Anubav Vasudevan

This is a workshop for 2nd year philosophy graduate students, in which students revise a piece of work to satisfy the PhD program requirements.

Before there was a “Chicago School” of neo-classical economics, the School of Chicago referred to a wide-ranging set of philosophical, psychological, and pedagogical doctrines produced, in collaboration, by such prominent members of the University’s faculty as the philosophers John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, and the psychologist and educator James Angell.  In a 1904 entry in the Psychological Bulletin, William James announced the entrance of the Chicago School onto the American intellectual scene, proclaiming: “Chicago has a School of Thought! a school of thought which, it is safe to predict, will figure in literature as the School of Chicago for years to come… Professor John Dewey, and at least ten of his disciples, have collectively put into the world a statement, homogeneous in spite of so many cooperating minds, of a view of the world, both theoretical and practical, which is so simple, massive, and positive that, in spite of the fact that many parts of it yet need to be worked out, it deserves the title of a new system of philosophy.”

At the core of this system was the simple idea that all thinking, in even its most theoretical guise, must ultimately be viewed a form of practical activity. The abstract theories that are the end products of such thought, are, accordingly, nothing more than cognitive tools deriving their significance entirely from the instrumental role that they play in addressing the concrete needs for which they were devised. Behind this simple conceit lay a more elaborate conception of functionalist psychology and the logic of inquiry, according to which theory and practice, thinking and doing, are not to be viewed as separate spheres of human life. Each is instead to be understood with reference to the service it renders the other so as to effect a “continuous, uninterrupted, free, and fluid passage from ordinary experience to abstract thinking… [One in which] observation passes into development of hypothesis; deductive methods pass to use in description of the particular; inference passes into action with no sense of difficulty save those found in the particular task in question.” Upon such psychological and philosophical foundations, the theorists of the Chicago School attempted to erect a far-reaching  campaign of educational reform, in which the purpose of a university education was not to be conceived as the transmission of knowledge to students, but rather as the sharing of communal social experiences through which young people could be successfully integrated into a deliberative democratic society. 

In this course, we will undertake a critical examination of the psychological, philosophical, and pedagogical writings comprising the work of the Chicago School. The central text for the course will be Studies in Logical Theory, originally published in 1903, which collects together a number essays written by the original members of the faculty of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. (B)

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam.

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam.

This course will undertake a critical review of the some of the seminal logical and metaphysical writings of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce made numerous original contributions to the field of mathematical logic, particularly to the fields of relational and quantificational logic, and, in the first part of the course, we will carefully examine some of Peirce's most important writings on the subject. In the second half of the course, we will examine some of Peirce's most characteristic metaphysical doctrines. These include: triadism - the view that all experience may be classified within a tripartite scheme consisting of the categories of "firstness," "secondness," and "thirdness;" tychism - the view that objective chance is an operative feature of the cosmos; haecceitism - the view that individual substances have an essence de re and not merely de dicta; and synechism - the view that the cosmos is fundamentally a continuum, no part of which is fully separate or determinate. (II)

Philosophers have long drawn inspiration for their views about the nature of human cognition, the structure of language, and the foundations of knowledge, from developments in the field of artificial intelligence. In recent years, the study of artificial intelligence has undergone a remarkable resurgence, in large part owing to the invention of so-called “deep” neural networks, which attempt to instantiate models of cognitive neurological development in a computational setting. Deep neural networks have been successfully deployed to perform a wide variety of machine learning tasks, including image recognition, natural language processing, financial fraud detection, social network filtering, drug discovery, and cancer diagnoses, to name just a few. While, at present, the ethical implications of these new and powerful systems are a topic of much philosophical scrutiny, the epistemological significance of deep learning has garnered significantly less attention.

In this course, we will attempt to understand and assess some of the bold epistemological claims that have been made on behalf of deep neural networks. To what extent can deep learning be represented within the framework of existing theories of statistical and causal inference, and to what extent does it represent a new epistemological paradigm? Are deep neural networks genuinely theory-neutral, as it is sometimes claimed, or does the underlying architecture of these systems encode substantive theoretical assumptions and biases? Without the aid of a background theory or statistical model, how can we, the users of a deep neural network, be in a position to trust the reliability of its predictions? In principle, are there any cognitive tasks with respect to which deep neural networks are incapable of outperforming human expertise? Do recent developments in artificial intelligence shed any new light on traditional philosophical questions about the capacity of machines to act intelligently, or the computational and mechanistic bases of human cognition? (B) (II)

This course provides a first introduction to mathematical logic for students of philosophy. In this course we will prove the soundness and completeness of deductive systems for both propositional and first-order predicate logic. (B) (II)

In this course, we will examine the various ways in which the concepts and techniques of modern mathematical logic can be utilized to investigate the structure of knowledge. Many of the most well-known results of mathematical logic, such as the incompleteness theorems of Gödel and the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, illustrate the fundamental limitations of formal systems of logic to fully capture the structure of the semantic models in which truth and validity are assessed. Some philosophers have argued that these results have profound epistemological implications, for instance, that they can be used to ground skeptical claims to the effect that there must be truths that logic and mathematics are powerless to prove. One of the aims of this course is to assess the legitimacy of these epistemological claims. In addition, we will explore the extent to which the central results of mathematical logic can be extended so as to apply to systems of inductive logic, and examine what forms of inductive skepticism may emerge as a result. We will, for example, discuss the epistemological implications of Putnam's diagonalization argument, which shows that, for any Bayesian theory of confirmation based on a definable prior, there must exist hypotheses which, if true, can never be confirmed. (B) (II)

This course provides a first introduction to mathematical logic. In this course we will prove the soundness and completeness of deductive systems for both propositional and first-order predicate logic. (B) (II)

This course is a first introduction to American Pragmatism. We will examine some of the seminal philosophical works of the three most prominent figures in this tradition: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Our main aim will be to extract from these writings the central ideas and principles which give shape to pragmatism as a coherent alternative to the two main schools of modern philosophical thought, empiricism and rationalism. (B) (III)

(II)

In this course, we will prove the soundness and completeness of deductive systems for both sentential and first-order predicate logic. We will also establish related results in elementary model theory, such as the compactness theorem for first-order logic, the Lӧwenheim-Skolem theorem and Lindstrӧm's theorem. (B) (II)

This course will survey some of the seminal writings of the early American Pragmatist tradition. We will focus primarily on works by the three most prominent figures in this tradition: C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Our aim in the course will be to extract from these writings the central ideas and principles which give shape to pragmatism as a coherent philosophical perspective, distinct from both empiricism and rationalism. (B) (II)

This course will begin by examining the central writings of the early American Pragmatists, C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. We will compare the early formulations of pragmatism that appear in these works, both against one another other, as well against more recent formulations of pragmatism, as put forward by such philosophers as Putnam, Davidson, and Rorty. (II) (III)

In this course, we will prove the soundness and completeness of deductive systems for both sentential and first-order logic. We will also establish related results in elementary model theory, such as the compactness theorem for first-order logic, the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem and Lindstrom’s theorem. (B) (II)

This course will provide an introduction to Bayesian Epistemology. We will begin by discussing the principal arguments offered in support of the two main precepts of the Bayesian view: (1) Probabilism: A rational agent's degrees of belief ought to conform to the axioms of probability; and (2) Conditionalization: Bayes's Rule describes how a rational agent's degrees of belief ought to be updated in response to new information. We will then examine the capacity of Bayesianism to satisfactorily address the most well-known paradoxes of induction and confirmation theory. The course will conclude with a discussion of the most common objections to the Bayesian view. (B) (II)