tEACHING

I have taught courses in a wide variety of areas.
Below are course summaries for the courses I have taught.

Biomedical Ethics

This course is an examination of the philosophical foundations of bioethical theory and an exploration of some of the most contentious contemporary issues. We employ philosophical analysis to examine a number of moral issues arising in health care including justice in health care, experimentation and research on human subjects, reproductive technology, aging, organ donation, and euthanasia. Throughout the course we examine assumptions about rights, persons, and ethical principles at work in medical decisions.

Ethical Theory

This course examines a number of questions related to prominent accounts of the right and good as well as the nature of morality. We investigate what it is for something to be good and whether morality is objective, subjective, or relative. We look at whether moral statements are capable of being true or false. We also study evolutionary debunking theories, contractualism, and the relationship between God and morality. And finally, we evaluate the arguments for and against the leading contemporary ethical theories: utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

Ethics in Contemporary Society

This course introduces students to philosophical debates surrounding several contentious contemporary moral issues: abortion, animal welfare, euthanasia, and global poverty. We start by discussing the leading contemporary normative ethical theories and how to apply them to specific moral issues. Students may already have beliefs regarding many contemporary ethical issues. However, most people do not have a fully developed arguments or reasons to justify their beliefs. Without such arguments, beliefs about specific issues run the risk of being mere prejudices. By “prejudice,” I mean a belief that you have for no good reason. By relying on moral theories like these to justify your beliefs about specific moral issues, students can help to ensure that their beliefs are not mere prejudices.

Ancient Philosophy

This course examines the beginnings of Western philosophy from its origins with the so-called “Presocratics,” through Plato and Aristotle, and concluding with the Hellenistic Philosophers. We focus on understanding the views these early philosophers held on issues including, but not limited to, justice, virtue, governments, moral responsibility, and the nature of the soul.

Introduction to Philosophy

This course is an introduction to some key problems and debates in the Western philosophical tradition. We explore competing theories that seek to address God’s existence, the foundations of morality, free will and moral responsibility, personal identity, and the principles of a just government. We not only seek to cover many areas of philosophy but also every period of philosophy. We cover arguments from the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophical periods.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics concerns the basic features of reality, covering topics such as existence, properties, consciousness, personal identity, free will, and time. This course provides students with a survey of these issues. The primary purpose of the course is to enable students to understand these each of these topics better and to appreciate and evaluate the arguments on all sides, while attempting to form their own considered view.

Modern Philosophy

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of the early modern period in Europe, with an emphasis on issues in metaphysics and epistemology. European philosophers of this period focused to a large extent on questions about the fundamental nature of the world, the nature of God, the relation of mind to body, and how we can have knowledge of the external world. We will examine attempts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to come to grips with these questions by focusing on the writings of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkley, Hume, and Kant.

Philosophy of Mind

This course is about the mind and its place in nature. We examine the relationship between consciousness and the physical brain, arguments that the mind is not material, questions about consciousness in robots and programs, the problem of free will as it relates to determinism and indeterminism, and scientific challenges to the commonsense assumption that you have conscious control over your own actions.

Senior Capstone / Honors Thesis

This course aims to teach students how to develop a thesis and research paper on a topic of the student’s choosing. We focus on the necessary steps to develop and write a research paper, including how to conduct a literature review, create an annotated bibliography, prepare an outline and abstract, write a draft, and revise drafts based on comments.