PHIL

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.

Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.

In what sense, if any, do the laws of logic express necessary truths? The course will consider four fateful junctures in the history of philosophy at which this question received influential treatment: (1) Descartes on the creation of the eternal truths, (2) Kant's re-conception of the nature of logic and introduction of the distinction between pure general and transcendental logic, (3) Frege's rejection of the possibility of logical aliens, and (4) Wittgenstein's early and later responses to Frege. We will closely read short selections from Descartes, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and ponder their significance for contemporary philosophical reflection by studying some classic pieces of secondary literature on these figures, along with related pieces of philosophical writing by Jocelyn Benoist, Matt Boyle, Cora Diamond, Peter Geach, John MacFarlane, Adrian Moore, Hilary Putnam, Thomas Ricketts, Sebastian Rödl, Richard Rorty, Peter Sullivan, Barry Stroud, Clinton Tolley, and Charles Travis. (V)

Socrates found himself surrounded by people who took themselves to know things: about the Gods; about statesmanship; about how to educate the youth; about friendship and justice and human excellence, etc. Socrates was inclined to trust those around him - but also afraid that, by doing so, he would end up taking himself to know what he in fact did not. So went around testing all those claims, attempting to refute them. Over and over again, he proved that his interlocutor did not know what he took himself to know, thereby successfully protecting himself from the illusion of knowledge. Along the way, however, he made an interesting discovery: as his interlocutor pressed some point, and as he resisted it, the two of them were doing something together. The interlocutor's need to believe that he had an account of the way things are, coupled with Socrates' commitment to rejecting falsity, taken together, amounted to a shared pursuit of knowledge. This class investigates that discovery - arguably, of philosophy itself - by way of a close reading of some Socratic dialogues: Euthydemus, Protagoras, Meno, Euthyphro, Charmides. (IV)

The topic for 2018-19 will be "Enlightenment liberalism and its critics," the critics coming from both the left and the right. Enlightenment liberalism was marked by its belief in human freedom and the need for justifications on any infringements of that freedom; by its commitment to individual rights (for example, rights to expression or to property); and by its faith in the rational and self-governing capacities of persons and their basic moral equality. The Workshop will begin in the fall with several classes just for students to discuss foundational readings from liberal thinkers like Locke, Kant and Mill (we may also have some outside speakers taking up Kantian and Millian themes). In the Winter quarter, we will consider critics from the left, notably Marx and Frankfurt School theorists like Herbert Marcuse. In Spring, we will turn to critics from the "right" such as Nietzsche (who rejects the moral equality of persons) and Carl Schmitt. There will be sessions with the students discussing primary texts and then sessions with outside speakers sometimes interpreting the primary texts, sometimes criticizing the critics of liberalism, and sometimes developing their ideas.

Anxiety is discussed in modern philosophy as a mood or feeling which reveals ‘nothing’.  The class will be devoted to the modern philosophical discourse on “anxiety” and “nothing”. Among the texts that we shall study are: Kierkegaard’s ‘The concept of Anxiety’, Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, and Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’.We shall also compare the philosophical concern with anxiety/nothing with the discussion of anxiety in psychoanalysis, especially in Lacan’s Seminar ‘Anxiety’ i.e., seminar 10.