PHIL

In this seminar will examine the views of the American pragmatist philosopher C.S. Peirce as they pertain to the nature and methodology of science. The course will be organized around a careful reading of the six essays comprising the series “Illustrations of the Logic of Science,” published by Peirce in Popular Science Monthly in the years 1877-78.  Among the many topics addressed in these essays are: (1). What is the aim of scientific inquiry? (2). What are the conditions for the meaningfulness of a scientific hypothesis? (3). What is the role of probability in science (inverse inference vs. hypothesis testing)? (4). Are there natural laws? (5). What are the grounds for inductive inference? (6) How are we to classify the various sciences? In addition to the six essays mentioned above, we will also consider some of Peirce’s later writings on the subject as well as contemporary interpretations of the Peircean view. (II)

In this seminar we will address questions about the nature of reasons and normativity, with a particular eye toward the difficulties philosophy has encountered in attempting to locate our responsiveness to normativity in the causual order. Readings will be drawn from a manuscript in progress as well as a range of work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action, skewing toward contemporary sources. (III)

A close reading of Michel Foucault’s 1979-80 course at the Collège de France, Du gouvernement des vivants. Foucault’s most extensive course on early Christianity, these lectures examine the relations between the government of the self and regimes of truth through a detailed analysis of Christian penitential practices, with special attention to the practices of exomologēsis and exagoreusis. We will read this course both taking into account Foucault’s sustained interest in ancient thought and with a focus on the more general historical and theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from his analyses. (I)

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

Søren Kierkegaard created a pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus, who is cited as the author of Philosophical Crumbs as well as The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs.  This course will begin with a careful reading of Philosophical Crumbs.  If there is time, we will go on to The Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  This course is open to graduate students in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Philosophy Department.  For all other students, permission of the instructor is required.

Ancient Greek tragedy has been of continuous interest to philosophers, whether they love it or hate it. But they do not agree about what it is and does, or about what insights it offers. This seminar will study the tragic festivals and a select number of tragedies, also consulting some modern studies of ancient tragedy. Then we shall turn to philosophical accounts of the tragic genre, including Plato, Aristotle, the Greek and Roman Stoics, Seneca, Lessing, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Iris Murdoch, and Bernard Williams. If we have time we will include some study of ancient Greek comedy and its philosophical significance. (I) (IV)

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. There are approximately four meetings in each of the three quarters. Students must therefore enroll for all three quarters. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

John Rawls’s book, Political Liberalism, stakes out a remarkably original way to conceive of the goals and possibilities of political philosophy.  In addition, in Political Liberalism Rawls offers an account of distributive justice that fits with his new conception of the discipline’s goals and possibilities.  In the seminar we will (i) lay out and assess Rawls’s argument justifying his turn to political liberalism; (ii) lay out and assess the new version of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness; (iii) lay out and assess at least one other political liberal view of proper distributive principles; (iv) examine how choosing between competing accounts of distributive principles is supposed to proceed in light of the constraints of political liberalism; and (v) determine whether and how far those constraints should be loosened. (I)

In his Moral Sentimentalism, Michael Slote provides an account of the moral judgment that gives a prominent place to the evaluative feeling of empathy as the natural sources of human morality. But rather than embracing an emotivist account of this judgment, his claim is that this judgment is true or false in very much the same way as descriptive judgments are and that all the shortcomings of emotivism can be avoided. As for his account of empathy, he relies on social psychological research on empathic feelings. In this course, we shall take our starting point from a critical account of Slote’s theory and of the social psychological foundations on which he claims to build it. We shall then turn to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments where we find an earlier version of moral sentimentalism, one which claims a virtue theoretical heritage in a much more convincing way than the version suggested by Slote.

This course will be devoted to the confrontation of two of the most important masterpieces of Continental Philosophy: Being and Time of Heidegger and Totality and Infinity of Levinas. In this course we shall try first to focus on the Heideggerian project of a “deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence”. Against Heidegger, Levinas maintains that ontology cannot be fundamental—the question of being at the core of Heidegger's project cannot just be directed to one's own tacit understanding of being.  If the question of being is an actual question, its addressee must be an Other.  Levinas teaches that metaphysical experience of otherness cannot be captured in Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Nevertheless, Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics” challenges Levinas’s idea of a Metaphysical Experience that could be entirely free of  Ontology and Phenomenality (in the Heidegger's senses of these terms). Against Levinas he defends the the idea that the Other cannot be identified to a Metaphysical Presence (as it is for Levinas) but necessarily coincides with an Absence and a Trace. We will try to identify and to criticize such a reduction of the Levinas' Metaphysics to the so-called "Metaphysics of Presence" identified and deconstructed by Heidegger and Derrida. Through the analysis of the philosophical conflicts between Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida about metaphysics, the fundamental goal of this course will be to defend a sense for Metaphysics after the so-called “End of Metaphysics."