Courses tagged with "Information control" (39)

This course is a study of basic metaphysical issues concerning existence, the mind-body problem, personal identity, and causation plus its implications for freedom. This class features classical as well as contemporary readings and it provides practice in written and oral communication.

Western philosophy and theoretical mathematics were born together, and the cross-fertilization of ideas in the two disciplines was continuously acknowledged throughout antiquity. In this course, we read works of ancient Greek philosophy and mathematics, and investigate the way in which ideas of definition, reason, argument and proof, rationality and irrationality, number, quality and quantity, truth, and even the idea of an idea were shaped by the interplay of philosophic and mathematical inquiry.

This course explores the nature of meaning and truth, and their bearing on the use of language in communication. No knowledge of logic or linguistics is presupposed.

This will be a seminar on classic and contemporary work on central topics in ethics. The first third of the course will focus on metaethics: we will examine the meaning of moral claims and ask whether there is any sense in which moral principles are objectively valid. The second third of the course will focus on normative ethics: what makes our lives worth living, what makes our actions right or wrong, and what do we owe to others? The final third of the course will focus on moral character: what is virtue, and how important is it? Can we be held responsible for what we do? When and why?

This course explores topics related to the representation and expression of propositional attitudes (e.g. belief, knowledge, and desires) and speech acts (e.g. saying and asking) in natural language. The main focus will be on semantics of predicates such as believe, know, want, say, ask, etc. Other topics will include the syntax of main and embedded clauses and formal representation of the pragmatics of conversation. The course provides practice in written and oral communication.

This course is an examination of philosophical theories of action and motivation in the light of empirical findings from social psychology, sociology, and neuroscience. Topics include belief, desire, and moral motivation; sympathy and empathy; intentions and other committing states; strength of will and weakness of will; free will; addiction and compulsion; guilt, shame and regret; evil; self-knowledge and self-deception; and, virtues and character traits.

This course is a CI-M course.

This course is a seminar on the philosophical analysis of film art, with an emphasis on the ways in which it creates meaning through techniques that define a formal structure. There is a particular focus on aesthetic problems about appearance and reality, literary and visual effects, communication and alienation through film technology.

The class will be devoted to the work of David Lewis, one of the most exciting and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. We will have seminar-style discussions about his work on counterfactuals, time, causation, probability, and decision-theory.

This course explores different kinds of infinity; the paradoxes of set theory; the reduction of arithmetic to logic; formal systems; paradoxes involving the concept of truth; Gödel’s incompleteness theorems; the nonformalizable nature of mathematical truth; and Turing machines.

This course begins with an introduction to the theory of computability, then proceeds to a detailed study of its most illustrious result: Kurt Gödel's theorem that, for any system of true arithmetical statements we might propose as an axiomatic basis for proving truths of arithmetic, there will be some arithmetical statements that we can recognize as true even though they don't follow from the system of axioms. In my opinion, which is widely shared, this is the most important single result in the entire history of logic, important not only on its own right but for the many applications of the technique by which it's proved. We'll discuss some of these applications, among them: Church's theorem that there is no algorithm for deciding when a formula is valid in the predicate calculus; Tarski's theorem that the set of true sentence of a language isn't definable within that language; and Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, which says that no consistent system of axioms can prove its own consistency.

This course examines problems in the philosophy of film as well as literature studied in relation to their making of myths. The readings and films that are discussed in this course draw upon classic myths of the western world. Emphasis is placed on meaning and technique as the basis of creative value in both media.

In this course we will cover central aspects of modern formal logic, beginning with an explanation of what constitutes good reasoning. Topics will include validity and soundness of arguments, formal derivations, truth-functions, translations to and from a formal language, and truth-tables. We will thoroughly cover sentential calculus and predicate logic, including soundness and completeness results.

This course is a seminar on the nature of love and sex, approached as topics both in philosophy and in literature. Readings from recent philosophy as well as classic myths of love that occur in works of literature and lend themselves to philosophical analysis.

Modal logic is the logic of necessity and possibility, and by extension of analogously paired notions like validity and consistency, obligation and permission, the known and the not-ruled-out. This a first course in the area. A solid background in first-order logic is essential. Topics to be covered include (some or all of) the main systems of propositional modal logic, Kripkean "possible world" semantics, strict implication, contingent identity, intensional objects, counterpart theory, the logic of actuality, and deontic and / or epistemic logic. The emphasis will be more on technical methods and results than philosophical applications.

This course explores the values (aesthetic, moral, cultural, religious, prudential, political) expressed in the choices of food people eat. It analyzes the decisions individuals make about what to eat, how society should manage food production and consumption collectively, and how reflection on food choices might help resolve conflicts between different values.

This course examines fundamental issues in the philosophy of law, including the nature and content of law, its relation to morality, theories of legal interpretation, and the obligation to obey the law, as well as philosophical issues and problems associated with punishment and responsibility, liberty, and legal ethics.

This course is an introduction to problems about creativity as it pervades human experience and behavior. Questions about imagination and innovation are studied in relation to the history of philosophy as well as more recent work in philosophy, affective psychology, cognitive studies, and art theory. Readings and guidance are aligned with the student's focus of interest.

This course gives an introduction to the science of linguistic meaning. There are two branches to this discipline: semantics, the study of conventional, "compositional meaning", and pragmatics, the study of interactional meaning. There are other contributaries: philosophy, logic, syntax, and psychology. We will try to give you an understanding of the concepts of semantics and pragmatics and of some of the technical tools that we use.

Quantum mechanics--even in the ordinary, non-relativistic, "particle" formulation that will be the primary focus of this course--has been a staggeringly successful physical theory, surely one of the crowning achievements of 20th century science. It's also rather bizarre--bizarre enough to lead very intelligent and otherwise sensible people to make such claims as that the universe is perpetually splitting into many copies of itself, that conscious minds have the power to make physical systems "jump" in unpredictable ways, that classical logic stands in need of fundamental revision, and much, much more. In this course, we intelligent and sensible people will attempt to take a sober look at these and other alleged implications of quantum mechanics, as well as certain stubborn problems that continue to trouble its foundations.

Along the way, we will take plenty of time out to discuss philosophical questions about science that quantum mechanics raises in new and interesting ways: e.g., what it means to attribute probabilities to physical events, what the aims of scientific inquiry are (does it aim at something true, or merely at something useful?), what the role of observation is in constructing a scientific theory, what it means to say that there is an "objective" physical world, whether something as basic as logic can be viewed as an empirical discipline, whether there can be meaningful scientific questions whose answers cannot possibly be settled by experiment, and more.

This course will introduce you to the Western philosophical tradition through the study of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Cavendish, Hume, and Kant. You'll grapple with questions that have been significant to philosophy from its beginnings: Questions about the nature of the mind, the existence of God, the foundations of knowledge, and the good life. You'll also observe changes of intellectual outlook over time, and the effect of scientific, religious, and political concerns on the development of philosophical ideas.