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 2025. Approval of dissertation committee is required.
An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.
Students may count either PHIL 20100 or PHIL 20012, but not both, toward the credits required for graduation.
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.
People differ from one another, and some of those differences really matter—for working together, for understanding each other, and for shaping who we are. Which differences have philosophical significance, and why? This course explores both the obvious social categories—race, gender, class, culture—and the more elusive, fine-grained differences that challenge the conceit of a universal human nature. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and literary texts, we’ll investigate how conversation can bridge (or deepen) these gaps, ultimately asking what it means to truly understand someone whose experience may be radically unlike our own.
Note that you do not need to take this as a two quarter class, you can take only the Fall Quarter, but IF you wish to take the Winter quarter you must take the Fall quarter.
People differ from one another, and some of those differences really matter—for working together, for understanding each other, and for shaping who we are. Which differences have philosophical significance, and why? This course explores both the obvious social categories—race, gender, class, culture—and the more elusive, fine-grained differences that challenge the conceit of a universal human nature. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and literary texts, we’ll investigate how conversation can bridge (or deepen) these gaps, ultimately asking what it means to truly understand someone whose experience may be radically unlike our own.
Note that you do not need to take this as a two quarter class, you can take only the Fall Quarter, but IF you wish to take the Winter quarter you must take the Fall quarter.
This course is designed to provide MAPH students – especially those interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy – with an introduction to some recent debates between philosophers working in the analytic tradition. The course is, however, neither a history of analytic philosophy nor an overview of the discipline as it currently stands. The point of the course is primarily to introduce the distinctive style and method – or styles and methods – of philosophizing in the analytic tradition, through brief explorations of some currently hotly debated topics in the field.
This course is open only to MAPH students. MAPH students who wish to apply to Ph.D. programs in Philosophy are strongly urged to take this course.
What can reflection upon artificial intelligence teach us about human thought? This question may be asked and understood in many ways. Our concern will be philosophical: the insight we seek is into the nature and structure of thought as it is for the one thinking, as it informs, shapes, or constitutes the life of a thinking being. This course will lay the groundwork for pursuit of our question by (1) introducing and examining the idea of a model of a human intellectual capacity (2) outlining the basic concepts needed for understanding the architecture of the currently most noteworthy form of artificial intelligence—the class of language models known as GPTs, (3) introducing some of the philosophical ideas needed for analyzing the forms of thought that go into human linguistic communication, and finally (4) endeavoring to bring all of these elements together. (B)
While some of the philosophical readings are challenging, prior familiarity with philosophy is not a prerequisite.
(I)
Aquinas regards justice as the preeminent moral virtue, and in the Summa theologiae he devotes more Questions to it than to any other virtue (II-II, qq. 57-79). With occasional help from other passages of his, and with an eye to his sources (especially Aristotle) and to later thinkers, we will first work through his general accounts of the object of justice (ius—the just or the right), justice as a virtue, the nature of injustice, and the distinction between distributive and commutative justice. Then, as time permits, we will discuss selected texts on more specific topics such as judicature, restitution, partiality, murder, theft, verbal injuries, fraud, and usury. (A)
Completion of the general education requirement in humanities.
