11490

PHIL 118   Human Nature

Kritika Yegnashankaran

M . W . .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

OLIN 205

HUM

Cross-listed:  Human Rights;  Science, Technology & Society   Is there a human nature? Does it matter? An ancient tradition claims that we have a detailed set of inborn capabilities and limitations, rich in implications for how we can live our lives and organize society. An opposing tradition emphasizes plasticity and indeterminacy; at the limit, it pictures us as "blank slates," ready to form ourselves or to be formed by society. What remains of this debate once we refine the claims of each side? If there is a human nature, what is it, who can speak with authority about it, and what implications does it have for changing what we are? If there isn’t a human nature, does this more freely license the genetic and technological development of what we are? We will investigate these and other questions in the course through an interdisciplinary mix of readings from philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology, and other fields.   Class size: 25

 

11491

PHIL 120   Intro to Philosophy of Science

David Shein

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 204

HUM

Cross-listed: Science, Technology & Society (core course)   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: 25

 

11489

PHIL 122   "Why" Philosophy

Ruth Zisman

. T . Th .

11:50 am -1:10 pm

ASP 302

HUM

Why? It is one of the first questions that we learn to ask and one of the last questions we find ourselves asking. Within its utterance one can hear the perpetual human quest for knowledge, understanding, and truth, for reason, ground, and cause, for warrant and explanation. To ask “why” of the world is to refuse to take the world as a given. Indeed, to ask “why” of the world is itself to engage in the act of philosophical thinking—to demand analysis, reflection, and thought. The history of philosophy can, in fact, be read as orbiting around a series of important “why” questions: Why being and not non-being? Why good and not evil? Why suffering? Why death? Why know? Why question? Why write? Why philosophize? This course will attempt to explore these questions and the way in which they are both posed and answered throughout the history of philosophy. Texts will be drawn from the following authors: Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, and Butler.

Class size: 25

 

11504

PS / PHIL 167   Foundations of the Law

Roger Berkowitz

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

ASP 302

HUM

Cross-listed:  Human Rights , Political Studies  Corporate executives hire high-priced lawyers to flout the law with impunity. Indigent defendants are falsely convicted, and even executed for crimes they did not commit. We say that law is the institutional embodiment of justice. And yet, it is equally true that law, as it is practiced, seems to have little connection to justice. As the novelist William Gaddis writes: “Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you have the law.” This course explores the apparent disconnect between law and justice. Can contemporary legal systems offer justice? Can we, today, still speak of a duty to obey the law? Is it possible for law to do justice?  Through readings of legal cases as well as political, literary, and philosophical texts, we seek to understand the problem of administering justice as it emerges in the context of contemporary legal institutions. Texts will include Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of a Metaphysic of Morals,  Herman Melville, Billy Budd, and selections from Dostoevsky, Twain, Melville, Plato, Blackstone, Holmes, Milton, Kant, and others.  Class size: 22

 

11492

PHIL 230   Philosophy and the Arts

Garry Hagberg

. T . Th .

3:10 pm -4:30 pm

OLIN 205

HUM

This course explores the ways that philosophers (and philosophically engaged critics) have approached issues concerning the nature and value of art.  After a discussion of Plato’s influential account of representation and the place of art in society, we will turn to questions raised by painting, photography and film, and music.  From there, we will turn to broader topics that cut across various art forms: Are serious (or “high”) and popular (or “low”) art to be understood and evaluated differently?  How do we evaluate works of art, and why do we so often disagree on their value?  And what, if anything, do the various items and activities that we classify as “art” have in common?  Readings include Hume and Kant on taste,  Stanley Cavell on the moving image, and Theodore Adorno and Walter Benjamin on mass culture.  Class size: 25

 

11493

PHIL 237   Symbolic Logic

William Griffith

M . W . .

10:10am - 11:30 am

ASP 302

MATC

Cross listed:  Mind, Brain & Behavior  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

 

11494

PHIL 247   The First Person Perspective:

Philosophy of Mind

Kritika Yegnashankaran

M . W . .

1:30 pm -2:50 pm

OLIN 101

HUM

Cross-listed:  Mind, Brain & Behavior  The philosophy of mind addresses questions regarding the nature of the mind-brain relation, mental representation, and conscious awareness, to name a few. The dominant trend in contemporary philosophy of mind is to pursue these questions in close alliance with empirical sciences, such as psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The result is typically a mechanistic and reductive picture of the mind, one on which the mind is just one arena among many in which causal factors operate to produce effects. However, some philosophers question whether a mechanistic picture of the mind can adequately accommodate our first person perspective, that is, what it feels like from the inside to have a mind and navigate the world with it. In this course, we will address the question of whether mechanistic accounts of the mind can accommodate our first person perspective by focusing on three main topics: the qualitative or phenomenological dimension of experience; our knowledge of our own attitudes; and our engagement in mental action.  Class size: 20

 

11495

PHIL 251   Ethical Theory

William Griffith

. T . Th .

1:30 pm -2:50 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

 

11496

PHIL 256   Environmental Ethics

Daniel Berthold

M . W . .

10:10am - 11:30am

OLIN 301

HUM

Cross-listed: Environmental & Urban Studies, Human Rights, Science, Technology & Society, Social Policy   The course will explore a variety of ethical issues surrounding the relation of human beings to their environment. We will look at several far‑reaching critiques of the anthropocentric character of traditional moral paradigms by deep ecologists, ecofeminists, social ecologists, ecotheologians, and others who argue in different ways for fundamentally new accounts of the moral standing of nature and the ethical duties of humans to non‑human creatures and things. While we will concentrate on contemporary authors and debates, we will begin by looking at the precedents and origins of the contemporary scene in such nineteenth‑century writers as Henry Salt, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and E. P. Evans, and early twentieth‑century writers like Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Rachel Carson. Throughout our discussion of opposing theoretical constructs, we will give attention to the implications for social policy, legal practice, and political action. Class size: 20

 

11499

PHIL 302   Philosophy Research Seminar

Kritika Yegnashankaran

. T . . .

4:40 pm -7:00 pm

RKC 200

HUM

An intensive advanced seminar required of all philosophy majors in their junior year. A problem in contemporary philosophy is carefully selected, exactingly defined, and thoroughly researched; an essay or article is written addressing the problem, going through numerous revisions as a result of class responses, faculty guidance, and further research; the article is formally presented to the seminar, followed by discussion and debate; and the article in its completed form is submitted to an undergraduate or professional journal of philosophy or to an undergraduate conference in philosophy. The seminar integrates the teaching and practice of writing into the study of the subject matter of the seminar. Emphasis will be placed on the art of research; the development, composition, organization, and revision of analytical prose; the use of evidence to support an argument; strategies of interpretation and analysis of texts; and the mechanics and art of style and documentation. This course is required of all junior Philosophy majors.  Class size: 15

 

11498

PHIL 325   Socrates: Man, Myth, Monster

Thomas Bartscherer

. T . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 304

HUM

Cross-listed: Literature  In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates claims to lack self-knowledge, suggesting that he does not know whether he is "a monster more complicated and savage than Typhon or a tamer and simpler creature, with a share in a divine and gentle nature." The identity and character of Socrates, which Plato here suggests is a mystery to the man himself, has been a persistent puzzle. The earliest portraits we have of Socrates are strikingly incompatible and have inspired widely divergent interpretations of the man, his philosophy, and his significance through to the present day. In this course, we will study primary ancient sources on which our knowledge of Socrates is based—including Aristophanes' Clouds, Xenophon's Socratic texts, several Platonic dialogues, and selections from Aristotle— as well as a number of exemplary texts from the modern and contemporary reception and interpretation of Socrates (including Nietzsche, Vlastos, Kofman, Nehamas, Hadot and others). Our investigation will aim to give due consideration to the philosophical, literary and historical questions that together constitute the enigma that is Socrates. All readings will be in English. Class size: 15

 

11500

PHIL 385   Philosophy of Wittgenstein

Garry Hagberg

. . W . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 304

HUM

A first reading of major works of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Readings: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Blue Book, and The Philosophical Investigations. This course fulfills the single-philosopher requirement for junior philosophy majors.

Class size: 15

 

11501

PHIL 399   Kierkegaard

Daniel Berthold

M . . . .

1:30 pm -3:50 pm

OLIN 304

HUM

An examination of a variety of Soren Kierkegaard's aesthetic, psychological, and theological texts. We will investigate the portrait of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions of existence; the critique of systematic philosophical discourse; the existentialist psychology of inwardness; the religious categories of absurdity, paradox, and offense; and the nature of language and authorship. Readings will be drawn from such pseudonymous works as Either / Or (Victor Eremita), Repetition (Constantine Constantius), Fear and Trembling (Johannes de Silentio), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Johann Climacus), Training in Christianity and The Sickness Unto Death (Anti-Climacus), as well as some of the sermons or ‘Edifying Discourses’ written under Kierkegaard’s own name. We will also read a variety of writers who have engaged Kierkegaard’s authorship in ways central to the several projects of modernity and postmodernity, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Sylviane Agacinski (and other feminist commentators).  Class size: 15