Philosophy Today

COURSE OBJECTIVE
Students become familiar with some ongoing developments in the History of Philosophy, Practical Philosophy, and Theoretical Philosophy. After this course, students will be able to locate these developments against a broader historical background and relate them to developments in other academic disciplines and/or subfields of philosophy. They will also have refined their research and presentation skills.

COURSE CONTENT
History of Philosophy. On the one hand, the themes and thinkers studied by historiographers of philosophy tend to follow ongoing developments in practical and theoretical philosophy, as well as in other academic disciplines. On the other hand, trends in ongoing debates tend to emerge from the rediscovery or revaluation of past thinkers. We will illustrate these two directions using the history of philosophy of science. Theoretical Philosophy. Recent epistemology has seen the rise of virtue epistemology: the idea that acquiring and possessing knowledge essentially involves intellectual virtues. However, recent findings from cognitive and social psychology suggest that people are hardly, if ever, intellectually virtuous because they suffer from various kinds of cognitive biases. We will study a number of papers that seek to explore this tension.

This course is directly related to the department's research. Students will become acquainted with the practice of philosophical research and publishing in progress by reading a number of forthcoming papers or chapters and interacting with their authors.

TEACHING METHODS
Seminar. Student participation: presentation of topics, close reading of papers, and group discussions.

TYPE OF ASSESSMENT
One presentation (20%) and two essays (80%). Insufficient essays require a resit, but only for that essay.

TARGET AUDIENCE
Philosophy majors