Teaching Tools & Materials
I grade student papers anonymously using an online tool I built, Paper Grader.
I create interactive practice problems for my logic students at deductivelogic.org, a tool I originally built in coordination with Ned Hall, for his introductory logic course at Harvard.
I use handouts to provide an easily-navigable ‘map’ of the issues under discussion, and to help guide student attention. Some sample handouts of mine:
Writing Handout
Peer Review Worksheet
Parfit’s “The Puzzle of Reality”
Guest Lecture on Dogmatism
Courses Taught as Primary Instructor
An introduction to the central questions in philosophy of mind, divided into three parts: 1) Historical Foundations, 2) Consciousness, 3) Cognition and Representation. What kinds of things are mental states (e.g. thoughts, beliefs, desires, sensations, feelings)? Is the mind just the brain? (What else could it be?!) Can a science of the brain answer all of our questions about the mind? What is consciousness, and how is it related to the physical world? How is the mind able to represent the world and reason about it?
Courses Taught as GSI
Descartes’ Meditations, Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Leibniz’s Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics, Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.
Imaginative understanding vs. causal explanation (the first-personal vs. the third-personal); functionalism; imaginative understanding and personal identity; agency and free will.
The fine-tuning argument, modality & possible worlds, time (A-theory vs. B-theory), space (relationism vs substantivalism), universal properties, laws of nature, mereological composition.
Descartes’ Meditations, Spinoza’s Ethics, Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
An intensive writing course for philosophy majors, involving weekly one-on-one meetings to discuss a short writing assignment. Readings focused on free will.
Cartesian dualism, logical behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism; qualia & ‘the hard problem’; personal identity.
Cartesian skepticism, Berkeley’s idealism, Humean skepticism, the existence of God, personal identity.
A close investigation of three kinds of problems in epistemology: the problem of the external world, the problem of induction, the problem of other minds.
The basics of deductive logic: translation, validity, implication, and equivalence in truth-functional and quantificational logic; systems of deduction, and their soundness and completeness.
Cartesian dualism, logical behaviorism, functionalism; qualia & epiphenomenalism; personal identity; folk psychology & reductionism.
Cartesian dualism, logical behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism; qualia & physicalism; naturalistic reduction.