Throughout the semester, department faculty will meet with graduate students to share their research interests and projects. These informal sessions are meant to acquaint graduate students with the breadth and depth of philosophical work in the department and to inform their choices of faculty advisors and mentors.

Many say that we are suffering from a crisis of a lack of trust in science in this country. In response, significant effort has been lavished on improving science communication — with the aim of promoting such trust. But it’s not always clear what “trust of science” ought to mean. Does “science” really deserve “our” trust? Why? Without compelling answers to these questions, we are rudderless when it comes to improving the relationship between science and the public. I will attempt to steer us in a better direction.

In teaching beginning courses in critical thinking and logic, teachers seek to develop a way of presenting the subject matter that addresses the difficulties and common confusions so often found among students.  Unfortunately, many of the textbooks do not address these problems directly nor pedagogically.  The talk will discuss the approach I eventually took to  confront these difficulties and confusions by reorganizing the presentation of the subject matter, and which along the way led to writing the book The Elements of Arguments: An Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking.

Celebrate International Democracy Day with ice cream, popsicles, and conversation about what democracy means to you!

Throughout the semester, department faculty will meet with graduate students to share their research interests and projects. These informal sessions are meant to acquaint graduate students with the breadth and depth of philosophical work in the department and to inform their choices of faculty advisors and mentors.

When Thomas Hobbes, in the middle of the 17th century, reluctantly took up the problem of free will in his exchange with Bramhall, he blamed medieval scholastic philosophy for having fatally obscured the true nature of the problem. In a way, he is very much correct, because the medieval approach to the problem exemplifies the understanding of self-control that Hobbes seeks to reject: the idea that we control ourselves because we have a will that can exercise second-order control over our volitions. Hobbes’s approach, however, is hardly new. Indeed, its clearest statement goes back to Augustine, at the start of the Middle Ages. On the Augustinian approach, our volitions are self-reflexively under their own control, with no need and no possibility of securing any sort of higher-level control.

Come hear four award-winning CLA faculty talk everything from Korean media to the power of community. Join us for brief, exciting presentations, followed by a [...]