CARLOS GRAY SANTANA
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Fall 2021

Fall 2020/Spring 2021

Spring 2020

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Fall 2017

Environmental Ethics


Seminar: Environmental Philosophy


According to the students' own visualizations of the course, this was a class about:
-Applying the different branches of philosophy of environmental topics
-The philosophy of scientific classification, through a postcolonial lens
-How scientific classification and our relationship with our environment shape each other

​-A bunch of depressing topics that left us thinking of the environment as a house on fire
Environmental Ethics
Game Theory
Cognitive Science

Senior Seminar: Public Philosophy

A year of synchronous hybrid teaching. Glad I tried it; don't need to try it again.
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Philosophy of Biology

Here's the syllabus, but we did shift focus a bit at the end of the semester, given the pandemic.

Senior Seminar: Philosophy for a Digital World

The topic was unfortunately prescient, since we spend the last few weeks of the semester fully digital...
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Environmental Ethics

I added an aesthetics component to the course this time around. One class session, after reading an argument for the aesthetic value of ugliness and imperfection, groups of students competed in writing odes to ugly nature. Here's the winning one, about the Great Salt Lake.

Food and the Environment

A grad seminar for philosophy grads, environmental humanities masters students, and a brave MPA student. There was lots of food, but the star was definitely the blind tastings of tea and chocolate. What we learned: pricier chocolate isn't necessarily better, but tea, surprisingly, doesn't all just taste like contaminated hot water.
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Game Theory

Here's a link to some NetLogo code where my students tried to program a strategy that can beat Tit-for-Tat in the repeated prisoner's dilemma. In the code their strategy is called Unknown, (though they preferred calling it Sherlocke, after the detective and the philosopher) and while it can't beat Tit-for-Tat in an evenly mixed field, it does outperform it if there are no players playing the Grim Strategy. It works by identifying each individual's type based on their history of interaction, then playing optimally against those types. To run the code, you'll need NetLogo.
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Women in Philosophy 1600-1800

Here's a link to a .pdf of a collaborative encyclopedia my students built about early Modern philosophy, with an emphasis on unjustly neglected figures. It's obviously an incomplete work in progress, but history always is.
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Seminar: Biodiversity

On the first day of class students were tasked with determining a method (prioritization algorithm) for determining which hexes on this fictional map to set aside as nature reserves. Details on each hex were in these dossiers. The students spent 3 hours fighting over how to spend their limited resources making a system of nature reserves, and still weren't happy with the outcome, which was the point of the activity.

Environmental Ethics

These are some of the laws passed when the class formed a mock Utah State Legislature and proposed and debated environmental bills:
Bees
Canyons
Fossil Fuels
Ski Areas
Vertical Integration
Older courses:
Literature and Philosophy
Seminar: Intuitions
Philosophy of Science​
Photo: Capitol Reef National Park
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