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This course will concentrate on major figures and persistent themes in ancient and medieval philosophy. A balance will be sought between scope and depth, the latter ensured by a close reading of selected texts. This course was also cross-listed as MI 30301.

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Built around Plato's Symposium, Shakespeare (including A Midsummer Night's Dream), Catholic writings (including Humanae Vitae), and several movies, this course explores the nature of romance and erotic love. We will examine such topics as sexuality, marriage, and procreation with an eye towards how we can be better at being in love. The course generally tries to integrate the analytic approach of philosophy with the imaginative approach of literature.

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The aim of this course is to enable participants to bring together materials from various disciplines bearing on our current environmental crisis, and from this integrated perspective to evaluate possible ways in which the crisis might be resolved. Disciplines to be consulted include ecology, thermodynamics, economics, value theory, and environmental history, among others. This project will rely on the integrative skills of philosophy to discern how materials from these disparate sources fit together. This course was also cross-listed as HESB 30239, IIPS 30926, and STV 30149.

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This course is an introduction to philosophy for students seeking (or being forced) to fulfill the first of their university philosophy requirements. The course is intended to introduce you to philosophical questions, to make you aware of how some of history's greatest philosophers have approached those questions and what they have had to say about them, to help you articulate philosophical concerns of your own and, most importantly, to learn how to address them. Among the areas of philosophy will explore this semester are ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics and theory of knowledge.

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This course is designed as a "topics-based" introduction to philosophy. What this means is that instead of working through the history of philosophy focusing on great historical figures and their views on different topics, we will focus on great philosophical topics and look at what historical and contemporary writers have said about them. Topics to be addressed will include the existence of God, the relation between the mind and the body, human freedom, and the foundations of morality.

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This course is an introduction to biomedical ethics. The first part of the course provides an introduction to basic ethical theory, which is intended to serve as a background aid for thinking through the particular issues discussed in the remainder of the course. Specific topics to be discussed include confidentiality and truth-telling in the doctor/patient relationship, medical experimentation and informed consent, abortion, treatment decisions for seriously ill infants, physician assisted suicide, and health care reform.

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This course explores the nature of modern morality through an examination of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. We will read MacIntyre's groundbreaking account of emergence of modern morality, After Virtue, and compare his interpretation of the morality of modernity with that offered by Charles Taylor in The Ethics of Authenticity. We will also read works by Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, two thinkers whose ideas have powerfully shaped the moral culture of the modern world.

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Bertrand Russell suggested that philosophical theories can be tested by their ability to deal with logical puzzles. This is the approach to philosophy that we will take in this course. The puzzles with which we will be concerned are paradoxes: sets of propositions each member of which is intuitively true but which nonetheless seem jointly inconsistent. Paradoxes of various sorts have been a focus of study in almost every area of philosophy; accordingly, this course will use paradoxes as a tool to raise questions about the following topics, among others: the nature of space and time; the nature of physical objects and change; the possibility of an omniscient and/or omnipotent God; the rules which govern what we rationally ought to believe, and what we rationally ought to do. We will also discuss more purely logical paradoxes such as the sorites, the liar, and Russell's paradox. A subsidiary aim of the course will be to help students to appreciate the importance of consistent beliefs and to improve their ability to think clearly about the logical relations between claims.

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