PHIL

In this class, we will read a number of Platonic dialogues and use them to investigate the questions with which Socrates and Plato opened the door to the practice of philosophy. Here are some examples: What does a definition consist in? What is knowledge and how can it be acquired? Why do people sometimes do and want what is bad? Is the world we sense with our five senses the real world? What is courage and how is it connected to fear? Is the soul immortal? We will devote much of our time to clearly laying out the premises of Socrates' various arguments in order to evaluate the arguments for validity.

Decisions about medical treatment and medical policy often have profound moral implications. Taught by three philosophers, a physician, and a medical lawyer, this course will examine such issues as paternalism, autonomy, informed consent, assisted suicide, abortion, organ markets, distributive justice in health care, and pandemic ethics. (A)

John Locke’s political philosophy contributed mightily to the English and American constitutions.  It is still a significant force in modern debates about rights and the criteria of political legitimacy.  We begin the course with Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and go on to read his important “A Letter Concerning Toleration.”  Issues to be addressed include Locke’s conception of the state of nature, his explanation of the need for a political society, and his justifications of economic inequality and the right of revolution.

We then turn to a very different writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Rousseau has been read as defending, among other things, liberalism, totalitarianism, civic republicanism, and communism.  We will read his First and Second Discourses, On the Social Contract, and parts of the short essay On the Government of Poland.  Issues to be addressed include Rousseau’s account of developmental psychology, his conception of the initial political agreement, the nature of the General Will, the role of the Legislator, and what is meant by his infamous claim that citizens can be “forced to be free.”  Our goal is to grasp Locke and Rousseau in their historical and intellectual contexts but also to determine what is true and vital in their views. (A)

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.

Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman constitute a trilogy which describe Socrates’ last days before his fatal trial. These dialogues represent some of Plato’s most mature and sophisticated reflection on knowledge, sense-experience, his theory of forms, and the nature of philosophy. We will read all three dialogues in their entirety, focusing on questions of overall structure and argument, rather than on close readings of individual passages. (B) (III)

We will survey ancient theories of causation, and the associated relationships of contact, mixture, and interpenetration. Our aim is also to understand how these theories guided the development of physics, metaphysics, and ethics more broadly. We will focus in particular on the works of Plato, Aristotle, Chrysippus and Epicurus. Towards the end of the course, we will examine how the ancient conversation about causation and contact set the stage for the development of early modern physics and philosophy, with particular attention to the development of Hume’s famous critique of causation as an empty concept. (B) (III)

An examination of ancient Greek philosophical texts that are foundational for Western philosophy, especially the work of Plato and Aristotle. Topics will include: the nature and possibility of knowledge and its role in human life; the nature of the soul; virtue; happiness and the human good.

Thomas Aquinas is sometimes labeled an “intellectualist,” because of the priority that he assigns to intellect or reason in human life. Nevertheless he treats love as a fundamental principle, not only of human life but of absolutely all life and even all reality, and he thought and wrote extensively about it.  In this course we will read and discuss sizeable passages, from several of his works, concerning the nature of love in general, its various kinds, its causes and effects, how it exists in different subjects — human, angelic, divine, and even non-rational — and what it has to do with morality, virtue, and happiness. As regards the history of the topic, the we shall especially want to consider how Aquinas’s thought on love relates to that of Aristotle and to the Platonic tradition. (A)

Any language contains terms that apply truly, and in the same sense, to indefinitely many things; for instance, species- or genus-terms, such as hippopotamus or animal. How things admit of such “universal” terms has engaged philosophers ever since Plato, who proposed participation in the forms. In the third century, the Neoplatonist Porphyry wrote an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories, in which he raised, but did not even try to answer, three metaphysical questions: whether genera and species are real or only posited in thoughts; whether, if real, they are bodies or incorporeal; and whether, if real, they are separate entities or belong to sensible things. At the beginning of the medieval period, another Neoplatonic thinker, Boethius, took up Porphyry’s questions. He offered a strict definition of universals, explained the difficulty of the questions, and proposed (without fully subscribing to) what he took to be Aristotle’s way of answering them. Boethius’s treatment oriented the approach to universals by philosophers up through the 12th century. The tools at their disposal, however, were mostly those provided by ancient logical works; and perhaps for this reason, the discussion reached a kind of impasse. But then there appeared translations of numerous hitherto unknown writings of Aristotle and Arab thinkers. Aristotle’s hylomorphism and his doctrine of (what came to be called) abstraction, together with the notion of “common nature” proposed by Avicenna (also a Neoplatonist), seemed to show a way out of the impasse. But they also raised new questions of their own—partly because of their sheer difficulty, and partly because of theological pressures, in the late 1200s, against the standard Aristotelian account of individuation by “matter.” The topic of universals thus tracks various other prominent themes in medieval metaphysics. We will look at background passages in Aristotle and Porphyry, and study texts of some of the most important authors, including Boethius, Abelard, Avicenna, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. (B) (III)