Topic: Philosophy and Everyday Life

Despite its reputation, I promise that philosophy can actually help people to
understand their daily lives.  So, we will begin the course by tackling the moral
aspects of romantic relationships, marriage, adultery, homosexuality, and date
rape.  Once we see how various contemporary philosophers and feminists have
tackled these problems, we will consider two other ethical issues: the morality of
abortion and the idea that eating animals is somehow immoral.  To tackle these
issues philosophically, we have to ask, "when does a person become a person?"
And, "How are people different from animals?"

The problems of vegetarianism and of abortion will bring us into our second unit,
"What is a person?"  Once we have discussed the ethical issues above, we will
be in a position to see how our everyday ethical choices are often deeply
informed by our concept of what a person really is.  To begin with the concrete,
we will use a short story of Zora Neale Hurston's and some readings on race and
gender to raise these questions: we seem to think that each person has a
particular gender and race, but what does that mean?  Are these biological or
social categories, or is that a false dichotomy to begin with?  We will then get a
bit more abstract by tackling how humans can be distinguished from animals,
and we will use the famous Director's Cut of the film "Blade Runner" to help us
distinguish humans from artificial beings.

Once we have spent some time learning how philosophy is done, in the final unit
we will be in a position to learn a bit about how modern philosophy came to be.
We will read some short texts by Galileo, Descartes, and Locke, and then a
wonderful example of early modern philosophy, Berkeley's Three Dialogues.  In
this text, Berkeley tries to convince us that reality is quite different from what the
philosophers say it is, and that most folks know that.

NOTE:  There will be no pop quizzes, no tests, and no midterm or final in this
course.  Instead, students will be asked to discuss the texts, and to write three
short philosophical essays.