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About the Courses:
Introduction to Philosophy: This course asks you to grapple with some tough questions: What is the nature of morality? Is there a God? Do human beings have free will? A soul? What, if anything, can we know? You will not find out the answers to these questions until the final day of class.
Text for Spring: a customized book available only at the Kirkwood Bookstore entitled The Brown Book of Philosophy: Second Edition. Its cost should be under sixty dollars.
Ethics: In this course, we study a variety of "theories" about the nature of morality including duty-based ethics, relativism, and utilitarianism. Then we study issues in applied ethics: euthanasia, media ethics, just war, to name a few. This course is not designed to make you a better person; it will either leave you unchanged or make you a little worse.
Texts for Spring: a customized book available only at the Kirkwood Bookstore (with an approximate cost of fifty dollars) and Teach Yourself Ethics by Mel Thompson (Paperback - Nov 1, 2006, approximate cost: fifteen dollars).
Basic Reasoning: This is a course in which you study the nature of arguments themselves -- how they are constructed, how they work, what they are supposed to do, etc. In this course, you learn a method of evaluating arguments, spend time evaluating arguments, and get the opportunity to create your own arguments. Some of the arguments we discuss are quite provocative -- but that's only to keep things interesting!
Texts: Introducing Symbolic Logic byRobert Martin (Broadview Press); A Rulebook for Arguments (third edition) by Anthony Weston; Greatest American Speeches: The Stories and transcripts of the words that changed our history (Hardcover); Bertrand Russell’s Why I’m Not a Christian. The total combined cost of these texts is approximately seventy dollars.
For more information on these or other courses that I teach, contact me!
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