The Next Generation of Ethical AI [poster, syllabus in progress]
This is a summer school I'm running, in 2025, for high school students. It will cover the technical basics of deep learning, some way AI is applied in some sensitive areas like healthcare and education, and the broader ethical challenges posed by AI technology. The goal is to help ensure that the next generation of AI users, developers, and policy-makers are philosophically informed and ethically sensitive to the risks of AI.
Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence [syllabus]
This is an upper-level course I taught at Columbia in 2022, as a Teaching Scholar. It covers the relationship of AI to philosophy of mind, science, and ethics. The main goal of the course is to offer students a great deal of latitude in the work and final project they do for the course, while still ensuring that their projects are scaffolded.
Ethics [syllabus]
This is an intermediate-level course I taught at Columbia in 2022. It takes a broad and pragmatic approach to ethical questions, and introduces traditional ethical theories in the context of current ethical dilemmas. The course's other distinguishing feature is that it is ungraded — an experiment that went very well, but that I probably won't try again any time soon. (Ungrading mostly served pedagogical goals that I can achieve in other ways. Grades serve pedagogical goals that aren't easy for me to achieve in other ways.)
Metaphysics [syllabus]
This is an intermediate-level course I taught at Columbia in 2020. It introduces metaphysics through some traditional topics, and then turns to broader questions about realism, the goal of metaphysics, naturalism and the legitimate sources of evidence for metaphysical claims, and the place of metaphysics in inquiry.
Philosophical Monsters [syllabus in progress]
This is a 2000- or 3000-level course I plan to teach. It introduces a range of philosophical topics through the monsters they have created (philosophy of mind has P-zombies and swampmen; ethics has the utility monster; etc.). The first half of the course tours this bestiary and covers the first-order questions these monsters are supposed to help answer. The second half of the course investigates the methodology that gives such evidential weight to these monsters, and thought experiments more generally.
Other
I have drafts of syllabi on the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy and psychology of humor, the epistemology of conspiracy theories, and some other subjects, which I can provide on request.
This is a summer school I'm running, in 2025, for high school students. It will cover the technical basics of deep learning, some way AI is applied in some sensitive areas like healthcare and education, and the broader ethical challenges posed by AI technology. The goal is to help ensure that the next generation of AI users, developers, and policy-makers are philosophically informed and ethically sensitive to the risks of AI.
Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence [syllabus]
This is an upper-level course I taught at Columbia in 2022, as a Teaching Scholar. It covers the relationship of AI to philosophy of mind, science, and ethics. The main goal of the course is to offer students a great deal of latitude in the work and final project they do for the course, while still ensuring that their projects are scaffolded.
Ethics [syllabus]
This is an intermediate-level course I taught at Columbia in 2022. It takes a broad and pragmatic approach to ethical questions, and introduces traditional ethical theories in the context of current ethical dilemmas. The course's other distinguishing feature is that it is ungraded — an experiment that went very well, but that I probably won't try again any time soon. (Ungrading mostly served pedagogical goals that I can achieve in other ways. Grades serve pedagogical goals that aren't easy for me to achieve in other ways.)
Metaphysics [syllabus]
This is an intermediate-level course I taught at Columbia in 2020. It introduces metaphysics through some traditional topics, and then turns to broader questions about realism, the goal of metaphysics, naturalism and the legitimate sources of evidence for metaphysical claims, and the place of metaphysics in inquiry.
Philosophical Monsters [syllabus in progress]
This is a 2000- or 3000-level course I plan to teach. It introduces a range of philosophical topics through the monsters they have created (philosophy of mind has P-zombies and swampmen; ethics has the utility monster; etc.). The first half of the course tours this bestiary and covers the first-order questions these monsters are supposed to help answer. The second half of the course investigates the methodology that gives such evidential weight to these monsters, and thought experiments more generally.
Other
I have drafts of syllabi on the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy and psychology of humor, the epistemology of conspiracy theories, and some other subjects, which I can provide on request.
