PHIL 101 - Introduction to Philosophy
Matti Eklund
We will examine some of the enduring problems that philosophers have articulated and tried to address: Can we know anything at all about the world? What is the nature of mind? What are the fundamental constituents of reality? Is there a God? How should we live? Do we have free will? Our reflections on both what great thinkers of the past and philosophers writing in our own time have had to say about these matters will also enable us to consider the nature of the philosophical enterprise itself: What is philosophy? What is its subject matter? What are its methods? What can it reasonably hope to achieve? Why is it worth pursuing?

PHIL 145 - Contemporary Moral Issues
Neelam Sethi
Recent Supreme Court decisions--such as the one on Lawrence v. Texas which found laws against sodomy to be unconstitutional--have been debated in terms of due process versus 'equal protection'. As such they have raised the question: Should privacy be protected because individuals have the right to pursue the meaning of their own lives independent of government or should it only be protected such that the law can be applied equally to all? In this course we will explore the philosophical concerns at stake, and evaluate the solutions to contemporary issues--such as affirmative action, abortion, gay marriage, adoption rights, and Native American rights--in terms of different philosophical conceptions of ethics. Students will study different approaches to ethics including consequentialist, deontological, and virtue based, and use them to analyze current socio-political concerns. In addition to primary philosophy texts, we will read court cases, political analysis, personal narratives, and other writings, as well as audio-visual materials.

PHIL 191 - Introduction to Cognitive Science
B. Bienvenue
Offered by Department of Physchology (PHYSC 102)
This course surveys the study of how the mind/brain works. We examine how intelligent information processing can arise from biological and artificial systems. The course draws primarily from five disciplines that make major contributions to cognitive science: philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science. The first part of the course introduces the roles played by these disciplines in cognitive science. The second part of the course focuses on how each of these disciplines contributes to the study of five topics in cognitive science: language, vision, learning and memory, action, and artificial intelligence

PHIL 231 - Introduction to Deductive Logic
Peter Sutton
The logic of truth-functional connectives, identity, and the universal and existential quantifiers; a formal language; translation between it and English; constructing worlds and models; and constructing proofs. We'll use a textbook accompanied by a software package, Language, Proof, and Logic by J. Barwise and J. Etchemendy.