PHIL 230 - Knowledge and Reality (4)

An introduction to the questions, methods, topics and figures in two classical areas within philosophy—metaphysics (the nature of things and reality) and epistemology (our knowledge of things and reality). Topics include material things and their properties, causation, free will, social things, nature of categories such as race and gender, relation between belief and knowledge, nature of evidence, epistemic virtues, perception, skepticism and testimony, epistemic injustice and epistemic discrimination. Emphasis will be placed on students developing their individual understanding of the various structures—linguistic, historical, social and political—that are often at play in relation to the topics of this course. Fall.