James Conant

James Conant is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He received both his B.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1990) from Harvard University. He taught for nine years at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Chicago in 1999. He has published articles in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, among other areas, and on philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Frege, Carnap, Putnam, Cavell, Rorty, and McDowell, among others. He is currently working on three projects: a monograph on skepticism, a co-authored work (with Cora Diamond) on Wittgenstein, and a forthcoming collection of essays. He has edited two volumes of Hilary Putnam's papers and co-edited (with John Haugeland) one volume of Thomas Kuhn's papers.

CV (PDF)

Contact

office: Stuart Hall, Room 202
office hours: on leave
office phone: 773/702-6146
email: jconant@uchicago.edu

Selected Publications

• Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors (PDF Part One | Part Two)
• The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus (PDF)
• The Method of the Tractatus (PDF Part One | Part Two)
• On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy (PDF)
• On Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics (with Hilary Putnam)
  Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes > Vol. 70 (1996), pp. 243-265 (Link)
• Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use
  Philosophical Investigations Volume 21 Issue 3 Page 222-250, July 1998 (Link)
• Philosophy and Biography
  in Wittegnstein: Biography and Philosophy by James Carl Klagge (Link)
• In the Electoral Colony: Kafka in Florida
  Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2001), pp. 662-702 (Link)
• The Dialectic of Perspectivism, I
  Sats - Nordic Journal of Philosophy, Vol 6, No 2 (2005) (Link)
• The Dialectic of Perspectivism, II Sats - Nordic Journal of Philosophy, Vol 7, No 1 (2006). Link
• Kierkegaard's POSTSCRIPT and Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Teaching How to Pass from Disguised to Patent Nonsense
  Wittgenstein Studies 2/97 (Link)
• Mild Mono-Wittgensteinianism, Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond, edited by Alice Crary, M.I. T. Press, 2007 Link
• What 'Ethics' in the Tractatus is Not, in Religion and Wittgenstein's Legacy, edited by D.Z. Phillips, Ashgate Publishing, 2005. Link
• Co-authored (with Cora Diamond), On Reading the Tractatus Resolutely, in The Lasting Significance of Wittgenstein's Philosophy, edited by Max Kölbel and Bernhard Weiss, Routledge, 2004.Link
• Varieties of Skepticism, in Wittgenstein and Skepticism, edited by Denis McManus, Routledge Press, 2004. Link
• Nietzsche's Perfectionism: A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator, in Nietzsche's Postmoralism, edited by Richard Schacht, CUP, 2000. Part 1 Part 2
• Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell, in Richard Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, Blackwell, 2000. Part 1 Part 2
• Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder, The Yale Review, Vol. 79, No. 3 (1991). Link
• Must We Show What We Cannot Say? in The Senses of Stanley Cavell, edited by R. Fleming and M. Payne, Bucknell University Press, 1989. Link
• On Bruns, on Cavell, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, Spring 1991. Link
• The Concept of America, in Society, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2003. Link

Please see my CV (PDF) for a complete list of publications.

Recent Courses

21100/31301. Aesthetics: Philosophy, Photography, Film

Open to college and grad students. This is a course in both philosophy (in particular, that branch of philosophy known as aesthetics or the philosophy of art) and art history (in particular, the history of the theory of film and photography). We are concerned with a variety of interrelated and overlapping philosophical questions that arise in connection with photography and film. (V) Winter 2003.

21801/31801. Philosophy and Film

Open to college and grad students. The course will investigate some of the conditions and modes of visual presentation that make it possible for a viewer of a motion picture drama to become absorbed in what is experienced as an independent fictional narrative world. This will involve exploring questions such as the following: What is the difference between an objective and a subjective camera shot? How is a subjective camera shot attached to or associated with the point of view of someone in the world of a movie? What is an objective camera shot? Is it, as some say, a point of view on the world of a movie that is no one's point of view -- a view from nowhere? What could that mean? Is it possible to construct a fictional narrative movie world entirely out of subjective camera shots? Along the way, some attention will be given to some specific aesthetic questions (e.g., what does it mean to say a painting or a film is "realistic"), as well as more general philosophical issues such as the following: What is a point of view (and how, if at all, does it differ from a perspective)? What is a subjective (as opposed to an objective) point of view? Is the concept of an objective point of view a contradiction in terms? We will view a number of films that will help to illustrate and sharpen our discussion of the difficulties attending these issues. Some attention will be given to exploring the similarities and differences between the presentation of a fictional narrative world in film and in some of the other other visual and dramatic arts, most notably painting and theatre. Co-taught with Joel Snyder, Dept. of Art History. Autumn 2004.

21810/31810. Resemblance and Family Resemblance: Goethe, Galton and Wittgenstein.

Open to college and grad students. This course will critically examine and explore the possibility of forms of unity and their representation that do not fit into any of the categories of representation traditionally allowed for by philosophers -- such as the category of singular representation (such as intuitions or definite descriptions) or general representation (such as concepts or diagrams). The three main authors who explore the possibility of such anomalous forms of unity and their representation that we will discuss will be the German poet, philosopher and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the British psychologist, naturalist and theorist of photography, Francis Galton, and the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Co-taught with Joel Snyder. (A) Autumn 2006.

29601. Intensive Track Seminar

Open to college students. Autumn 2007.

31890. Resemblance and Family Resemblance: Goethe, Galton and Wittgenstein

Open to grad students and college students with consent of instructor. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor.This course will explore the similarities and differences in Goethe's conception of archetypal representations, Galton's understanding of composite photographs, and Wittgenstein's remarks on family resemblance and the perception of aspects. (A) Autumn 2003.

34110. Sellars

Open to grad students and college students with consent of instructor. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor. Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. We begin with a brief survey of the positivist and empiricist background of his thought (C.I. Lewis, Carnap). We read some of his eminar papers, especially "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," and discuss recent controversies surrounding his work (Rorty, Brandom, McDowell, and others). Co-taught by Michael Kremer Winter 2004.

50500. Non-Discursive Representation from Goethe to Wittgenstein

Open to grad students. The seminar will be on the topic of non-discursive representation in the history of German thought from Kant to Wittgenstein. The topic emerged as a central issue on the intellectual agenda of post-Kantian philosophy, aesthetics, and scientific theory in response to considerations put forward by Kant in two notoriously difficult paragraphs, 76 and 77, of his Critique of Judgment (1790). In this series of dense reflections, Kant tries to refine and clarify his earlier distinction between discursive understanding and what he, again, alternately refers to as an "intuitive understanding" or an "intellectual intuition" ,-- types of cognition which, although thinkable (and perhaps attributable to a divine intellect), are not available to human intellect. These pages of Kant's, intended to establish the inevitability of his earlier distinction between two mutually exclusive forms of representation, had the opposite effect: his characterization of a kind of thinking not supposed to be possible for humans, instead proved immensely suggestive to subsequent generations of philosophers, poets, and scientists, starting with Goethe, who sought to characterize the fundamental sort of insight to which their own endeavors aspired. This pivotal Kantian demarcation -- between discursive representation and intuition -- is vigorously contested in the work of the major idealist philosophers who endeavored to think beyond Kant's strictures on human cognition. The seminar will run for two quarters, Fall and Winter. co-taught with David Wellbery. (V). Autumn 2006, Winter 2007.

51704. The Philosophy of Visual Moderism

Open to grad students. Much of the reading for this course will be work by Michael Fried. Other material to be discussed will be by Denis Diderot, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Stanley Cavell. Persons expecting to take Fried's spring seminar are stongly encouraged to enroll in this seminar as well. See the announcement below. The Committee on Social Thought announces a Spring Quarter 2005 Graduate Seminar Thursdays, 3-5:50 Modern Photography and Other Themes Instructor: Michael Fried The guest professor for this seminar will be Michael Fried from Johns Hopkins University. The topics will be Fried's aesthetic theory, art criticism and art history, especially but not exclusively his views on photography. James Conant, Robert Pippin. Winter 2005.

53900. Workshop: Wittgenstein

Open to grad students. Prerequisites: Consent of instructor. This Workshop meets over three quarters.
Co-taught with Michael Kremer. Winter 2005, Autumn 2006; James Conant . Autumn 2006, Winter 2007, Spring 2007, Autumn 2007.

57601. Topics in Kantian Philosophy

This course will be devoted to a study of selected portions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and certain parallel episodes in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. The portions of the course devoted to Kant will focus on his views on the relation between sensibility and understanding (especially as articulated in the Transcendental Deduction), and those devoted to analytic philosophy will focus on how those Kantian views are inherited, articulated and transformed in the writings of certain analytic philosophers (especially Moritz Schlick, C. I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell). The aim of the course is both to use certain central texts of analytic philosophy to illuminate some the central aspirations of Kant's theoretical philosophy and to use certain central Kantian texts in which those aspirations were first pursued to illuminate the direction in which one central current of the analytic tradition in epistemology and philosophy of mind has been - and still is - traveling. Open to grad students. Autumn 2003.

52200. Late Kuhn.

PQ: Enrollment -- including 'R' enrollment -- is restricted to graduate students in Philosophy and CFS except by explicit permission of the instructors. An advanced graduate seminar on the late works of T.S. Kuhn -- that is, works from the early 80s through the mid 90s. Students should already be quite familiar with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and at least some of the philosophical discussions and controversies that followed it (including Kuhn's own essays in The Essential Tension) J. Haugeland, J. Conant. Winter 2001.

34400. Søren Kierkegaard(=SCTH 39400, FNDL 265).

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. After selected introductory readings to acquaint students with the idea of a pseudonymous author, we engage in a careful reading of this text. J. Lear, J. Conant. Autumn 2001.

53700. Varieties of Skepticism.

This seminar is devoted to an investigation of different varieties of skepticism--different both with respect to philosophical topic (external world, other minds. meaning, etc.) and with respect to the logic of the skeptical problematic (Cartesian, Humean, Kantian, etc.)--and the different varieties of response they have engendered in contemporary philosophy. Readings will be from Descartes, Kant, G.E. Moore, C.I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Strawson, Barry Stroud, Michael Williams, John McDowell, Stanley Cavell, Charles Travis, among others. J. Conant, H. Putnam. Autumn 2001.

34100. Early Analytic Philosophy-I: Frege.

This is the first part of a two-part sequence. Students may take the first part without taking the second; but only students enrolled in the first part may take the second part for credit. Part I furnishes an overview of Frege's philosophy and related aspects of Russell's philosophy, with special attention to Frege's conception of logic, his distinctions between concept and object and sense and reference, his critique of psychologism, his context principle, and his attempt to demonstrate that mathematical truths are analytic a priori, along with a brief look at Russell's logical atomism, his account of the unity of the proposition, and his theory of judgement---in short: everything you need to know in order to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Secondary reading includes articles on Frege and/or Russell by Thomas Ricketts, Joan Weiner, Warren Goldfarb, Gareth Evans, John McDowell, Peter Geach, Peter Hylton, Leonard Linsky, and Anthony Palmer, among others. J. Conant. Winter 2002.

34200. Early Analytic Philosophy-II: Early Wittgenstein.

This is the second part of a two-part sequence. Only students who have enrolled in Part I may take this course for credit. Part II furnishes an overview of the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein, with special attention to the critique of Frege and Russell, the structure and the method of the Tractatus as a whole, its relation to the writings of the members of The Vienna Circle, the central exegetical controversies presently surrounding the work, and the transition from the Tractatus to Wittgenstein's later work. Secondary reading includes articles by Moritz Schlick, Frank Ramsey, Rudolf Carnap, Hide Ishiguro, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch, Thomas Ricketts, Peter Hacker, Peter Geach, and Elizabeth Anscombe, among others. J. Conant. Spring 2002.

43920. Action and Perception.

Open only to grad students. The course will be devoted to exploring and assessing John McDowell's treatment of problems in the philosophy of perception (especially as set forth in his already classic work Mind and World) and the possibility of a parallel treatment of problems in the philosophy of action. In addition to some texts by McDowell and some selections from Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, the seminar will focus mostly on writings on perception and/or action by Elizabeth Anscombe, Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, Jennifer Hornsby, Brian O'Shaughnessy, John Searle, Michael Thompson, and Wilfrid Sellars. In the Winter Quarter, the course will be conducted by James Conant and Robert Pippin; in the Spring Quarter, the course will consist mostly of presentations of recent work on the philosophy of action by John McDowell and discussion of those presentations. Although the course meetings will be distributed over two quarters, it will count for only one quarter of credit. Students who wish to take the course for credit must attend the entire two-quarter sequence of the course Robert Pippin and James Conant . Winter 2007.

57601. Analytical Kantianism and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

This will be both a graduate seminar on Kant and on the reception of the Kantian philosophy in analytic philosophy. It will be devoted both to an intensive study of selected portions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and to a brief and selective survey of some of the most difficult, influential and rewarding texts in epistemology and philosophy of mind in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. The course is based on the conviction that teaching these two sorts of texts together will allow each to illuminate the other. The portion of the course concerned directly with Kant will be devoted to an intensive study of selected portions of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The focus of the course will be on the Transcendental Analytic and especially the Transcendental Deduction, but some effort will be made to situate those portions of the text with respect to the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Dialectic. The portion of the course concerned with the inheritance of Kantian philosophy in the analytic philosophical tradition will begin by briefly looking at the views of Moritz Schlick, the central figure of Vienna Circle and a leading exponent of early logical positivism in order to get some sense of the sort of view and the sort of reading of Kant to which subsequent figures in the analytic tradition were reacting. We will then proceed to read carefully the following four texts: the first three chapters of C. I. Lewis's Mind and the World Order, most of Wilfrid Sellars's classic essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (EPM), Robert Brandom's Study Guide to EPM, and John McDowell's lectures Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality and related writings. We will also have occasion to look briefly at related writing by these authors and by some of the contemporary authors with whom they were concerned to disagree. Conant. Autumn 2003.

31100. Aesthetics: Philosophy and the Visual Arts (=ArtH 269/369).

The course will examine specific philosophical issues that arise in connection with painting, film, and photography, with special attention to questions of meta-aesthetics (what makes something a work of art?), normative aesthetics (what makes something a good work of art?), the theory of aesthetic representation (what is it for a painting, or a photograph, or a film to represent something?), and aesthetic realism (what does it mean to say that, e.g., a painting is realistic?; and is its being so a source of aesthetic value?). Readings will include writings by Ernst Gombrich, Denis Diderot, Michael Fried, Nelson Goodman, Erwin Panofsky, Charles Baudelaire, P. H. Emerson, Paul Strand, Rudolf Arnheim, V. Pudovkin, Andrew Basin, Siegfried Kracauer, Victor Perkins, and Stanley Cavell. J. Conant, J.Snyder. Spring 2001.