Minor - Department of Philosophy - The University of Utah

Why a Philosophy Minor complements ANY Major

Philosophy is well-known for the meaning and satisfaction students derive from the study of big, historically influential ideas and thinkers. Less well-known are the practical benefits deriving from adding philosophy courses to your schedule – whether for mere GenEd electives, a Minor, or a second Major. Consider three such practical benefits (for further benefits of adding philosophy courses to your schedule, see our “Why Study Philosophy” page):

Philosophy is arguably the most interdisciplinary of academic fields. The history of every other academic discipline traces back to philosophy. Whether you're majoring in psychology, biology, physics, or whatnot, your discipline was founded by philosophers working on specialized topics unique to (what has become) your field. Part of the legacy of these philosophical origins is that scholars across all fields continue to earn PhD degrees – “PhD” abbreviates “Philosophy Doctorate”. The philosophical foundations underlying other disciplines makes the study of Philosophy particular well-suited as Minor or a second Major. Many of our course titles are a tribute to the interdisciplinarity of philosophy – such courses as “Philosophy of Biology”, “Philosophy of Physics”, “Philosophy of Science”, “Philosophy of Social Science”, “Philosophy of Mind”, “Philosophy of Language”, “Philosophy of Law”, “Philosophy of Literature”, “Philosophy of Education”, “Philosophy of Art” . . . you get the idea. Bottom-line: The study of Philosophy combines fantastically well with a Major in any other field. Adding a Philosophy Minor or second Major typically rewards students with a deeper understanding of issues relevant to their first Major.

The study of Philosophy provides skills that will help you get into a better graduate program. Philosophy students consistently outperform other students on standardized grad school prep exams – e.g., GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT. Those exams do not emphasize discipline-specific knowledge; rather, they emphasize skills with logical reasoning and comprehension of logic-rich texts. Why? The thinking is that if you are good with logical reasoning, then we can train you! Philosophy students do fantastically well on these exams for the simple reason that Philosophy courses focus on logical reasoning. Adding a Philosophy Minor or second Major will help improve your prep exam scores, and that will likely get you into a better-ranked graduate program.

The study of philosophy improves students' reading and writing skills. If mastery with creative writing (among other forms) is your goal, then English courses are terrific. If instead, the goal is mastery of reading and writing skills associated with academic, journal-style texts – i.e., writings rich in logical reasoning – you can do no better than to take Philosophy courses. Indeed, recent data for the GRE exam show that for the two portions of the exam associated with verbal and writing skills, Philosophy students earned the very highest scores of any Major. (English Majors also did well, though, in both categories, they came in second to Philosophy Majors.) Adding a Philosophy Minor or second Major will improve your reading and writing in your first Major, helping you to earn better grades.

The Philosophy Department offers three distinct Minors (explained below).

Applied Ethics

21 credit hours

The field of applied ethics consists in the analysis of ethical issues as they arise in the management and resolution of real-world problems. Applied ethics promotes an ongoing "conversation" between specific cases and pressing issues.

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Cognitive Science

18 credit hours

How does the mind work? How do our thoughts tell us about the world around us, and are these thoughts accurate? These questions have been asked for thousands of years, and it is against this background that the field of cognitive science emerged.

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Philosophy Minor

18 credit hours

Philosophical inquiry encompasses a wide range of topics, across a wide range of disciplines, including interrelations between disciplines. Nearly every academic discipline is a historical outgrowth of philosophy.

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Applied Ethics

& Human Values Minor

The field of applied ethics consists in the analysis of ethical issues as they arise in the management and resolution of real-world problems. Applied (or as it is sometimes called, practical) ethics promotes an ongoing “conversation” between specific cases and pressing issues, on the one hand, and theory and meta-theory on the other. Bioethics, business ethics, and environmental ethics are but a few of the areas of applied ethics that have flourished in recent years, and all three areas are well represented by the faculty at the University of Utah.

In the Applied Ethics Minor, students will learn skills of ethical reasoning and analysis in the context of their preferred area of study. Course work may include ethics, political philosophy, political thought or democratic theory; courses applying ethical analysis to health care, business and the professions, engineering and the environment, global or social justice, law and politics, or communication and the media; and courses in these particular fields illustrating ethical issues. No prerequisites are required. The minor will be of particular interest to students planning careers in one of the subject matter areas who wish to be able to bring ethical perspectives and skills to their field.

Work in applied ethics requires understanding of moral and political philosophy, a grasp of how to apply basic principles to problems in specific areas, and familiarity with the specific areas of application themselves. Accordingly, the minor is structured according to three broad areas of course work: (I) Theory, (II) Applied Theory, and (III) Specific Areas of Practice. Here we acknowledge that the distinctions between these major categories are not always clean; therefore, our model allows for the fact that certain courses may appear in more than one place.

Students are required to take two courses from each broad area and one additional course from area I or II. We have selected practical areas to correspond to existing areas of faculty strength and existing courses.

Select at least two courses from the following:

PHIL 3500 Ethics (HF)
PHIL 3700 Political Philosophy (HF)
PHIL 5500 Contemporary Ethical Theory
POLS 3010 Democratic Theory
POLS 5010 Foundations of Political Thought: Late Modern
POLS 5025 American Political Thought
POLS 5035 Contemporary Political Thought
POLS 5140 Feminist Political Theory

Select at least two courses from one of the following groups. Note that both of these courses must be taken from the same group.

Group A: Bioethics

COMM 5140 Communication and Aging
HIST 4095 Governing Bodies
PHIL 3520 Bioethics (HF)
PHIL 5520 Advanced Bioethics
POLS 5321 Health Policy

Group B: Business & Professional Ethics

BUS 1050 Foundations of Business Thought (BF, HF)
COMM 4170 Applied Organizational Communication (Prerequisite COMM 3170)
COMM 5170 Contemporary Issues in Org. Comm (Prerequisite COMM 3170)
COMM 5660 Media Ethics (Prerequisite COMM 1500)
MGT 5600 Business Ethics
PHIL 3510 Business and Professional Ethics (HF)

Group C: Engineering & Environmental Ethics

PHIL 3510 Business and Professional Ethics (HF)
PHIL 3530 Environmental Ethics (HF)
PHIL 3730 Justice & International Affairs (IR)
PHIL 4540 Engineering, Ethics, & Society (HF)
POLS 5322 Environmental Policy

Group D: Global, Societal & Political Ethics

LING 3470 Language and Culture (IR, HF)
PHIL 3730 Justice and International Affairs (IR)
POLS 5440 Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict
POLS 5450 Political Violence/Terrorism
SOC 3365 Ethnic Minorities in the United States (DV, BF)
SOC 3380 Race/Ethnicity, Class and Gender (Prerequisite SOC 1010) (DV)
SOC 3435 Sociology of Economic Development

Group E: Law, Politics and Ethics

COMM 5300 Mass Communication Law (Prerequisite COMM 1500)
COMM 5320 Freedom of Expression
PHIL 3710 Philosophy of Law
POLS 5120 Judicial Process (Prerequisite POLS 1100)
POLS 5211 Constitutional Law
POLS 5212 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties
POLS 5240 Local Government Law
POLS 5250 Corrections Administration
POLS 5300 Administrative Theory ( Prerequisite POLS 1100 & 3300)
POLS 5380 Public Budgeting and Finance ( Prerequisite ECON 1010, POLS 1100 & POLS 3300)
POLS 5390 Administration in Local Government

Group F: Communication/Media Ethics

COMM 3030 Communication and Social Responsibility (CW, HF)
COMM 3070 Communication and Gender (DV)
COMM 3170 Introduction to Organizational Communication
COMM 3190 Intercultural Communication (DV)
COMM 3415 Intro to Cultural Studies
COMM 5000 Studies in Communication
COMM 5660 Media Ethics (Prerequisite COMM 3505)
LING 3600 Cross-Cultural Communication (DV, HF)

The student must take at least two courses, to be approved by Leslie Francis, from any fields where applied ethics are treated. To fulfill this requirement, students are encouraged to take courses in their major which also have an emphasis on ethics.

Students must take one additional course, to be selected from either Area I or Area II (please see above). This will permit students either 1) to deepen their understanding of (meta)-theory; or 2) to select an applied theory course from an area other than that chosen already for emphasis, thus allowing for comparative theoretical analysis and application.

For information about declaring the Applied Ethics Minor, please contact Professor Leslie Francis or the academic advisor, Connie Corbett.

Cognitive Science

What is Cognitive Science?

Ever since we could ponder, humans have wondered about the mind. How does the mind work? How do our thoughts tell us about the world around us, and are these thoughts accurate? These questions have been asked for thousands of years, and it is against this background that the field of cognitive science emerged 35 years ago.

With twentieth century developments in mathematics, logic, computing, and artificial intelligence, theorists from a variety of scientific and theoretical fields began to develop an intriguing thesis: the mind is a kind of computer. Most simply, when new information comes in to the mind, that information is processed according to a set of rules and by drawing upon relevant information from stored memory, all to deliver some kind of output. This was the basis of early modern computing, and applying these concepts to the study of the mind has proved a fruitful and exciting research agenda.

Today's cognitive scientists don't all commit to the thesis that the mind is a computer, but they do all commit to the same pursuit as early human thinkers, namely, figuring out how the mind works. Cognitive science today is a richly interdisciplinary pursuit of knowledge, involving anthropologists, computer scientists, engineers, linguists, philosophers, psychologists, roboticists, and others. As a Cognitive Science minor, you will have the opportunity to engage in this exciting new field, taking a variety of courses from each of the contributing disciplines, and because this research is so young, you will have the rare opportunity to contribute to those developments.

Requirements for Cognitive Science Minor in Philosophy

The Cognitive Science Minor in Philosophy calls for a minimum of 18 units of coursework that meets the following four requirements:

Complete the following foundations course:

PHIL 3440 (Foundations of Cognitive Science)

Complete all four of the following requirements:

Computer Science: (Take CS 1030 if you are a Computer Science Major. if you are a major in the social sciences take COMP 1010).

COMP 1010 (Programming for All Level 1) (offered in fall only) - this class is intended for non-majors in Computer Science

CS 1030 (Foundations of Computer Science) - this class is intended for majors in Computer Science

Linguistics:(Choose one of the three linguistics courses listed below)
LING 1200 (Introduction to the Study of Language)
LING 3300 (Computers and Language)
LING 4020 (Introduction to Syntax)

Philosophy:
PHIL 3400 (Mind, Language, and Reality)

Psychology:
PSY 2100 (Cognitive Psychology)

Take at least one course from the following recommended list:

Anthropology:
ANTH 3134 (Language, Thought, and Culture: The Anthropology of the Human Mind)
ANTH 3481 (Evolutionary Psychology)

Computer Science:
CS 1000 (Engineering Computing)
CS 4300 (Artificial Intelligence)
CS 5310 (Robotics)
CS 5650 (Visual Perception from a Computer Graphics and Visualization Perspective)

Linguistics:
LING 3190 (Language and Nature)

Philosophy:
PHIL 5350 (Philosophy of Science)
PHIL 5450 (Philosophy of Mind)

Psychology:
PSY 3140 (Cognitive Neuropsychology)
PSY 3150 (Sensation and Perception)
PSY 3190 (Psychology of Language)
PSY 4125 (Cognitive Science Seminar)

This electives list in not exhaustive. Other course may be substituted, on approval from the Cognitive Science Advisor.

The Grade Requirement has three parts. First, only coursework taken for a letter grade will contribute to the above requirements; CR/NC coursework will not count. Second, no individual course receiving a grade lower than C- will count for any of the above requirements. Third, the overall grade-point average (GPA) for courses meeting the above requirements must be at least 2.00.

Various of the above requirements may, in special cases, and with approval, be satisfied with transfer credit. Requirement 2 is an exception: in all cases, the Advanced Course Requirement must be satisfied by course work completed at the University of Utah.

For information about declaring the cognitive science minor, please contact Dustin Stokes or Connie Corbett.

Areas	Minimum	Qualified Courses
I Ethics and Value Theory	One course	3011, 3080, 3390, 3500, 3510, 3520, 3530, 3750, 3700, 3710 3730, 3740, 3750, 3790, 3800, 3820, 4540, 5130, 5191, 5500, 5510, 5520, 5530, 5540, 5700, 5710, 5800
II Metaphysics and Epistemology	One course	3012, 3300, 3310, 3350, 3370, 3375, 3380, 3400, 3440, 3600, 3870, 4380, 4400, 4450, 4480, 5192, 5300, 5350†, 5370†, 5375†, 5400, 5450, 5480
III History of Philosophy	One course	3013, 3040, 3060, 3085, 3086, 3100, 3110, 3120, 3130, 3810, 4140, 5040, 5060, 5100, 5110, 5120, 5145, 5193*, 5360
IV Logic and Formal Methods	One course	1250, 3200, 3210, 5200, 5210, 5220
* These courses typically have variable content and may be taken multiple times, each time counting as a new and separate course, so long as the course content is different. † These courses sometimes have variable content, in which case they may be taken multiple times. Check with instructor for permission to take a second time.
Full COURSE TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS at bottom of this page

Why a Philosophy Minor complements ANY Major

Applied Ethics

Cognitive Science

What is Cognitive Science?

Requirements for Cognitive Science Minor in Philosophy

Philosophy Minor

Course Titles