Philosophy
Tufts - Summer Courses Open to High School Students - Introduction to Philosophy
The major types of philosophical thought and the central problems of philosophy are presented through study of some classic texts of the great philosophers. Offered each term. Open to high school students, who will be prompted to submit an additional application after enrollment including: a high school transcript, letter of recommendation, parental permission, and other required consent forms.
Brown Pre-College Programs: Philosophy Courses
Happiness is often represented as the most important thing in life. But what is happiness? How is it achieved? And is it all that important? Based on a popular Brown University course, this course explores these fundamental questions about happiness. Students will be invited to reflect on their own views of happiness and its importance in their lives by considering insights and findings from the two disciplines that have studied it most extensively, philosophy and psychology.
What kind of thing am I? Am I really awake as I write this, or am I dreaming? Do I really have hands, or a body, or am I merely a brain in a vat? Questions such as these motivate the philosophical tradition known as skepticism. In this course, we will think critically about the political, rather than merely philosophical, origins of these questions. We will consider whether skepticism about the nature of (human) being originates specifically in the context of slavery and its afterlives.
Though these two statements appear to be saying somewhat different things, in fact, they are logically equivalent: Either they're both true, or else they're both false. We can't make exactly one of them true. And this is a fact about logic. Now let's see an example of a paradox: At a desert oasis, A and B both separately undertake plots to try to kill C. A poisons his canteen, and later B punches a hole in it. C dies of thirst. Who killed him? At the trial, A argues that she can't possibly be the killer, for C never drank the poison. B argues that it couldn't have been him either, for B only deprived C of poisoned water. Both of their arguments seem pretty good, but C was surely killed, and someone should be held accountable. But, whom? The above story is just a simple example, but it illustrates nicely that even very innocent-seeming propositions can sometimes lead us into trouble. Part of this course will be an opportunity to investigate some of the most mind-bending and perplexing paradoxes that have ever been discovered, and we will try our hardest to solve them together.
The logic part of the course will be similar to an accelerated math class. We will cover new material every day, and there will be problem sets every night. In terms of content, we will cover much of the same material that a college-level introduction to logic course would cover. We will start by formally defining the core concepts (propositions, truth/falsity) as well as the logical operators (conjunction, disjunction, negation, the conditional). We will use truth tables to examine how these operators affect the truth of sentences that contain them. We will work our way toward definitions of satisfiability, implication, and validity. In the second half of the course, we will introduce predicates and quantifiers into our system in order to study first-order logic in all of its depth and rigor.
Harvard Pre-College Courses
Ancient Philosophy: How should we live? What can we know? What are we? In ancient Greek philosophy, we find these questions asked and answered in ways which are simultaneously surprisingly relevant to our own lives and foreign to our way of thinking. This course is an introduction to the topic, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and ending with a survey of the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans. This course serves as an introduction to some key skills in the history of philosophy, including close reading, writing, and productive discussion. We put a special emphasis on the ethical claims of the various ancient Greek traditions, but also spend some time thinking about how ancient philosophers' ideas in metaphysics and epistemology influenced these answers.
Law and Philosophy: Many important political and social philosophical issues arise in connection with how we address legal questions, and philosophical issues also arise regarding the nature of law and legal reasoning. This course introduces students to a number of these issues and encourages independent critical thinking about them. Included among the questions to be explored are: what is the relationship between law and morality? Is there ultimately a substantial difference between legal reasoning and what seems to be more open-ended reasoning about policies or justice? What justifies society in criminalizing various acts and administering criminal punishment? Under what circumstances (if any) would the law be justified in permitting some persons to be treated differently than others on the basis of gender or sexual preference?
Truth, Post-Truth, and the Internet Era: What is truth? Should we uphold objective standards of truth or is it all just relative to one's perspective? Should a democracy treat everyone's opinion equally, no matter how ill-informed, or does that lead us into polarization, misinformation, and partisanship? Should there by any limits on freedom of speech and to what extent should we tolerate those whose values are deeply opposed to our own? This course helps students think about these important societal questions clearly and critically. We look at phenomena like misinformation, propaganda, online radicalization, artificial intelligence, freedom of expression, and censorship, and we think about their implications for democracy and human rights. We also draw on many interesting case studies, such as pandemics, elections, wars, ecological crises, and civil unrest. Students come away from the course with a wealth of knowledge about these important issues, plus the skill set to formulate their own views clearly and convincingly.
Happiness and the Meaning of Life: What makes for a good life? Can we make ourselves happier long term and if so, how? Are a happy life and a meaningful life the same thing or can they diverge? How have these concepts been understood by philosophers in different times and cultures and what does modern psychology have to say? This course examines these questions with the aim of helping students develop their own views in a more considered, well-informed way. We cover a variety of different philosophical traditions, both ancient and modern, such as Buddhism, Stoicism, Hedonism, Epicureanism, Daoism, Sufism, Existentialism, and modern psychology. Along the way, students develop their abilities to think philosophically about questions of fundamental importance to their own lives, and to formulate their own views clearly and convincingly, both in conversation and in writing.