Winter Quarter

This course offers an opportunity for Philosophy postgraduate students to develop their professional skills. As part of the course, students will construct a portfolio consisting of the following items: (i) a one-page research proposal; (ii) a (recorded) short research presentation (c. 10-15 minutes), with accompanying powerpoints and handout; (iii) a (recorded) short teaching presentation (c. 10-15 minutes), with accompanying powerpoints and handout; (iv) an academic webpage; (v) a syllabus for an undergraduate course; (vi) an academic CV; (vii) and a teaching statement. The goal of the course is to facilitate the production of the above portfolio, through intensive and collaborative work.

In this seminar, we will examine the related notions of reduction, emergence and fundamentality. Once we get sufficiently clear on what they are supposed to be, we will consider how they pertain to explanation and how they are supposed to illuminate issues regarding the ontological structure in reality.

The seminar will examine various kinds of relativism, with special reference to epistemic relativism, relativistic accounts of knowledge ascriptions and the relationship between relativism on the one hand and hinge epistemology and feminist epistemology on the other. In closing, we will also deal with the meta-philosophical issue of whether a coherent model for relativistic intuitions may be provided.

This course provides an overview of the exciting field of medical epistemology. Based on case-studies drawn from contemporary medical practice, the course will be themed around the following key topics: Disease classification. Hierarchies of evidence in evidence based medicine. The role of trust in the medical context. Expert disagreement in the medical context. Vaccine skepticism. Informed consent. Testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in the medical context. Alternative medicines. Diagnostics and epistemic value. Placebo effect.