Course Description

This course introduces students to central questions in both philosophy of the last few hundred years, and contemporary philosophy.

The first three weeks of the course will be on introducing various tools for thinking about arguments, with a focus on how to read argumenttative writing.

The next six weeks will focus on big questions from 18-20th century philosophy, including:

• What is it to know something?
• What can we know about the world, and especially about the parts we can’t observe?
• What does the fact that we can know things tell us about what the world must be like?
• How do we know anything about causation, and what even is it for one event to cause another?
• Does the fact that we exist, or the fact that we seem so suited to living in the environment we’re in, provide reason to believe in God?
• Does the fact that the world contains so much suffering provide reason to not believe in God?

And the last four weeks of the course will focus on philosophical issues that arise in one important contemporary topic: climate change. Climate change raises interesting issues about knowledge - e.g., how much can we know on the basis of climate models, about ethics - e.g., what do we owe to people in the distant future, and about politics - e.g., what is the relationship between social obligation and personal obligation. And using philosophical tools to investigate these questions is a good way to both get a deeper understanding of issues concerning climate change, and of philosophy.

Required Materials

You don’t have to buy anything for the course. We are primarily using three books:

• The Problems of Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell.
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, by David Hume.
• Philosophy and Climate Change, edited by Mark Budolfson, Tristram McPherson, and David Plunkett.

The first two books are public domain, and I’ve linked to versions of them I’ve made which I think are easier to read (and search) than other versions you might find.

The last book is available for online access through the University of Michigan library. The link above takes you to the library catalog entry for it, and with UM library access, you should be able to get to the rest of the book.

There will also be some readings made available through Canvas.

For this course you will need to register to use iClicker Cloud. The university has a guide to using iClicker for students. This is a paid service, but the licence the university has with iClicker should mean you can get a free account which will do all you need for the course.

Course Requirements

1. Do the reading before lecture, attend lecture, and answer iClicker questions during lecture. (Some of these will be full points for any answer, as the aim is to get a sense of the room; questions about the reading will typically be marked correct or incorrect.)
2. Attend discussion sections, and participate fully. (The discussion section leader will tell you more about what they are expecting.)
3. Do three short assignments during the early part of term.
4. Write two longer essays during the later part of term.

Summary of Grading System

1. Participation in lecture, via iClicker - 10%
2. Participation in discussion section - 10%
3. Short assignments, 3 by 10% - 30%
4. Longer essay, 2 by 25% - 50%

Note that there is no final exam for the course; the final paper is due on the day of the exam.

Deadlines

• First short assignment - Monday, September 18.
• Second short assignment - Wednesday, October 18.
• Third short assignment - Monday, October 30.
• First essay - Friday, November 17.
• Second essay - Monday, December 11, 3.30pm.

Class Schedule

Students must read the listed readings before the listed class. Monday’s class session. Important: class readings are subject to change, contingent on circumstances and the progress we make as a class. Students are encouraged to attend lectures and check the course website for updates. The links to readings will often be to things behind paywalls, but they are (I believe) all things you have access to through the UM library. You might have to be logged in to UM to get them though.

It might not be obvious, but many of the paper titles below contain links to places the paper is accessible.

Other Information