Recent Courses
PHIL 20100-01 Introduction to Logic
An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.
Students may count either PHIL 20100 or PHIL 20012, but not both, toward the credits required for graduation.
PHIL 21209 Modernism, Philosophy and the Arts
What is art? Why should we care about it? The predicament of modernism is that we can no longer rely on our traditional answers to these questions. Modernism, says the philosopher Stanley Cavell, is “a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted…the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence.” The artist in the modernist predicament cannot make art without trying to answer these questions for themselves. But without history and convention to help us answer these questions, how do we know what would, and what could, count as answers? What is it for art to exist and why should we hold onto its importance?
In this class, we will investigate art, philosophy and the modernist predicament through a study of Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? along with works by Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, T.S. Eliot, Kierkegaard and others. We will also listen to the music of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, John Cage, Ligeti and more. Ultimately, we will ask: Do we still share in the difficulties of modernism? Or are the difficulties of art and philosophy in our modern world something else entirely?