Philosophy 107: Theories of Knowledge and Reality
Sections M003, M007 (TH 11:00-12:20; 12:30-1:50) Instructor: Jeremy Pierce
Email:
Office Hours: Tuesday 2:30-3:30; Wednesday 2:00-3:00; by appointment
Bowne 414-415 (phone: 443-4779)
Phone numbers to know: Philosophy Dept.: 443-2245
Note: email is almost always better than phone
Mailbox: 541 Hall of Languages (you may need to leave assignments in my box there)
About your instructor: I’m a Ph.D. student in philosophy. I’ve been teaching in the Philosophy Department here for six years in addition to having been a teaching assistant for three years. I also teach at Le Moyne College, but this semester I’m just doing two sections of this class here. I love philosophy and enjoy helping students think more carefully and reflectively. I’m in my eighth year of marriage with three kids (Ethan is five, Isaiah four, and Sophia 22 months). They usually awaken between 6:30 and 7:30 am and sometimes aren’t all in bed until late in the evening, so we value sleep time and our few chances to spend time alone together in the evenings. I ask that you not call me at home between the hours of 9pm and 10am. I read my email regularly, usually just before I go to bed and soon after I get up in the morning (which is often very early, but I sleep as late as my kids allow, and sometimes I don’t check email until after they’ve eaten). Ideally you can reach me early enough that I can get back to you in time. If you put off assignments until later in the evening, don’t expect a response until morning.
Required Texts:
Jay Rosenberg, Three Conversations About Knowing (2000, Hackett)
Gregory E. Ganssle, Thinking About God: First Steps in Philosophy (2004, InterVarsity)
Clifford Williams, Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue (1980, Hackett)
John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (1978, Hackett)
I have ordered these at the bookstore in the Schine. A number of readings for this course are in the online course reserve, which you can access from the library’s website ( but I recommend going through the Blackboard system, which you will have to do for other things for this course anyway. To access Blackboard, go to and log in with your SU login name and password. It should be the same as your SU email name and password if you’ve never used Blackboard before. Once you’ve logged in, select this course. Links to online readings, including one not from the library course reserve, will be there, and the reading questions, exam study sheets, and dialogue assignments will also be in Blackboard. I will not print out reading questions or readings. You will be responsible to print those out yourself if you want hard copies.
Course Description: Philosophy 107 is an introductory philosophy course on epistemology (the study of knowledge) and metaphysics (the study of the nature of reality). The course introduces methods and tools of philosophical investigation through a cluster of questions about reality and our knowledge of it. Recognizing good and bad reasoning is crucial to rigorous pursuit of truth in these areas, so we look at methods and tools for doing philosophy alongside the questions raised in the course. In epistemology, this includes what knowledge amounts to and what kinds of belief may be good or bad. It also involves whether we can have real knowledge from our ordinary five senses, from the methods of scientific study, or from religious pursuits. In metaphysics, our questions will be about the existence of God, whether scientific study can (in principle) capture all of reality, whether our actions are free and/or determined by prior events, what it is to think and have a mind, our relation to the physical world, whether the physical world is all there is, what it is to be a person, what it is to persist through time, and whether we continue beyond death.
Course Objectives: The main course goal is to teach you to read, think, and write more critically about some issues you may be encountering for the first time and others that may be more familiar. You will be expected to do philosophy, not just to know it, and you will develop skills in reading closely while thinking carefully about the texts. You will need to know the philosophers and their views but also to defend views (including presenting arguments for views you don’t yourself hold). This also means giving reasons for your own beliefs, which involves offering arguments for your position, criticisms of other views, and responses to objections against your view. As we move from topic to topic, we will see how philosophers try to respond to objections, by finding a problem with the objection or by modifying the view to make their case stronger. In the process, you will develop skills in doing this yourself.
Expectations: Attendance significantly affects your grade. If you are not in class and do not contact me beforehand, you should expect it to count against you unless you have a really good excuse with documentation. If you ask me beforehand, I may be more lenient. Please hand in your assignments when they are due. I reserve the right to subtract up to a point for each calendar day (counting weekends and holidays, since you actually can work on those days, even if you prefer not to, and it’s not fair to people who hand it in on time if I do otherwise). I have a mailbox in the Philosophy Department, and I can receive late assignments there, but I may not check it more than a few times a week. I can also receive late assignments via email, but I prefer to have a hard copy if possible. We may have some on-the-spot in-class writing assignments, reflections on the issues we’re discussing and reading. They may often be in the middle of a class to break up the time, but I may also do them at the beginning or end of a class session.
You’re expected to do all the required reading. I give reading questions before each class to focus you on the main points and prepare you for discussion. I won’t collect your answers to these. They just serve as a guide to help with the reading. I may, however, ask you to reflect in writing in class on issues that I’ve assigned you to read about, and I may have you do this at the beginning of a class before we discuss it. Having done the reading will help a great deal with this, not to mention how valuable it will be for you if you try to engage with the reading before we discuss an issue in class. Some topics are difficult if you haven’t prepared yourself by digesting the assigned reading and thinking about the arguments it discusses, so these reading questions are important.
If you have trouble with any material, please come to my office hours or set up a separate appointment. I love to talk about philosophy, and I want to help you learn, so take advantage of this. I don’t take your coming to see me as a sign that you’re stupid or a bad student. It usually shows that you care either about the material or about how well you’re doing, and this is more likely to make me more sympathetic to you because I know you’re trying and you care. If anything, it will give me a higher view of you as a student.
Special considerations:
If you need special considerations about exams or anything else, please let me know well in advance. I’m happy to help in whatever way I can.
Course Requirements:
Attendance and participation are 10%. If you are on time for class and show that you care about your progress, you generally will do fine here, even if you don’t have a lot to say in class, but participation can certainly help with people who have trouble in other aspects of the class.
In-class writings are 10%. I will have lower standards on these than I will on exam essays or dialogue papers. Some of these will reflect simply whether you have some understanding of the issues that the readings covered. Others will pose a question you may not have thought about before, to encourage your reflection on it on your own before you hear what others have to say.
Short reflection papers are 10%. There will be three of these. Each one will be at least a full page of writing (which means you will have to go on to the second page to get full credit). These will tend to be low-pressure assignments to get you thinking through an issue with more time than the in-class writing assignments will allow but not on the level of carefully-prepared discussions of more in-depth and comprehensive issues.
Dialogue papers: You’ll do three papers in the form of dialogues. Each will be 10% of your final grade, totaling 30%. These are meant to be conversations between different characters, and the goal is to present and fully discuss both sides of an issue. Students tell me this format can be far more fun than a standard paper, and it also seems to help with understanding the material better.
Exams: There will be four non-cumulative in-class exams, including perhaps multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true-false, matching, short answer (i.e. phrases or sentences), long answer (i.e. multiple paragraphs), and perhaps a longer essay. Each exam will be 10% of your final grade, with the exams as a whole taking up 40% of your grade.
Writing Expectations:
Exams and papers must be typed, black ink/white paper, 12-point font (not Courier), 1-inch margins. Dialogues are conversations and can reflect how people really talk (e.g. slang), but it’s a writing assignment, and I have standards about spelling and punctuation. A wide variety of people should able to understand your writing for this class. If you hand in papers or exams suffering from low standards, it will affect your grade. If you would like help with your writing, you can seek out the HBC Writing Program.
Honesty: I take the university’s policy on academic dishonesty very seriously. Know what constitutes plagiarism and how to cite properly. I caught at least eight instances of serious plagiarism in my first two years of teaching (in addition to minor cases).
Schedule of topics and assignments:
This is tentative and subject to change. If I change anything, I will announce it in class and put an announcement in Blackboard. I will give internet links in Blackboard for online course reserves and other online readings. You can access Blackboard at Before you do anything else, make sure you can log in.
8-29 class intro
8-31 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.1-2 (pp.13-24)
9-5 Jay Rosenberg, “The First Conversation”, pp.1-17 of Three Conversations About
Knowing
9-7 Wesley Salmon, “An Encounter with David Hume” (online)
9-12 Jay Rosenberg, “The Second Conversation”, pp.18-36
9-14 John Hawthorne, “Arguments for Atheism” (online)
9-19 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.3-5 (pp.25-40)
Alvin Plantinga, “Reformed Epistemology” (online)
9-21 exam 1
9-26 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.6-9 (pp.43-65)
9-28 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.10-13 (pp.66-85)
10-3 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.14-16 (pp.86-106)
10-5 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.17-19 (pp.109-129)
10-10 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.21-22 (pp.138-149)
online reading TBA
10-12 Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, chs.23-27 (pp.153-181)
10-17 exam 2
10-19 Clifford Williams, Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue, pp.1-11, 17-21
Gregory Ganssle, Thinking About God, ch.20 (pp.130-137)
10-26 Clifford Williams, Free Will and Determinism: A Dialogue, pp.30-41, 49-58
10-31 Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck” (online)
11-2 Jan Cover and Rudy Garns, “The Mind-Body Problem”, Part I (online)
11-7 Jan Cover and Rudy Garns, “The Mind-Body Problem”, Part II (online)
11-9 Simon Blackburn, “Zombies and Mutants” (online)
Jan Cover and Rudy Garns, “The Mind-Body Problem”, Part III (online)
Frank Jackson, “The Qualia Problem” (online)
11-14 exam 3
11-16 reading: John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (online)
Eric Olson, “Psychology and Personal Identity” (online)
11-21 John Perry, “The First Night”, pp.1-18 of A Dialogue on Personal Identity and
Immortality
11-28 John Perry, “The Second Night”, pp.19-36 of A Dialogue on Personal Identity and
Immortality
11-30 Michael Clark, “The Ship of Theseus” (online)
Eric Olson, “Why We Need Not Accept the Psychological Approach” (online)
12-5 John Perry, “The Third Night”, pp.37-69 of A Dialogue on Personal Identity and
Immortality
12-7 Michael Clark, “The Paradox of the Many” (online)
Theodore Sider, “The Four-Dimensional Picture” (online)
12-12 exam 4 12:30-2:30 (regularly scheduled final exam time for this class)
Important dates:
8-31 short paper #1 due
9-12 short paper #2 due
9-21 exam #1
9-28 dialogue #1 due
10-17 exam #2
10-26 dialogue #2 due
11-14 exam #3
11-21 dialogue #3 due
12-5 short paper #3 due
12-12 exam #4