PHIL

In this seminar we will explore a set of interrelated topics in the philosophy of action. These include: the purposive structure of practical reason, the nature of the relationship between means and ends, the idea of ‘practical inference’, and the place of causation in the understanding of intentional agency. Course readings comprise a manuscript by the course instructor in conjunction with a constellation of primarily contemporary writings on these topics.

This will be an introductory course on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The seminar will be organized around the follow proposal: the book is meant to reveal the sort of understanding that is at stake whenever a philosophical problem arises. It teaches that such understanding is not a form of knowledge — and in particular not scientific knowledge— of whether or why something is the case. Its clarification of the sort of understanding at issue here allows for a reading according to which the Tractatus, contrary to what most commentators assume, seeks to affirm rather than to cancel philosophy. It affirms it as a fundamental concern with understanding distinct from science or from reason.

The idea that there exist different “races” of human beings is something that many—perhaps even most—people in the United States today take for granted. And yet modern notions of “race” and “racial difference” raise deep philosophical problems: What exactly is race? Is race a natural kind (like water) or a social kind (like citizenship)? If race is a social kind—i.e. something human beings have constructed—are there any good reasons to keep using it? According to many philosophers, these questions cannot be properly analyzed in abstraction from the history of modern racism and the liberation struggles racial oppression has given rise to. Together, we’ll read classic and contemporary texts on these themes by authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Charles Mills, Naomi Zack, Chike Jeffers, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Lucius Outlaw. (A)

A fundamental category through which we understand the world is the category of action. This course offers an intensive overview of the metaphysics of action. We will first cover some basics including the relationship between actions, agency, and agents, the range of action kinds, what kind of thing action is, the distinction between basic and nonbasic action, agent nihilism, and the possibility of mental action. Next, in hopes of coming to better understand the nature of action, we will look at how action relates to other phenomena such as reasons, causation, knowledge, control, and normative life. (B) (II)

Key contemporary debates in the philosophical literature often rely on formal tools and techniques that go beyond the material taught in an introductory logic class. A robust understanding of these debates---and, accordingly, the ability to meaningfully engage with a good deal of contemporary philosophy---requires a basic grasp of extensions of standard logic such as modal logic, multi-valued logic, and supervaluations, as well as an appreciation of the key philosophical virtues and vices of these extensions. The goal of this course is to provide students with the required logic literacy. While some basic metalogical results will come into view as the quarter proceeds, the course will primarily focus on the scope (and, perhaps, the limits) of logic as an important tool for philosophical theorizing. (B)

We will read selections from, and secondary literature on, some early Socratic dialogues in order to engage with a set of Socratic theses on desire, motivation, and value: (1) Everyone desires the good (or: what he believes to be good?) (Meno, Gorgias, Lysis) ; (2) Everyone does what he believes (or knows?) to be best (Protagoras, Apology) (3)  It is better to be wronged than to do wrong (Gorgias, Apology) (4) Only good men do wrong voluntarily (Hippias Minor) (5) Courage/Moderation is Wisdom (Laches, Protagoras, Charmides). We will want to examine these views both for consistency; for their individual merits; and in order to see whether we can put them together into a distinctively Socratic ethical point of view. (III) 

In this seminar, we read Plato’s Republic closely and in its entirety. We will attend equally to the epistemological and political aspirations of the text and we will examine its engagement with issues in the fields of psychology, aesthetics, metaphysics, and education. While this course will primarily focus on Plato’s text, the students will have the opportunity to read works from the secondary literature. (B)

(II)

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.

Aristotle said that “first philosophy” is the branch of knowledge that is both most general—having to do with everything—and the most foundational. In this course we will explore various attempts in the history of philosophy to describe and produce such a science, beginning with Plato and Aristotle’s attempts to describe being and ending with Wittgenstein’s skepticism about such a project. We will try to produce a generalization about what first philosophy is and about its possibility and limitations. (B)