Colin Patrick
Visiting Assistant Professor
MW 3:00-4:00p
Or by appointment
In my view philosophy is not only a body of written work but primarily the practice of carefully, honestly, and systematically interrogating settled assumptions about ourselves, our history, and our natural and social world. I think the value of these things is often overlooked and even downplayed in our information-saturated culture, leaving us feeling overwhelmed and somewhat hesitant and disempowered to do our own thinking, encouraged to trust what we hear and read from those with the biggest platforms or loudest voices, and otherwise leave critical thinking to the “experts.”
In my courses I seek more than anything to empower students to push back against this, to be confident in their capacity to recognize arguments and inferences when they come across them, to build confidence in their ability to critically appraise them, to be able to draw out the logical implications of viewpoints and arguments - especially those that they’re under any kind of pressure to accept as “common sense,” and to construct inferences and arguments of their own.
Academic Credentials
BA from Wesleyan University, 1998
PhD from the University of Chicago, 2012
Teaching
Fall 2024 Courses:
PHIL 101: Logic
MWF 9:10am - 10:10am
Analyses of arguments with an emphasis on formal analysis. Propositional and predicate calculus, deductive techniques, and translation into symbolic notation.
Prerequisites: None
PHIL 241: Data, Privacy, andEthics
MWF 10:20am - 11:20am
Exploration of ethical implications specific to data collection, study design, data analysis, and the dissemination and application of data. Practical guidance about how to uncover ethical weaknesses in existing protocols and how to undertake constructive, effective, fair data scientific research and application of automated processes. Survey of technological advances in strategies for collecting data, implementing studies, analyzing data, and disseminating findings both to broad public audiences and to narrow groups who are disproportionately impacted. Explores research on the consequences of choices made by human and machine actors and assemblages of human-in-the-loop sociotechnical systems.
Focuses on both legal and ethical frameworks.
Prerequisites: None.
Research
My research and teaching interests are in ethical theory, applied ethics, practical reason, deductive and inductive logic, Hegelian dialectics, Marx, philosophy of history, philosophy of technology, and philosophy of film.