Fall 2021Fall 2020/Spring 2021Spring 2020Fall 2019Fall 2018Spring 2018Fall 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. 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... 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.Bub 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.r Bub 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. 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 |
