Philosophy

Critical thinking empowers students to recognize fallacious reasoning, manipulative rhetoric, and other dubious defenses of faulty beliefs. It encourages students to explore various methods of justification, explanation and argumentation in order to understand why we believe what we believe. In this course, we consider reasoning – how we seek to influence other people’s beliefs, and how our beliefs are influenced by others. We search for a good basis upon which to change our beliefs.

In this course we will treat the assertion that Black Lives Matter is a rejection of the devaluation of Black life. In so doing, we will conduct philosophical investigations into the ways in which Black lives have been devalued in America. Throughout the semester, we will also consider the vast perspectives on iterations such as all lives matter, protests as a form of resistance, and the use of violence by the police state.

This course attempts to understand the dialogues of Plato, with their ironic protagonist Socrates, by locating them in the cultural, political and intellectual context of late fifth and early fourth century BCE Greece. Plato was engaged in a struggle to establish philosophy as a superior form of knowledge based on reason and dialectic. He tried to demonstrate that the sources and methods on which others based their knowledge—poetry, politics, religion and rhetoric—were unreliable and dangerous. We will read the dialogues of Plato against other culturally important materials: the epics of Homer, the rhetoric of the sophists, the political thought of Thucydides, Athenian tragedy. And we will measure the success of Plato’s efforts by asking to what extent one can ever hope to transcend one’s cultural context and attain knowledge that is secure, objective, “absolute”—a question as relevant in our own turbulent times as it was in Plato’s.

How do philosophical concepts of identity impact theories and research methods in psychology? How can mental illness be understood as a response to a complex situation? How are philosophical perspectives on human freedom relevant to psychotherapy? We will delve into these questions through a study of the Existentialist movement in 19th and 20th century European philosophy. Selected philosophers include Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, etc. In the second half of the semester, we will examine how these philosophical theories shaped psychological schools and therapeutic practices. Special attention will be devoted to Existential Phenomenological Psychology, Existential Therapy, and Qualitative Research Methods.