PHIL

This course introduces students to contemporary philosophy through five questions: Can we know the true nature of reality? Do we have free will? What makes someone the same person over time? How does the mind relate to the brain? What does it take to live a good life? No prior background in philosophy is required.

Elisabeth Anscombe gave this title to a volume of her collected philosophical essays. She ends the introduction with the claim: "Whitehead's remark about Plato might, somehow narrowly, be applied to his great predecessor: Subsequent philosophy is footnotes on Parmenides." I shall offer a reading that differs from Anscombe's of the thesis expressed by her title and her remark on philosophy and its history.

We'll read and discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Our central concerns will include: (1) Wittgenstein's metaphilosophy, (2) meaning and rule-following, (3) privacy and expression. (II)

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?

Topic: Thinking and Speaking

According to one intuitive picture, the capacity to think is prior in nature to the capacity to express one’s thought linguistically. After all, can’t we perfectly well imagine a thinker locked in their own mind with no means of expressing themselves? Since the late 19th century, this intuitive picture has come in for sustained philosophical criticism from several directions. Thought, critics argue, is itself an essentially linguistic capacity and the very idea of a non-linguistic thinker a chimera. In this course, we will take up some of the most prominent objections to the intuitive picture with a view to evaluating their success. Among the questions that will structure our inquiry are the following: Is the relation between thought and language one of conceptual priority or mutual dependence? How should we understand the ability of language to figure as a vehicle for the communication of thought? Does it make sense to speak of language determining or constraining thought? If thought is essentially linguistic, what implications does this have for our conception of the self and its relation to society? While the focus of the course will be on approaches to these questions from within analytic philosophy, we will also draw on ideas and arguments from linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and the continental traditional. Readings will include selections from Frege, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Brandom, Sapir, Chomsky, and Foucault, among others.

Topic: Dialectic

Dialectic is a central concept for some of the most influential philosophers of the western tradition – most prominently Plato and Hegel, for each of whom it can seem synonymous with philosophy itself – but has received surprisingly little attention as a topic unto itself. Indeed, with its close associations with paradox, contradiction, and the apparent rejection of logical laws, the very idea of dialectic has come into ill-repute, dismissed by figures as diverse as Heidegger and Russell as a kind of sophistry or obscurantism; moreover, the concept has been employed in such a variety of contexts, from metaphysics to the philosophy of history, that it can be difficult to discern whether it constitutes a single topic at all. In this course we shall trace the history of dialectic from its origins in the dialogues of Plato, through its revival in Kant’s critical philosophy, to its best-known form in Hegel’s logic, with the aim of drawing out a common strand uniting these diverse historical manifestations, namely an understanding of dialectic as in first instance a form of philosophical logic reflecting an underlying concern with the possibility of philosophical method. We shall also examine the relation between this and other influential conceptions thereof and consider some prominent criticisms of the idea of dialectic; time permitting, we shall conclude with a discussion of what, if anything, a conception of dialectic in the context of contemporary philosophy might look like.

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?

Readings will be drawn from contemporary literature and from a book manuscript by the instructor.

Practices of enslavement are common in recent human history. Focusing on transhistorical practices offers a unique opportunity to learn about the communities in which they occur, comparative aspects of slavery, and how slavery and labor are bound up in all aspects of a society, from the economy to politics to art and culture. This course will be about the entanglements of slavery and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome and their transhistorical implications. The main questions of the course include: What were the realities of slavery at the time that prominent ancient philosophers lived? How did they engage with these realities in their philosophical works, both in obvious and non-obvious ways? What were the legacies of ancient philosophical writings about slavery in later discussions of slavery in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere? How can contemporary perspectives on slavery help us to understand the institution? And what can be learned about how slavery is represented in different cultures by focusing on ancient Greek and Roman philosophers? The course is organized around key ancient texts and topics in ancient and contemporary slavery studies.