Virtue Epistemology and Other Spring 2011 Courses

I have had a few inquires about the courses I am teaching this semester. This is a re-posting of the list. I have added the virtue epistemology course description.

1. Sexual Ethics (Big lecture course, freshmen and sophomore, satisfies the GEN ED requirement and the humanities requirement, cross-listed with the gender studies program)

2. Virtue Epistemology (upper-level undergraduate and graduate course in philosophy)

3. Biological Bases of Behavior (graduate course in neuropsychology)

Course description for virtue epistemology:

Unlike other directions in epistemology, virtue epistemology takes epistemology to be a normative discipline. On this view, epistemology is a central component of value theory. The opposing position in epistemology is naturalized epistemology that proposes to abandon the classical project of analyzing knowledge and to look at how people actually reason and form beliefs and memories instead. The key concepts of virtue epistemology are the concepts of the intellectual role model and intellectual virtues. Epistemic norms, epistemic values and epistemic reasons are derivative concepts, typically defined in terms of the concepts of an intellectual role model or intellectual virtues. In this course we will evaluate a range of virtue-theoretical approaches to epistemic concepts. Our aim is to reach a level of expertise at which we can determine whether some form of virtue epistemology both can withstand all the classical challenges in epistemology and is empirically sound.