Fall Quarter

Rights and obligations in a social world

In everyday life many of our encounters and relationships result in rights and obligations. For instance, if I promise to phone you tomorrow, you now have a right to my calling you then, and I have an obligation to do so. But what are rights and obligations, and how exactly do we come by them? Do we have some rights irrespective of our specific encounters and relationships with others? This course will focus on such questions, drawing on the work of moral, legal, and social theorists.

This course will offer a comprehensive overview of the core area of philosophy known as epistemology. The topics covered include: theories of knowledge; modal epistemology; virtue epistemology; epistemic externalism/internalism; radical scepticism; epistemic value; understanding. There will also be some discussion of applied epistemology, which is the application of theoretical work in epistemology to particular domains, such as law or education.

The last fifty years of scientific knowledge and technological developments have led to numerous ethical dilemmas that neither medicine nor law alone can adequately address. The emergence of biomedical ethics strains to fill this gap, confronting crucial new questions such as how to define life and death, how to allocate limited resources, how to justify research harms, and issues of social disparity and justice. This course will provide students the philosophical foundations of western normative ethics, with some reference to non-western views. During the term, we will practice utilizing these ethical tools to examine cases related to: autonomy and confidentiality, pharmaceutical clinical trials, research on animals, reproductive technologies, and end-of-life decisions.

The law comes up in almost every part of our lives. But the practice of law still has its own norms and values, which might be questioned from outside. For example: why defend guilty people? Why should a lawyer discredit an honest witness? Why make an injurer pay for all the harm he inflicted if it was an accident? Why release a guilty defendant because of how the evidence was gathered? What does “presumed innocent” and “beyond a reasonable doubt” mean, and what’s the difference between legal proof and ordinary proof? The course explores these and related questions, drawing on cases, news items and leading scholars.

Questions that first arose in early modern philosophy continue to shape present-day thought on a variety of topics, including: What is the nature of knowledge?  What does sensory experience contribute to knowledge?  Is the knowledge of which human beings are capable different in kind from the knowledge of which animals are capable?  What is the nature of the relation between mind and body?  What is human freedom, and is it even possible for humans to be free?  What is the relation between science and human experience?  These questions, and answers to them, originate in the early modern period, and they continue to be discussed to this day.  We will examine the questions and answers to them--as well as other questions and answers--advanced in three classic works of philosophy written in the early modern period: Descartes's *Meditations on First Philosophy*; Hume's *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding*; and Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason*.