Washington University in St. Louis
Spring 2025:
Intro to Cognitive Science (2 sections).
Philosophy of language.
Fall 2024:
Intro to Cognitive Science (2 sections).
Philosophical writing.
University of Cologne
Summer Term 2024:
Logic for philosophy.
Winter Term 2023/24:
Logic for philosophy.
Skeptical doubts.
Summer Term 2023:
Russell on the problems of philosophy.
Logic for philosophy.
Winter Term 2022/23
Modal logic for philosophy.
Epistemic contextualism.
Summer Term 2022
Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the problems of philosophy (Part II).
Classics in philosophy of language.
We are going to read and discuss the works of Frege, Russell, Quine, Grice and others on meaning. Our topics of investigation will include: (a) the relationship between truth and meaning, (b) the difference between implicature, entailment and presupposition, (c) the semantic contribution of singular terms, i.e. names and definite descriptions, to the meanings of complete sentences and (d) the analysis of belief-ascriptions (as well as other propositional attitudes).
Winter Term 2021/22:
Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the problems of philosophy (Part I).
Introduction to Formal Epistemology.
Summer Term 2021:
Kripke on Naming and Necessity.
Classics in philosophy of mind.
Winter Term 2020/21:
Paradoxes and what we learn from them.
A paradox emerges when something that we don't accept seems to follow from things we do accept. So paradoxes tell us that either some of assumptions are false, or that our reasoning is invalid. They bent our minds because often we do not know which premises must go and our reasoning steps still seem valid. In this course, we are going to study several paradoxes in philosophy of language, epistemology and ethics to see what kinds of conclusions we should draw from them.
Philosophy of language and its impact on other areas of investigation.
In this seminar, we are going to read a number of papers from the philosophy of language and use tools from this area to address philosophical questions in epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
Summer Term 2020:
Empiricism and rationalism in the modern era.
Formal methods in philosophy.
Winter Term 2019/20:
Introduction to Formal Epistemology.
Modal Logic and Philosophy.
This course will introduce the student to standard modal logic and its import to different areas of philosophy. We will explore applications of modal logic to issues in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. Reading materials accessible here.
Summer Term 2019:
Introduction to formal methods in philosophy.
Textverständnis und Essaytraining.
Geschult werden die Fähigkeiten der Studierenden, philosophische Texte strukturiert zu lesen, Argumentationsgänge präzise zu analysieren und klar gegliederte Essays zu verfassen.
Winter Term 2018/19:
Introduction to Formal Epistemology.
Modal Logic and Philosophy.
Summer Term 2018:
Introduction to Formal Epistemology.
In this course I will introduce the main topics and methods of the research field known as ‘formal epistemology’. We will see how modal logic can be used as a means of encoding epistemic principles of knowledge and belief, and apply it to the treatment of paradoxes such as the Knowability Paradox and Moore's Paradox. We will also go through the literature on Bayesianism, thus bringing the probability calculus to bear on epistemological issues, such as the problem of apparently rational but inconsistent beliefs and the relationship between categorical beliefs and degrees-of-belief. Reading materials accessible here.
Knowledge and Skepticism.
Winter Term 2017:
Introduction to Formal Epistemology.
Modal knowledge, imagination and reason.
LMU Munich
Summer Term 2017:
Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (B.A./M.A.).
In this seminar we are going to explore some philosophical questions about the field of Artificial Intelligence. We will start by reviewing the first attempts to automate theorem-proving techniques (in the 50s and 60s) and the frustrated use of those results to emulate intelligence/rationality in general. Next we analyze the use of neural networks to compute several types of functions and the connectionist paradigm in cognitive psychology/AI. Finally, we will discuss the miscellaneous toolbox that is available to Artificial Intelligence practitioners nowadays—most importantly, machine learning techniques—with an eye towards answering the question whether we are any way nearer to successfully simulating rational or intelligent agents.
Winter Term 2016/17:
The A Priori (B.A./M.A. Seminar).