Open Yale Courses

PHIL 181: Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature with Prof. Tamar Gendler

About the Course

Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature pairs central texts from Western philosophical tradition (including works by Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Rawls, and Nozick) with recent findings in cognitive science and related fields. The course is structured around three intertwined sets of topics: Happiness and Flourishing; Morality and Justice; and Political Legitimacy and Social Structures. View class sessions »

Course Structure

This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2011.

About Professor Tamar Gendler

Tamar Szabó Gendler is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University and Chair of the Department of Philosophy. She received her BA in Humanities and Mathematics & Philosophy from Yale in 1987 and her PhD in Philosophy from Harvard in 1996. After a decade teaching first at Syracuse University and then at Cornell, she returned to to Yale as a professor in 2006. Her professional philosophical work lies at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, and she is the author of Thought Experiments (2000) and Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology (2010), and editor or co-editor of Conceivability and Possibility (2002), Perceptual Experience (2006) and The Elements of Philosophy (2008). She has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.

How to use these pages:

This folder contains course content in HTML format for offline viewing. From this "start" page you can access all of the class sessions by clicking on the link above. The Syllabus page and course resources can be accessed directly from the "content" folder. If your computer is connected to the Internet, the audio and video files will be accessible via their respective links.

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