PHIL

Students are required to submit the college reading & research course form.

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in either the Autumn or Winter Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in either the Winter or Spring Quarter. (Students may not register for both PHIL 29901 and 29902 in the same quarter.) The senior seminar meets all three quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.

Course not for field credit. An introduction to the techniques of modern symbolic logic. The focus will be on the syntax and semantics of classical propositional and first-order quantificational logic. The course will introduce methods for determining whether a given argument is valid or invalid. We will discuss how statements and arguments of ordinary discourse can be represented within the formal language of propositional and quantificational logic. There will also be discussion of some important meta-theorems for these logical systems.

This course will be devoted to two early Essays of Levinas, Time and Other and Existence and Existents. We will try to situate these two works in the context of the French reception of German Existentialism. The major goal of this course will be to show that the concept of Otherness in Levinas’s philosophy does not entail a simple abandonment of the Heideggerian “ontological difference” but lies in a new deduction of it that entails a new concept of Time, beyond its ontological (and Heideggerian) meaning. We will try to explain how this new deduction of the ontological difference is based on the elucidation of phenomenological events that remain hidden to the so-called “phenomenological reduction” and that requires a reform of the phenomenological method that Levinas inherits from Husserl and Heidegger. Thanks to this new method, Phenomenology can be accomplished as an investigation that is able to go beyond intentional objects.

This lecture-discussion course will trace different theories of explanation in history from the nineteenth century to the present.  We will examine the ideas of Humboldt, Ranke, Dilthey, Collingwood, Braudel, Hempel, Danto, and White.  The considerations will encompass such topics as the nature of the past such that one can explain its features, the role of laws in historical explanation, the use of Verstehen history as a science, the character of narrative explanation,the structure of historical versus other kinds of explanation, and the function of the footnote. (II)

This course introduces problems in the philosophy of art with both traditional and contemporary texts. Topics include the definition of art, representation, expression, metaphor, and taste. (A) (I)

This course is a reading of works by a variety of contemporary authors who deal with the question of whether, and how, fiction and philosophy are related to one another. (A) (I)

This course will study in alternation chapters from Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and David Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, two major philosophical works whose literary forms are at least as important as their contents. Topics will include human knowledge of the existence and nature of God, anthropomorphism and idolatry, religious language, and the problem of evil. Time permitting, we shall also read other short works by these two authors on related themes. (IV) (V)

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.

A survey of some of the central concerns in various areas of philosophy, pursued from the perspective of the analytic tradition. In epistemology, our topics will include the definition of knowledge, the challenge of skepticism, and the nature of justification. In the philosophy of mind, we will explore the mind-body problem and the nature and structure of intentional states. In the philosophy of language, we will address theories of truth and of speech acts, the sense/reference distinction, and the semantics of names and descriptions. In ethics, we will focus on the debate between utilitarians and Kantians.