Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.
This workshop is open only to PhD Philosophy graduate students planning to go on the job market in the Autumn of 2021. Approval of dissertation committee is required.
Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.
This workshop is open only to PhD Philosophy graduate students planning to go on the job market in the Autumn of 2020. Approval of dissertation committee is required.
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.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
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.
Consent of Director of Undergraduate Studies. Required and only open to fourth-year students who have been accepted into the BA essay program.
This will be a course on Plato's Gorgias. (IV)
The course will have three foci in Wittgenstein’s later writings: (1) Philosophical Investigations’ famous remarks on rule-following—at least insofar as they bear upon a kind (or kinds) of skepticism concerning semantically contentful language; (2) discussions that bear upon a related kind (or kinds) of skepticism concerning psychologically contentful expression that appear shortly thereafter in Philosophical Investigations; and (3) remarks about belief, doubt, and (what might be called) quasi-logical propositions that run through On Certainty. A thought that we’ll have to grapple with, and keep returning to, is nicely articulated in this sentence from On Certainty: “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing” (§166). (II)
In one of his most widely read pieces of writing—the chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding called “Of Identity and Diversity”—John Locke writes: “[S]ince consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person…” Locke’s theory of personal identity has puzzled, annoyed, and inspired readers since it was published in the second edition of his Essay, in 1694. The main aim of this course will be to arrive at a reading of it that (1) situates it in the context of earlier philosophers’ writings about selves and souls, (2) is informed by an understanding of Locke’s own views concerning consciousness and memory, among other things, and (3) carefully considers objections that later writers—most famously Butler and Reid—made to Locke’s theory. In this endeavor, we’ll be aided by two excellent recent books: Udo Theil’s The Early Modern Subject (2011) and Galen Strawson’s Locke on Personal Identity (2011). Along the way, we’ll devote some time to considering one or two recent neo-Lockean accounts of personal identity. (B)
One prior philosophy course.
This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.
Enrollment limited to first-year graduate students.
This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.
Enrollment limited to first-year graduate students.
Philosophers have long drawn inspiration for their views about the nature of human cognition, the structure of language, and the foundations of knowledge, from developments in the field of artificial intelligence. In recent years, the study of artificial intelligence has undergone a remarkable resurgence, in large part owing to the invention of so-called “deep” neural networks, which attempt to instantiate models of cognitive neurological development in a computational setting. Deep neural networks have been successfully deployed to perform a wide variety of machine learning tasks, including image recognition, natural language processing, financial fraud detection, social network filtering, drug discovery, and cancer diagnoses, to name just a few. While, at present, the ethical implications of these new and powerful systems are a topic of much philosophical scrutiny, the epistemological significance of deep learning has garnered significantly less attention.
In this course, we will attempt to understand and assess some of the bold epistemological claims that have been made on behalf of deep neural networks. To what extent can deep learning be represented within the framework of existing theories of statistical and causal inference, and to what extent does it represent a new epistemological paradigm? Are deep neural networks genuinely theory-neutral, as it is sometimes claimed, or does the underlying architecture of these systems encode substantive theoretical assumptions and biases? Without the aid of a background theory or statistical model, how can we, the users of a deep neural network, be in a position to trust the reliability of its predictions? In principle, are there any cognitive tasks with respect to which deep neural networks are incapable of outperforming human expertise? Do recent developments in artificial intelligence shed any new light on traditional philosophical questions about the capacity of machines to act intelligently, or the computational and mechanistic bases of human cognition? (B) (II)
