Summary

This course is designed to consider a small range of basic philosophical issues that relate to everyone.  Thoughtful people in any occupation of life have always raised philosophical questions.  Doing so seems to be part of what it is to be an interested, creative human being.

Most people are not very good at thinking about such questions, because they don't know how to begin to approach them.  Philosophical questions do not have straightforward factual answers.  Rather, they are more theoretical.  The right approach involves thinking things through, looking for connections among many considerations, and being willing to go where the best reasoning leads.

If you can develop some skill in dealing with such questions, you will not only find yourself opening up to a personally satisfying dimension of human life, but also you will find yourself with a thinking skill that can be used to great advantage in application to many other open-ended questions arising in your career or other areas of practical life.  Open-ended questions about how you should raise your children, about what business strategy is likely to succeed, about what attitude to take toward religion, about politics -- all require much the same sort of approach that will be taught in this course.

The basic questions for this semester

In this course we will be looking at three groups of basic philosophical questions.  These are not necessarily more basic than other philosophical questions, but they have been chosen to provide a good sampling of what philosophical issues are like, and of how they might be approached.  They are also somewhat related to one another.

1. What makes something morally right or wrong?  Is there a right way to live?  (Lead instructor: Prof. James Swindler)
   Although people differ in their opinions about the answers to these questions, various philosophers have developed careful theories about the best answers.  We will look at a few of those theories to see what we might learn from them.

2. When, if ever, are people morally responsible for what they do?  (Lead instructor: Prof. Kenton Machina)
   What is moral responsibility?  Why is it important?  What conditions do you have to meet before you are morally responsible for something?  For example, do you have to have "free will"?  Does anyone ever meet those conditions, or is moral responsibility now an outmoded concept?

3. What is the nature of our minds?  (Lead instructor: Prof. Harry Deutsch)
   Everyone agrees that human beings have a mental life--they think thoughts, form intentions, have experiences, and so on.  But should we imagine that this mental life goes on in some sort of nonphysical mind, that has no location, weight, size, or shape?  What, then, would be the role of our brains (which certainly do have location, weight, size, and shape)?   Can we explain consciousness simply as brain function?