My teaching interests range from metaphysics, the philosophy of art, and the philosophy of language to ethics, epistemology, and 19th-century German philosophy, and Big Data. As an educator, I have two main goals: (1) to ensure that my students come away from my classroom with a sense of what philosophy is like, and how it can be of use to their everyday pursuits, and (2) to close the skills gap between majors and non-majors by the end of the semester. Recruiting students into taking one more philosophy class comes a close third.
Below, you'll find syllabi from classes that I've taught, and for classes that I'd like to teach.
Course Instructor
PHIL 101: Introduction to Ethics
Capilano University
An introduction to ethical theory through the lens of contemporary moral disputes. We will be discussing a wide range of philosophical concepts and methods (including consequentialism, deontology, virtue ethics, and the ethics of care) by applying them to concrete ethical problems such as whether animals have rights, indigenous rights and the environment, minority rights, whether cultural appropriation is always bad, what torture is and why it’s wrong, as well as examining why people commit crimes, and whether the criminal justice system treats suspects ethically.
PHIL 102: Knowledge and Reality
Capilano University
This course is an introduction to metaphysics and epistemology. Topics include the nature of philosophy, free will, nonexistents and abstract objects, knowledge, truth, truth in fiction, privilege, social construction, minds, and personal identity.
PHIL 110: Critical Thinking
Capilano University
An introduction to critical reasoning, which satisfies the quantitative/analytical requirement for baccalaureates. Topics include the nature of arguments and the concepts of validity and soundness, truth tables, propositional logic proofs and translations, categorical logic, informal fallacies, basic statistical reasoning, and precisifying language.
PHIL 208: Environmental Ethics
Capilano University
An introduction to ethical and political issues arising from the relationship between humans and their natural surroundings. Topics include climate change and intergenerational justice, geoengineering, restoration, pollution and economic development, environmental racism, indigenous rights, sustainable development, preservation, the human-nature dichotomy, wilderness, biodiversity, ecofeminism, and deep ecology.
PHIL 240: Philosophy and Gender Relations
Capilano University
An introduction to feminist theory. Topics include the sex/gender distinction, feminism, intersectionality, feminist science, sexism and misogyny, oppression, objectification, sexual preferences, sexual harassment, and consent.
PHIL 302: Knowledge and Truth
Third-year course, Capilano University
An upper-level course in epistemology covering analyses of the predicates ‘knows’ and ‘is true’.
PHIL 336: Aesthetics
Third-year course, McGill University
A general introduction to philosophical aesthetics focused on answering the question “What is art?” The first half of the course examines a number of key attempts to define ‘art’ throughout its history: the mimetic theory, definitions focusing on aesthetic attitudes and disinterest, theories that hold that art is the result of artistic expression or the communication of feelings, and the rise of contextualist theories of art. The second half of the course explores various sources of skepticism about attempts to define ‘art,’ from neo-Wittgensteinian criticisms to ‘cluster’ theories, the exclusivity of the artistic canon and gendered conceptions of artistic genius, the (surprisingly late) origins of our concepts of "art" and "works," and the difficulty of accounting for the art of non-Western cultures.
PHIL 375: Philosophy and Literature
University of British Columbia
An introduction to philosophical problems posed by works of literature. The course begins by inviting students to consider the nature of literature, the differences between fiction and literature, and whether fiction and non-fiction call for different modes of engagement. From there, the course introduces some of the major theories of fiction and traces their implications for our understanding of truth, interpretation and the limits of authorial intent, the influence of genre, the puzzle of imaginative resistance and the paradoxes of fiction, whether moral defects constitute aesthetic defects, and the ontology of literature and fictional characters. The course's philosophical content is supplemented with several (short) pieces of literature which draw out relevant issues and offer common touchstones for discussion.