Here you can find information on classes that I have designed or taught.
It seems likely that climate change is the most important ethical problem of our time, and it raises a variety of interesting ethical questions. Are the ecosystems that we live in valuable for their own sake, or are they simply valuable because humans rely on them for our lives and livelihoods? What is the fairest way to divide up the cost of addressing climate change given that neither the causes nor the harms of climate change are equally distributed? How can we—and how should we—put general environmental principles into practice, particularly where effective change requires widespread buy-in from voters and/or political actors? This course offers an introduction to these questions and others that arise in the field known as “climate ethics.”
Most of what we know about the world originates with other people. We rely on teachers, parents, textbook authors, the news... right up until trust breaks down and we find ourselves doubting everything. Roughly, “epistemology” is the study of knowledge. “Social epistemology,” then, is the study of how knowledge works in social situations: how we can gain knowledge from the words of others, how knowledge is distributed in populations, even what kinds of social organizations are best at creating knowledge. This course offers a survey of the field.
Today, those computer programs known as large language models can summarize works of fiction, translate from one language to another, and compose emails. Similar programs can identify the objects in images, create new images that are virtually indistinguishable from a real picture, and splice audio together to make it sound as though a dead musician is performing live in front of you. Such programs are not just tools of creation: computer algorithms are used to determine the ads you see when you visit a website, detect cancer, and set the length of prison sentences. Tomorrow, AI—artificial intelligence—will likely be an even bigger part of our lives. Large language models are getting easier to use and make fewer obvious mistakes than they used to (though they still have a tendency to "halucinate"). Image generation tools are becoming more and more widespread in (e.g.) the video game industry. AI applications, such as driverless cars and “killer robots,” are getting closer to reality.
These technologies raise important philosophical questions. Suppose that your driverless car is speeding down the road when something unexpected happens—a pedestrian steps into the crosswalk. Should the car prioritize saving your life or that of the pedestrian? Who gets to decide? The car company? The government? Should we put it to a vote? What about large language models: what can they tell us about our own brains, about consciousness and learning? How can we address the biases that we find throughout these models? This class offers an introduction to the various philosophical problems and questions surrounding AI, with a particular focus on the deep learning mechanisms that power contemporary AI applications.
The early modern period—roughly 1630 to 1780—is a notable one in the history of philosophy. One reason is that it produced a surprising number of extraordinarily influential philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume. Another is that the early modern period witnesses the division between philosophy and science; it’s here where our contemporary understanding of philosophy—a discipline that is distinct from physics, economics, psychology, etc.—begins to develop. The course will survey four major topics from the early modern period: method, the relationship between mind and body, ethics and political philosophy, and the domain of knowledge and ideas.
In the modern world, science is often seen as the most reliable, trustworthy, and definitive source of knowledge. Does it deserve this reputation, and if so, why? How, if at all, can science resolve ethical questions? And what kinds of dangers does science pose? These questions and more are addressed by philosophy of science. This course offers an introduction to field, with particular emphasis on four contemporary topics: the methodology of evolutionary biology, the relationship between science and metaphysics, the ethics of cancer screening, and the rise (scientific) misinformation.
This course offers an introduction to the philosophy of the life sciences, with a specific focus on contemporary issues relating to genes and genetics. The class begins with a discussion of evolution and its conceptual foundations, paying particular attention to different views on the role of adaptation within evolutionary biology. We’ll then turn our attention to a number of more philosophical problems that are raised by evolutionary biology, such as the implications of evolutionary biology for human nature, individuals, and society.
This course offers an introduction to philosophy, and particularly to philosophy as it is practiced in the 21st Century. Special attention will be paid to issues that are relevant outside the philosophy classroom, such as limits on free speech, personal identity, scientific knowledge, and medical ethics.