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Freshman Seminar: Simulation and the Social Sciences
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Summary
Computer simulations have been used for almost as long as there have been computers. The earliest scientific use of computer simulations were for physics and engineering. Will this bridge hold up to strong winds? What is happening inside of a nuclear explosion? Etc.
Increasingly people are also employing computer simulation for use in understanding social behavior both in humans and other animals. How will people flee a fire? How will they react to an epidemic? How does the behavior of predators effect the dynamics of an evolving population? Etc. This class is about the nuts and bolts of computer simulation of social behavior and about the underlying theory behind this work |
David Hume
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Summary
David Hume was a prominent Scottish philosopher of the 18th century. One of the most famous “empiricists,” his thought has deeply influenced contemporary philosophy. Many philosophers, including Immanuel Kant, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles Sanders Pierce credit Hume as an major intellectual precursor to their own thought.
Before there was a word for it, Hume was a social scientist. He was as much of a psychologist, economist, sociologist, and anthropologist as he was a philosopher. In this course, we will read Hume's largest and most philosophically complete work, A Treatise on Human Nature. The Treatise covers a lot of philosophical ground; Hume weighs in on almost every philosophical problem of his day and creates a few new ones along the way |
Materials from Fall 2015
Syllabus First paper assignment Second paper assignment Third paper assignment Materials from Fall 2013 |
Philosophy of Economics
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Summary
The science of economics has come to occupy a central position in contemporary society. Because of its importance to political decision making, economics is intertwined with a number of other philosophical issues surrounding justice, rights, and fairness. The central theme of this course will be on the arguments in favor and against markets as effective solutions to social problems like the distribution of goods. Focusing on markets will allow us to analyze a wide number of foundational issues in economics including the testability of economic claims, the use of “rationality” postulates, the foundation of the right to property, and
measuring the success or failure of an economy. |
Materials from Fall 2016
Syllabus Assignments Materials from Fall 2014 Syllabus Limited selection of reading questions Discussion questions Materials from Spring 2013 Syllabus Discussion Questions |
Game Theory
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Summary
Understanding how people should and do make decisions is important or a variety of different disciplines. Economics, sociology, political science, history, philosophy, and even biology all attempt to understand the process of making decisions. Some decisions are made in a context where the outcomes are determined by a single person's choice (and perhaps by some random events). Other decisions are more complicated, they involve several different decision-makers all trying to do the best they can.
These strategic situations surround us. Choosing investments, routes to the supermarket, and whether to honor a promise are strategic choices and all are studied by game theory. This set of mathematical techniques attempts sometimes to predict people's decisions and at other times to justify them. This course focuses on these techniques. Along the way we will discuss it's philosophical foundations as well as its varied applications. |
Rational Choice
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Summary
We often criticize one another's decisions. People who spend their money at casinos are charged with being ignorant, people who save too much are regarded as miserly, people who chose unpleasant mates are fooling themselves, etc. Often times we criticize one another because we disagree with their values -- a greedy CEO is criticized because he cares too much about money. In this course, we will focus on a different sort of criticism, an internal criticism where we regard people as behaving inconsistently with their own ends. Implicitly judgments like this rely on a notion of “correct” decision making, which will be the topic of our course.
This theory, as it has been developed over many years, is now very detailed and complicated; it involves significant mathematics. The theory is not without its critics either, and we will review a few of those criticisms as well. Ultimately, learning about this theory will help to tune ones thinking about a variety of problems from gambling to investing to one's romantic life. |
Philosophy of Biology
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Summary
This course will examine a range of foundational problems in evolutionary biology, as well as the implications of evolutionary biology for some basic topics in philosophy. Issues to be discussed include the meanings and roles of a variety of central concepts (such as species, fitness, function and adaptation) and controversies over adaptationism, genetic information, units of selection and the evolutionary explanation of human behavior. This course will be accessible both to philosophers interested in the epistemological and metaphysical status of evolutionary biology, and to biologists interested in better understanding the foundations of their field. Although there are no formal prerequisites for this course, students will be expected to have taken courses in either philosophy or biology.
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Freshman Seminar: Social Dilemmas
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Summary
Everywhere we find circumstances where individual short-term self interest and social goals conflict. Everyone in India would be better off if everyone had fewer children, but each individual has an incentive to have more. We would all be better off if everyone would take public transportation, but
every individual has an incentive to drive. These social dilemmas represent a large number of social problems in almost every culture, and they have been subjective to extensive theoretical and laboratory investigation. Much of this study has focused on how to “solve” these problems, that is how to elicit cooperative from people in these dilemmas. This course will focus on both of these studies and will attempt to apply them to actual human problems. Students will be required to create a final presentation which presents an actual social problem that fits this type. If the problem is ongoing (not solved) you will need to suggest a few potential solution and why you think they might be successful. If the problem has been solved, you will need to show how it was solved. The presentation will be built up over a series of informal group presentations, and the quality of your work will be evaluated by your peers. |
Nature of Law
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Summary
This course has two primary parts. In the first part we discuss a few influential accounts of what law is. In particular we will focus on how law is different from other social institution, and also how these accounts bear on the process of “interpretation” that is required of judges. Our last book of the first section, Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire, discusses the process of interpretation in some detail. While reading this we will have the opportunity to discuss the oft-used distinction between “activist” judges and “judicially restrained” judges.
In the second part of the course, we will read a series of influential U.S. Supreme Court decisions. We will attempt to square the reasoning in these decisions with the framework for interpretation set out in the first half of the course. In this section half, we will look at court cases in three major areas, Equal Protection, Privacy, and War Powers. This last topic will allow us to look at one recent supreme court decision, Hamdi v Rumsfeld. |
