Non-catalog courses offered Summer/Fall 09

(For catalog Summer/Fall 09 courses -- not listed here -- see the Registrar's Course-Schedule website.)

Summer 09

Phil 195 – Early Hollywood Horror Films (4 credits)
Instructor:  Michael Mendelson

Many view early Hollywood horror films as unsophisticated cinematic forays that pale in comparison to the kinds of special effects and violence that are characteristic so many contemporary horror films. In this course, we will view some of the great classics of the 1930’s viewing them as serious artistic and philosophical endeavors directed by some of the greatest filmmakers of all time.  HU

Phil 196 - Philosophy and Technology: Metaphysics and Morality in the Digital Age (4 cr)
Instructor: Greg Reihman

Are new technologies changing how we decide what’s real and what’s
right? Can classical and contemporary views of metaphysics (what’s
real) and morality (what’s right) help us understand how we think
and act when we're online, e.g., in virtual worlds? To help answer these questions, students will read a variety of philosophical works and explore several different virtual environments (e.g. Second Life). HU

Phil 198 – Contemporary Horror Films (4 credits)
Instructor:  Michael Mendelson

Contemporary horror films are often characterized simply in terms of violence, bloodshed, and gore.  However, there are a variety of sub-genres that need to be taken into account, and in this course we will view a wide array of films that do indeed exhibit some of the characteristic traits but also make philosophical statements that are both reflective and provocative. HU

Fall 09

Philosophy 90: College Seminar (4 Credits)
CONTEMPORARY GOTHIC, MORAL HORROR, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
Instructor:  Michael Mendelson

Traditionally, Philosophy has been an optimistic enterprise, one which is designed to explore the nature reality in an attempt to provide an accurate picture of the nature of reality.  This account is often intended as providing us with the means of overcoming the sense of anxiety and vulnerability that often plague us as we observe the world around us, and providing us with a purpose and “meaning” to the lives that we lead.  However, beginning at least as early as the 18th century, there has been a movement, often referred to as “The Gothic” that has subjected this optimism to severe criticism, often via painting, novels, film, and music. In this seminar, we will begin by examining some of that traditional philosophical optimism (e.g.  Plato’s Symposium), and then we shall examine contemporary examples that call into question that optimism  --e.g. Expressionist painting and cinema, novels by Joyce Carol Oates, Patrick McGrath, and Poppy Z. Brite, as well as some contemporary music.  Our overall purpose will be to evaluate these somewhat “outsider” attempts to raise deep and disturbing questions about the traditional philosophical optimism with which the seminar will begin.

Michael Mendelson is an Associate Professor of Philosophy, and his interests involve the history of philosophy (especially Ancient, Medieval, and the 17th and 18th centuries), and he is especially interested in using “The Gothic” as a neglected prism through which to examine the traditional optimism of  Western and Eastern  philosophy.  HU

Phil 295 – Metaethics (4 Credits)
Instructor: Mark H. Bickhard

Metaethics is concerned with questions about ethics, rather than questions within ethics.  That is, metaethics is the exploration of secondary questions about ethics.  Furthermore, just as it is difficult to do physics without assumptions in the realm of metaphysics, it is difficult to do ethics without assumptions in the realm of metaethics.  In this sense, metaethics is also the study of framing assumptions that constrain and support ethics.  We will explore this field, examining issues such as: Do moral facts or properties exist, and, if so, what are they like?  What kind of metaphysics can support, constrain, and make sense of ethics?  Can moral judgments be correct or incorrect?  What sort of connection is there between making a moral judgment and being motivated to act as that judgment prescribes?  What is the semantics of moral discourse — what does moral discourse really talk about?  HU

Phil 347/Rel 347/ AmStud 347- William James - American Religious Thinkers (4 credits)
Instructors: Michael Raposa /Gordon Bearn

Teacher of Gertrude Stein and W.E.B. Du Bois, friend of Helen Keller, defender of Pragmatism, William James is back.  He died in 1910 at the age of 68, but then languished as little more than a leading example of an unpopular but distinctively American philosophical style.  Now, thanks to the advocacy of the late Richard Rorty, James' humane version of Pragmatism is bringing new life to philosophy.  Sadly however, lost in this know nothing revival of the merely pragmatic, are the metaphysical and religious dimensions of James' writings, dimensions which will be the focus of this seminar.   In the 1870's James established what may have been the first experimental psychology laboratory in the United States, and his first fame followed the publication of the enormous two volume Principles of Psychology (1890).  We will start our study with James's own abridgment of that book, and proceed to read his study of the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).  Our seminar will conclude with James' final philosophical system, Radical Empiricism, presented in a series of articles at the end of his life.  Radical Empiricism is the culmination of James' investigation of what in 1884 he described as "the wonderful stream of our own consciousness."  This seminar will enjoy the wonder in that stream.  HU

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