PHIL

Topic: The Representation of Thought

This course will serve both as an introduction to some traditional logical questions presented by statements about what people think, believe, or judge to be true (e.g. “Tom thinks the weather is fine for walking”, “Frege believed that numbers are objects”), and as a venue for thinking through and trying to answer those questions on our own. To that end we will closely read a small number of mostly classic texts, in three units. In the first unit we will examine the notion of intensionality—of certain sentential contexts, for our purposes especially the content-clauses of statements about belief—within which familiar logical laws appear to fail to preserve truth. The second unit will connect these traditional logical problems of intensionality with traditional philosophical-psychological problems of intentionality, through attention to Elizabeth Anscombe and Anthony Kenny’s attempts to address the problems of the first unit by use of the concepts intentional subject, intentional act/state, and intentional object. The third unit will introduce the need to represent the self-consciousness of a thinking, believing subject, and the logical rigors of doing so adequately, focusing on Hector-Neri Castañeda’s often-cited but rarely read ‘He’.

Topic: Reality and Truth: Plato and the Problem of Being

We will confront foundational questions about the nature of truth and reality through an intensive study of Plato’s Sophist. Questions about what is real are familiar to us. We wonder whether people are being fake with us, or whether God exists, or whether there is really such a ‘thing’ as justice. But there is also a prior and more fundamental question: What does it mean for something to be real? This is known in philosophy as ‘The Problem of Being.’ Plato’s Sophist is one of the Western philosophical tradition’s most searching attempts to answer this question. We will try to follow in Plato’s footsteps. Major themes of the course will include: reality vs. mere appearance; authenticity vs. pretending; truth and falsehood; and the difference between beings (entities, things) and their being. Readings will include works by John McDowell, Lesley Brown, and Martin Heidegger.

Topic: The First Person Perspective

It is often remarked that one occupies a unique perspective on oneself, that, paradigmatically, one relates to oneself in a very different manner than one does to others. There are various ways of bringing out what is unique about this perspective. We will explore two in particular in this course. The first involves the idea of ‘first person authority’; the second involves the idea of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’. We will examine a number of philosophical debates surrounding these themes. Some questions to be explored: 

Are first-personally authoritative self-ascriptions (e.g. ‘I think it will rain tomorrow’) to be understood as cases of self-knowledge? If so, how are we to account for such knowledge? If not, what alternatives do we have for accounting for these self-ascriptions and the authority with which they are made? 

Does ‘I’ refer? If so, to what does it refer, and how does it manage to refer to it? 

How does the first person perspective differ from, and how is it related to, both the second and the third person perspectives? 

Readings will include selections from: Anscombe, Bar-On, McDowell, Moran, Rödl, Strawson, and Wittgenstein.

Topic: Trust

Trust plays a crucial role in our interpersonal relationships and our ability to undertake complex activities with others. This class, broken into three parts, will survey some recent literature devoted to this topic. In the first we will investigate the metaphysical nature of trust. Is it a belief, an attitude, an emotion, or something else? We will ask what the relationship is between trust and trustworthiness; whether trust can be willed; and how trust interacts with individual agency. In the second we will investigate the rationality of trust. In particular we will consider how it is that trust or trusting relationships can provide, on the one hand, a valid reason for belief and, on the other, a valid reason to perform some action. In the third part we will draw on some of the insights hopefully gained in the first two to think about some related ethical issues such as epistemic injustice, forgiveness, and collective action. Authors may include: Richard Holton, Pamela Hieronymi, P.F. Strawson, and Annette Baier.

Topic: Practical Reasoning

This course explores the nature of practical reason by examining practical reasoning, its activity. We will examine some accounts that philosophers have given of deliberation and of the so-called practical syllogism or inference; we will consider the relationship between the two and ask what they tell us about practical rationality. In the second half of the course, we will consider the perennial question of whether practical rationality requires acting well, that is, ethically or morally.

What is philosophy? And how can it help us understand – and occasionally answer – questions as wide-ranging as those in ethics, politics, moral psychology, language, feminism, and metaphysics? In this course, we will explore ideas in the history of philosophy in order to acquaint ourselves with the range of topics that can be the proper object of philosophical attention. Using the distinctive features of the discipline, including slow, reflective engagement with ideas, critical attention to argument, and precise analysis of the concepts underlying ordinary thought, we will ask ordinary questions about the world and discover that philosophy is the practice of answering them with a level of rigor and depth that gives us a greater grasp on the world and ourselves. Some of the questions we will explore during the quarter are: Can my goodness be a matter of luck? Why are some bodies declared “normal,” some “broken,” and some food? What is gender? And is there anything philosophical we can say about the pandemic? 

Topic: What Is the Human Being?

The philosopher Immanuel Kant claims (famously) that philosophy boils down to three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? He also suggests, however, that these three questions reduce, at bottom, to a fourth: What is the human being? Philosophy, then, is the study of what it is to be a human being. In this general introduction to philosophy, we will examine a variety of efforts made by philosophers, both contemporary and historical, to answer Kant’s three questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? We will do this always with an eye to how these efforts contribute to answering Kant’s broader question: What is the human being? Possible topics of discussion include the nature of knowledge, the limits of science, whether there are objective moral truths, whether we are free, the nature of artistic beauty, whether we should trust our gut instincts, and whether there is progress in culture.

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.

Topic: Through Film

Film has been and is perhaps our central artistic medium, influencing and reflecting the values of our time, while also exploring perennial aspects of the human condition. Movies then present powerful avenues through which to engage with our deepest and most enduring philosophical questions. This course serves as a general introduction to philosophy, using films to explore the practice of thinking philosophically, as well as the broad range of questions and themes with which philosophers have concerned themselves for over 3,000 years, such as: How can we be free if we are subject to the laws of nature? How can we know or perceive anything with certainty? What is a just political community? Can we ever determine the right answer to ethical dilemmas? To explore these questions, we will discuss a wide selection of films, from The Third Man to Office Space to Blade Runner; we will examine how philosophers themselves have engaged directly with those films; and we will study philosophical texts, both historical and contemporary, that address questions raised by those films. (A)

This course traces a central thread in ancient Greek and Roman thought—the nature of the soul (psuchê). Standing far from what we now associate with the word ‘soul,’ psuchê was treated as the distinguishing mark of life, and the subject of activities like perceiving, feeling emotions, and thinking. Yet the notion also went through radical transformations: from the soul’s mythical beginnings in the Homeric epics, to its immortalization in the Platonic dialogues, to its scientific treatment in Aristotelian biology, to its materialist character in Stoic and Epicurean philosophy. These changes reflected evolving answers to a variety of fundamental questions, such as: what is the relation of soul to body? What is the nature of human reason and thought? Do nonhuman organisms have souls? Is the soul immortal? We will explore these changes, seeing how they were symptomatic of diverging explanations of the natural world, life, the gods, the human good, and immortality. We will also explore how these conceptions foreshadow or depart from contemporary theories of mind, life, and personal identity. (B)