An introduction to a range of philosophical debates about the mind, human nature, and the self that have become central to 21st century intellectual life.

An introduction to a range of philosophical debates about the mind, human nature, and the self that have become central to 21st century intellectual life.

Catalog Description:
A critical study of alternative theories of the good life, virtue and vice, right and wrong, and their application to perennial and contemporary moral problems.

A topical introduction to philosophy which surveys historical and current work in philosophy of mind and the study of cognition. The material revolves around the reasons we have to attribute minds to people. We explore several reasons for having a mind: the capacity for knowledge, innate representations, language, consciousness, agency, control over the body, freedom from natural causality.

Catalog Description: The course concerns techniques of analyzing sentences and arguments by uncovering the formal structures and relations which underlie them. This involves translating ordinary language into the symbolic formulas of elementary logical systems and proving formalized arguments.

Catalog Description:
A study of ancient Greek philosophy, focusing on the thought of the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle.

This course examines the new beginning of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries, which still has a grip on us today. Faced with the success of the new sciences, early modern philosophers aimed to make philosophical knowledge as secure as scientific knowledge. Rationalists (e.g. Descartes) tried to model philosophy on mathematics, while empiricists (e.g. Locke, Hume) favored the methods of natural sciences. Kant tried to combine the strengths of both methods and reflected extensively on the powers of philosophical reason. We will read very carefully central texts from Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant, and reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches. Special emphasis is given to their theories of knowledge (epistemology), and their views on the relationship between mind and body (metaphysics). The books will be available from the Tulane Bookstore.

Catalog Description:
This course will be devoted to a study of classical works of political philosophy in the Western tradition, primarily Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics.

Catalog Description:
This course will be devoted to an examination and critical assessment of classical works of modern political philosophy in the Western tradition, focusing each term on the writings of approximately three or four of the following thinkers: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Mill.

Catalog Description:
This course is about how to deal with moral problems
in business management with integrity. The scope and resources
for making principled responses to ethical challenges will be
examined and a variety of cases will be analyzed.

Catalog Description:
American philosophy from early 17th century to late 19th century. Readings in and discussion of representative thinkers in each period from the Puritans to the pragmatists.

In this course, we will discuss Buddhism as a philosophical school of thought, beginning at its origins in India. After situating the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha or “Awakened One,” in its context in the Brahamanic tradition, we will discuss the core of Buddhist thought, including the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, focusing on the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics which those doctrines put forward. We will analyze arguments put forth by the Buddha and his successors. Following this introduction, we will discuss different Buddhist schools of thought and how they each analyze and interpret the teachings of the Buddha to arrive at their own positions. Particular emphasis will be placed on Zen Buddhism and its usage of koans as an exercise in understanding that perspective. To wrap up the course, we will study a series of lectures given by Keiji Nishitani, a Buddhist of the Kyoto School who studied Western philosophy under Heidegger. His lectures focus on the position of Buddhism in the modern world, the challenges its faces in that world, and how it might meet those challenges, as well as some musings on Western philosophy in general.

A study of historical and contemporary skepticism about knowledge.

A detailed critical examination of the political philosophy of John Locke. Locke is arguably the pivotal figure in the development of modern individualist liberalism. Both historically and philosophically, the course examines Locke's doctrines of natural law, freedom, property rights, contractually grounded government, rights of resistance and rebellion, and the rights of toleration.

Locke, Berkeley and/or Hume examined both individually and as contributors to one of modern philosophy’s historical developments.

The course will focus this semester on a close reading of Plato’s Sophist.