Background
I love teaching. I started doing something resembling teaching when I became a private tutor in college. I then started officially tutoring for the philosophy department at my college (Florida International University). Afterward, I was fortunate enough to teach three sections of Logic and Semantics at a local high school for a semester. I greatly enjoyed the position, and in graduate school (University of Rochester) I relished every opportunity to guest lecture or teach. By chance, I got to teach a college introductory logic course at the University of Rochester, and it was both incredibly time consuming and what I most looked forward to that semester. I am now at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and I'm happy that I get to teach every single semester. Though it would be nice if I had fewer courses for the simple reason that I also greatly enjoy my research.
Below, you'll find the courses I teach or have taught. I have also included my teaching evaluations where possible. I'll try to have the most recent syllabus for each course uploaded, but given that I'm actively teaching most of these courses, I may fail.
Meaning of Life
We all find ourselves at one point or another wondering what everything adds up to. This sentiment manifests itself as different questions: 'why am I here?', 'what's my purpose?', 'how can I lead a fulfilling life?', or, perhaps most relevantly, 'what is the meaning of life?'. Such questions are usually pondered for a brief moment, after which we realize the sheer enormity of what we're asking and just how impossible finding an answer seems to be, and so we return to the demands of daily life.
Now that you're in college, these questions are of the essence. Where will you go from here? Which skills should you develop? Which major should you choose? What should you pursue? Money? Fulfillment? Happiness? What does it mean to be happy or fulfilled? In this course, we're going to set all else aside and dedicate real effort to coming to grips with these questions. Our focus will be on developing our ability to think about what we're asking and acquiring the tools necessary to assess the responses on offer and evaluate their viability. To be clear, the questions we'll be asking certainly have answers, though we have yet to figure out precisely what they are. Our task will be to engage in the search for the truth. By the end, you will have a greater understanding of what it is you want to know about your existence and how best to pursue that which is most meaningful.
Philosophy of Mind
Our minds are full of beliefs and desires, and they are full of qualities such as colors, smells, tastes, pains, and joys. Philosophers and scientists have long struggled to fit this qualitative world of experience into the quantitative world of physics. In order to have any hope of reconciling the two, we need to know: what are our minds? The objective of this course is to seek an answer to that question. We'll begin by getting a clear understanding of exactly what we're asking, and then the rest of the course will be dedicated to trying to figure out where minds fit into the physical world, if indeed they do.
Space, Time, and Reality
Questions about the nature of space and time—or the nature of reality more generally—are questions that fall within the domain of metaphysics. Metaphysics is concerned with what there is and what it's like. While a comprehensive definition of the subject can be difficult to provide, perhaps the most straightforward thing to say is that metaphysics is concerned with fundamental reality. As such, metaphysical questions are quite easy to identify. For example: what is time, and how should we understand our passage through it?; what is an object, how is it related to its parts, and what relationship does it bear to its properties?; what does it mean for an object to change?; what is space, and how does it relate to time?; are physical laws necessarily deterministic, and, if so, to what extent can we truly be said to be free?
In this course, we will address these questions. As will become quickly apparent, reality is exceedingly difficult to make sense of, and much of what we take for granted can rarely withstand rational scrutiny.
Symbolic Logic
Logic is the study of consequence; it concerns itself with what can be inferred from what. More specifically, in logic we're concerned with what makes an argument a good argument — what is needed to make a conclusion follow from its premises. In this course, we'll be occupying ourselves with formal logic. This means that we'll be looking specifically at the structure of arguments, learning which types of structures are conducive to truth-preservation, and learning how to test arguments for validity. This will involve learning how to symbolize arguments, construct truth tables, and work through proofs. To this end, we'll be looking at two systems of logic in particular: statement and predicate logic. Both of these systems are artificial languages that aim at mapping more or less what goes on in natural language. In order to avoid things getting too dry, we'll occasionally consider some philosophical issues such as what we're looking for in a good artificial language, what the purpose of such languages is, the effectiveness of the languages we're considering, and whether what we're aiming for has any hope for success.