Department of Philosophy Course Descriptions
Spring 2003

PHIL 103R Introduction to Ethics, (4 credits), Reed
What are your rights and duties, and so what should you do? What is the best life for you, and so what type of person should you become? These two questions are both important, but they mark different approaches to ethics, with many emphasizing one but not the other. A principal aim in this course is to teach you an approach to ethics as a practical problem-solving self-discipline. This approach has traditionally been known as casuistry.
Evaluations will be based on daily quizzes, periodic short tests, class participation, class presentations, and a final exam. The aims of the course are the following:
Students will
1) Develop critical thinking skills, distinguishing manipulation from persuasive reasoning and valid from faulty reasoning,
2) Learn the relationship between happiness, ethics, and morality,
3) Learn the relationship between morality and social identity (gender/sex, race/ethnicity, socio-economic class, & sexuality/sexual orientation),
4) Learn why cultural differences do not entail that morality is relative to culture or society,
5) Learn a method for making decisions in situations where important life-choices or values are at stake but in which you don't know what to do, and
6) Explore the relationships between ethics, biology, psychology, and culture.

PHIL 110M/R Logic and Critical Reasoning, (4 Credits), Martinez-Saenz(Two sections)
This course is divided in two parts. The first part of course considers important aspects of philosophical reasoning in relation to the Aristotelian tradition by way of the study of categorical logic, the analytic tradition by way of the study of prepositional/predicate logic and its different applications. Students will take three exams and weekly quizzes to determine their competency during this part of the semester. The second part of the course helps students develop their critical thinking skills. Students will engage in exercises evaluating landmark Supreme Court decisions. Students, for example, will evaluate Dred Scott v. Sanford, Marbury v. Madison, Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. These are just a few examples of landmark cases that not only had undeniable political implications, but forced us to question our willingness to accept others. The second part of the class will be evaluated by weekly quizzes, in-class exercises and one final paper.

PHIL 200R Philosophy of Women’s Lives, (4 credits), McHugh
In this course we will survey contemporary feminist theory across cultures. Because we will be doing readings across cultures, we will seek to question if there is one standard feminist view that encompasses all of feminist theory. We will be reading feminist perspectives from Islamic women, African women, African-American women, Latinas, Chicanas, Indian women, and Euro-American women. We will be covering a wide array of topics and a diversity of approaches.
Tentative texts are: Lila Abu-Lughod, (ed), Remaking Women; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought; bell hooks, All About Love; Linda Kauffman, (ed) American Feminist Thought at Century's End; Elaine Kim, (ed) Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women; Ellen McCracken, The New Latina Narrative: The Feminist Space of Postmodern Ethnicity; Gwendolyn Mikell, African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa; Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge.
You should come to class having read the material for the day and prepared to write on and discuss the material. This will not be a lecture-oriented class. I expect your full participation so that we can engage in dialogue together. This will make the course much more interesting for all of us. (Cross-listed with Women's Studies.)

PHIL 200R Signs, Symbols, and Language, (4 credits), Sagastume(same as Spanish 230R)
This is a theory course designed to provide a comprehensive background of the philosophy of language from Plato to Derrida. The course is taught in English and is geared to students of different disciplines : English, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Theatre, being particularly beneficial for majors and minors in areas of Literature and Philosophy.

PHIL 200R Mysteries of Self & Soul (4 credits), Reed
In this course students will explore a range of definitions and descriptions of what we variously refer to as “the self,” “the mind, ” “the soul,” “the spirit,” “the psyche,” “free will,” “personality, ” “character,” etc. The two primary prompts for our considerations will be movies such as The Matrix and The Exorcist and texts from the history of philosophy and psychology, including Freud and Beauvoir. Evaluations will be based on daily quizzes, periodic short tests, class participation, class presentations, and a final exam.
We will address questions such as the following:
1. Am I my body, or something more than but including my body, or something in but distinct from my body?
2. Can I be aware of anything except through the medium of my bodily sense organs? Can I have an “out-of-body” experience?
3. Am I the same person I was 10 years ago, even though almost every cell in my body is different? Would I be the same person if I lost an arm? If I became quadraplegic? If I were just a brain in a vat?
4. When did “I” begin existing? When I was conceived as a fertilized egg? When I became a viable fetus? When I was born? When I learned to talk? When I went through puberty?
5. Will I survive the death of my body in any meaningful sense?
Philosophy 200R, Mysteries of Self & Soul continued:
6. What is the relationship between my conscious experience and the functioning of my brain? Are they the same thing? If they are different, how do they influence each other? Do they influence each other?
7. Do I constitute myself through my own choices and actions? Or am I constituted – made to be who I am – by the influences in my environment?
8. Am I free or just unaware of the many ways my will is determined by forces outside of me?
9. Do I know for sure that other selves exist? Could they all just be extremely complicated mechanisms like robots?
10. Am I just an extremely complicated mechanism?

PHIL 200R Philosophy of Culture in Latin America, (4 credits), Martinez-Saenz
Prerequisite: None. Writing Intensive
The student will be exposed to different philosophical perspectives from different regions in Latin America. The class covers primarily four areas of study. First, we will examine the idea of a “Latin American Philosophy.” In other words, is there some “thing” that we can identify as peculiar to Latin America? Second, we will evaluate different conceptions of being in the world from a Latin American perspective. Our questions will include but will not be limited to the following: What does it mean to be a human being? Why do I exist? How should I live? Third, we will consider education and movements of liberation. What role does spirituality play in social and political movements in Latin America? How does education affect culture and cultural identity most specifically? Fourth, we will evaluate the influence of the “postmodern” movement in Latin America. What does it mean to be a postmodern Latin American philosopher? Should one be a postmodern Latin American philosopher? Have Latin American philosophers in general remained prisoners of “modernity”? Students will be expected to write 4 short essays and take two exams. There will also be short answer quizzes given periodically on the reading assignments. In this class students will be expected to engage in dialogue with me and, at times, with each other.

PHIL 211 Modern Philosophy, (4 credits), McHugh
Prerequisite: PHIL 210 or permission.
This course will analyze the modern period in philosophy, the seventeenth-century through the nineteenth-century. We will read modern thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Kant, and Darwin and contemporary analyses of these thinkers by philosophers such as Charles Mills, Carole Patemen and Susan Bordo. During the semester we will consider a wide variety of issues. Some of these will be what is the proper role of government, how does one know if others have thinking minds, the role of the individual in society, what is reason, who has reason. There will be weekly writing assignments focused on developing philosophical skills and tests/quizzes. Writing intensive.

Philosophy 380 Constructing Bodies, (4 credits), McHugh
Prerequisite: one course in Philosophy or permission.
Constructing Bodies is an advanced course in epistemology and philosophy of the body. We will begin by studying standard theories of knowledge, critical theories of knowledge, and critical aesthetics. We will then move on to readings in philosophy of the body focusing on the construction of female and male bodies through Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight and The Male Body along with supplementary readings. In addition to philosophical texts, we will be using popular media as a text and a subject for analysis. Course projects consist of weekly reaction papers, a book review, a midterm and final paper you will reconstruct for a class colloquium. Writing intensive.