PHIL

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)

In this class we will investigate what it is for a society to be just. In what sense are the members of a just society equal? What freedoms does a just society protect? Must a just society be a democracy? What economic arrangements are compatible with justice? In the second portion of the class we will consider one pressing injustice in our society in light of our previous philosophical conclusions. Possible candidates include, but are not limited to, racial inequality, economic inequality, and gender hierarchy. Here our goal will be to combine our philosophical theories with empirical evidence in order to identify, diagnose, and effectively respond to actual injustice. (A)

In this class we will explore questions of justice that arise in and around work. We will consider concepts such as exploitation and domination as they apply to workers under capitalism. We will explore the foundation of the right to strike, and the right to form a union. We will consider the merits of different justifications for workplace democracy and worker control. We will explore the role of domestic injustice in sustaining wage inequality for women, and consider the relationship of race to capitalism. We explore these topics through a variety of normative lenses, drawing on cutting edge work in the liberal, neo-republican, Marxist, feminist, and human rights traditions. (A)

I shall discuss the subject on the basis of 4 lectures Leo Strauss gave on “Jerusalem and Athens” and “Reason and Revelation” in the period 1946-1967.

“In wonder is the beginning of philosophy,” wrote Aristotle; Descartes also thought that those deficient in wonder were also deficient in knowledge. But the relationship between wonder and inquiry has always been an ambivalent one: too much wonder stupefies rather than stimulates investigation, according to Descartes; Aristotle explicitly excluded wonders as objects of inquiry from natural philosophy. Since the sixteenth century, scientists and scholars have both cultivated and repudiated the passion of wonder. On the one hand, marvels (or even just anomalies) threaten to subvert the human and natural orders; on the other, the wonder they ignite fuels inquiry into their causes. Wonder is also a passion tinged with the numinous, and miracles have long stood for the inexplicable in religious contexts. This seminar will explore the long, vexed relationship between wonder, knowledge, and belief in the history of philosophy, science, and religion.

The imagination of many contemporary intellectuals—including philosophers, physicists, and cognitive scientists of various stripes—is gripped by problems surrounding consciousness. Most notably, philosophers have been entirely stumped by the question of how something like conscious awareness arise in a material world. In this course we shall investigate the assumptions that lie behind this question, in order to penetrate the aura of mystery surrounding it. A central theme of the course shall be that, in order to tackle the puzzles surrounding consciousness, we shall need understand self-consciousness better. (B)

In this class we shall attempt to get to grips with various philosophical accounts of evil. This will partly involve getting in view how different ethical orientations—both contemporary and historical—entail different kinds of perspectives on what evil is. At the heart of the course will be an attempt to get to grips with two central tendencies in our thinking about evil: First, the idea of evil as somehow a positive force, something with its own distinctive character, and on the other hand, the idea of evil as a mere privation. (A)

This introduction to Marx’s thought will divide into three parts: in the first, we will consider Marx‘s theory of history; in the second, his account of capitalism; and in third, his conception of the state. (A)

In the first part of the course, we’ll be discussing an argument to the effect that: in order for radical skepticism about empirical knowledge not to be intellectually obligatory, we must understand ourselves as enjoying a very particular kind of self-consciousness. In the remainder of the course, we’ll be trying to get into view what an adequate account of that sort of self-consciousness might look like. (III)