsche calls “the art of slow reading”).  This will be our way of seeking to understand (both from within and without) what it can mean to think philosophy and literature together (as well as, perhaps, what dangerous explosions such a collision may cause). 

Prerequisites:  This course will include a good deal of demanding reading, and so is intended only for careful, diligent, and ambitious students.  Grades will be based on two philosophical papers (roughly 45% each), with the final 10% of your grade based on regular homework assignments (in which you will learn to practice Nietzsche’s “art of slow reading”).  This course is good preparation for:  learning how to read (well). 

Required text:  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, W. Kaufmann, ed. (NY:  Penguin).

In this course we will seek to understand the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas—that major 20^th century Continental philosopher perhaps best known as the thinker of alterity — by carefully studying his most important and influential work, Totality and Infinity:  An Essay on Exteriority (first published in 1961).  This famous text is neither the first nor the last in which Levinas develops his own critical alternative to the dialectical and phenomenological projects of Hegel and Heidegger.  But Totality and Infinity contains Levinas’s clearest statements of his most famous views, including his conception of alterity — that is, both the other person and the absolute otherness which an other person paradoxically conveys through their face — as well as his original thinking of such fascinating and important philosophical concepts as desire, the invisible, totality, transcendence, infinity, atheism, justice (and injustice), ethics, freedom (and its ethical limits), enjoyment, corporeality, need, affectivity, ipseity, nourishment, mysticism, joy, love, separation, habitation, the feminine, labor, possession, the body, the child, the gift, economy, work, expression, pluralism, the will, death, time, patience, ambiguity, fecundity, fraternity, and peace.  As that begins to suggest, Totality and Infinity articulates an entire philosophical vocabulary, one through which Levinas presents and motivates his ethical ideal of the stages (and pitfalls) on the way to human fulfilment. 

Course Requirements:  This course will require a significant amount of difficult and challenging reading.  To facilitate your understanding of these works, attendance will be required.  (If I conclude that class attendance needs to be enforced, that may be done with brief in-class quizzes on the assigned reading.)  Final course grades will be based on any such quizzes and (much more significantly) on two short but carefully composed and highly polished papers (for undergraduates) or one final research paper (for graduate students).    

Required Text:  1).  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity.  (The French original is also recommended: Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini.)

What is a universal? When we talk about “justice,” “human being,” “the nature of a cow,” do we actually mean anything? Are universals no more than concepts or abstractions? Are they real? Do they manifest through particulars? Are universals more real than their particulars, or the reverse? Do we think only with universals? If language is constituted by universals and universals are not real, does language ever access reality? These are the kinds of questions this course will address through a study of different texts written by Western and Indian authors on the question of universals. In the West, the debates surrounding that question took shape during the Middle Ages (we will read texts from realist and nominalist thinkers both in the Islamic and Latin scholastic traditions), but grew from an interpretation of Greek philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, and Porphyry). They have continued throughout the 20^th century and we will explore some of the creative solutions that were proposed. In India, the question emerged from debates between Buddhist and non-Buddhist thinkers on epistemological and ontological controversies. We will study how Indian philosophers discussed whether perception gave us access to particulars only or to universals as well, and whether reasoning can allow us to know reality if it uses universals. We will also address the issue of the status of language and whether words refer to particulars or universals, a question we will investigate from the Buddhist theory of exclusion (apoha) and some of its Nyāya’s responses. The question of universals also picked on ontological considerations regarding the ultimate constituents of reality and whether we can talk of essences or natures of things (svabhāva), including our own self (ātman). This will occupy the last part of the course.

The course will adopt a historical approach, situating each of the debates within its own intellectual context, with the goal of developing a critical reflection regarding these questions, which are at the center of epistemology, ontology, and the philosophy of language.

The course will differentiate expectations and assessments between undergraduate and graduate students. Students should expect to write weekly short responses and a final paper.

This seminar will aim to open an inquiry into the meaning of education, under contemporary conditions, as it intersects and interrelates with philosophy as a range of practices and modes of the conduct of life.   Our inquiry will not be confined to “philosophy of education” in a narrow sense but will aim to interrogate some of the multiple dimensions (for instance political, ideological, ethical, technological) in which education in philosophy and philosophical conceptions of education inform, and are informed by, the contemporary problems of an individual or collective life. What are the roles of philosophy and philosophical education in the understanding, communication, and transmission of prevalent conceptions of meaning, practice, belief, culture, or value? How does philosophical education interact with the functions of power or authority in preserving and enforcing conformity and collective belief in, or the reproduction of, existing structures of authority, dominance, ideology, or technology, including in schools? In what way, if any, can philosophical education or a philosophy of education be liberating or emancipatory and how does a philosophical practice of education offer to provide or promote distinctive terms, bases, or forms for the pursuit of modes of social and political critique and the potential for transformation? We will pursue these questions, among others, with a view to interpreting and reflecting on the temporalities of life, thought, and experience that are practiced and pursued in various philosophical projects and the specific methods, conceptions, and relationships of education they suggest, entail, or demand.

Readings likely to include texts by: Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Emerson, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Montessori, Rancière, Friere, Arendt, Althusser, Nussbaum.

In this course we will seek to understand the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas—that major 20^th century Continental philosopher perhaps best known as the thinker of alterity — by carefully studying his most important and influential work, Totality and Infinity:  An Essay on Exteriority (first published in 1961).  This famous text is neither the first nor the last in which Levinas develops his own critical alternative to the dialectical and phenomenological projects of Hegel and Heidegger.  But Totality and Infinity contains Levinas’s clearest statements of his most famous views, including his conception of alterity — that is, both the other person and the absolute otherness which an other person paradoxically conveys through their face — as well as his original thinking of such fascinating and important philosophical concepts as desire, the invisible, totality, transcendence, infinity, atheism, justice (and injustice), ethics, freedom (and its ethical limits), enjoyment, corporeality, need, affectivity, ipseity, nourishment, mysticism, joy, love, separation, habitation, the feminine, labor, possession, the body, the child, the gift, economy, work, expression, pluralism, the will, death, time, patience, ambiguity, fecundity, fraternity, and peace.  As that begins to suggest, Totality and Infinity articulates an entire philosophical vocabulary, one through which Levinas presents and motivates his ethical ideal of the stages (and pitfalls) on the way to human fulfilment. 

Course Requirements:  This course will require a significant amount of difficult and challenging reading.  To facilitate your understanding of these works, attendance will be required.  (If I conclude that class attendance needs to be enforced, that may be done with brief in-class quizzes on the assigned reading.)  Final course grades will be based on any such quizzes and (much more significantly) on two short but carefully composed and highly polished papers (for undergraduates) or one final research paper (for graduate students).    

Required Text:  1).  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity.  (The French original is also recommended: Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et Infini.)