Teaching

I am, first and foremost, a teacher in the liberal arts tradition. I see the highest goal of education as intellectual liberation: helping students develop the critical tools to reason freely and fairly about the world, and to develop the creativity required for genuine truth-seeking. On this page, you can find a list of my current courses, as well as resources for students looking to improve their abilities to research, read, and write philosophy.

Resources for Students

Current Courses

The Good Place and the Good Life
The central question of NBC’s sitcom The Good Place is ‘how can we be ethically good people?’ It is also one of the rare television shows with a main character who is a professional philosopher! In this course, we will take up this question, and drawing on many of the same resources from moral philosophy as the characters in the show we will try to figure out what it means to be good, what makes ethical claims true or false, and how to live a good life in a complex world. Students will read classic and contemporary works in ethics with a focus on developing research skills, including how to apply those research skills to questions of immediate relevance to students’ own lives.
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence has been described as everything from the key to a prosperous human future, to an existential threat to our very survival. This course examines the nature of Artificial Intelligence, exploring what work in the field can tell us about the human mind. Topics include the analogy between the human mind and a computer, philosophical challenges to developing a genuinely artificial intelligence, and the nature and prospects of generative AI technologies (such as ChatGPT) to qualify as intelligent. The course will conclude with an examination of the ethical implications of AI technology, including on misinformation and when implemented in technologies such as self-driving cars.