BERKELEY CONNECT: PHILOSOPHY
The Berkeley Connect program opens up the extraordinary resources of the university to you: the extraordinary
students on our campus. By joining, you will become part of a community of like-minded faculty, mentors, and students
that will provide a supportive environment in which to exchange and discuss ideas and goals. Berkeley Connect will help
you to make the most of your time at the university as you learn more about the major in Philosophy. We’re excited to
get to know you!
[photo attached: “Philosophy photo”]
Message from the Director
Program Description
Faculty
Berkeley Connect Mentors
Syllabus
Schedule
How to Sign Up
Contact Us
Links & Resources
MESSAGE FROM THE DIRECTOR
Have you been enjoying your philosophy classes but wish you had an opportunity to develop closer relationships with
professors, graduate students, and your peers? Do you have questions about how to get the most out of your
experience in the Philosophy Department – whether and when to go to office hours, how to structure the paper-writing
process, how to think about which classes to take – but are unsure who to ask? Are you interested in why philosophy
uses the methods it uses, and how these methods contribute to our understanding? If so, Berkeley Connect in
Philosophy is specially designed for you.
Berkeley Connect is an opportunity to connect with professors, graduate students, and your peers, while receiving
mentoring and reflecting on philosophy as a discipline.
[photo attached: “Buchak photo 1”]
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Berkeley Connect links undergraduate students with experienced mentors in Philosophy. These mentors lead small
groups of 10-20 students in regular meetings; they also meet with students one-on-one to provide guidance and advice.
The core of the Berkeley Connect program is a one-credit, pass-fail course that is designed to create a community of
students with similar intellectual interests. There is no homework associated with Berkeley Connect: no exams, no
papers, no quizzes. Instead, small group meetings focus on sharing ideas and learning new skills within the Philosophy
major as a way to foster friendships and provide a supportive intellectual community for Berkeley undergraduates.
The only requirement for joining Berkeley Connect in Philosophy is that you have an interest in the field of study. You
do not have to be a major in order to participate! Undeclared freshmen and sophomores are welcome, along with
entering junior transfers and juniors and seniors who have declared the major.
Every semester, Berkeley Connect sponsors a wide range of activities and events for participating students. They
include:
 small-group meetings led by your mentor;
 one-on-one meetings with your mentor;
 special events, including informal lectures by professors and guest speakers, and panels on
career options, graduate school admissions, and other topics;

and visits to Berkeley resources.
At the heart of Berkeley Connect is the relationship between you and your mentor. The Berkeley Connect mentors are
advanced graduate students or recent PhDs in Philosophy, who are chosen both for their demonstrated commitment to
undergraduates and for their scholarly achievement. They are dedicated to providing the kind of close-knit community
and one-on-one attention that can be hard to find at a large university.
When you sign up for Berkeley Connect, you will join one of several small groups of participants in Philosophy. Your
small group will be led by your mentor, and will meet every other week during the semester for an hour-long dinner
discussion sessions. Discussions will focus on key intellectual issues within Philosophy as well as key skills you need to
succeed in the major. Above all, the small groups will focus on building connections among students, so that each group
becomes a supportive community for all participants.
You will also meet with your mentor one-on-one at least twice during the semester, once to get acquainted, and a
second time just before Tele-Bears, to discuss your plans for completing your major. Your mentor also has office hours
every other week, during which you are free to show up and ask questions, talk over your day or your week, discuss
what you are learning in class, or just have an informal conversation.
FACULTY
Professor Lara Buchak, Faculty Director, buchak@berkeley.edu
Lara Buchak’s primary research interests are in decision, game, and rational choice theory. Her work focuses on how an
individual ought to take risk into account. She is also interested in the philosophy of religion, and she has written on the
question of what faith is, and under what circumstances it is rational to have faith. Her core undergraduate courses at
Berkeley are Philosophy of Religion (Phil 11) and Philosophy and Game Theory (Phil 141).
Professor Buchak is excited to be directing Berkeley Connect because she thinks Berkeley students are some of the best
in the world and she wants to create opportunities for faculty and students to interact more, and for students to feel at
home in the Philosophy department.
[see attachment: “Buchak photo 2”]
Professor Wesley Holliday, Assistant Director, wesholliday@berkeley.edu
Professor Holliday's main areas of research and teaching are in epistemology and logic. Among the courses he teaches
are Knowledge and Its Limits (Phil 4), Modal Reasoning (Phil 143), and Intermediate Logic (Phil 140A). Professor Holliday
is also an advisor to the undergraduate Philosophy Forum, the undergraduate philosophy journal, Harvest Moon, and
the undergraduate New Crop Philosophy Prize. He is thrilled to have the opportunity to interact with undergraduates
through the Berkeley Connect program, to learn from their fresh perspectives on his discipline, and to help introduce
them to the intellectual adventures of philosophy.
[see attachment: “Holliday photo”]
BERKELEY CONNECT MENTORS
Zack Bruce, zbruce@berkeley.edu
Zack Bruce graduated from UCLA in 2003, and is currently working on a Ph.D. with Professors Barry Stroud and Daniel
Warren. His main interests are in early modern philosophy, especially Descartes. He is completing a dissertation on
Descartes’s epistemic program, modal theory, and scientific method. He also has research interests in epistemology and
philosophy of religion.
Zack is very excited to be a Berkeley Connect teaching fellow. This appointment represents a culmination of his teaching
career at UC Berkeley. As a GSI, he has emphasized the importance of developing and honing critical thinking skills and
living the ‘examined life’. He is thrilled to have the opportunity to mentor students who are just beginning their
philosophical journey at Berkeley.
[see attachment: “Bruce photo”]
Michael Rieppel, mrieppel@berkeley.edu
Michael Rieppel completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in May 2013 under the direction of Professors John Campbell, John
MacFarlane, and Line Mikkelsen. His philosophical interests center on the philosophy of language, the theory of
meaning, philosophical logic, and metaphysics. He also maintains an active interest in the history of early analytic
philosophy, especially Frege. In his dissertation, he investigates the semantics of predicative expressions, with a
particular focus on the question of how we ought to think about quantification into predicate position (as in e.g. 'She's
everything one might hope to be: healthy, wealthy, and wise.').
[see photo attachment: “Rieppel photo”]
Katrina Winzeler, kwinzeler@berkeley.edu
Katrina Winzeler graduated from Tufts in 2003 with a B.A. in Philosophy and Biology, and is currently working on a Ph.D.
with Professors Geoffrey Lee and Sherrilyn Roush. She is interested in the mind, which means that her philosophical
interests span from Philosophy of Mind (consciousness, mental causation) to Philosophy of Science (explanation and
reduction, physics, biology -especially evolutionary theory) to Philosophy of Psychology, and beyond. She is writing a
dissertation on mental disorder and psychotherapeutic interventions. She has specific interests in mood disorders and
addiction. She is especially interested in, and vexed by, the relations between neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy
when it comes to psychopathology.
She likes to dabble in the philosophy of physics, quantum mechanics, multiverses, cosmology, and the concept of
entropy. Outside of her academic interests, she loves the natural world, both listening to and writing music, a good
mystery, and living at the level of non-reflective phenomenal experience whenever she gets the chance.
Katrina has always enjoyed the experience of working closely with students. She thinks that it is energizing to facilitate
the navigation of difficult philosophical texts, ideas, and subsequent writing. Moreover, though, she tries to infuse her
teaching with as much mentoring as she can fit in, helping students discover more about how Philosophy fits into their
lives, working together to recognize the goals that are important to them, and being a source of support and a soundingboard. She’s excited that she can focus on these tasks much more overtly through Berkeley Connect.
[see photo attachment: “Winzeler photo”]
TENTATIVE SYLLABUS
Week 1: Meeting your faculty I
Large group meeting: panel with 4 faculty.
Discussion questions: What made you become a philosopher? Which philosopher do you most admire? What are you
currently working on? What is you major past research about? What’s the value of philosophy?
One-on-one mentoring meeting: Initial meeting, getting to know you.
Week 2. Being a student in the Philosophy Department
Small group meeting
Discussion questions: What are the challenges of speaking in class or interacting with faculty? How do I navigate going
to office hours? How can I make the most out of my time in class? What have I been wondering about concerning
academic life but am not sure who to ask?
Week 3: What is philosophy?
Small group meeting.
Discussion questions: What is philosophy? What makes a question or problem philosophical? Why are some areas
included in philosophy and not others? What can I tell my parents or friends about what philosophy is and what I study?
Comparison of short passages from Plato, Descartes, Wittgenstein, contemporary writers (e.g. David Lewis).
Week 4. Study break and mentoring
One-on-one mentoring meeting: Planning your academic future, selecting courses.
Study break with faculty.
Week 5. Reading and Research
Small group meeting.
How to read, analyze, criticize a philosophical argument, using examples. How to do reading for class efficiently and
with understanding. How to do research with the available technology (jstor, google scholar, SEP, philpapers etc.). How
to better engage with what is going on in class.
Week 6. The writing process I
Large group meeting, led by Professor Niko Kolodny
Week 7. The writing process II
Large group meeting, led by Professor Niko Kolodny
Week 8. Working habits & the writing process
Small group meeting
Discussion questions: how should I write a paper, from start to finish? What techniques have worked for me in writing
philosophy papers? How should I interpret comments on papers? Discuss challenges with philosophy coursework and
methods for overcoming them. What is confusing about what is expected of me in writing papers?
One-on-one mentoring meeting: writing papers, working habits, or topic of mentee’s choice.
Week 9. Meeting your faculty II
Large group meeting: panel with 4 faculty.
Discussion questions: what is your technique and working habits? How do you come up with a topic to write about?
How have you gotten from being an undergrad to where you are now? Do you have advice for undergraduates about
working habits?
Week 10. Why does philosophy use the methods it uses?
Small group meeting.
Discussion questions: What methods does philosophy use? How are these like and unlike the methods of other
disciplines? Why are the standards for papers what they are? Do they advance discovery or are they arbitrary?
Week 11. Does philosophy ever make progress?
Small group meeting
Discussion of progress in philosophy.
Week 12. What can I do with my degree?
Large group meeting: panel with Berkeley Connect staff; also with those with philosophy degrees that have gone on to do
something else. Statistics and anecdotes. How to think about one’s career.
Week 13, Group-specific sections
Small group meeting: specific tracks.
Upper-level: How should I think about what to do with my life and whether to go on with philosophy? What is graduate
school like? How do I prepare?
Transfers: How can I continue to adjust to the workload at Berkeley? What are my specific challenges?
Lower-level: How should I structure the courses I take over the next few years?
Study break with faculty.
Week 14. How has philosophy changed your outlook?
Small group meeting
What difference has philosophy made in how you think or what you believe? About, e.g., religious beliefs, moral
questions, what it takes to know something?
SCHEDULE
In the spring semester, the following sections of Berkeley Connect are available in Philosophy:
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Section 1, CCN xxxxx, Mon 6-7 PM (lower division)
Section 2, CCN xxxxx, Mon 7-8 PM (lower division)
Section 3, CCN xxxxx, Tues 5-6 PM (juniors/seniors)
Section 4, CCN xxxxx, Tues 6-7 PM (juniors/seniors)
Section 5, CCN xxxxx, Tues 7-8 PM (junior transfers)
Section 6, CCN xxxxx, Weds 5-6 PM (junior transfers)
HOW TO SIGN UP
To participate in Berkeley Connect in Philosophy, you enroll in a designated section of Philosophy
98/198 (one unit of Directed Group Study, taken on a Pass/Not Pass basis). Many students chose to
enroll for more than one semester. Participation is NOT restricted to declared majors.
To sign up, enroll in a Berkeley Connect section via TeleBears when course registration opens. Please
see the Berkeley Connect sections listed above under “Schedule.”
**Be sure that you are enrolling in a section of Philosophy 98 or 198 that is labeled Berkeley Connect.
**Read the schedule notes carefully—different sections are designated as primarily for lower-division
(freshmen and sophomores), upper-division (juniors and seniors), or junior transfer students.
If you are interested in participating in Berkeley Connect, but course registration is not currently open,
you can click on Sign Up! to fill out an interest form, and you will be sent more details when the next
semester’s information becomes available.
CONTACT US
Please see our FAQs. If you have additional questions about Berkeley Connect in Philosophy, please
contact:
Professor Lara Buchak, buchak@berkeley.edu, (510) 296-5932
You can also contact the central Berkeley Connect office at berkeleyconnect@berkeley.edu or (510)
664-4182.
LINKS & RESOURCES
Philosophy Department website: philosophy.berkeley.edu