My teaching philosophy is student centered. When considering how I will organize the classroom and present the material on any given day, I abide by the principle that the students should always be fully engaged in the material and the ideas, and that my job is to facilitate that for all of them. I actively foster an environment that encourages intellectual honesty, epistemic humility, charitability, and responsiveness, and that sets expectations for careful reading and interpretation, careful critical scrutiny, and careful contributions whether written or shared in class discussions.
Sample of Courses Offered:
Introduction to Philosophy
Interactive lecture and discussion. Topics include what, if anything, we can know about the world, the freedom or determinacy of the human will, personal identity and identity over time, what a just society should look like, and what it means to behave morally.
Introduction to Ethics
Interactive lecture and discussion. Topics include Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics; Socrates and the sophists; Plato; Aristotle’s virtue ethics; the Epicureans, Stoics, and skeptics; Locke, Nozick, Rawls and contractarianism; Kantian deontology; Mill and utilitarianism; the Ethics of Care; and Nietzsche.
Contemporary Moral Issues
Discussion based, writing intensive. Topics include basic ethical and political theory (deontology, consequentialism/utilitarianism, virtue ethics, care ethics, contractualism, and principles of distributive justice), animal rights & welfare, abortion, free speech, pornography and other sex work, artificial intelligence, human enhancement, criminal justice, immigration, global justice, racial justice, and environmental ethics.
Philosophy in Science Fiction
Interactive lecture and discussion, mixed media. Topics include external world skepticism/the simulation argument; time, space, and time travel; mind/body dualism, consciousness, phenomenology, and supervenience; personal identity; identity over time; free will and determinism; machine ethics and artificial intelligence; and death/immortality.
Elementary Logic
Lecture, discussion, and problem-set based. Course covers english-to-symbolic logic translation, basics of propositional calculus, first-order predicate calculus, and multi-place relational predicate calculus.
Jurisprudence & Social Issues
Interactive lecture and discussion. Topics include theories in analytic jurisprudence (legal positivism, natural law theory, legal pragmatism); normative jurisprudence (obligation to obey the law, legal authority, legitimate limitations on liberty); and criminal justice (consequentialist, retributivist, and hybrid theories of punishment; alternatives to punishment; abolition).
Data & Information Ethics
Interactive lecture and discussion. The course explores ethical issues surrounding the collection, use, and analysis of data in various contexts. Topics include the ethics of UX design, the effects of algorithms on autonomy, data privacy, and transparency in the collection and use of user data.