PHIL

Topic: Creativity and the Logic of Discovery

In this course we will explore epistemological issues surrounding the process of discovery. Our investigation will be guided by three questions: (1) Does the stage of inquiry concerned with generating hypotheses or, broadly speaking, novel ideas possess a discernible rational structure? (2) What (if any) general rules, methods, cognitive attitudes, and epistemic standards might be appropriate to this activity across different domains? (3) How should insights about the discovery process inform the way we reason in our everyday contexts? We will think about, for example, what C.S. Peirce called “musement” or “pure play”, a creative activity that he thought to be crucially important for producing the ideas that are converted into scientific and philosophical study. The notion of creativity and the relation it bears to a logic of discovery will also loom large in our discussion of other related topics, which will include: concepts from Gestalt psychology; objectivity and bias in observation; tacit knowledge and know-how in theoretical contexts; usage of metaphor and analogy in representing phenomena in scientific reasoning; and strategic guesswork involved in mathematical problem-solving.

Aristotle states that “being is said in many ways,” we shall seek to understand this statement and to study the history of its interpretations.                                  

Among the modern authors we shall discuss are Franz Brentano, Ernst Tugendhat, Charles Kahn, Aryeh Kosman, Stephen Menn, David Charles.

The theme for 2019-20 is “Migration and Citizenship.” Confirmed speakers as of 1/19 include David Miller, Joseph Carens, Ayelet Shachar, Adam Hosein, Adam Cox, Aziz Huq, and Seyla Benhabib, who will also be the Dewey Lecturer on January 15.

This is a seminar/workshop many of whose participants are faculty from various related disciplines. It admits approximately ten students. Its aim is to study, each year, a topic that arises in both philosophy and the law and to ask how bringing the two fields together may yield mutual illumination. Most sessions are led by visiting speakers, from either outside institutions or our own faculty, who circulate their papers in advance. The session consists of a brief introduction by the speaker, followed by initial questioning by the two faculty coordinators, followed by general discussion, in which students are given priority. Several sessions involve students only, and are led by the instructors. Students write a 20-25 page seminar paper at the end of the year. The course satisfies the Law School Substantial Writing Requirement. Students must enroll for all three quarters to receive credit.

The theme for 2019-20 is “Migration and Citizenship.” Confirmed speakers as of 1/19 include David Miller, Joseph Carens, Ayelet Shachar, Adam Hosein, Adam Cox, Aziz Huq, and Seyla Benhabib, who will also be the Dewey Lecturer on January 15.

This is a seminar/workshop many of whose participants are faculty from various related disciplines. It admits approximately ten students. Its aim is to study, each year, a topic that arises in both philosophy and the law and to ask how bringing the two fields together may yield mutual illumination. Most sessions are led by visiting speakers, from either outside institutions or our own faculty, who circulate their papers in advance. The session consists of a brief introduction by the speaker, followed by initial questioning by the two faculty coordinators, followed by general discussion, in which students are given priority. Several sessions involve students only, and are led by the instructors. Students write a 20-25 page seminar paper at the end of the year. The course satisfies the Law School Substantial Writing Requirement. Students must enroll for all three quarters to receive credit.

The theme for 2019-20 is “Migration and Citizenship.” Confirmed speakers as of 1/19 include David Miller, Joseph Carens, Ayelet Shachar, Adam Hosein, Adam Cox, Aziz Huq, and Seyla Benhabib, who will also be the Dewey Lecturer on January 15.

This is a seminar/workshop many of whose participants are faculty from various related disciplines. It admits approximately ten students. Its aim is to study, each year, a topic that arises in both philosophy and the law and to ask how bringing the two fields together may yield mutual illumination. Most sessions are led by visiting speakers, from either outside institutions or our own faculty, who circulate their papers in advance. The session consists of a brief introduction by the speaker, followed by initial questioning by the two faculty coordinators, followed by general discussion, in which students are given priority. Several sessions involve students only, and are led by the instructors. Students write a 20-25 page seminar paper at the end of the year. The course satisfies the Law School Substantial Writing Requirement. Students must enroll for all three quarters to receive credit.

We will study Hegel’s Elements of Philosophy of Right. The book is an absolute classic of practical philosophy. Its ambition is nothing less than to provide a systematic treatment of the unity of action theory, ethics and political philosophy. Hegel’s theory is considered by many as the highpoint and completion of practical philosophy in the post-Kantian German Idealism. And it is essential for the development Marxism and Critical Theory. It is a crucial treatise to study – not only for those interested of the history of ethics and political theory, but for anyone reflecting on the logic and origins of the kind of society we live in. At the same time, the book is hardy an easy read. For one, the genre of text is quite peculiar: it was written for as a condensed “Leitfaden”  for the students listening Hegel’s lectures. Moreover, the range of topics discussed under the heading of the Philosophy of Right – as well the order in which they are presented – seems quite from a contemporary perspective.

Hegel’s guiding thought is that the power of practical reason and freedom can only be understood through its actuality. What stands at center of his treatise is thus the idea of practical reality, encapsulated in his famous slogan that “the rational is actual and the actual is rational.” Hegel’s point is that the domain of the practical is a stratum of being that is not a reality given to the mind, but one that reason apprehends as its own work in virtue of bringing it into being. This thesis has two sides: On the one hand, it means that there are aspects of reality whose very existence depends on our understanding of them as rational. On the other hand, it means that the norms of rationality cannot be understood independently of their realization in practice. Various features of our contemporary intellectual climate make it difficult for us to grasp this idea. Hegel’s slogan is often taken as a peculiar excess of Absolute Idealism that just reflects a conservative attitude towards the status quo. However, the central topics for a Marxist critique of right and western liberalism – such as alienation, exploitation and imperialism – can already be found in Hegel’s account on bourgeois society. (V)

Literature:

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, ed. by A.W. Wood,, trans. by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press

Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of intellectual excellence or knowledge in the domain of the practical: techne and phronesis. The one is in the order of an ability, the other in the order of a tendency. The artisan knows how to build a house, but whether she decides to do so is not explained by that knowledge. The phronimos, by contrast, knows to act well such that it is not a further question whether she chooses to do so. In contemporary epistemology and action theory, these two kinds of expertise are often discussed under the heading of ‘intelligent skill’ and ‘intelligent virtue’ as irreducibly practical forms of cognition that can’t be assimilated to knowing that something is the case. Following Gilbert Ryle’s seminal discussion in The Concept of Mind, both, skill and virtue, are standardly opposed to ‘brute’ or ‘mere habit.’ The general concept of habit has received surprisingly little attention. In the seminar we will start with the discussion of habit in the Aristotelian tradition, before we turn to the contemporary debates on the two kinds of practical knowledge. Among the questions we will discuss are the following: What is the role of habit in human life? Can knowing how be reduced to knowing that? And if not, what kind of conceptual understanding does it involve? Can virtue be explained through the analogy with skill? Or does the intelligibility of latter ultimately depend on the former, as Aristotle suggest? (I)

Immanuel Kant’s “critical” turn set off a revolution in 19th-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the reactions against it. Our focus will be the conception of ethics and the philosophy of right. Kant’s main project was to show that the laws of morality and right are internal to the very ideas of practical reason and autonomy. On the one hand, we will study Post-Kantian German Idealist attempt to complete the enlightment project: J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel argue that since the idea of freedom cannot be understood independently of its actuality, one has to give an account of the necessity of its realization in the material world. On the other hand, we will investigate the (constitutive(?)) blindspots of this tradition and its abstract conception of the subject. In this connection we will study the critical works of Karl Marx, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Foundations of Natural Right contains Fichte’s most influential contribution to philosophy: the argument that thought is a constitutively social and thus linguistic phenomenon. Self-consciousness and mutual recognition necessarily go together. There can only be an ‘I’, a thinking individual, insofar as there is a ‘You’ and thus a material medium of address. The argument is part of Fichte’s ambitious project to deduce the necessity of individual rights and directed duties from the ‘I think.’ The rather elevated starting point and the details of the purported deduction were quickly doubted and are notoriously hard to understand. But the questions raised in the course of the endeavor set the agenda for the philosophy of right in the German Idealist tradition. From the contemporary perspective, one of the most striking features of the approach is the wide range of topics that are said to belong to an investigation with that title. According to Fichte, the philosophy of right must explain both: what we owe to each other and how we know of each other. Knowledge of another person and the necessity of her rights must have the same source. To show this Fichte discusses the relation between theoretical and practical reason; the ground of the idea of the efficacy of the will in the material world; the distinct appearance of the ‘body’ of a rational being. The main part of the class will be a close reading of the first steps in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (1796). Then we will look at later versions of the argument for the unity self-consciousness and recognition in the Wissenschaftslehre and in The System of Ethics (1798). (I)

Human rights are claims of justice that hold merely in virtue of our shared humanity. In this course we will explore philosophical theories of this elementary and crucial form of justice. Among topics to be considered are the role that dignity and humanity play in grounding such rights, their relation to political and economic institutions, and the distinction between duties of justice and claims of charity or humanitarian aid. Finally we will consider the application of such theories to concrete, problematic and pressing problems, such as global poverty, torture and genocide. (A) (I)