Fall 2022 Course Offerings

Instructor: Ben Yelle (b.yelle@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: M/W 2:50pm-4:30pm

Attribute(s): NUpath Creative Express/Innov

This course can be used for the following requirements:

• Ethics Minor elective
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective

Description: This course explores some of the “big” questions in Philosophy: How should we act? What does it mean to know something? What makes some works of art “better” than others? – by teaching these very same topics to children! This is a service-learning course in which you will learn the methods and tools of philosophical inquiry and apply them by using children’s literature to facilitate philosophical discussions in the elementary school classroom. You’ll be teaching kids Philosophy! You will do this by creating a community of inquiry and learning how to devise and communicate different answers to philosophical questions at the elementary level.

Instructor: Jung Lee (ju.lee@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: Tuesdays 4:35pm – 7:35pm

Attribute(s): NUpath Integration Experience, NUpath Interpreting Culture, NUpath Societies/Institutions

This course can be used for the following requirements:

• Ethics Minor elective
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective
• Religious Studies Major elective
• Religious Studies Minor elective

Description: Examines the nature of religion and religious life in Boston, emphasizing the lived experience of the sacred in an urban setting. Offers students an opportunity to develop research methods based in ethnography, the analysis of texts, and the interpretation of material culture. Readings include works in the method and theory of religious studies, the practice of ethnography, and case studies of lived religion, especially those that focus on urban religion. Expects students to engage in fieldwork in Boston, examining the implicit religious dimensions of everyday life and particular religious communities. Assignments include field reports, analysis of the religious landscape of Boston, and a research paper on a designated religious community. Requires prior completion of one introductory-level course in the social sciences or humanities.

*UPDATE* We have cancelled this course for Fall 2022. It has been moved to Spring 2023. 

Professor: Jung Lee (ju.lee@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: M/W 2:50pm-4:30pm

Attribute(s): NUpath Difference/Diversity, NUpath Ethical Reasoning

This course can be used for the following requirements:

• Ethics Minor elective
• Information Ethics Minor elective
• Mindfulness Studies Minor elective
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective
• Religious Studies Major elective
• Religious Studies Minor elective

Description: Focuses on how traditions imagine the moral life in cross-cultural contexts. Topics may include ideals of human flourishing, notions of virtue and vice, and conceptions of self and community. Offers students an opportunity to learn methods of philosophical analysis and argumentation in cross-cultural contexts.

Professor: Elizabeth Bucar (e.bucar@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: online asynchronous

Attribute(s): NUpath Engaging Difference and Diversity, NUpath Employing Ethical Reasoning

This course can be used for the following requirements:

• Ethics Minor elective
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective
• PPE Major supporting course, Racial or Gender Justice
• Religious Studies Major elective
• Religious Studies Minor elective

Description: Explores approaches to gender, social organization of sexuality and gender, sexual ethics, and marriage in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Explores various sources within each tradition that serve as normative foundations, contemporary cultural and sociological dynamics that challenge those foundations, and psychological/existential considerations for understanding the general nature of human sexuality. Addresses how these traditions understand gender and gender roles, seek to shape and control interactions between men and women, regulate sexual relations outside of and within marriage, view sexuality education, regard homosexuality, and examine historical and contemporary approaches to marriage, divorce, and parenting. PHIL 1271 and WMNS 1271 are cross-listed.

Professor: Whitney Kelting (m.kelting@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: M/Th 11:45am-1:25pm

Attribute(s): Attribute(s): NUpath Difference/Diversity, NUpath Interpreting Culture

This course can be used for the following requirements:

• Ethics Minor elective
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective
• Religious Studies Major elective
• Religious Studies Minor elective

Description: Explores Islam through its foundations narrative, rituals, doctrines, and ethical teachings. Presents Islam in terms of its diversity by focusing on a series of key debates in Islamic thought and practice from its early history to the present day in cross-cultural perspectives.

Professor: John Basl (j.basl@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: T/F 9:50-11:30AM

Attribute(s): NUpath Capstone Experience, NUpath Writing Intensive, NU Core Experiential Learning

Prerequisites: Prior completion of three philosophy or religion courses, or instructor permission.

This course can be used for the following requirements:

• PPE Major Capstone
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective
• Ethics Minor elective
• Information Ethics Minor elective

Description: “The Earth is spherical” and “it is wrong to kill innocent children for fun” are both true sentences. Neither the empirical nor the ethical claim are particularly controversial. However, while there is very little (reasonable) controversy about what makes the first sentence true (and how we know it is true), there is considerable controversy about both the metaphysics and epistemology of the second claim and others like it.

This seminar will provide a broad and deep overview of central answers to metaethical questions about what makes moral claims true and how we know them. The seminar will start with a quick refresher of answers to metaethical questions that are, for the most part and for good reason, not taken seriously by contemporary metaethicists, like Cultural Relativism and Divine Command Theory.  We will then turn to what are widely-considered the live options in contemporary Western metaethics. Some of these views deny that moral claims are true or false (Non-Cognitivism), some claim that all moral claims are false (Error Theory) or that moral language is simply a fiction where we pretend some moral claims are true (Fictionalism). On most views, there are genuine truth-makers for moral claims, but there is much disagreement about what they are. On some views, they are grounded in our subjective attitudes or desires (Subjectivism), on others they are tightly bound up with rationality (constructivism), on yet others, the moral truth-makers are entirely independent of us, either very much like the natural facts that make empirical claims true (Naturalist Realism) or some more mysterious kind of non-natural fact (Non-naturalist Realism). After a critical survey of the terrain, we’ll turn our attention to book-length treatments of particular views or articles that push us to think about metaethical issues in new ways.

Professor: Liz Bucar (e.bucar@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: M/W 2:50pm-4:30pm

NU Path: Capstone Experience (CE) and Writing Intensive (WI)

Prerequisites: Prior completion of three philosophy or religion courses, or instructor permission.

This course can be used for:

• PPE Major Capstone
• Religious Studies Major Capstone
• Religious Studies Major elective
• Religious Studies Minor elective
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective
• Ethics Minor elective

Description: We think we know cultural appropriation when we see it. Blackface, Native American headdresses, all manner of Halloween costumes—these clearly give offense. But what about Cardi B posing as the Hindu Goddess Durga in a Reebok ad, AA’s twelve-step invocation of God, or the earnest namaste you utter at the end of yoga class?

In this class we will unpack the ethical dilemmas of a messy form of cultural appropriation: the borrowing of religious doctrines, rituals, and dress for political, educational, and therapeutic reasons. Does borrowing from another’s religion harm believers? Who can consent to such borrowings? Religion is an especially vexing arena for appropriation debates because diversity within religious groups scrambles our sense of who is an insider and who is not. In order to understand why some appropriations are insulting and others benign, we will have to ask difficult philosophical questions about what religions really are.

Students will develop their own independent research projects and create public-facing ways to share their findings.

Professor: Don Fallis (d.fallis@northeastern.edu)

Sequence: M/W/Th 9:15am-10:20am

NUPath Attributes: Analyzing/Using Data, Formal/Quant Reasoning

This course fulfills the following requirements:

• Politics, Philosophy and Economics Major – Logic and Game Theory concentration elective
• Philosophy Major elective
• Philosophy Minor elective
• Ethics Minor elective
• Information Ethics Minor elective

Description: In an uncertain world, we can rarely be absolutely sure of anything. But in order to make good decisions, we still need to draw reliable conclusions about things that we can’t observe directly from imperfect (noisy) information. For instance, how can we determine a patient’s disease from their symptoms and test results? How can we keep track of an autonomous vehicle’s location just using sensor readings?

Probability theory and information theory provide answers. In this course, we’ll consider the philosophical questions of what probability and information are, what rules we should follow in reasoning about them, and how these rules can be justified. More specifically, we’ll explore formal methods, such as Bayes’s Theorem, Shannon’s Information Theory, and Probabilistic Graphical Models, for drawing inferences in an uncertain world. We’ll practice these methods by solving a number of fun and instructive probability puzzles, such as the Monty Hall Problem and the Frog Riddle. And we’ll use the Python programming language as a tool for understanding and implementing these methods.

No prior knowledge of programming or Python will be assumed.