Matthew Boyle is Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor of Humanities and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago. He works on topics in the philosophy of mind, especially self-knowledge, the nature of rationality, and some questions about the role of rationality in perception and action. He also writes on topics in the history of philosophy, with a particular focus on the works of Immanuel Kant, although he also has interests in a variety of other figures, including Aristotle, Aquinas, Fichte, Hegel, and Sartre. He is the author of Transparency and Reflection: A Study of Self-Knowledge and the Nature of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2024) and the editor of Reason and Nature: New Essays on Themes from John McDowell (Harvard University Press, 2022). A list of his articles is available on his PhilPapers page.
Before moving to the University of Chicago in 2016, Boyle was Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He has held visiting positions at the Universität Leipzig, Germany, and the Universität Basel, Switzerland. He has been the recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Rhodes Scholarship. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and a BPhil from Oxford University.
Recent Courses
PHIL 50113 The Concept of World and Its Vulnerability
We will be interested in the special and problematic notion of an attitude toward the world as a whole, and in some questions that arise in contexts where people face what they experience as the end of their world or its vulnerability to destruction. Readings will include texts from Freud, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, as well as more contemporary readings from Cora Diamond, Jonathan Lear, Brian O’Shaughnessy, and others.
Permission of instructor required for grad students not in Philosophy or Social Thought.
PHIL 27500/37500 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
This will be a careful reading of what is widely regarded as the greatest work of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Our principal aims will be to understand the problems Kant seeks to address and the significance of his famous doctrine of "transcendental idealism". Topics will include: the role of mind in the constitution of experience; the nature of space and time; the relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of objects; how causal claims can be justified by experience; whether free will is possible; the relation between appearance and reality; the possibility of metaphysics. (B) (IV)
PHIL 27000 History of Philosophy III: Kant and the 19th Century
The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy. We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing specifically on the influence of Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy and its lasting influence on discussions of ethics and political philosophy. We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he announces his project of grounding all ethical obligation in the very idea of a free will. We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life". We will conclude with an examination of some important challenges to the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical and political theory: Karl Marx’s re-interpretation of the idea of freedom in the economic sphere; Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill’s radicalizations of the ideas of political liberty and equality; and the appropriation and critique of the Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom by writers on racial oppression including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.
PHIL 51312 Problems in the Philosophy of Emotion
This will be an exploratory seminar on some problems about what emotions are and what role they play in our lives. We will consider questions about how to define the general category of emotions; about the intentionality of emotions; the relations between emotion, perception, and judgment; the connections of emotion with embodiment; the relation of emotions to time and to human sociality; and other topics as time permits. We will give particular consideration to some emotions of which there has recently been interesting philosophical discussion, notably anger, shame, love, and grief. (I) and (II)
Permission of instructor required for graduate students not in Philosophy or Social Thought.
PHIL 27000 History of Philosophy III: Kant and the 19th Century
The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy. We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing specifically on the influence of Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy and its lasting influence on discussions of ethics and political philosophy. We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he announces his project of grounding all ethical obligation in the very idea of a free will. We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life". We will conclude with an examination of some important challenges to the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical and political theory: Karl Marx’s re-interpretation of the idea of freedom in the economic sphere; Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill’s radicalizations of the ideas of political liberty and equality; and the appropriation and critique of the Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom by writers on racial oppression including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.
PHIL 57504 Kant’s Critique of Judgment
This will be a study of Kant’s third and final Critique, his Critique of Judgment. We will attempt to survey they book as a whole, including Kant’s influential account of the nature of judgments of beauty and sublimity, as well as his theory of “teleological” judgment and its place in our understanding of the natural world. We will also seek to comprehend and assess Kant’s claim that these studies constitute essential contributions to a critique of our cognitive power of judgment, a critique which is crucial to the completion of his larger “critical” project surveying the scope and limits of human cognition as a whole. (IV)
Students not in Philosophy or Social Thought should consult the instructor before enrolling.
PHIL 27000 History of Philosophy III: Kant and the 19th Century
The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through nineteenth-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of agency and morality. Kant’s famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals rejects any appeal to nature or religious authority and instead grounds moral obligations in the very idea of freedom conceived as something that is for everyone. This thought ultimately leads to the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century thought-–for the first time in the history of philosophy, history comes to be a topic for philosophy. We will study how these ideas are taken up and transformed in the works of philosophers like J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.
PHIL 28500/38500 Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: Existentialist Reflections on Consciousness, Freedom, Authenticity, and Relation-to-Others
This will be a close reading of Sartre’s great early work, Being and Nothingness (1943), focusing on his account of consciousness, freedom, anguish, and bad faith, as well as his conception of basic relations to other persons such as desire, shame, and love. We may also spend some time considering the development and critique of Sartre’s ideas in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and in her classic work of philosophical feminism, The Second Sex.
PHIL 53027 Intersubjectivity
The seminar will be a consideration of some problems about what it is to encounter, recognize, and understand another subject — a mind that is not one’s own. Questions to be considered include:
1. What role, if any, does our understanding of our own minds plays in grounding our understanding of other minds?
2. In what ways does our knowledge of other persons depend on perception? What role does perception of bodies play in our awareness of other minds? Can we perceive the mental states of another person, or must we always make an inference from something exterior and visible to something interior and invisible?
3. Does understanding other minds require possession of a “theory of mind”? To what extent is our understanding of other minds appropriately conceived as a kind of theoretical understanding?
4. How is our capacity to understand other subjects related to our capacity to stand in relations of “mutual recognition” with other subjects? Is the idea of another mind fundamentally the idea of a “second person”, a “you” to my “I”?
5. What is the relation between understanding other minds and feeling concern for other persons? Is our capacity for shame, empathy, a sense of justice, etc. grounded on our understanding of other minds, or do such forms of concern for others themselves ground our understanding of what another mind could be?