Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
The central goal of my philosophy teaching is the improvement of my students’ cognitive capabilities. I want them to strengthen their reading and writing, sharpen their ability to identify logically valid arguments, develop their meta-cognitive abilities, and see the value of philosophy for themselves.
Courses Taught
Introduction to Philosophy
A first encounter with philosophical thinking through enduring questions about knowledge, reality, morality, and the nature of mind. The course emphasizes close reading of primary texts and developing the skills of philosophical argumentation. Students learn to identify assumptions, construct arguments, and engage charitably with positions they find counterintuitive.
Introduction to Ethics
An introduction to moral philosophy through classical and contemporary frameworks: virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and care ethics. The course moves between theoretical foundations and practical application, asking students to reason carefully about what they owe to others and why.
Contemporary Moral Issues
An issues-driven course examining contested moral questions in light of philosophical frameworks. Topics may include the ethics of AI and automation, climate justice, free speech, economic inequality, and emerging biotechnologies. Students develop the ability to analyze positions they initially find persuasive and to articulate positions they find uncomfortable.
Medical Ethics
An examination of ethical questions arising in medical practice and healthcare policy, including informed consent, end-of-life care, resource allocation, reproductive technologies, and the ethics of clinical research. The course draws on both philosophical theory and concrete cases to cultivate practical moral reasoning in clinical and policy contexts.
Philosophy Through Movies
This course uses cinema as a vehicle for philosophical inquiry, treating film as a medium capable of generating its own philosophical insights. Students analyze how narrative structure, visual composition, and the experience of spectatorship raise questions about personal identity, perception, free will, and the nature of reality.
Philosophy of Video Games
An exploration of philosophical questions raised by and within video games: the nature of agency in interactive media, the ethics of virtual action, questions of identity in avatar-mediated experience, and the aesthetics of games as an art form. The course takes games seriously as objects of philosophical analysis while also using them as provocations for broader questions about choice, responsibility, and meaning.
Minds and Machines
An introduction to the philosophical foundations of the scientific study of the mind. The first two-thirds of the course traces cognitive science from its origins in the early twentieth century to the present, examining the major frameworks that have shaped how researchers understand thinking, perception, and intelligence. The final third turns to recent developments in artificial intelligence, including large language models and autonomous drone swarms, asking what these systems can and cannot tell us about minds.