Instructor: Edgar Boedeker
Office Hours: Mon. 10-11am; Thur. 11-12am	Office: Baker 156
Email: boedeker@uni.edu	Phone: 273-7487

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• Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
• Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998).
• Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1977).
• Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Introduction by Richard Rorty and Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997).
• Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, translated by Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991).
• packet of photocopied material from Plato, Aristotle, René Descartes, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell.

Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, the criteria for someone's knowing something, and the conditions of the possibility of knowledge in general. Metaphysics is the study of the ultimate nature of reality. These two fields of philosophy are closely related, in part because what is known includes what is real. In this course, we will trace some of the most important milestones in the historical development of these areas of philosophy, through examining several major attempts to answer the following questions:

• What is a proper philosophical account of the perception of physical objects?
• To what extent does such perception count as knowledge?
• Is there such a thing as a priori knowledge, i.e., knowledge independent of experience?
• If there is such a thing as a priori knowledge, how is this related to the perception of physical objects?
• What are the metaphysical implications (or assumptions) of an adequate answer to these questions? That is, what sorts of things (e.g., minds, sensations, physical objects, universal objects) must exist in order for such an account of the epistemic status of perception and a priori knowledge to true?

This course will acquaint you with many of the most important issues and positions in the history of Western metaphysics and epistemology. You will gain an understanding of how this history forms the background for the ways in which these questions have been pursued in the 20th Century.

Course format:

Class meetings will consist of a mixture of lecture and discussion. In order to benefit from both, it is essential that you do all of the reading for each class. One of the most important things that this course will offer you is the opportunity to hone your interpretive, argumentative, and rhetorical skills by writing several papers on the often difficult texts we will be reading.

Evaluation:

There will be three papers:

• one 2-3 page paper (worth 20% of your grade)
• one 4-5 page paper (worth 30% of your grade)
• one 8-10 page paper (worth 40% of your grade).

Furthermore, active and constructive participation in the class discussions will count toward around 10% of your final grade.