Problems of Philosophy

This course will assume on the part of students, a level of preparation in writing and critical thinking roughly commensurate with completion of a year of post-secondary study. Students will be presumed to have had first-year level instruction and experience in writing critical and argumentative essays in some field of study. They will be required to demonstrate the ability to explore independently beyond assigned readings and information presented in lectures. This will generally include reading in course subject areas beyond the texts assigned by the instructor and incorporating this material into written coursework.  Extra material may include secondary criticism and commentary, unassigned texts by the author under study or relevant cultural or intellectual history.

The course is to be taught as a survey of some number of specific philosophical problems united by a common theme.  Although choice of particular problems to cover will vary from instuctor to instructor.  Each offering of the course is expected to provide more generality than any particular 1000 or 2000-level Philosophy course and will include a choice of subjects that crosses the subject areas of 1000 and 2000-level Philosophy courses to some degree. A particular offering of the course would typically include 5-7 Problems. Problems to be covered in the course may include, but are not limitted to the following:

1. Freedom and Determinism: analyse the positions of hard determinism,  soft determinism and indeterminism and their answers to the question concerning whether human beings have free will; explain the assumption of hard determinism required for scientific explanation and its consequences for understanding free will and choice.
2. The Nature of Reality: analyse the positions of realism and idealism, the place of materialism in any scientific explanation of the universe, the nature of universals and particulars, and the difference between existence and essence; explain nomological accounts of physical reality and the problem of change and permanence.
3. The Existence of God: analyse the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God, as well as the concept of an absolute being, and the logical consequences of this conception for an understanding of the nature of the universe and human existence; explain whether evolutionary biology is a refutation of teleology in nature, the project of fideism and religious faith, and the problem of evil. 
4. The Problem of Knowledge: analyse the positions of rationalism and empiricism, the significance of the distinction between reason and sense perception for our knowledge of the world, as well as representationalism as an accurate mirror of the external world; explain the problem of skepticism and the distinction between certainty and belief.
5. Moral Judgement: analyse the basis of moral judgements, especially the difference between deontological, consequentialist and virtue theories in ethics, as well as the tenability of divine command theory and the relation between science and moral values; explain the problem of moral relativism as opposed to an objective basis for moral judgements. 
6. Social Justice: analyse the competing theories concerning the nature of justice, especially the difference between formal and substantive theories of justice, positive and negative rights, the notion of fairness, the principle of equality, and the relation between justice and liberty; explain the distinction between retributive and distributive justice, as well as the problem of punishment and the problem of economic desert. 
7. Personal Identity: analyse the problems which arise for the position that there is a personal identity, the sense of a constant human agency which is meaningfully distinct from the body and which underlies changing experiences, as well as what death signifies for such identity. 
8. Existential Questions: explain the problem of meaning in human existence, including the relation between purpose and chance, the ends of life, the possibility of happiness, and the question of absurdity. 
9. The Mind-Body Problem: analyse the nature of mind and different theoretical accounts of its functioning, including property dualism, epiphenomenalism, supervenience, physicalism and substance dualism, as well as the difference between perception, cognition and affectivity; examine the nature of subjective, first-person experience and its consequences for physicalism. 
10. Aesthetic Judgement: analyse problems surrounding the conception of art and the beautiful, including the issues of  aesthetic attitude, art as expression, art as symbolism, art as truth, and art as social institution, as well as the relation between beauty and pleasure, harmonious form, intellectual discernment; explain the competing positions of objectivity and subjectivity of aesthetic value.