Fall Course Descriptions

Dr. Maureen Donnelly
Class meeting details and description forthcoming.

Dr. Barry Smith
ONLINE
Class #: 23951

This course provides an introduction to central themes in the history of philosophy viewed from an ontological perspective. The course is designed to be of interest to both philosophers and those with a background in computer and information science. Topics treated will include:

1.  A brief history of ontology from Aristotle to the Human Genome Project
2.  The ontology of social reality
3.  Ontology leaving the mothership of philosophy
4.  Why computer science needs philosophy
5.  The Semantic Web
6.  Towards a standard top-level ontology
7.  Ontology and the Federal Government Data Integration Initiative (anno 2009)
8.  The meaning of life

Dr. Barry Smith
ONLINE
Class #: 23951

Artificial Intelligence is the subfield of Computer Science devoted to developing programs that enable computers to display behavior that can be characterized as intelligent. The ultimate goal of many AI researchers is to create what is called General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) by which is meant an artifical system that is as intelligent as a human being. Recent successes of ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened a new era of popularization of AI. For the first time, AI tools have been created which are immediately available to the wider population, who for the first time can have real hands-on experience of what AI can do  The course will be structured around discussions of a series of recognizably philosophical questions such as:

Are human brains computers?

Could we ever reach the point where we can accept the thesis that an AI system could have something like consciousness or sentience?

Could we reach the point where an AI system could be said to behave ethically, or to have responsibility for its actions?

Can a computer have desires, a will, and emotions?

Can a computer have responsibility for its behavior?

Could a machine have something like a personal identity?

Would I really survive if the contents of my brain were uploaded to the cloud?

Students will be graded on the basis of their contributions to these discussions, and on one major essay and oral presentation.

Dr. John Beverley
Monday, 1:00 PM – 3:40 PM
Class #: 23607

Humans are perplexing. Many engage effortlessly in discourse without violating conversational norms. Some accurately diagnose treatment options for medical conditions, based on minimal information. Some identify lemmas needed to prove theorems too complex for automated approaches. Humans are perplexingly good at solving complicated tasks. Artificial Intelligence communities have, for decades, worked to design computing systems able to solve complicated tasks as well as humans can. Siri, autonomous vehicles, Computer-Aided Diagnosing systems, and automated theorem provers, are examples of the fruits of such labor. For such feats of computing ingenuity to work properly, however, relevant knowledge must be represented in formalisms interpretable by computing systems.

One goal of this course is to provide students with a deep understanding of formalisms underwriting contemporary knowledge representation. We will examine several ‘Description Logics’ which reflect decidable fragments of First-Order Logic and provide formal foundations for widely used semantic web languages. Semantic web languages – such as the Resource Description Framework – in turn provide concrete vocabularies used to represent information across the web. Another goal of this course is to provide students with a deep understanding of these semantic web languages, emphasizing their importance to the development of ontologies – structured vocabularies comprised of human and computer interpretable terminological content representing entities in some domain. Students will gain competency in the application of semantic web languages to represent the philosophical commitments of one of the most important ontologies in the world: Basic Formal Ontology (BFO).

Ontology modeling of this sort is just a first step towards capturing the perplexity of human intelligence. Students will take a further step towards that goal in this course by exploring how exactly ontologies like BFO are used in the real world. To that end, students will learn to use the Protégé ontology editor to represent BFO hierarchies, automated reasoners native to Protégé to check for logical consistency, the SPARQL semantic web querying language to extract important information from BFO-conformant data sets, and the SHACL semantic web language to validate dynamic updating of BFO-conformant ontologies. Throughout, students will learn to use Github – a common version control environment in the ontology developer toolkit, and in doing so gain insight into how knowledge represented using semantic web standards is revised and maintained across a wide range of stakeholders, users, and contributors.

Will, at the end of this course, students be able to capture the perplexing human ability to solve complex tasks? Probably not. Students will, however, be able to recognize how far contemporary Artificial Intelligence research has progressed towards that goal, viewed through the intersecting lenses of logic and ontology.

Dr. Toby Friend
Tuesday, 1:00 PM – 3:40 PM
Class #:  19968

According to Einstein, "scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature."  Assuming he's right, it's no wonder metaphysicians have wondered what kind of thing laws of nature are. We'll look at a variety of competing views, from eliminativist (there are no laws) and reductionist views (laws are just regularities), to various realist views. The literature on this topic is an eclectic mix of reasoning based on actual scientific theory, metaphysical intuition and classic analytic-style argumentation. We'll also investigate the status of laws of nature in the special sciences: are there any laws of biology or economics?, and if there are, can these laws be fully explained in terms of laws of physics? This will feed in to a discussion of the way in which laws of nature may or may not be essential for causal explanation and counterfactual reasoning.

Dr. Alexandra Oprea and Sadie Dempsey
Wednesday, 1:00 PM – 3:40 PM
Class #: 23605

The seminar will begin with an overview of core concepts and methods in PPE that draw from each of the different disciplines. We will discuss topics such as: rational choice, collective action, equality, liberty, paternalism, democracy, and regulatory politics. We will then proceed to explore a series of special topics across soem of the most promising research areas in PPE:  immigration, education, coporate power, AI & automation, and healthcare. The goal is to offer an overview of the most exciting research in PPE right now and to develop the interdisciplinary skills required to produce similar cutting-edge research. Students will be expected to complete a 15-20 page research paper and present their work-in-progress to their peers.

Dr. Barry Smith
ONLINE
Class #: 23606

The goal of the course is to give the students conceptual tools to understand and evaluate critically the philosophical assumptions of different schools of thought in economics. Debates between different approaches in economics may be viewed in part as ontological debates as to the nature of social entities such as prices, markets, economic actors. Hence, the course aims at introducing the core categories that determine the world of economics and exploring how different interpretations of these categories can support different economic claims and systems.

Part One of the course introduces topics in social ontology with an eye on economic applications: agency, complexity, information, collectivity, speech acts, claims and obligations. Part Two analyzes themes underlying the works of the main contemporary economic schools of thought, including classical and neoclassical economics. Keynesian economics, institutional economics, Austrian economics, complexity economics, and Marxist economics. Austrian economics will be given special prominence because it is arguably the economic school of thought that makes the most open use of philosophical categories in its theories. Part Three will introduce AI technology as a bearer of new possibilities and a new understanding of the working of economic processes and of society as a whole.

See HUB Registration site for Individual Tutorial Course Sections with Philosophy Department Faculty, to be arranged with permission of instructor:

            PHI 599  Graduate Tutorial  
            PHI 605  Supervised Teaching
            PHI 701  MA Thesis Guidance Tutorials (Arranged with Professor)
            PHI 703  Dissertation Guidance Tutorials (Arranged with Professor)