PHIL

We will read work from Russell's entire career with a particular focus on both his philosophy of science and the role of science (including geometry and mathematics) in his philosophical development. We will also look at his influences and contemporaries (including Whitehead, Keynes and Carnap) and at how Russell's views on causation and structuralism have been treated by more recent philosophers of science. (II)

Game theory is a rich area of formal tools developed over the last 70 years or so for the modeling of certain kinds of rational interaction. The concept of a game plays a prominent role in the writings of several distinguished philosophers of language such Ludwig Wittgenstein and David K. Lewis. It is thus natural to ask to what extent game theory can play an important role in explaining distinct linguistic phenomena. The goal of this class is to explore this question from a philosophical and linguistic perspective, focusing on issues in natural language semantics and pragmatics. (II)

A careful study of Mill's Utilitarianism in relation to his ideas of self-realization and of liberty. We will study closely at least Utilitarianism, On Liberty, the essays on Bentham and Coleridge, The Subjection of Women, and the Autobiography, trying to figure out whether Mill is a Utilitarian or an Aristotelian eudaemonist, and what view of "permanent human interests" and of the malleability of desire and preference underlies his political thought. If time permits we will also study his writings about India.

Topic: Current Issues in General Jurisprudence. The Workshop will expose students to cutting-edge work in "general jurisprudence," that part of philosophy of law concerned with the central questions about the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the nature of legal reasoning. We will be particularly interested in the way in which work in philosophy of language, metaethics, metaphysics, and other cognate fields of philosophy has influenced recent scholarly debates that have arisen in the wake of H.L.A. Hart's seminal The Concept of Law (1961). Students who have taken Leiter's "Jurisprudence I" course at the law school are welcome to enroll. Students who have not taken Jurisprudence I need to understand that the several two-hour sessions of the Workshop in the early fall will be required; they will involve reading through and discussing Chapters 1-6 of Hart's The Concept of Law and some criticisms by Ronald Dworkin. This will give all students an adequate background for the remainder of the year. Students who have taken jurisprudence courses elsewhere may contact Prof. Leiter to see if they can be exempted from these sessions based on their prior study. After the prepatory sessions, we will generally meet for one hour the week prior to our outside speakers to go over their essay and to refine questions for the speaker. Confirmed speakers so far include Leslie Green, Stephen Perry, Frederick Schauer, Natalie Stojlar, Mark Murphy, and Kevin Toh.

This course is meant as an introduction to Wittgenstein's later work.  Our primary focus will be a close reading of Philosophical Investigations, with supplementary readings drawn from other writings.  Topics covered will include: meaning and understanding, sensation and privacy, imagination and intentionality, and the nature of philosophy. 

The class will focus on a careful reading of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality. We will consider what 'genealogy' means to Nietzsche, and what form of argument it enables him to make. We will also consider the various different modes of 'reading' that Nietzsche's text invites, and think critically about what this means for philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche's work. 

We will explore the connection between two abiding concerns of Western philosophy, and French philosophy in particular: the nature of linguistic meaning and skeptical worries about the possibility of knowledge.

20th century philosophers had an especially keen interest in language. This orientation was of a piece with the broader intellectual and aesthetic current of “modernism”, in which the means through which human beings engage in communicative and expressive activity becomes the subject matter of that very activity.

In much of the arts and humanities, the modernist drive to scrutinize communicative and expressive media was motivated by misgivings about traditional modes of representing the world and the self, and suspicion of the longstanding cultural confidence in the accuracy and power of these modes. But philosophy was a different case. For philosophy had already been struggling for millennia with doubts about the possibility of accurate representation, just as it had been struggling for that long with puzzles about the possibility of knowledge, and the objectivity of truth, and even the intelligibility of existence itself. Against the backdrop of this difficult history, the message of modernism seemed one of promise. Philosophers thought that attention to the means of human expression, especially to language, could prove the key to dissolving the skeptical puzzles that had heretofore dogged their attempts to achieve a satisfactory understanding of our place in the world as knowers, thinkers, and agents.

We will take as our test case one such skeptical puzzle, perhaps the most famous one. This is the argument of ‘external-world skepticism’, according to which we can know nothing at all about the world around us. Some of the most famous and influential presentations of external-world skepticism are due to two French writers of the early modern period—Montaigne and Descartes—and we will begin by examining their texts.

In the remainder of the course, we will look at three attempts to solve the problem of external-world skepticism through reflection on the nature of language. The first is logical empiricism, which aimed to show that purported statements of skepticism or of other sweeping philosophical doctrines are meaningless. The second is ordinary-language philosophy, according to which arguments for skepticism depend upon distortions of our ordinary practices of offering and assessing claims of knowledge. The third is the contemporary movement of contextualism, which traces the skeptical threat to a failure to grasp the pervasive context-sensitivity of meaning. We will ask in each case whether the claims made about the nature of language can be sustained, and whether they really do have the power to defeat the skeptical challenge.

No philosophical background is presupposed. The texts we read will be challenging (in addition to Montaigne and Descartes, they include Carnap, Quine, Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell and Laugier), but we will talk carefully through the basic ideas needed to begin to appreciate what these writers might be after. (B)

We examine attempts to achieve a satisfactory philosophical understanding of causation, of necessity, and of their interconnection. One organizing theme of our reflections is the contribution of these categories to the idea of 'the natural world'; another is their bearing on the idea of the will. Readings are both historical and recent, drawn from Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Hobbes, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Anscombe, D. Lewis, and J. Woodward. (II)

Topic: Marx and Philosophy. Karl Marx is at once an incisive philosophical thinker, and a powerful critic of the whole enterprise of philosophy. In this course, we will investigate Marx's critique of philosophy. In particular, we will do so with an eye to the implications such a critique may have for philosophy as it exists today. That is, we will ask what conclusions can be drawn within philosophy, and about philosophy, from Marxian premises. This will require careful examination of key works by Marx, as well as by Hegel, Feuerbach, and Engels. It will also involve reflection on central disputes in contemporary theoretical philosophy, including the mind-body problem, the problem of knowledge, and the naturalism/anti-naturalism dispute.

Topic: Marx and Philosophy.  Karl Marx is at once an incisive philosophical thinker, and a powerful critic of the whole enterprise of philosophy. In this course, we will investigate Marx's critique of philosophy. In particular, we will do so with an eye to the implications such a critique may have for philosophy as it exists today. That is, we will ask what conclusions can be drawn within philosophy, and about philosophy, from Marxian premises. This will require careful examination of key works by Marx, as well as by Hegel, Feuerbach, and Engels. It will also involve reflection on central disputes in contemporary theoretical philosophy, including the mind-body problem, the problem of knowledge, and the naturalism/anti-naturalism dispute.