Courses tagged with "K12" (56)
The course has two goals. First, to give you a sense of what philosophers think about and why. Here we look at a number of perennial philosophical problems, including some or all of: how knowledge differs from "mere opinion," the objectivity (or not) of moral judgment, logical paradoxes, mind/body relations, the nature and possibility of free will, and how a person remains the same over time, as their bodily and psychological traits change. The second goal is to get you thinking philosophically yourself. This will help you develop your critical and argumentative skills more generally. Readings will be from late, great classical authors and influential contemporary figures.
This course is an intensive seminar on the foundations of analytic philosophy for first-year graduate students. A large selection of classic texts, such as Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic, Russell's Problems of Philosophy, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, is covered in this course.
This course will investigate the semantics of generic sentences, i.e., sentences that are used to talk about habits, tendencies, dispositions, or kinds. For instance:
- Dogs are good pets.
- The giant panda is an endangered species.
- A soccer player makes lots of money.
- Mary smokes after dinner.
- This machine crushes oranges.
This is a half-semester course.
This course presents a comparison of different proposed architectures for the syntax module of grammar. The subject traces several themes across a wide variety of approaches, with emphasis on testable differences among models. Models discussed include ancient and medieval proposals, structuralism, early generative grammar, generative semantics, government-binding theory/minimalism, LFG, HPSG, TAG, functionalist perspectives and others.
This course provides an overview of the distinctive features which distinguish sound categories of languages of the world. Theories which relate these categories to their acoustic and articulatory correlates, both universally and in particular languages, are covered. Models of word recognition by listeners, features, and phonological structure are also discussed. In addition, the course offers a variety of perspectives on these issues, drawn from Electrical Engineering, Linguistics and Cognitive Science.
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 is a graduate seminar surveying recent work on self-knowledge. Some questions that will be explored and discussed are: What is the distinctive philosophical interest of self-knowledge? Is self-knowledge really an epistemic achievement? Is it plausible that there is a uniform explanation of all distinctively first-personal self-knowledge?
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.
The Creole languages spoken in the Caribbean are linguistic by-products of the historical events triggered by colonization and the slave trade in Africa and the "New World". In a nutshell, these languages are the results of language acquisition in the specific social settings defined by the history of contact between African and European peoples in 17th-/18th-century Caribbean colonies.
One of the best known Creole languages, and the one with the largest community of speakers, is Haitian Creole. Its lexicon and various aspects of its grammar are primarily derived from varieties of French as spoken in 17th-/18th-century colonial Haiti. Other aspects of its grammar seem to have emerged under the influence of African languages, mostly from West and Central Africa. And yet other properties seem to have no analogues in any of the source languages.
Through a sample of linguistic case studies focusing on Haitian Creole morphosyntax, we will explore creolization from a cognitive, historical and comparative perspective. Using Haitian Creole and some of its Caribbean congeners as test cases, we will evaluate various hypotheses about the development of Creole languages and about the role of first- and second-language acquisition in such development.
We will also explore the concept of Creolization in its non-linguistic senses. Then we will address questions of "Caribbean identities" by examining a sample of Creole speakers' attitudes toward the Creole language and the corresponding European language and toward the African and European components of their ethnic make-up.
The seminar will be devoted to understanding what we're up to when we ascribe contents to a person's assertions and mental attitudes. We seek to make clear the rules of the game for the philosophy of language. We'll survey classic discussions of the issue by Field, Lewis and Stalnaker. But much of the emphasis of the class will be on getting clear about the limitations of our theoretical tools. I'd like to focus on places where our theorizing runs into trouble, or breaks down altogether.
Many details of phonetic realization cannot be predicted from standard phonological representations on a language-independent basis, so phonetic realization must be specified in grammar. In this seminar we will investigate phonetic realization as a component of grammar.
The basic questions that we will address are:
- What is the form of the phonetic realization component?
- What is its relationship to phonology?
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