| Course Number | Phil 101H.001 (spring 2025), Univ of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Title | Introduction to Philosophy: Central Problems, Great Minds, Big Ideas |
| Credit Hours | 3 credits |
| Course Description | See below |
| Prerequisites | None |
| Target Audience | Undergrads with no prior experience with philosophical texts or reasoning |
| Class Times and Location | Mon Wed Fri 11:15–12:05 in Peabody (PE) 2066 |
| Instructional Format | In-person, mix of structured lecture and group discussion, with student presentations and collaboration |
| Instructor | Professor Jim Pryor (he/him, email jimpryor@unc.edu) |
| Teaching Assistants | None |
| Course Website | https://intro.jimpryor.net or Canvas |
| Instructor’s Office Hours | Mon 3:30–4:40 and Fri 12:45–1:45 in Caldwell 108A, or by appointment |
| Course Texts | 3 required textbooks and additional readings provided by web links |
UNC students enrolled in the course can access the Canvas site.
Those pages include the Zoom links for any course meetings you need to attend remotely, and for my office hours. These can also be retrieved from this restricted page.
Most of the information for the course will be published on this public website, and can also be viewed by people not enrolled in the course. But I will try to also link or copy the content into Canvas, so you’re able to access everything though that system if you want to.
This front web page won’t be updated frequently. Regular announcements, readings, and lecture notes will be posted at this page instead.
Here will be a sparser evolving index of all the handouts, webnotes and readings we’ve used during the course (together with some upcoming ones).
This course will be an introduction to philosophy in the analytic tradition, by focusing on a few representative issues:
How can we tell whether animals and future computers have “minds” — that is, their own thoughts, experiences, ambitions, self-awareness, and so on — or whether they’re instead just mindless automata?
Relations between minds, brains, and machines: Are your mind and body made of different stuffs? If a machine duplicates the neural structure of your brain, would it have the same thoughts and other mental states that you have?
What does it take to have free will? Is this incompatible with one’s choices being programmed or physically determined?
The course will place a strong emphasis on learning how to read philosophical texts and how to evaluate and produce philosophically compelling arguments. The format will vary between lectures and in-class group discussion.
The course is offered by Professor Jim Pryor (he/him). Undergrads generally address me as “Professor Pryor.”
Professor Pryor’s office is Caldwell 108A. He can best be reached by email, at jimpryor@unc.edu.
Professor Pryor’s office hours are on Mondays from 3:30–4:30 and Fridays from 12:45–1:45. (If you have a quick question, you can also ask just after class.) If you’re unable to meet in person or at these times, we can also arrange to meet by Zoom. The Zoom link for office hours can be found on this restricted page.
Feel free to drop into office hours to discuss anything you like about our course. I’m happy to talk about paper ideas, continue discussion, and so on. If you do come to my office and I’m already speaking with someone, make sure that we know that you’re waiting for us to finish.
This course does not presuppose any prior background or coursework in philosophy.
It aims to introduce you to a range of philosophical topics and writing, and give you experience analyzing and discussing arguments and writing philosophical papers.
Our class meetings will be a mix of structured lecture and group discussion, in which I’ll be both a guide and participant. Over the term, we will also consult closely about your writing, some of which will be submitted in several stages.
In addition to group discussions, you’ll also be learning how to give each other constructive feedback on your writing-in-progress.
You’ll be learning how to engage respectfully and charitably with the arguments of others: both your peers and the philosophers we study. This includes identifying what the arguments and their underlying assumptions are; clearly explaining these arguments; formulating counter-examples and other reasonable objections; and recognizing how views can best be defended (whether you endorse them or not).
You’ll also be learning how to develop your own independent arguments, objections, proposals, and responses.
All our philosophy courses aim at the acquisition and nurturing of basic philosophic skills. One of the main goals of our philosophy curriculum is to instill and enable the development of skills that are distinct to philosophy, but which are foundational to all forms of knowledge.
These basic philosophical skills involve being able to:
This course satisfies the Ways of Knowing Focus Capacity (FC-KNOWING). These courses help students develop intellectual humility; learn to question assumptions, categories, and norms that structure their worldviews; and understand the sources and effects of biases. They’ll learn, use, and distinguish strengths and weaknesses of one or more approach(es) to knowledge of the unfamiliar, such as: aesthetically, philosophically, linguistically, historically, or culturally remote forms of knowledge and worldmaking, or formal logic, scientific practice, and similar formalized approaches to countering bias and creating knowledge.
These courses address questions like these:
As an FC-KNOWING course, we will aim at the following learning outcomes:
Alternatively, you may use this course to satisfy the Ethical and Civic Values Focus Capacity (FC-VALUES). These courses help develop your capacity to think carefully and critically about how to make and justify private and public decisions, and address questions like these:
As an FC-VALUES course, we will aim at the following learning outcomes:
Every Focus Capacity course includes the following activities:
These elements — referred to as “recurring capacities” — will help you repeatedly practice crucial skills for future study, life, and career success.
These should be available in the Campus bookstore. You can also buy or rent them online.
Total expected cost: approximately $35.
Additional readings will be provided by web links. Some of these are in a restricted section of the course website. The username and password for these will be announced in class and on Canvas.
In addition to philosophy articles and textbooks/dialogues, we’ll also read some science fiction stories that deal with issues that we’re examining in the course. We’ll discuss these in class.
There are three course numbers: Phil 101, Phil 101H, and Phil 102. Some semesters multiple courses under these numbers may be offered, other semesters only one. The fundamental aims of these courses is the same, but they can be led by various instructors. They will make different selections about what issues to explore, and what readings to use, and they will have different teaching styles.
This syllabus only describes how the course will look when I, Prof. Pryor, am the instructor. (See later for a list of other philosophy courses being offered this term that are also reasonable entry-level courses, for students with no previous coursework in philosophy.)
When I offer one of these courses, there is a fundamental choice the course is designed around, that may differ from what some of you expect and are looking for. I’ll explain that choice and its consequences explicitly here in the syllabus, and also in our first class meetings. You’ll need to understand any differences from what you’re expecting, and whether for you, those differences make the course more appealing or less.
That fundamental choice is that this course will be skills-oriented, as opposed to oriented towards facts about which philosophers said what, and what their theories were. The aim of this course will be to begin teaching you how to think, read, and write like a philosopher. The course doesn’t assume you’ve done any philosophical coursework or reading beforehand. It doesn’t assume you have the ambition to become a philosophy major. But it does assume you want to train, for at least this one semester, in the skills that philosophers rely on and that make philosophy a distinctive field. It assumes this, because that is what the course is designed to achieve.
We will be considering a few famous philosophical topics, and things some major philosophers have said about them. The course is organized so that our discussion of each topic will inform and engage helpfully with our exploration of the others. But those topics themselves are not what drive the course. What drives the course is the aim of developing your philosophical skills.
Below, I aim to be explicit about this course’s requirements and expectations, and what level of understanding and engagement with the material you’ll achieve; also what grade you can expect to earn. Sometimes there’s a gap between what I’m requesting, and evaluate students on the basis of, and what some students come into the course looking for and expecting they can rely on. This university’s written policies, and the practice of many other professors in our Philosophy department, and those at comparable universities, are on more-or-less the same page as the expectations in place for this course. At the same time, it does happen that you can find courses, especially entry-level GenEd courses in non-STEM fields (sometimes even other Philosophy courses, though usually not ones in our department), where the expectations are lighter.
This course asks you to do what it does not because of my educational tastes, but because that’s what’s needed for you to develop your reasoning, arguing, and writing skills, and to understand our issues with any definite clarity.
What kind of workload does this course ask of you? The University says that a 3 credit course should be expected to demand 9–12 hours of work per week on average, including the time for classroom meetings. This course should be in the middle of that range. That means in a standard week (when no writing is due) you should still expect to be devoting 4–5 hours to this course outside of our in-class meetings. That includes reading (and re-reading, analyzing, and taking notes on) the assigned texts, reviewing any lecture notes from the past few classes, coming to my office hours, discussing the issues with other students, and so on. When you’re reviewing for an exam or working on a paper you should expect to need more time.
In past semesters, students who wrote B+ and A- papers mostly reported taking 12–16 hours on each graded submission (each of the first and second versions of papers they submitted multiple drafts of), and I expect preparing for the final exam needs similar time. Mortgaging the sum of these efforts across the whole semester, that’s another 3 hours/week on average.
So the expected workload for our course is 3 hours/week in the classroom, 4–5 more hours regularly each week for reading and review, and an average of 3 hours/week for writing and exam prep (though you’ll need this last time in irregular chunks — some weeks you’ll need 9 hours, other weeks you’ll need none).
It will be important that you attend class meetings consistently. Material not in the readings, or referred to only briefly there, will sometimes only be fully explained in class, and essential background and framing for many of the readings will also be provided.
The University’s Class Attendance Policy can be found here. In brief, they authorize absences only for some University activities, religious observances, disabilities, significant health conditions including pregnancy, and personal or family emergencies. If these include your situation, then consult these links:
The University Approved Absence Office (UAAO) provides information and FAQs for students related to University Approved Absences.
Students can be excused because of disability, pregnancy, or religious observance, as required by law and approved by the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC), or the Dean of Students (see next item) for short-term military service.
Students can be excused for significant health conditions (generally, these will require you to miss classes for five or more days) and/or personal/family emergencies, as approved by the Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS), Gender Violence Service Coordinators, and/or the Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office (EOC).
If you need to miss class because of a more temporary illness, email me directly to let me know. If you need to miss class for other kinds of reasons (like a job interview or to attend a wedding), ask me about it well in advance.
If you do miss a class, you will be responsible for catching up with missed content; and permission to miss a class doesn’t excuse you from quizzes or writing done during, or due before or after the class.
Sometimes I’ll record our class meetings with Zoom or similar methods, and if you needed to miss a meeting in-person, you can ask me on a case-by-case basis for access to each recording. I used to make it possible for students to Zoom into lectures synchronously, but — despite my strong and repeated warnings that this wasn’t a great replacement for the lectures, but only meant as a last-resort backup — many students abused the option and made it their dominant way to consume the lectures. But the course is not designed for that. I don’t want you to think you can get anything like full value from the course by trying to consume lectures that way. So I’m not going to make lectures regularly available by synchronous Zoom anymore.
I aim to provide online summaries of lectures, and will post any handouts I distribute in class to the website. These resources are mainly intended to help you review materials and discussions that you already experienced in the classroom. But they can also be of some use helping you keep up if you have to miss a class.
Note that you can not rely on everything discussed in class also being summarized online. And you should not expect that the online materials fully make up for attending class meetings, nor for reading the assigned texts. Every year some students clearly do try to skip some classes and/or readings (they acknowledge this in their course feedback), thinking that they’re getting all they need from the webnotes. These students can end up passing the course, but perform much less well than they expected, and are disappointed in their grades. So be warned in advance that although the online materials can help you, there’s limits to what you’ll get out of relying solely on them.
See the Policies section below about using laptops or other devices in class.
When you join our class meetings, you are expected to have read any material assigned for that day, and to be ready to discuss it and/or ask questions about it. See below about regular quizzes we’ll have before class to remind you of this expectation.
It is essential that you ask questions when things in the readings or lectures or our group discussions are unclear, and be ready to participate in discussions. I’ll expect you to actively engage with each other in class, and encourage you to do it outside of class too.
Talking about philosophy is one of the best ways of learning how to do it. Your participation and engagement with the course will make up 15% of your grade. See this page on classroom expectations for more details. (This course won’t have separate “discussion sections” as that page assumes; we’ll integrate discussion into the main meetings.) If you don’t plan to earnestly participate and engage, you should not take this course.
Some people find group discussion more challenging than others. I’m aware of this and try to accommodate it to an extent. You should strive to participate in our discussions where you can. But there are also other ways to be involved: sometimes we’ll discuss in small groups of 2–5 instead of as a whole class; or you can focus more on asking questions; or you can pursue matters further in office hours.
Your participation grade will reflect regular contributions to group discussion, but also these other aspects of how you’re engaging with the course.
The course has a presentation component. These won’t be presentations you prepare in advance; instead they’ll consist of you giving summaries of your small-group discussions, and/or of material presented in recent lectures. Each student will be expected to do this at least twice, and will be given opportunities to do it more.
The course also has a collaboration component. This will involve you giving each other feedback on your midterm papers-in-progess. More on this later.
These two components are required for IDEAs in Action courses.
There will be reading assignments for most class meetings. These readings are often pretty short, but many times require close study. You should read them carefully before we discuss them in class, and expect to read them more than once. For many of the texts, you won’t understand the material sufficiently with just a single reading. A good strategy would be to read a text once before we discuss it, and then go back and read it again after we’ve discussed it. If you don’t plan to do this, again you should not take this course.
I’ll often post summaries of material I presented in class. You should read these materials carefully as soon as they’re available, and expect that you’ll have to read many of them more than once, too.
Here is a detailed guide about how you’re expected to read philosophy papers. We’ll look at that guide again a few weeks into the semester.
As I said above, the online webnotes can’t be relied on to fully make up for reading the assigned texts — reading those texts carefully, usually several times, taking notes while you do so, and thinking about them. Nor can class meetings be relied on to substitute for those efforts.
One student from a previous semester complained I learned more doing my own studying than in lecture!
They may or may not have had legitimate dissatisfactions with their lectures. But the particular complaint they’re expressing shows a misunderstanding of the course’s design. Of course you should learn more from your own studying; that’s how this course — and most philosophy courses, and not only them — are meant to work. Lectures (and group discussions and webnotes and the rest) are only there to help you in doing your own studying. If you rely on others to do the intellectual work for you, and spoonfeed it to you in a few hours of classroom meetings each week, or a few pages of online lecture summaries, you’re going to get only a small fraction of the value this course aims to provide.
When I asked students in a previous semester What do you think are the most important things you learned?, the most satisfying response was:
the critical thinking skills necessary to think philosophically, the ability to formulate questions to challenge my fundamental assumptions, to stake out and defend a position to these questions
That is the primary teaching aim of this course. And you can’t learn these things just by absorbing what someone says in lecture. You have to exercise your minds. Most of that exercise will happen in the reading, thinking, studying, and writing you do outside the classroom. If you want this course to be engaging and fully rewarding, you’ll need to put the effort in to do that.
When students in a previous semester were polled about steps they could take to improve their learning, here’s a sampling of their responses:
I could definitely study the more difficult concepts for me more often and maybe reading the material again could help. I just hate rereading things.
I could probably look over my notes for the readings more than I do, or try to connect the concepts in class to those in the reading to see some better usage of some of the arguments.
I could read more, sometimes I just don’t read every reading, especially if I feel like I already have a well thought out opinion on the topic.
Yes, I know that I should probably take notes on the readings instead of simply reading them.
Just hold myself accountable for readings and lectures.
Becoming more active while doing the readings.
Read the text more in depth, ask questions.
Reread the readings and take notes on them.
Stay on top of the readings.
Throughout the semester we’ll have online quizzes due the night before some classes, to prompt you to keep up with readings and the main lessons of the preceding lectures and discussion. These won’t be on a regular schedule, but you should expect them on average once/week. We’ll be discussing the quizzes in class the day after you complete them, so there won’t be opportunities for you to postpone them. But to accommodate the fact that sometimes you’ll fall behind in your course prep because of illness, or acute demands elsewhere in your schedule, I’ll ignore your performance on two quizzes you do worst on or miss entirely. Your performance on the remaining quizzes will make up 25% of your grade for the course. Mostly the quizzes will be a few multiple choice questions, that (once you’ve done the readings and reviewed your notes) will take only five–ten minutes to complete.
Several times during the semester, you will write short essay-style response pieces in class, which we will then discuss, and which will be graded for effort and thoughtfulness. This will make up 10% of your course grade, and should sum to 2–3 pages of writing.
In the middle of the semester, you will develop a longer essay out-of-class which you’ll submit an initial version of by Fri Mar 7 (immediately before spring break).
I will give you feedback on this writing after break, and you will also collaborate to give each other feedback. You will then aggressively rewrite and expand your essays in response to the feedback, and submit revisions by Fri Mar 28.
The first submissions should be 3–4 pages, and the revisions should be 4–5 pages. Both versions will be graded, primarily for effort, and together they will make up 25% of your course grade. I will also communicate to you what grade your final submissions would get if they were being evaluated for quality; and higher-quality submissions may earn you some extra credit for the course.
There will also be an in-person final exam, given in compliance with UNC-Chapel Hill’s final exam regulations and according to the final exam calendar. The scheduled exam period for our class is Wed Apr 30 from 4–7 pm. The final exam will make up 25% of your grade for the course.
Where possible, I will try to grade your work without seeing whose work is whose.
Your grades for the different components of the course will be weighted as follows:
15% for overall participation/engagement with the course, including presenting summaries of small group discussion 10% for occasional in-class response writing (totalling 2–3 pages) 25% for out-of-class writing submitted for instructor and collaborative peer review, then substantially revised (first version 3–4 pages, revisions 4–5 pages) 25% for short online quizzes due before many classes 25% for in-person final exam, including essay-style questions (4 pages writing)
In total, the writing in these assignments will exceed the University requirement of ten pages of writing.
The first three components will be graded primarily for effort and thoughtfulness (though higher-quality writing can earn you extra credit). The quizzes will be graded for accuracy, and the final exam for accuracy and the quality of your writing and argument.
Should it be necessary to convert between numeric and letter grades, I assume the following correspondences:
F 0 or 50, explained below D 63.3 and higher D+ 66.7 and higher C- 70.0 and higher C 73.3 and higher C+ 76.7 and higher B- 80.0 and higher B 83.3 and higher B+ 86.7 and higher A- 90.0 and higher A 93.3 and higher
Here is a detailed explanation of how I’ll understand different grades.
Here are aggregate grade distributions for the last few years I’ve offered this course. I leave out the students who stopped turning in assignments or otherwise checked out.
Earned a straight A: 9% Earned an A-: 21% Earned a B+: 29% Earned a straight B: 23% Earned a B-: 11% Earned some kind of C or D: 7%
Generally, the students who earned grades of B or less weren’t consistently making the efforts requested for the course.
They’d do most, but not all, of the assigned reading; and they rarely read texts more than once. They skipped a substantial number of lectures, and/or when they came to class, they multitasked by doing other things on their phone or computer. Their out-of-class writing was completed in a rush (only one or two sessions, instead of returning to them multiple times over the 1–2 weeks you’ll have to work on each version). When we had class discussion, they wouldn’t often participate, or they wouldn’t pay much attention to what other students were contributing: the proposals they make, how others respond to them, and how the conversation evolves. They wouldn’t ask many questions, or pay much attention to questions that others ask.
Students who were less ambitious in all of these ways, but turned in their assignments on time, and managed to pass course exams, even with weak results, got some kind of C in the class. Students who were passive in some of the ways, but in other ways put in some more effort, sometimes earned B-s or even Bs.
Students who earned grades of B+ and higher were making all the efforts the course expects. If they worked reasonably hard over the semester, kept up with the readings, completed all their work on time, participated regularly in group discussion, but still ended up only “sort-of getting it” with respect to the positions and arguments we discuss, that corresponds to a final grade of B+. Higher grades than that should also be within anyone’s reach, but they require you to achieve more than “sort-of getting it.” To earn the higher grades, you’ll have to find ways over hurdles in your thinking or understanding you encounter during the course. This may mean reading the texts another time, going over lecture notes another time, coming to my office hours or asking more questions during or after class, and so on. A few people may be antecedently attuned enough to philosophers’ ways of addressing the issues we consider, that the higher grades come with less struggle. But for many students, this isn’t the case. For many, just “going along for the default ride” of the course won’t be enough to get past a B+. Going further will need you to take a more active and aggressive approach.
Grade Appeals: If you feel you have been given an incorrect grade for any part of the course, we can review together how I evaluated your work and applied the announced standards. If this doesn’t resolve the issue, you have the right to discuss with our department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies (currently Professor Markus Kohl), or to appeal through a formal University process. You’ll be expected to make a case that the grade reflects an arithmetic/clerical error, arbitrariness, discrimination, harassment, or personal malice. To learn more, consult the Academic Advising Program website, or this summary of University policies.
Most requests that I and other professors hear for changing grades are based on how good/bad it would be for a student to get a given grade; but it would be unfair and inappropriate for justifications like that to succeed.
All students are expected to follow the University Honor Code, which applies to all course assignments, quizzes/exams, and petitions for absences or rescheduling. In brief, this means students are expected to refrain from “lying, cheating, or stealing” in the academic context. For more information or to clarify which actions violate the honor code, consult with your instructors, studentconduct.unc.edu, and/or The Instrument of Student Judicial Governance.
What constitutes “lying, cheating, or stealing” depends on the academic activity.
During quizzes and exams, you aren’t allowed to collaborate, or consult anything but the notes and resources I specify.
For written assignments, you can’t resubmit your own work for different courses (whether taken the same semester or not). Work you turn in for different courses must be substantially different.
I will be happy to talk paper ideas through with you. But I won’t read and give feedback on drafts except for the versions you officially submit. There are two reasons for this: First is my limited time and energy to give such feedback, but if I agree to do it for any of you I should be ready to do it for anyone who wants me to. The second is that students tend to think that if my eyes have read a passage and I haven’t raised any complaints about it, then the passage must be fine and not have any deficiencies. But this isn’t true at all. If you come to me with a draft, there will likely be all sorts of ways it could still be improved, but we’ll only have a limited time to discuss, and you’ll only have a limited capacity to take in critical feedback, so I’ll have to focus on what seemed to be the most important outstanding issues, that need the most work from you in continuing to develop the paper. I don’t want you to walk away from our meetings with the impression that any text we didn’t discuss is at the best level you could make it, or be expected to make it.
So as a matter of policy, I won’t read your drafts until you officially turn them in. But what I am happy to do is to sit with you and have you talk me through your argumentative ideas: not at the sentence-by-sentence level, but in big picture terms. We are usually able to have very productive discussions in this way that helps students a lot in refining their papers before they submit them.
You can however ask each other, and other philosophy students, for feedback on drafts. In this course, you’re allowed (indeed are encouraged!) to get feedback from your peers on your essays before submitting them. You can also make use of UNC’s Writing Center and/or Learning Center (see description and links later). But in all cases, the work you submit must represent your own developed thoughts and expression, and you’ll have to give appropriate credit for ways that others influenced the essay.
In this course, you are also allowed to build on work that was started by others — whether this be papers you found online, or got from a friend, or were generated by ChatGPT or similar resources. In principle, it can be OK to begin with such sources, but there are rules and limits for how you have to proceed. And as I’ll explain, it will generally work out worse for you to do this, both educationally and in terms of your course performance.
When turning in essays for this course, every student — whether they used other people’s work as a starting point or not — will have to turn in not only their final product, but also earlier notes, drafts, and a log of their work process. If you built on other people’s work, or work generated by an AI, those original sources have to be provided, and you need to document where it was found (and/or what prompt was used to generate it). There won’t be any automatic penalty for using such resources. But your grade for the assignment will be based on what efforts and contributions you made to the final product. So if you, say, started with a mediocre paper found on a paper mill or output by ChatGPT, but then you transformed and refined it into something much better, using it as a springboard for your own original thinking, and you’re completely forthcoming about having done this, that’s okay, and you can get a decent grade from doing that.
Your grade for the assignment will reflect the distance between what you start with and your finished product, which in some cases may not be very substantial. This is one reason why it may be hard to get a good grade from these methods. Another is that often the sources you start with will contain ideas or argumentative moves that you’re not fully on top of, and that will tend to be evident in the finished product. This will also be reflected in your grades.
So if you want to explore the freedom our course allows you to honestly incorporate/build on work started by others, and develop your skills of finding such work and adding to it to make it your own, you are free to do so. But the nature of what you’re doing will often (in most cases) make it harder for you to get the best grades.
The important thing is for you to be explicit and straightforward about how you produced your assignment, and what resources you made use of. To the extent you do that, I will be charitable and fair in grading what value your own efforts added to the final result.
Misrepresenting any of this is a terrible idea. Use of online papers or AI-generated work may be caught by the courseware. It may stand out when I’m reading your essay, and reviewing your notes/drafts/work log. Or your submission may be manifestly similar to work turned in by other students in the course, who relied on the same kinds of resources you did. If there’s any doubt about this, there won’t be opportunities for you to suddenly come up with earlier drafts. It’s part of the assignment that you already provide evidence of what is your own work with the original submission. Ultimately, I will rely on my best judgment about what extent a submission reflects your independent work.
If there’s reason to believe there are undocumented sources, or that students have misrepresented the ways and extent to which they’re making use of their sources, that will be presumptive evidence of an Honors Code violation, and the case may be given to the Honors Court for investigation. This starts a formal process where ultimately, a committee of other students will decide whether wrongdoing occurred, and if so, what the penalty should be.
This schedule lists due dates for assignments and the rough order of our topics. See this other page for course announcements, context for the main readings, links to optional further reading, lecture notes, and any minor tweaks to the schedule. Check that page frequently.
Here are some other philosophy courses taught this semester that are open to introductory audiences and have some overlap with the issues explored in this course:
PHIL 101 and 102: non-honors versions of this course, with varying syllabi, taught by Zach Ferguson on Mon Wed Fri at 9:05, and by Rory Hanlon on Tue Thu at 2:00 or 5:00, and by Katie Deaven on Mon Wed Fri at 10:10 or 12:30.
PHIL 143: AI and the Future of Humanity: Philosophical Issues about Technology and Human Survival, taught by Katie Deaven on Mon Wed Fri at 8:00, and by Shanna Slank on Tue Thur 11:00.
PHIL/LING 145: Language, Communication, and Human and Animal Minds, taught by Kyle Cessna on Tue Thu at 8:00.
PHIL 230: Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics: the Philosophy of Experience and Reality, taught by Carla Merino-Rajme on Tue Thu at 9:30.
Here are two more such courses in the Philosophy catalog, but not being offered in spring 2025:
Each of these courses will address some topics our class doesn’t, and vice versa. Generally, these courses are related like this: one of them will cover issues X and Y, perhaps spending 1–2 weeks on issue Y. Another one will spend more weeks on issue Y, but won’t cover issue X, and will cover some further issues Z.
How can you decide which course will suit you best? That can be hard to do, especially being in the position of newcomers to the topics. You might reasonably just defer to which course best fits your schedule.
Honors course enrollment and wait list procedures are located here. Please direct all registration questions to Jenn Marshburn jenn.marshburn@unc.edu, Enrolled Student Services Coordinator for Honors Carolina.
If you have two final exams scheduled at the same time, or three scheduled within twenty-four hours:
You can apply at your dean’s office for permission to have one of the exams rescheduled. This must be done before the first day of exam period, and there are rules about which exam will be rescheduled. See the exam schedlue for more details.
As noted on that page, you cannot be excused from taking a final exam except in special circircumstances, which must be documented and approved by an academic dean. See the final exam regulations and exam schedule for more details.
As discussed above, there will be no mechanism for making up missed quizzes.
If you know in advance you’ll have good reason for being unable to submit your out-of-class writing assignments by their deadline:
What if it turns out that you can’t turn in an assignment, but now it’s only days or hours before (or even after 😮) the deadline?
The Office of the Dean of Students (ODOS) has staff who work with students who are dealing with medical and/or personal issues that are interfering with their courses. If you contact ODOS, they will be able to work with you to verify the cause of the disruption, connect you with campus services that may help, and notify me and other professors about the issue. They sometimes make recommendations about what would be reasonable accommodations for your situation, which I will take seriously. If you’re going to fall behind in the reading, class meetings, or assignments, then get in touch with them as soon as possible (in any case within five days) to tell them about your situation. I’ll expect last-minute or after-the-fact requests for extensions or other academic accommodations to come through the ODOS.
What if you missed a deadline and don’t have an extension, or you were granted an extension but you missed that too? Then I’ll permit you to turn the assignment in up to 72 hours late, for a substantial grade penalty (roughly taking what would have been a B+ to a C+). This permission can only be used once during the semester.
I won’t prohibit the use of laptops or tablets for taking notes, though I strongly discourage this. I’ll post summaries of the main outlines of my lectures, to help reduce your need to write down the new material I’m presenting. Whatever your note-taking practices, you should be reviewing these online lecture notes outside of class anyway. An effective use of your time in the classroom is to focus on following my presentations and the class discussion, and actively raising questions when you don’t.
If you must have a device open in class, don’t browse the web, or play games, or read/send texts or other social media during our meetings. It’s pretty clear to everyone when you are doing this, and it’s rude and distracting to your instructors and your classmates. See this page on classroom expectations for more about this.
You may not record our class meetings in any format without prior express authorization from me and the department. To request the use of assistive technology as an accommodation, contact the EOC (see below). For others, permission to record will only be granted in extraordinary circumstances. Students are never permitted to copy or distribute recordings of the class, and must delete any they possess when the course concludes.
As mentioned above, sometimes I will record the lectures myself, and you can request access to these recordings on a case-by-case basis.
The University’s Class Attendance Policy was summarized above.
The Honor Code and how it applies to this course was also summarized above.
Our AI Use Policy is that generative AI tools are permitted for the following uses: brainstorming, outlining and planning, drafting, and revising your out-of-class writing. Use of these tools will factor into my evaluation of the assignment; and must be fully documented. Undocumented use will be considered academic dishonesty and will be referred to the Honors Court. See above for more discussion. AI tools are not permitted for use with quizzes/exams.
The following is information that the University mandates we include with every syllabus. (So you will see a lot of overlap with your syllabi for other courses.)
All students are expected to adhere to University policy and follow the guidelines of the UNC Code of Conduct. Additional information can be found at studentconduct.unc.edu.
UNC-Chapel Hill is strongly committed to addressing the mental health needs of a diverse student body. The Heels Care Network is a place to access the many mental health resources at Carolina. Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) is the primary mental health provider for students, offering timely access to consultation and connection to clinically appropriate services. Go to their website caps.unc.edu or visit their facilities on the third floor of the Campus Health building for an initial evaluation to learn more. Students may also call CAPS anytime at 919-966-3658 for immediate assistance.
For free feedback on any course writing projects, check out UNC’s Writing Center. Their coaches can assist with any writing project, including multimedia projects and application essays, at any stage of the writing process. You don’t even need a draft to come visit. To schedule a 45-minute appointment, review quick tips, or request written feedback online, visit writingcenter.unc.edu.
Want to get the most out of this course or others this semester? Visit UNC’s Learning Center at learningcenter.unc.edu to make an appointment or register for an event. Their free, popular programs will help you optimize your academic performance. Try academic coaching, peer tutoring, STEM support, ADHD/LD services, workshops and study camps, or review tips and tools available on the website.
In this course, as in other University programs and activities, you should expect an environment free of discrimination, harassment, and other misconduct. If this expectation isn’t respected, here is some information about University policies, how to obtain support, and file grievances:
The University is committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all members of our community and to ensuring that educational and employment decisions are based on individuals’ abilities and qualifications. Consistent with this principle and applicable laws, the University’s Policy Statement on Non-discrimination offers access to its educational programs and activities as well as employment terms and conditions without respect to race, color, gender, national origin, age, religion, sex, genetic information, disability, veteran’s status, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. Such a policy ensures that only relevant factors are considered, and that equitable and consistent standards of conduct and performance are applied.
If you are experiencing harassment or discrimination, you can seek assistance and file a report through the Report and Response Managers in the EOC (reportandresponse@unc.edu).
Any student who is impacted by discrimination, harassment, dating or relationship violence, sexual violence, sexual exploitation, or stalking is encouraged to seek resources on campus or in the community. Reports can be made online to the EOC or by contacting the University’s Title IX Coordinator (Elizabeth Hall, titleixcoordinator@unc.edu), or the Report and Response Managers in the EOC (reportandresponse@unc.edu).
Please note that I am designated as a Responsible Employee, which means I must report to the EOC any information I receive about the forms of misconduct listed here. If you’d like to speak with a confidential resource, those include Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), the University’s Ombuds Office, and the Gender Violence Services Coordinators. Additional resources are available at safe.unc.edu.
I reserve the right to make changes to the syllabus, including assignment due dates and dates of quizzes. These changes will be announced as early as possible so that students can adjust their schedules.
I welcome your input about the course at any time. You are welcome to approach me directly. I’ll also provide opportunities for anonymous evaluation and feedback during the term.