UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO - STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
The Department of Computer Science & Engineering

CSE 410/510 & PHI 498: PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (Spring 2004)

Instructor:	Prof. William J. Rapaport
Times:	TTh 9:30 - 10:50 a.m.
Classroom:	O'Brian 109

Course Description:

What is philosophy? What is "the philosophy of X" (where X = things like: science, psychology, history, etc.)? What is computer science? What is science? Is computer science a science? If so, what is it a science of? Is it a science of computers? What is a computer? Is it a science of computation? What is computation? What is an algorithm? What is a procedure? What is a recipe? What are Church's and Turing's "theses"? What is "hypercomputation"? What is a computer program? What is the relation of a program to that which it models or simulates? What is simulation? Are programs (scientific) theories? What is an implementation? What is software? Can computer programs be copyrighted, or patented? Can computer programs be verified? What is the philosophy of artificial intelligence? What is AI? What is the relation of computation to cognition? Can computers think? What are the Turing Test and the Chinese Room Argument? What is computer ethics? Should we trust decisions made by computers? Should we build "intelligent" computers?

Prerequisites: None. But some familiarity with either computer science or philosophy would be helpful.

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