Courses

Examines a range of topics within philosophy of language. Includes an overview of several works considered classics in the field (e.g. Wittgenstein, Quine, Searle, Alston, Grice), as well as critical review of major schools of thought in regard to language and criticism. Insights from linguistics and related disciplines, including text linguistics and sociolinguistics, are considered in evaluating the schools of thought.

A descriptive and critical inquiry into the theory of knowledge, including such topics as foundationalism, relativism, evidence, warrant, cognitive reliability, skepticism, and the relationship of cognitive science and psychology to philosophical accounts of knowledge and rational inquiry.

This course doesn't merely explore different questions about the nature, value, and meaning of beauty, artworks, and aesthetic experience; it also sensitizes students to the value, pleasures, and risks of moving through the world with deep perceptual attention coupled to an expansive imagination.

A survey of central issues arising from the question, Is belief in God rational? Topics include arguments concerning the existence of God, religious pluralism, natural science and religious belief, religious language, and critiques of natural theology from Kierkegaard and Reformed Epistemology.

Examines the place of evidence in religion and assesses the evidential force of religious experience and related phenomena. The main body of the course addresses the evidential force of such experiences as near-death experiences, visions, mystical states of consciousness, as well as the Shroud of Turin as a unique religious artifact. Surveys some major contributors to the critical study of religious experience, e.g.: William James, Rudolf Otto, and R.C. Zaehner, and examines competing theories for religious phenomena, e.g., psychological and neurophysiological explanations for near-death and visionary experiences.

Examines some key issues pertaining to suffering and belief in God. Topics include the problem of evil, arguments from suffering original sin, everlasting suffering, and providence.

This course explores the philosophically perplexing tasks of finding a place for human consciousness in, and the mind’s causal relations to, the natural world. It also investigates the theories put forward to address these tasks, e.g., dualistic theories like substance dualism, dual-attribute theory, epiphenomenalism, and emergentism, and the monistic theories like physicalism (reductive, eliminative, and non-reductive), idealism (ontological and conceptual), and neutral monism.

Explore primary source material from five major (atheist and theist) existentialist philosophers, excerpts of existentialist fiction, a book that offers an overview of the common themes of existentialism, and another rife with existentialist themes that helps readers assess their own degree of existential alienation. Students engage in daily discussions and lectures on the material read. Students write two papers: a book review and a research paper, and keep a journal tracking their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journey through class readings and lectures. In small groups, students discuss and share their insights and struggles with existentialism.

This course examines some of the most influential views of human nature advanced by philosophers in the history of Western civilization, and explores the implications of these views for ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and metaphysics.