Experience and Reality (PHIL 230.001)
Instructor: Jim Sias. This class meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:00 – 2:15 p.m. in Caldwell 105.
More specifically, moral experience and moral reality.
This course is usually taught as an introduction to metaphysics and epistemology. We, too, will be focusing on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, but the metaphysics and epistemology of morality in particular. For instance, do moral properties like goodness and evil exist? Or are they really just projections of our own attitudes onto the world? If there are moral facts, how can we access them? Is moral knowledge possible? What sort of role might emotion play in the formation of our moral intuitions? Are there really such things as traits of moral character? These are the sorts of questions we’ll be asking in this class. And for answers, we’ll be looking into historical and contemporary texts in both philosophy and psychology.
Class meetings will be discussion-based, so students should come prepared to participate.
Jim Sias’s webpage