Spring Courses

For those of you who are interested, my course offerings for the spring are as follows:

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. Epistemology: Knowledge and Seemings (upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminar in philosophy)

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

Course description for epistemology:

Epistemology: Knowledge and Seemings
It is reasonable to think that sensory perception, introspection, memory and intuition can provide justification for our beliefs. But what sort of justification (if any) do they provide? On one view, seemings may provide prima facie justification for beliefs. At first glance, this position is very reasonable. But at further scrutiny, it turns out to face a number of problems. This course is devoted to the study of whether perception, introspection, memory and intuition can provide justification for belief. We will attempt to answer questions such as 'How many kinds of seemings are there?' 'How reliable is memory?' 'Is an internalist theory of justification feasible?', 'Is foundationalism mandatory for epistemic internalists?', 'Can we use a virtue epistemological approach to explain the plausibility of the hypothesis that seemings can justify beliefs?', 'If visual seemings can provide prima facie justification for beliefs, what about appearances that arise from other sense modalities?' 'Can seemings explain the appearance that high-level properties figure in the content of perception?' The course satisfies one of the two M/E requirements.