PHIL

This course is about the aims of human life. We address the question through two contrasting conceptions of life: 1) life in the sense of an ongoing activity—and its associated values of pleasure, enlightenment, and happiness, and 2) life in the sense of a biographical story—and its associated values of achievement, glory, meaning, and purpose. We will attempt to understand how these two conceptions of life are compatible, and if one or the other is prior. Readings include: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, and Jonathan Lear. (A)

This course will explore the problem of other minds, beginning with a comparison of this problem with others to which it is sometimes thought to be closely related. Our first object of comparison in this regard will be with the problem of our knowledge of the external world.  We will explore supposed similarities and differences between other minds and external world skepticism and between various philosophical responses to each. The main asymmetry between these two problems is often held to lie in the idea the that knowing another mind is a matter of knowing a special kind of content. (Human beings are not mere objects. When one knows another mind, one knows a formally distinct kind of object than a mere material thing.) We will also explore the idea that the most fundamental difference between the two problems lies not merely in the content but in the form of the knowledge. This requires treating the problem of other minds as one whose solution requires attention to the second person form—one in which, in the paradigmatic case, two subjects are known to each other. In this connection, we will explore a variety of forms of nexus—linguistic, epistemological, and ethical—in which a pair of subjects can stand in a reciprocal recognitive relation to one another. The primary readings for the course will be from Elizabeth Anscombe, Anita Avramides, Stanley Cavell, John Cook, Vincent Descombes, Martin Gustafsson, Jennifer Hornsby, John McDowell, Richard Moran, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (II)

In this seminar, we will examine the logical and metaphysical writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. We will begin by exploring the metaphysical underpinnings of Leibniz’s calculus of analytic containment, as developed in such essays as General Inquiries into the Analysis of Concepts and Truths (1686) and A Mathematics of Reason (1690). We then consider how Leibniz’s logic informs some of the metaphysical ideas developed in some of Leibniz’s less technical philosophical writings, including Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) and On the Ultimate Origination of Things (1697). These distinctive logico-metaphysical conceptions, which give a singular shape to Leibniz’s philosophy, reach their full maturity in his best known essay on metaphysics, the Monadology (1714), with which the seminar will conclude. (IV)

An in-depth study of Benedict Spinoza’s major work, the Ethics, supplemented by an investigation of some of his early writings and letters. Focus is on Spinoza’s geometric method, the meaning of and arguments for his substance monism, his doctrine of parallelism, and his account of the good life.

Modern theories of the subject – theories that answer the questions of what we are, how we are, and how we relate to others – have their roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophers of the era, finding themselves free to diverge from classical accounts of the human and its world, pursued anew such questions as: What is the mind and how does it come by its ideas? How do we attain a sense of self? Are we fundamentally social creatures, or does the social (at best) represent a restriction on our animal drives and passions? Literature, meanwhile, examined these questions in its own distinct manner, and in doing so witnessed what many scholars recognize as the birth of the novel – a genre for which accounts of the subject are of central importance. This interdisciplinary course will read widely in Early Modern and “Enlightenment” literature and philosophy to better understand the roots of contemporary accounts of the subject and the social. Philosophical readings will include texts by John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Mary Astell, Thomas Reid, Marya Schechtman, and Stephen Darwall. Literary readings will include Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. (A)

The invention of advanced AI technology is often said to introduce a radical change in the human form of life. The course will approach this issue through the philosophy of action. At the center of the class will stand the following three questions: In what sense can artificial intelligence support a form of agency? How does human agency differ from it? And how does human agency change because of it? The class investigates these questions by drawing on the history of the philosophy of technology as well as on contemporary debates on AI in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and social theory.

The idea that human beings are tool-using animals is found in Aristotle. Two and a half millennia later, in the 19th century, philosophers were confronted with the radical transformation brought about by the ubiquity of machine production in the industrial revolution. This raised fundamental questions about the reach, form, and value of human agency. For instance, does the machine enable the realization of the utopian promise of liberation from toil, or rather the dystopian threat of the wholesale replacement of human beings? Such questions are anticipated in the work of thinkers like Hegel, Kapp, and Marx. In different ways, they taken up in the 20th by philosophers such as Arendt, Heidegger, and Marcuse.  

Parallel questions are raised today by the radical transformation brought about by artificial intelligence. With technological revolutions of the 19th Century, the importance of the human body to securing our ends was challenged. The recent emergence of AI tools as putatively superior executors of the operations of human mindedness presents a yet deeper challenge to our practical self-understanding. The class investigates the philosophical responses to this challenge by bringing together the traditional philosophy of technology, analytic action theory, cognitive science and contemporary social theory. (A) or (B) and (I) or (II)

Nietzsche claims that “genuine philosophers” (unlike “philosophical laborers” like Kant and Hegel, who simply “press into formulas” existing moralities) are creators of value, or, as he puts it, “commanders and legislators:  they say, ‘Thus it should be,’ they determine first the ‘where to?’ and ‘what for’ of a people” (Beyond Good and Evil, section 211).  If Kant and Hegel are not “genuine philosophers” in this sense, then who is?  Homer?  The Presocratics? Plato? Nietzsche?  And what values then does Nietzsche create?

The first half of the seminar will examine Nietzsche’s reasons for treating moralities as historical artifacts, that can be explained in terms of the psychological needs of particular peoples at particular times, rather than timeless or objective standards governing human conduct.  We then consider the possibility that Nietzsche is a “genuine philosopher,” a “creator of values,” and try to understand what that means.  In the second half of the seminar, we consider whether several major Greek figures--Homer, whom Nietzsche lauds; the Presocratics, whom he, likewise, admires; and Plato, about whom Nietzsche is decidedly more ambivalent--created new values.

Nietzsche readings will be from Daybreak, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, and Twilight of the Idols, as well as his early lectures on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and “Homer’s Contest.”  From the Greeks, we will consider portions of Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Apology and Crito, as well as selections from Heraclitus and Parmenides.

Ever since the establishment of modern science, a central topic of discussion is whether and how scientific reasoning differs from political, moral, or philosophical reasoning. One of the traditionally identified unique features of science is its ‘ideal’ of being ‘value-free’. The value-free ideal of science states that scientific reasoning from evidence to theory should not be influenced by social, political, or moral values. In recent decades numerous philosophers of science have concerted that the value-free ideal of science is neither attainable nor desirable. Some of the motivations for this criticism are to promote traditionally underrepresented perspectives such as feminism in science and to rethink the social and moral responsibilities of scientists beyond those understood under scientific integrity. The main upshot of this critique is that scientific objectivity must be redefined in a way that does not imply value-freedom. This course will give an outlook on the central ideas and concepts in the science and values debate and beyond it. The core philosophical discussion will focus on the main arguments for the untenability or undesirability of the value-free ideal and their criticisms. The broader context of discussion will include topics such as the science-society relationship, how scientific expertise and scientifically informed policy relates to democratic governance, public trust in science, and misinformation. Some of the questions that this course aims to answer are:

What features of scientific reasoning makes it open/closed to the influence of social, political, or moral values?

Can science be objective without being value-free?

Is the value-free ideal of science attainable?

In which ways is the value-free ideal of science desirable/undesirable?

Is there a clear-cut distinction between scientific and social values?

Should scientific reasoning take the societal implications of research into account?

Should socially-relevant research be governed by special norms?

What is the significance of the objective image of scientific inquiry for public trust in science? (B)

Neo-Aristotelian analytic philosophical work in ethics and in the philosophy of mind treats developing a proper understanding of human nature as central to understanding the character and place of rationality in our lives, what it is for human beings to be in right relations with themselves and one another, and those qualities of character crucial to human happiness.  In this course, we will consider new work in analytic neo-Aristotelian philosophy alongside Aquinas’s understanding of the human being. For Aquinas, the human being is the intellectual animal—the highest sort of animal and the lowest of intellectual creatures.  Human beings have distinctive strengths and challenges on this view, and turning to Aquinas sheds a new light on contemporary philosophical work.

The three leading schools of the Hellenistic era (starting in Greece in the late fourth century B. C. E. and extending through the second century C. E. in Rome) – Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics – produced philosophical work of lasting value, frequently neglected because of the fragmentary nature of the Greek evidence and people’s (unjustified) contempt for Roman philosophy.  We will study in a detailed and philosophically careful way the major ethical arguments of all three schools.  Topics to be addressed include: the nature and role of pleasure; the role of the fear of death in human life; other sources of disturbance (such as having definite ethical beliefs?); the nature of the emotions and their role in a moral life; the nature of appropriate action; the meaning of the injunction to “live in accordance with nature”.  If time permits we will say something about Stoic political philosophy and its idea of global duty.  Major sources (read in English) will include the three surviving letters of Epicurus and other fragments; the skeptical writings of Sextus Empiricus; the presentation of Stoic ideas in the Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius and the Roman philosophers Cicero and Seneca. (I) (III)