11106

PHIL 104 Introduction to Philosophy from a Multicultural Perspective

Daniel Berthold

. T . Th .

8:30 - 9:50 am

OLIN 201

HUM

This course is an introduction to such major themes in the history of philosophy as the nature of reality and our capacity to know it; issues of ethics and justice; and conceptions of how one should live. Readings will include selections from a diverse range of traditions, including Western, Hindu, Buddhist, Chinese, African, Native American, and feminist texts. Class size: 22

11422

PHIL 113 Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

Ariana Stokas

. T . Th .

11:50 - 1:10 pm

OLIN 205

HUM

Cross listed: Cognitive Science The course seeks to introduce students to philosophical thinking about education.  Course work centers around the close reading of primary texts in the history of ideas, with a focus on how these texts illuminate the meanings and significance of educational practice. We will draw from ontology, epistemology, aesthetics and ethics in our effort to understand the nature and purposes of education. We will engage questions such as: What is education? Is education something that occurs only in a school environment? Why do we create schools and does education, understood as an ontological entity, show us something about the nature of human existence? What is "teaching"? How does teaching differ from other social practices such as medicine, law, social work, and nursing? How does teaching differ from parenting and friendship? And what, or who, is a "teacher"? Should teachers be certain kinds of persons, with certain kinds of moral and intellectual sensibilities? What is worth knowing and studying? Posed differently, what is a "curriculum"? What is a "course of study"? Is the latter a body of facts to be memorized? A set of questions to be posed and contemplated? A conversation about how we perceive and understand the world? What are the grounds, rationales, and philosophies of life educators might appeal to in their response to such questions? And why might it be important to address such questions before teaching students, whether in schools, universities, or other sites? Texts include: Plato, The Republic, Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Rabindranath Tagore, Personality, John Dewey, Experience and Education, Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, and Paulo Freire, Pedagogy Of The Oppressed. Class size: 22

11221

PHIL 114 Introduction to Philosophy of Action

Kritika Yegnashankaran

M . W . .

1:30 - 2:50 pm

OLIN 308

HUM

Placing a leaf on my head seems different in kind from a leaf’s falling on my head. The first we might call an action, and the second something that merely happens to me. Distinguishing our actions from what merely happens to us has important consequences for our self-conception, the way others assess and react to us, and our legal fate, to name a few. But what distinguishes actions from mere happenings? And is that an exhaustive distinction, or are there phenomena in the middle, such as driving on autopilot or drumming one’s fingers? In this course, we will examine questions about what distinguishes actions from happenings, and whether action comes in degree. We will focus on four main kinds of philosophical views, those that emphasize: (1) causal history; (2) the role of the agent; (3) explanation and knowledge of action; (4) the qualitative aspects of action. Class size: 22

11159

PS 115 Introduction to Political Thinking

Roger Berkowitz

. . W . F

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 301

SSCI

(PS core course) Cross-listed: Philosophy From Plato to Hannah Arendt, great thinkers in the Western tradition have asked about the nature and practice of political action.   Thinking about politics is, knowingly or not, conducted against the background of this shared tradition. This is no less true of political thought that aims to break away from “the classics” than of political thought that finds in them a constant resource for both critical and constructive thinking. This course explores fundamental questions of politics through a core body of readings by thinkers including Plato, More, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, and Arendt.   Looking comparatively at texts from ancient to recent times, we will compare more “utopian” with more cynical or “realist” approaches to political thinking while reflecting upon key political concepts such as justice, democracy, and “the individual”. We will also explore such enduring questions as the relationship between the state and the individual; the conditions for peaceful political order; and the connection between morality and politics. Class size: 22

11655

PHIL 120 Introduction to Philosophy of Science

David Shein

M . W . .

3:10 - 4:30 pm

OLIN 203

HUM

Cross-listed: Science, Technology & Society In this course, we will attempt to come to an understanding of the nature and limits of science and scientific reasoning. Our approach will be thematic and will include the following: the demarcation problem (what distinguishes scientific theories from putatively non-scientific theories such as astrology and creationism?), the riddles of induction (what reason is there to think the future will resemble the past?), models of explanation (what makes an explanation scientific?), the underdetermination thesis (can evidence ever confirm or disconfirm a theory?), and the realism/anti-realism debate (does science tell us what the world is really like?). Authors to be read include: Carl Hempel, David Hume, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, WV Quine, Alan Sokal, Bas van Fraassen, and others. Class size: 22

11112

PHIL 207 Medieval Philosophy

Adam Rosen

M . W . .

1:30 - 2:50 pm

OLIN 201

HUM

Cross-listed: Medieval Studies Are faith and reason essentially antagonistic or might they require one another for their mutual perfection? What, then, are the powers and limits of faith and reason, both independently and in relation to one another? These questions were central to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosopher-theologians on whose work we will concentrate: Moses Maimonides, St. Thomas Aquinas, Abū Nasr al-Fārābi, and Avicenna (Abū ‘Alī al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā' ). Of particular interest will be: specifying the endemic failures of faith and reason and their consequent need of one another (e.g., faith immunized from reason becomes blind pietism, just as reason, insulated from faith, becomes irrational because it is unable to specify its limits, and so the nature of its conclusions); tracing the lineages of Plato and Aristotle in the Medieval tradition(s), especially with regard to the former’s conception of matter and the latter’s distinction between patient and agent intellect; and bringing into relief the peculiarity of the modern, especially Kantian, determination of the relation of theoretical and practical reason by establishing its contrast with Medieval determinations of the relation of knowledge and practice, i.e., relations between rational and ethical virtues. Additional topics will include: revelation and its bearing on reason, morality, and the pursuit of human perfection; differential accounts of harmonization with the divine (e.g., access to providence) and its conditions; the human good and the nature of evil; and whether and how religious devotion can survive genuine confrontation with the questions raised by multiple religions. Class size: 22

11656

HR 235 Dignity and Human Rights Traditions

Roger Berkowitz

. . W . . . . . . F

3:10 -4:30 pm 1:30 - 2:50 pm

OLIN 205 OLIN 204

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Political Studies, Philosophy We live at a time when the claim to human rights is both taken for granted and regularly disregarded. One reason for the disconnect between the reality and the ideal of human rights is that human rights have never been given a secure philosophical foundation. Indeed, many have argued that absent a religiously grounded faith in human dignity, there is no legal ground for human rights. Might it be that human rights are simply well-meaning aspirations without legal or philosophical foundation? And what is dignity anyway? Ought we to abandon talk about dignity and admit that human rights are groundless? Against this view, human rights advocates, international lawyers, and constitutional judges continue to speak of dignity as the core value of the international legal system. Indeed, lawyers in Germany and South Africa are developing a "dignity jurisprudence" that might guarantee human rights on the foundation of human dignity. Is it possible, therefore, to develop a secular and legally meaningful idea of dignity that can offer a ground for human rights? This class explores both the modern challenge to dignity and human rights as well as attempts to resuscitate a new and more coherent secular ideal of dignity as a legally valid guarantee of human rights. In addition to texts including Hannah Arendt's book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, we read legal cases, and documents from international law. Class size: 22

11109

PHIL 237 Symbolic Logic

William Griffith

. T . Th .

1:30 - 2:50 pm

ASP 302

MATC

Cross listed: Cognitive Science For over two millennia the fact that some deductive arguments are “valid” and the fact that we have an ability to recognize that fact (at least some of us and sometimes!) has been a subject of interest to philosophers, and later mathematicians. In this course students will learn to use several different symbolic systems, some developed many centuries apart, which have been created in order to formally test for the validity of arguments expressed in ordinary language of various levels of complexity. Beginning from the common notion of a valid argument the course progresses through: truth tables; a system of natural deduction for propositional logic, which is proven to be consistent and complete; Aristotelian logic - immediate inference, mediate inference, the square of opposition; Venn diagrams; monadic quantificational theory; general quantificational theory, including identity. At each level both the characteristics of the formal systems and the task of interpreting their schemata into English are emphasized. The course ends with a discussion of the extension of such work into higher orders of logic and the foundations of mathematics and the surprise (at the time) of Gödel’s incompleteness proof. No prerequisites. Open to students of any level. Class size: 16

11532

PHIL 251 Ethical Theory

William Griffith

M . W . .

3:10 - 4:30 pm

ASP 302

HUM

Cross-listed: Human Rights What is it to be a “moral” being? What is it that one might call the “moral dimension” of our lives? Filling out detailed answers to such questions obviously would require such key concepts as “good,” bad,” “evil,” ”happiness,” “the good life,” “virtue,” “wisdom,” “ought,” “right,” “duty,” “justice,” “responsibility,” etc. An inquiry into the meaning or use of such concepts and the epistemological status of statements which use them, (frequently called “judgments of value”), are issues classified by contemporary philosophers as “metaethical”, i.e., “about” ethics. These are distinct from the task of making (and perhaps arguing for, recommending that we live by) value judgments, e.g., “one ought never to rape,” “all humans have these rights,” “we ought not to kill animals for food, “this, in general, is how human beings ought to live,” etc., which is frequently called doing “normative ethics.” It might be described as philosophizing “within” ethics. Our readings and discussions will deal with both types of questions as we focus on some of the primary texts of four philosophers whose thoughts on these fundamental questions have had a major influence on western philosophical thought: Aristotle, Epictetus, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. We will also consider brief selections from other philosophers: Thomas Reid, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and A. J. Ayer. No Prerequisites. Open to students of any level. Class size: 20

11113

PHIL 263 The Philosophy of Race

Adam Rosen

. . W . F

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLINLC 115

HUM/DIFF

Cross-listed: Human Rights The major tasks of a philosophy of race include: identifying and accounting for historically and geographically diverse histories of racialization; clarifying the forms and normative significance of the injuries of invidious racialization; acknowledging the motivations for and evaluating the efficacy of critical reappropriations of racial identity; and orienting resistance to ongoing forms of racialized injustice. Our question will be, Is the normative purview of liberalism adequate to these tasks? In order to address this question, the course will be divided into three parts. The first part will be historical and diagnostic in character. We will establish the centrality of race to the history of politics, morality, and epistemology. Topics will include: the centrality of unfree and maligned racialized others to the articulation of political values such as freedom and individualism, moral values such as innocence and integrity, and social values such as gender, sexual, and class norms; the role of racialization in the history of colonialism and the birth of the modern state (i.e., biopolitics); the question of a hidden anthropology in major stands of moral universalism; and the epistemic implications of white privilege. The second part of the course will be exploratory and critical. We will pose a number of questions designed to disclose the limits of liberalism in regard to race. Topics will include: the value of a psychoanalytic framework for understanding lived experiences of and commitments to race; forms of recognitive injury (e.g., Orlando Patterson’s famous account of “soul murder”) and responses to it (e.g., Sartre’s notion of identificatory overcompensation) that fail to show up on liberalism’s radar; and the politics of affirmative racialization in anticolonial struggles. The third part of the course will be practically oriented. We will explore the merits and weaknesses of three major forms of resistance to racism: rights-based liberal universalism, class struggle, and cultural politics (e.g., hip-hop). Class size: 22

11533

PHIL 271 Topics in the Philosophy of Language

Robert Martin

. . W . F

10:10 - 11:30 am

OLIN 201

HUM

Cross listed: Cognitive Science We will study Saul Kripke's ground-breaking lectures Naming and Necessity, given at Princeton University in 1970.  For background we will read essays of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, John Searle and others. If time permits, we will read some of the recent literature on Naming and Necessity.  Prerequisites: one prior course in philosophy (preferably Symbolic Logic) and permission of the instructor. Class size: 22

11672

HR 328 Theories of Human Rights

Olivia Custer

. T . . .

1:30 - 3:50 pm

RKC 115

HUM

11421

PHIL / CLAS 362 Plato's Writing: Dialog and Dialectic

Thomas Bartscherer

. T . . .

3:10 - 5:30 pm

OLIN 305

HUM

Cross-listed: Literature, Philosophy Interpreters of Plato have often asked why he wrote in dialogue form, and the answers proposed have frequently appealed to Plato’s conception of dialectic, although the meaning of that term in his texts is itself a matter of considerable debate. In this course, we shall be examining Plato’s writings from both a philosophical and a literary perspective. Our main business will be close and careful reading of whole dialogues, paying particular attention to the hermeneutical implications of the dialogue form—including such features as dramatic setting, character, and the interrogative mode itself—and the conception of dialectic as it emerges both in and through Plato’s writing. Readings from Plato will include Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Meno, Phaedrus, Republic, and Sophist. Primary readings will be complemented by a sampling of secondary scholarship that illustrates the wide range of modern approaches to Plato. All readings will be in English. 

Class size: 15

11107

PHIL 368 The New Genetics: Ethical, Legal and Social Issues

Daniel Berthold

. T . . .

1:30 - 3:50 pm

RKC 200

HUM

Cross-listed: Human Rights, Science, Technology & Society An examination of a variety of ethical, legal, social, and scientific debates surrounding recent advances in genetics, especially technologies facilitated by the decoding of the human genome: genetic screening and testing, issues of justice (genetic discrimination and privacy issues), gene therapy, cloning, and transgenic agriculture (genetically modified crops). Prerequisites: previous courses in Philosophy and/or Biology. Class size: 15

11108

PHIL 371 The Philosophy of Kant

Olivia Custer

M . . . .

10:10 - 12:30 pm

ASP 302

HUM

Cross-listed: German Studies An introduction to one of the classic texts of western philosophy, Kant’s magnum opus, The Critique of Pure Reason. Prerequisite: a previous course in philosophy and permission of the instructor. Class size: 15

11222

PHIL 372 Philosophy of Biology: Conceptual Foundations of Darwinian Theory

Kritika Yegnashankaran

. T . . .

4:40 - 7:00 pm

OLIN 107

HUM

The lively, and at times acrimonious, debate between evolutionism and creationism continues, but we can get clearer on the terms of the debate only by understanding precisely what each position is committed to. In this course we will undertake an in-depth examination of the conceptual foundations of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. We will address issues such as: the ingredients for natural selection; the units and levels of selection; the role of teleological notions, especially that of adaptation; the distinction between explanations of origin and distribution; the individuation of biological categories and kinds; the domain of phenomena which the theory purports to explain and to which the theory can be applied; and the conditions under which the theory can be corroborated or falsified. Prerequisite: One course in either Philosophy or Biology. Class size: 15