Can we know that God exists? If God exists, then why is there evil in the world? What is the relation between mind and body? Since I am not able to see your thoughts, how do I know that you have a mind? Can science explain consciousness? Can a computer be a mind? What kind of thing is a person? How am I the same person that ‘I’ was in my childhood? (I don’t look or behave like that child.) Does free will exist? Is it compatible with a scientific view of the world? Are there any grounds for morality? We’ll take this kind of topical approach to some of the most difficult and interesting questions in philosophy. Text: Perry and Bratman, eds., Introduction to Philosophy, 4th ed.

In this course, we will survey several problems that continue to motivate philosophical discussion and philosophical worry. Such problems will include: the problem of evil, the nature of the human soul, the existence of God, the extent of moral responsibility, the possibility and extent of human knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, what it means to lead a good life. The goal of this course is to illuminate fruitful ways of engaging with these philosophical problems, which means we'll wrestle with hard questions that rarely offer neat and tidy solutions. Be prepared to READ, REFLECT, and WRITE throughout the semester. On average, you should expect to dedicate roughly 4-5 hours each week to complete the required assignments for this course.

These courses are designed to introduce students to some of the major issues of philosophy and several approaches which philosophers take to deal with them. Questions of value, knowledge, and reality will be included, along with problems that arise in social, political, and religious philosophy. A fundamental aim of the course is to improve one’s ability to think rationally and to make critical judgments.

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This course will examine some of the main positions and arguments on such moral issues as abortion, affirmative action, capital punishment, and pornography, together with some of the deeper philosophical problems these issues raise.

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Most intellectual endeavors involve argumentation. From short letters to the editor to complex philosophical essays, and from simple everyday discussions to sophisticated legal debates, arguments are constantly invoked to support or criticize points of view. The purpose of this course is to help students learn how to analyze, critique, and construct arguments. (An argument is a piece of reasoning, not a quarrel or a fight.) The course material is organized into two main parts. The first part is an introductory survey of important linguistic and logical concepts and tools that we need for argument analysis. The second (and longer) part is an in-depth examination of a few philosophical essays focused on a small set of closely related questions and issues. (Different sections have different focuses.)

Prerequisites: Although no background in philosophy or logic is presupposed, the course requires a moderate degree of linguistic sophistication and a strong commitment to rational inquiry. Basis for grading: To be determined by individual instructor. This course is good preparation for almost all philosophy courses and any course that involves critical reading and writing. Texts: One critical thinking text, one language text, and other readings specific to each section.

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We will consider the origin of philosophy and its development from the pre-Socratics through Plato and Aristotle to Plotinus. Topics including knowledge, meaning, ethics, the nature of the good life, and the nature of being itself.

This course is an introductory survey of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy for philosophy majors and Honors Students. We shall study the writings of the Presocratics—for example, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, and then the writers after Socrates: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoic Marcus Aurelius. Our goal is to acquire a basic understanding of philosophical problems and solutions proposed by the most important Greek and Roman thinkers and to improve our writing and thinking about them. Class time will be devoted to discussion of the assigned readings. Evaluation is based primarily on two in-class examinations (30% each), and a final (40%). This section is restricted to Philosophy Majors and Honors students.

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In the seventeenth century, René Descartes, the founding figure of modern philosophy (a period in the history of philosophy running from the 1600s to the beginning of the twentieth century), initiated a revolutionary reorientation of Western philosophy by centering intellectual attention on the individual human subject as a knowing being. Descartes’ work launched a series of discussions about how we know what we claim to know about the fundamental nature of reality, discussions that continue up through the present. This course will focus on issues pertaining to epistemology (i.e., that part of philosophy concerned with constructing a theory of knowledge) and ontology (i.e., that part of philosophy concerned with constructing a theory of being) in the modern period, starting with Descartes and concluding with Immanuel Kant (late eighteenth century).

In particular, we will occupy ourselves with an exploration of, first, the distinction between the two basic epistemological orientations in modern philosophy, namely, rationalism and empiricism (as well as Kant’s attempted resolution of these opposed orientations), and, second, the ontological alternatives between monism and dualism, nominalism and metaphysical realism, and materialism and idealism. Additionally, a series of other related questions and problems will be explored, such as: the relation between mind and body, the essence of personal identity, the role of science as a means of access to reality, and various conceptions of truth. The authors from this period we will read are: Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Arnauld, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Boyle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

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The aim of this course is to introduce students to the living tradition of existential philosophy through a careful reading of several of its most famous, difficult, and important philosophical texts. The course will focus on four of existentialism’s classic philosophical works, Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking? We will also read my Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education, seeking in this way to understand the living legacy of the still unsettled and sometimes unsettling existential tradition.

Course Requirements: There are no formal prerequisites, but this course will require a great deal of difficult but rewarding reading, and you will need to demonstrate your active engagement with and understanding of all the required texts. In order to facilitate your digestion of some notoriously difficult texts and issues, regular class preparation and attendance will be required. To measure your fulfillment of these requirements, grades will be based on in-class pop quizzes (10%), a comprehensive in-class midterm (40%), and a cumulative course final (50%). The mid-term and final will both be open-book, and will require you to identify and explain passages from the assigned works. This course is excellent preparation for advanced classes in continental philosophy and, perhaps, for existence...

Required Texts: 1). S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, A. Hannay, trans. (London and New York: Penguin, 2004); 2). F. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, W. Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1982); 3) J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, H. Barnes, trans. (New York: Citadel Press, 2001); 4). M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper, 1968), and 5). I. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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Examination of social and ethical problems associated with the business, engineering, medical and legal professions. Meets New Mexico Lower Division General Education Common Core Curriculum Area V: Humanities and Fine Arts.

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Introduces second and third wave feminism, and some history of first wave feminism. Analyzes theories from their origins in early feminism to their advanced principles and proponents today.

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A survey of main themes in Dilthey, Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Hermeneutics, Structuralism, Deconstruction and the Frankfurt School.

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The nature of knowledge has been a central preoccupation of Western philosophy. In this course we will explore the following topics through classical and contemporary readings: skepticism; perception; analysis of the concept of knowledge; theories of the structure of knowledge and justification (foundationalism, coherentism, etc.); internalism and externalism with regard to justification; Kant and the a priori; induction; scientific method; the "ethics of belief"; challenges and alternatives to traditional epistemology.

Required text: Louis P. Pojman, editor, The Theory of Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Readings, Third Edition (Wadsworth, 2003), paperback.

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In popular discourse, “ethical issues” usually pertain, in a sometimes explicit and sometimes more-or-less vague way, to what threatens to get one in trouble (with your boss, your spouse, your customers, the voting public, the law, God…). Modern ethical theory has tended to conceive of the subject matter of “ethics” as, in the phrase of Harvard philosopher Thomas Scanlon, “What We Owe To Each Other.” It is not surprising that the term “ethicist” has a bit of the unpleasant odor of the scold and the killjoy about it. Under this conception, who but a Victorian schoolmarm would want to concern themselves with ethics? At its inception in Ancient Greece, however, ethics had a much broader and more personal meaning. The Ancient Schools took for granted that the point of ethics was to provide answers to the human individual’s most fundamental questions about how one should lead one’s life. The aim of ethics was wisdom, conceived as knowledge of the ultimate end, the “highest good.” This course proceeds on the assumption that such questions are both more stimulating than and logically prior to questions about what we owe to each other. Can they be answered by philosophy? The best recent work in ethical theory has grappled with this question. We will give a careful examination to three of the most important works of ethical theory published in the last thirty years: Alaisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. Through these works, students will gain insight into the current state of play of ethical theory and its future prospects. Assignments: Three 1000-1500 word papers and one two-hour closed-book final exam. Graduate students write a longer paper.

Are there any ethical truths? If so, how do we determine what those ethical truths are? These are the broad questions upon which this class will focus. In the first quarter of the class, we will examine some grounds for doubting that ethical claims can be true. In the remainder of the class, we will study four different types of ethical theory: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, contractarianism, and virtue ethics.

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This course studies some of the main currents of modern Christian thinking that lie in the background of discussion today. Among the topics discussed are the impact of modern science, religion and emotion, Biblican criticism, and recent changes in Roman Catholic theology. Readings include major works of Pascal, Wesley, Schleiermacher, Barth, Bultmann, Rahner, Vatican II, and Latin American liberation theology, all of which are studied in seminar format. Course requirements include a mid-term, final and term paper.

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We will investigate issues of the human relationship with the environment. We will be asking questions about aesthetics, rights, virtue, religion, obligations to the environment, and obligations to future generations. We will apply our theoretical study to concrete issues such as human population, pollution, resource use, endangered species, and wilderness.

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What can philosophy prove in the area of religion? How is it possible for people with different religious backgrounds to communicate with each other? What difference does an explanation from the social sciences make to religious faith? These are the kinds of questions explored in this class, through readings from such philosophers as Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, and others. The format of the course is generally of seminar shape but also includes lectures, discussions, and debates. Most of the readings are taken from "Ten Essential Texts in the Philosophy of Religion: Classical and Contemporary Issues," ed. Steve M. Cahn, and George Mavrodes's "Belief in God: A Study of the Epistemology of Religion." Course requirements include a seminar report, mid-term, final, and paper.

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Karl Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach declares, in 1845, that, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” He thus not only indicts philosophers of the past for describing socio-political phenomena from the sidelines of ineffective contemplation—he inaugurates a new mode of engaged political theorizing in which theory and practice are drawn into close dialectical connections with each other. Moreover, nobody credibly can deny that Marx’s ideas managed, at least for a time, to change the world (not even those who believe the popular journalistic wisdom in the late-capitalist press according to which a supposed something named “Marxism” died and was buried with the wheezing collapses of the sclerotic nomenklatura bureaucratic state apparatuses of Yugoslavia and the Eastern bloc started with the falling of the initial dominoes in 1989). Additionally, especially in relation to the European philosophical orientations of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Marx and his successors have been enormously influential, shaping a plethora of still-ongoing discussions and debates in so-called “Continental philosophy.” This course will spend the first half of the semester on the texts of Marx and Engels. The second half of the semester will involve examinations of writings by a number of Marxist and post-Marxist political thinkers/practitioners: Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács, Gramsci, Mao, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Althusser. A range of issues will be discussed: the structure of collective history, the various influences of the economy, the dynamics of revolutionary changes, the shape of social justice, the nature and function of ideologies… up to and including the status of philosophy itself in light of the Marxist conception of socio-political reality as a whole. In the process, questions will be asked about where we stand today, in our present circumstances, apropos the arguments and theories developed within the Marxist tradition.

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Philosophical questions about law include the following: what is law, and what is its relationship to morality? Under what conditions might civil disobedience be justified? What is a legal right? What is a moral right? What is the relationship between these two kinds of rights? What is the philosophical basis behind the liberty-rights protected by the United States Constitution (freedom of speech, religious freedom, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, freedom from undue interference with sexual and reproductive autonomy, etc.)? What (if anything) is the justification for our practices of criminal punishment? What does it mean to be responsible for one's actions, legally and morally? In this course we will investigate these issues through contemporary and historical readings. Inter alia, we will study the basic principles of American Constitutional Law as it relates to fundamental rights and equal protection, and read excerpts from important Supreme Court opinions that have shaped the law in these areas. Suggested prerequisite: a course in moral theory.

Required text: Frederick Schauer and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, editors, The Philosophy of Law: Classical and Contemporary Readings with Commentary.

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Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is widely considered one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century. This seminar will focus primarily on his most famous and influential work, Being and Time (1927). In this his early magnum opus, Heidegger develops and deploys a phenomenological method in order to help us understand the structure of intelligibility. The result is a revolutionary reconceptualization of existence, selfhood, and being, one which challenges -- and seeks to replace -- central presuppositions philosophers have inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics. Along the way, Heidegger offers original and influential interpretations of guilt, conscience, anxiety, death, authenticity, and temporality. This course is good -- indeed, indispensable -- preparation for understanding much subsequent work in continental philosophy and the other humanities, which often take insights Heidegger first elaborated in Being and Time as their own point of philosophical departure.

Required texts: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962); and I. Thomson, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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"The Greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." (Gandhi)

Many philosophical and literary attempts to locate, define, describe, and understand the human animal have been formulated with respect to the larger animal world or to some notion of animality. Is man a “featherless biped,” as Plato claimed or a “soulless machine” as Descartes believed? Do animals feel pain like us? Do they know they exist? How can there be thought without language? What separates the human from the non-human animal? And what do we share in common? These are some of the pressing questions that are being re-evaluated in light of scientific discoveries and cultural transformations along the fault line between human and non-human animals.

The bulk of the semester will focus on continental philosophers who have based some aspect of their thinking on animals: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy, to cite the most prominent. Questions of identity and ethics will direct our thinking as we deal with issues of the status and treatment of animals. This course will bridge the literary and the philosophical by pairing texts such as Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal.” We will read Nobel laureate J.C. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals in dialogue with Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Finally, I would like to devote some attention to the visual representation of the postmodern animal. This multi-disciplinary approach will allow us to gauge the range and richness of thought not only “about” but “with” the animal.

For information and questions, please contact me by e-mail at wputnam@unm.edu.

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One way to survey what the 19th Century meant to European philosophy is by charting a (certain) course from a principal late 18th Century character, the “man of universal duty and enlightened religion,” to the recognizably 20th Century character of the Nietzschean “free spirit.” The former will be represented in the course by Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge UP 1997); the latter by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (Cambridge UP 2001). Midway between these two bookends, we will study G.W.F. Hegel’s epochal work of social and political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge UP 1991). We will round out the course with a fair sampling of Early German Romanticism, Karl Marx, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (available on e-reserves or online).

Assignments: Three 1000-1500 word papers and one two-hour closed-book final exam. Graduate students write a longer paper.

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Timothy Williamson’s 2000 book, Knowledge and Its Limits, is widely regarded as one of the most important books in epistemology in the last half century. In this course, we’ll do a careful study of the book. Here are some of Williamson’s claims. (1) ‘Knowledge’ is a basic mental state: basic and so not, contrary to tradition, analyzable into parts, such as justified + true + belief; and mental state, which entails that two counterparts who are qualitatively identical internally—one who knows and one who is deceived, say, by an evil demon—are in different mental states. (2) Knowledge (just) is evidence. (3) Knowledge is the basis of justification, not the other way round. (4) Mental states are not luminous; one does not always know whether one is in a particular mental state. (5) Knowledge requires a margin for error, seemingly undermining, among other things, Nozick’s sensitivity condition. When it becomes available, hopefully by October, we will use Greenough and Pritchard (eds.) Williamson and Knowledge as a companion guide.

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We will consider the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body and the physical world. Is it possible for a computer actually to think or be intelligent? What is the nature of consciousness, and how is it related to the physical brain as treated by psychology and cognitive neuroscience? Readings from authors such as Descartes, Ryle, Turing, Putnam, and Dennett.

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The story of seventeenth century natural science tends to be told as a story of revolution: the natural scientists of this period overthrew the qualitative, “metaphysical” accounts of nature that were dominant in the Middle Ages, and they did so by establishing a new mathematical framework for the study of nature. This new quantitative natural science reached the pinnacle of its success with the 1687 publication of Newton’s The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. That, as I said, is the standard story. But is it accurate? Was the use of mathematics the real key to scientific progress in the seventeenth century? And if so, how precisely did the so-called mathematization of nature help unlock the secrets of the natural world? In this course we will examine and evaluate the standard story sketched above by taking a careful look at the philosophical and scientific work completed by three of the most important mathematically-minded philosopher-scientists of the seventeenth century: René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. We will read texts that reveal their struggle to put mathematics to work – in both their physics and their metaphysics – and examine the relationship between their philosophical doctrines and their mathematical accounts of nature. At the end of the semester, we will consider whether the struggles of Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz should encourage us to revise or even replace the standard story of seventeenth century natural science.

Requirements: Students enrolled in this course must 1) have already taken Phil 202: Modern Philosophy, and 2) have a high school level knowledge of mathematics (including basic geometry and some advanced algebra) but need not have any prior training in calculus. If you are interested in taking this course but do not meet the above requirements, please contact the instructor.

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In this seminar, we will consider writings and films about human identity and morality, with the work of the contemporary philosopher Stanley Cavell serving as a unifying structure. We begin the course with William Shakespeare’s King Lear and Cavell’s essay “The Avoidance of Love,” then pass to a series of essays by Shakespeare’s older contemporary Michel de Montaigne, including “On the Cannibals,” “On Cruelty,” and “On Experience.” We then move to American Transcendentalism, with a series of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, including “Experience,” “Self-Reliance,” “Friendship,” and “The Poet,” along with Cavell’s essays “Being Odd, Getting Even,” and “Finding as Founding: Taking Steps in Emerson’s ‘Experience.’” The course concludes with Cavell’s work on two films from the 1930’s: Bringing Up Baby, starring Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, which Cavell conceives as a member of a genre he calls “The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage”; and Stella Dallas, starring Barbara Stanwyck, a member of the genre Cavell names “The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman.”

Requirements: two short papers (5-7 pages for undergraduates, 7-10 pages for graduates), and a final paper of around 10 pages (15 for graduates), due on the final day of class, December 10th.

Texts: Michel de Montaigne: The Essays: a selection, trans. M. A. Screech Penguin; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays, Dover Thrift Edition; William Shakespeare, King Lear, Washington Square Press; A packet of Cavell’s essays will be available from the copy center in Dane Smith Hall.

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This course serves as an introduction to graduate study in philosophy at the University of New Mexico. This includes introduction to the faculty and their research interests, as well as an opportunity for scholarly interaction with fellow graduate students.

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