Course Description: This course is designed to introduce you to graduate work in philosophy at UCSD through a small seminar of your peers where you will be able to hone your analytic, writing, and presentation skills.  The small size of the class will allow everyone to be fully involved in the philosophical conversation and to practice philosophical writing throughout the quarter.  We will engage all of these skills in the course of exploring contemporary classic texts on a set of related issues with direct implications for metaphysics, ethics, the law, and our self-conception.  Beginning with a set of powerful skeptical challenges to our self-conception as free and responsible agents, we will then critically evaluate a variety of responses.  In the second half of the seminar, we will turn to the related questions of how punishment and responsibility are related and what, if anything, justifies punishment. 

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