PHIL

This course will survey Aristotle’s ethics and politics with a view to understanding their relation to one another.  

This will be a seminar on the philosophical notion of intentionality as it bears on questions about our ability to represent the world, on the one hand, and to change it, on the other.  Brentano famously suggested that “intentionality” – the power of our minds to be “directed at” objects, in a way that allows it to be in states that are “of” or “about” those objects – is the fundamental mark of the mental as such.  Brentano’s work inspired a phenomenological tradition that sought to investigate the various faculties of the mind by investigating the distinctive kinds of “objects” at which they are directed and the distinctive manners in which they present these objects.  Our aim will be, first, to survey some key contributions to this tradition, with particular attention to their claim that the fundamental way to investigate the mind is by investigating its several forms of intentionality, and second, to think about the continuing relevance of this idea to contemporary problems about mind and action.  The course will begin historically, with readings from Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. We will then turn to the reception, development, and criticism of this tradition within analytic philosophy by such figures as Chisholm, Kenny, Anscombe, Geach, Quine, Searle, Davidson, McDowell, Travis, and Crane. In the latter part of the course, we will divide our time roughly equally between topics in practical and theoretical philosophy. (III)

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy.  We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of what philosophical ethics might hope to achieve.  We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which the project of grounding all ethical obligations in the very idea of rational freedom is announced.  We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of rational freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a substantive conception of the proper organization of our social and political lives.  We will conclude by examining some important critics of the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical theory: Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

A close reading of the Nicomachean Ethics, with particular emphasis on his theory of moral virtue, moral education. (I) (IV)

In this course we will explore some of the central questions in epistemology and metaphysics. In epistemology, these questions will include: What is knowledge? What facts or states justify a belief? How can the threat of skepticism be adequately answered? How do we know what we (seem to) know about mathematics and morality? In metaphysics, these questions will include: What is time? What is the best account of personal identity across time? Do we have free will? We will also discuss how the construction of a theory of knowledge ought to relate to the construction of a metaphysical theory-roughly speaking, what comes first, epistemology or metaphysics? (B)

What is death, and what is its significance for our lives and how we lead them? In this course we will tack back and forth between the metaphysics of death (What is nonexistence? Are death and pre-birth metaphysically symmetrical?) and the ethical questions raised by death (Is death a misfortune-something we should fear or lament? Should we be glad not to be immortal? How should we understand the ethics of abortion and capital punishment?) Our exploration of these issues will take us through the work of many figures in the Western philosophical tradition (Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger), but we will be concentrating on the recent and dramatic flowering of work on the subject.

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.

This course will provide a rapid-fire survey of the philosophical sources of contemporary literary and critical theory.  We will begin with a brief discussion of the sort of humanism at issue in the critique—accounts of human life and thought that treat the individual human being as the primary unit for work in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.  This kind of humanism is at the core of contemporary common sense.  It is, to that extent, indispensable in our understanding of how to move around in the world and get along with one another.  That is why we will conduct critique, rather than plain criticism, in this course: in critique, one remains indebted to the system under critical scrutiny, even while working to understand its failings and limitations.  Our tour of thought produced in the service of critique will involve work by Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Freud, Fanon, Lacan, and Althusser. We will conclude with a couple of pieces of recent work that draws from these sources.  The aim of the course is to provide students with an opportunity to engage with some extraordinarily influential work that continues to inform humanistic inquiry. (A) (I)

This course is designed to provide MAPH students – especially those interested in pursuing a PhD in Philosophy – with an introduction to some recent debates between philosophers working in the analytic tradition. The course is, however, neither a history of analytic philosophy nor an overview of the discipline as it currently stands. The point of the course is primarily to introduce the distinctive style and method – or styles and methods – of philosophizing in the analytic tradition, through brief explorations of some currently hotly debated topics in the field. The course will be divided into six units; with the exception of the first unit, all of the topics discussed in this course can be seen as primarily located in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Yet in the course we will also be thinking about topics in such areas as metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of language.

The first unit of the course will focus on the nature of analytic philosophy and the idea of analysis. This will be followed by units on the analysis of knowledge, the propagation of knowledge through testimony, practical versus theoretical knowledge, the propagation of practical knowledge, and justice and injustice in epistemology.

The course will be run as a mixture of lecture and discussion. All students should come to class having done the assigned reading and prepared to engage in a productive discussion. Students will write three short papers (6-8 pages) and provide discussion prompts on the Canvas site for the course.

We will study the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital, attempting to understand the book on its own terms and with minimal reference to secondary literature. (A) (I)