Paskalina Bourbon

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.

“From the moment he falls in love, even the wisest man no longer sees anything as it really is.”  

         -Stendhal

“When [we] are just and loving, we see [the beloved] as she really is.” 

         -Iris Murdoch

Does love blind us to the reality of the beloved or does it allow (or even lead) us to see more clearly? Love is often thought of as a form of madness which obscures the lover’s vision. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch disagrees with this commonplace: for her, love is a form of attention, or of seeing and valuing the reality of the beloved. 

In this class, we will investigate this tension between the idea that love blinds and the idea that love reveals. Our primary focus will be on theories of love in analytic philosophy, but we will also read literature which will serve as a way of testing and investigating these theories.

We will begin with Dante, whose Commedia figures and thematizes the relationship between vision, knowledge and love. As we move from Dante to Iris Murdoch, Harry Frankfurt, Stendhal, Roland Barthes and others, we will test these and other conceptions of love by looking at examples of love in literature and film. Our goal will not simply be to define love; instead, we will try to better understand the nature and significance of love in life and in our lives.

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?