Daniel M. Mittag

Associate Professor of Philosophy

B.A., 1995, Drake University; M.A., 1998, Texas A&M University; M.A., 2003, Ph.D., 2009, University of Rochester.

E-mail: [email protected]
Office: Vulgamore Hall, Room 208
Phone: (517) 629-0239

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Daniel Mittag researches primarily in epistemology and the pedagogy of philosophy.  His teaching interests center on issues in epistemology, logic, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.  He is a member of the American Philosophical Association (APA) and the American Association of Philosophy Teachers (AAPT).

Publications and Presentations

Dan has published articles on evidentialism, epistemic value, and the epistemic basing relation. His work has appeared in publications such as the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, and The Routledge Companion to Epistemology.  He has also contributed to Oxford Bibliographies Online.

He has presented his work at several national and international conferences such as the XXII World Congress of Philosophy (in Seoul, South Korea), the American Philosophical Association, the Korean Society for Analytic Philosophy, the Indiana Philosophical Association, and the MidSouth Philosophy Conference.

Courses Taught

PHIL 101:  Introduction to Philosophy

Textual Analysis Mode

Description:
In this course we will survey several fundamental philosophical questions. We will begin with a brief introduction to basic philosophical concepts and the structure of arguments. We will then examine important questions and survey historical and contemporary responses by philosophers to these questions. Some questions to be discussed are: What can I know? Does God exist? Are my actions free? What makes an action morally right or wrong? This course will develop your analytic skills and improve your ability to think and write clearly. It will also allow you to appreciate important historical and contemporary philosophical texts and form your own responses to the fundamental questions mentioned above.

PHIL 107:  Logic and Critical Reasoning

Modeling Mode of Analysis

Description:
Logic and Critical Reasoning is an introduction to argumentation, logical analysis, and the principles of good reasoning. This course is designed to help you express your own arguments clearly and develop skill in identifying, interpreting, and evaluating arguments. Students who successfully complete the course will be adept at distinguishing rhetoric and emotional speech from rational argumentation, distinguishing successful from unsuccessful arguments, and diagnosing mistakes in reasoning. As such, this course is ideal for those interested in developing their critical reasoning abilities.

PHIL 207:  Symbolic Logic

Modeling Mode of Analysis

Description:
This is a course focusing on topics in modern deductive logic.  Our focus will be on propositional logic, predicate logic, and, as time allows, the logic of necessity and possibility.  We will develop an artificial language for representing the logical features of natural language sentences, and we will develop rigorous techniques for demonstrating the validity and invalidity of arguments.  Successful students will be able to use these techniques to model and analyze texts in every discipline.

PHIL 315:  Knowledge, Truth, and Reason

Prerequisite: One prior course in philosophy.

Description:
This course is an introduction to contemporary epistemology.  Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is the philosophical study of knowledge and justified belief.  Accordingly, our two central concerns will be with theories about what it takes to know that some proposition is true and with theories about what it is to be justified in believing a proposition.  During approximately the first two-thirds of the course, we will be critically discussing some of the most prominent and influential theories on these topics.  Then, for approximately the last third of the course, we will turn our focus to a sustained focus on a topic within the field.  Past offerings of the course have focused on evidentialism, contextualism, interest-relative theories of knowledge, social epistemology, and the epistemic significance of disagreement.

PHIL 318:  Philosophy of Mind

Textual Analysis Mode
May be taken for the neuroscience concentration.

Description:
This course is an introduction to the philosophy of mind focusing on the mind-body problem.  Accordingly, our central question will be: what is the relation of the mind to the physical world?  As we explore this topic, we will carefully evaluate the following historically prominent theories about the nature of the mind: the identity theory, dualism, logical behaviorism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism.  Additional topics include the problem of phenomenal consciousness, theories of mental content, and the extended mind thesis.

PHIL 325:  Philosophy of Language

Textual Analysis Mode

Description:
Words and sentences of a language have meanings, thereby allowing us to use sentences to communicate our thoughts, some of which are true. But how do words and sentences get their referents and meanings? What are meanings? This course focuses on central developments in the philosophy of language throughout the twentieth century. Topics include theories of meaning and reference, speech acts, pragmatics, and conversational implicature.

HSP 131H:  Religious Disagreement

Description:
With religious diversity comes religious disagreement.  Christians, for example, believe in the existence of a personal God.  Buddhists don’t.  Some believe that salvation is only attainable through the death of Jesus Christ.   All non-Christians deny this.  These are deep disagreements (and especially important ones to the religious).   What is the best way to understand and respond to them?  Can more than one view be correct or epistemically reasonable?  Given that we all know of this diversity in religious belief, and given that we know other reasonable people disagree with us, how can we be rational in continuing to believe as we do?  Does such awareness mean that we have an intellectual obligation to abandon our religious views?  In this course we will explore such questions as we investigate religious diversity from an epistemological perspective.

HSP 131H:  The Nature of Rationality

Description:
Results in empirical psychology show that often we do not reason in conformance with the laws of probability and the laws of logic. If these divergences are due to our underlying reasoning competence, then one might wonder whether we are rational creatures, after all, since we reflexively think of rationality as being defined exactly in terms of these laws. Is it right, then, to question our rationality on the basis of these empirical results? How exactly do they bear on the status of our rationality? Can we learn anything about the nature of rationality by considering them? In this course we will explore such questions as we investigate the psychology of human reasoning and the nature of rationality.