Teaching
I teach a variety of lower- and upper-level undergraduate courses. Below are some of the ones I offer most often. If you're curious and would like to see syllabi, or learn more about any of the courses listed below, just email me!
Food and Philosophy
Food is ethics, identity, pleasure, and health; this course examines all these aspects of eating and more. Topics include the ethics of eating animals; the role of technology in food production; the epistemology of food (how do we know what we're eating? Do we know what we're eating?); the aesthetics of food and drink, and the role of the critic; health, food, and the body; food's role in social and cultural identity.
Assignments include writing 'traditional' philosophy papers as well as blogging, reviewing meals, and analyzing public policy,
Introduction to Moral Theory
A survey course that begins with the three big traditions: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. We then move on, in the second half of the course, to metaethics and moral psychology, discussing issues such as the meaning of moral language, moral disagreement, and moral objectivity; the role of emotion in moral judgment and the nature of emotions such as disgust and anger. We conclude on a lighter note with a discussion of humor and its moral uses and abuses.
Seminar: Disagreement
Disagreement often gets a bad rap. This course looks at it from a variety of angles, and asks whether disagreement can be useful-- something to be embraced rather than feared. We begin with the epistemic implications of disagreement, looking at debates over how disagreement should affect our confidence (if at all), before moving on to discuss moral disagreement, disagreement and toleration in the political sphere, and finally, disagreement's role in philosophy itself. Assignments include interviewing a faculty member in another department about the role disagreement has played in their scholarship, and a group final exam in which students will choose a case study of a disagreement to present and analyze.