My teaching philosophy is student centered. When considering how I will organize the classroom and present the material on any given day, I abide by the principle that the students should always be fully engaged in the material and the ideas, and that my job is to facilitate that for all of them. I actively foster an environment that encourages intellectual honesty, epistemic humility, charitability, and responsiveness, and that sets expectations for careful reading and interpretation, careful critical scrutiny, and careful contributions whether written or shared in class discussions.
Descriptions of Courses Offered:
Introduction to Philosophy
Interactive lecture and discussion. Topics include what, if anything, we can know about the world, the freedom or determinacy of the human will, personal identity and identity over time, what a just society should look like, and what it means to behave morally.
Ethics
Interactive lecture and discussion. Topics include virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology, and the ethics of care; the is-ought gap, cultural moral relativism, and subjective vs objective value; preliminary questions in metaethics, including why we should care about right and wrong; and applications of ethical theory to real-world moral problems including ethical approaches to world hunger, the treatment of non-human animals, environmental challenges, pornography and free speech, and abortion.
Social and Political Philosophy
Interactive lecture and discussion. Topics include philosophical definitions of justice and the legitimacy of different forms of government (from Plato to Raz); social contract theory; the relationship between voluntarism and philosophical anarchism; theories of liberty and autonomy; theories of economic, social and distributive justice; and various positional critiques of the canon of Western political thought.
Philosophy of Law
Interactive lecture and discussion. Topics include theories in analytic jurisprudence (legal positivism, natural law theory, legal pragmatism); normative jurisprudence (obligation to obey the law, legal authority, legitimate limitations on liberty); and criminal justice (consequentialist, retributivist, and hybrid theories of punishment; alternatives to punishment; abolition).
Ethics of Data and Information
Interactive lecture and discussion. The course explores ethical issues surrounding the collection, use, and analysis of data in various contexts. Topics include the ethics of UX design, the effects of algorithms on autonomy, data privacy, and transparency in the collection and use of user data.
Theories of Justice
Discussion based, writing intensive. The course explores various philosophical theories of justice across different contexts and in greater depth than an introductory class. Topics include theories of distributive justice, theories of social justice, and theories of criminal justice.
Taking Lives: The Ethics of Killing
Seminar, writing intensive. Students present material and propose questions for group discussion. Topics include the harm of death and what makes killing wrong; the ethics of killing of enemy combatants and civilians in war; the ethics of end of life care, including refusal of treatment, physician assisted suicide, and euthanasia; the ethics of killing of non-human animals; and the permissibility of capital punishment.
Contemporary Moral Issues
Discussion based, writing intensive. Topics include basic ethical and political theory (deontology, consequentialism/utilitarianism, virtue ethics, care ethics, contractualism, and principles of distributive justice), animal rights & welfare, abortion, free speech, pornography and other sex work, artificial intelligence, human enhancement, criminal justice, immigration, global justice, racial justice, and environmental ethics.
Philosophy in Science Fiction
Interactive lecture and discussion, mixed media. Topics include external world skepticism/the simulation argument; time, space, and time travel; mind/body dualism, consciousness, phenomenology, and supervenience; personal identity; identity over time; free will and determinism; machine ethics and artificial intelligence; and death/immortality.
Elementary Logic
Lecture, discussion, and problem-set based. Course covers English-to-symbolic logic translation, basics of propositional calculus, first-order predicate calculus, and multi-place relational predicate calculus.