PHIL

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? 

This class will explore dependent type theory, with a focus on the identity relation. Different ways of thinking of the identity relation will be examined, culminating in a presentation of the Univalence axiom and a discussion of its role as a potential foundation for mathematics. (B) (II)

This course will be an overview of Eastern philosophy, focusing on the historical development of Buddhist and Confucian ideas from their early Indian origins to the present day. (A)

This course will be an introduction to the philosophical movement known as “existentialism” as it developed in France in the mid-twentieth century. We will approach this movement by reading two of its greatest works, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). In the first part of the course, we will examine Sartre’s account of consciousness, freedom, anguish, and bad faith, as well as his conception of basic relations to other persons such as desire, shame, and love. We will then turn to the development and critique of existentialist ideas in Simone de Beauvoir’s classic work of philosophical feminism, focusing on her critical reflections on love, independence, and the conception of woman as Other.

The ‘I think’ traditionally stands at the center of philosophical reflection. Yet there is a minority strand in the history of philosophy which has advocated that the second person pronoun is no less central. Human beings are social creatures. For this reason, addressing another as ‘you’ in communication is no less fundamental to human rationality than giving expression to oneself through saying ‘I.’ A guiding idea of the proposed seminar will be that, properly conceived, self-consciousness and recognition of another are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. In seeking to make out this claim, the seminar will explore the different aspects of the role of address in human life. It will take its point of departure from two guiding ideas: (1) the second-person present indicative form of interpersonal nexus is no less important for understanding human thought and action and logically no less fundamental than the corresponding first-person form, and (2) what is logically peculiar to the former form of thought is best brought to the fore if one examines what second-person thought in both its theoretical and practical guises have in common. The plan for the seminar is to alternate between examining problems in theoretical philosophy whose proper solution requires attention to the role of the second person and counterpart sorts of problem in practical philosophy. Under the first heading, we will explore the role of address and joint consciousness in speech act theory, the topic of shared understanding in the philosophy of language acquisition, and the problem of the apprehension of another human being as it arises in the epistemology of other minds. Interpolated between these topics, we will weave in and out of counterpart forms of philosophical difficulty arising out of reflection upon the place of the second-person in practical philosophy: in understanding the human striving for honor, in relations of justice, as well as in friendship and love. (I) (II)

The tendency in contemporary philosophy is to conceive of a linguistic sign as a composite notion to be analyzed in terms of kind of mere physical mark or acoustic noise to which something further — a meaning or use — is assigned or added in order yield a meaningful linguistic symbol. This course will explore figures in the history of philosophy and linguistics who opposed such a conception – figures, that is, who thought that the capacity to recognize linguistic signs presupposes some prior comprehension of their real possibilities of use. Readings will be from Frege, Hilbert, early and later Wittgenstein, Franz Boas, Roman Jacobson, Morris Halle, David Kaplan, Sylvan Bromberger, and others. (B) (I)

The history of philosophy, from antiquity to the early twentieth century, is littered with classic works bearing titles such as The Principles of Logic, The Foundations of Logic, A Theory of Logic, and so on. Most of the major philosophers in this tradition – Aristotle, Avicenna, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, etc. – devote at least one whole treatise to Logic, and in most cases several. These works are, like their other writings, composed of sentences – sentences of Greek, Arabic, Latin or German prose. The object of such works is to elucidate notions such as thought, judgment, negation, inference, and inquiry. Starting in the late 19th- and early 20th century a new kind of work in the theory of logic appeared – published by authors such as Boole, Peano, Frege, Russell, Hilbert, etc. These works contained comparatively little prose and a great many quasi-mathematical symbols in which formulae, axioms, theorems, proofs, etc. were set forward. The latter sorts of work had an enormous influence on how the nature of the discipline of logic itself came to be understood and how its relation, on the hand, to mathematics, and, on the other, to the rest of philosophy, came to be re-conceived. This, in turn, led – through the work of authors such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, etc. – to a series of efforts to challenge the ascendancy of the logico-mathematical conception of logic. The seminar will explore the relation between these two different conceptions of logic. We will be interested in ways in which these conceptions, at least in the hands of some authors, were carved out in a manner that allowed them at least to appear to coincide with one another, as well as ways in which they either tacitly diverged or openly conflicted with one another. The ideas set forth in two works by Wittgenstein – his early Tractatus and his later Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics – will shape our approach to these issues. The readings for the course will include canonical texts from the classic tradition of thought about logic from Aristotle through Kant and beyond, as well as targeted selections from those of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries whom he is most concerned to criticize (especially Frege, Russell, and Hilbert). The seminar will also feature various sidelong glances at parallel developments in the Continental tradition in authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Jakob Klein, and others. (III)

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of aesthetics, with a focus on art and art objects. With respect to art, our questions will include: What is art? What is the point of making art? What is it to appreciate art? (Does discursive knowledge (of the technique, the history of the painting or its subjects, the artist’s life, etc.) help or hinder this appreciation?) What is the metaphysical character of art objects (symphonies, paintings, novels, etc.)? What is the ethical status of art? (Were Plato’s ethical suspicions about art warranted?) With respect to aesthetics more generally, our questions will include: is beauty in the eye of the beholder? (What is it for something to be in the eye of the beholder?) Does beauty track (or even constitute) scientific truth? If so: why? If not, why have so many mathematicians, physicists, and biologists been preoccupied with the beauty of their theories?

An exploration of some of the central questions in metaethics, moral theory, and applied ethics. These questions include the following: are there objective moral truths, as there are (as it seems) objective scientific truths? If so, how can we come to know these truths? Should we make the world as good as we can, or are there moral constraints on what we can do that are not a function of the consequences of our actions? Is the best life a maximally moral life? What distribution of goods in a society satisfies the demands of justice? Can beliefs and desires be immoral, or only actions? What is “moral luck”? What is courage? (A)

What are minds, what are bodies, and what is the relation between minds and bodies? The reason these questions represent a problem is that a. the questions are of fundamental significance but that b. no answer to them is easy to defend. In this course we will try to understand this problem, and to arrive at some answers. To help us toward this goal we will read important philosophical work on the subject--some older writings (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume), but with a focus on work in the last eighty years (including Wittgenstein, Ryle, Anscombe, Davidson, Smart, Place, Armstrong, Kripke, Putnam, Searle, Lewis, Nagel, Dennett, Dretske, The Churchlands, Jackson, McGinn, Block, Kim, Chalmers).