PHIL

Painting raises philosophical questions, if only because one can wonder why some particular pieces of the overall visible may attract more visual attention than others, which appear nevertheless just besides the former.  In fact, this privilege comes mostly from the radical (although subtle) difference between common law phenomena (objects) and saturated phenomena.  Among them, the two main rival postulations are idol and icon.  Concerning the idol, one may ask what precisely is its function?  How far can it reach the thing itself even more than objective knowledge (the examples of Courbet and Cezanne will be privileged)?  Concerning the icon, one may open the road to theological questions:  how far can the invisible God be aimed at through visible images?  Is iconoclasm the only option?  What theological arguments could support the claim for icons (Nicene Council II)?  Can the concept of icon be extended to other issues than “the icon of the invisible God” (Colossians 1, 15)?

Joseph Soloveitchik was one of the most important philosophers of religion of the twentieth-century.  Firmly rooted in the tradition of Biblical and Talmudic texts and culture, Soloveitchik elaborated a phenomenology of Jewish self-consciousness and religious experience that has significant implications for the philosophy of religion more generally.  This course will consist of a study of some of his major books and essays.  Topics to be covered may include the nature of Halakhic man and Soloveitchik’s philosophical anthropology, the problem of faith in the modern world, questions of suffering, finitude and human emotions, the nature of prayer, the idea of cleaving to God.  Soloveitchik will be studied both from within the Jewish tradition and in the context of the classical questions of the philosophy of religion. (I)

This course will be devoted to an intensive study of selected portions of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The focus of the course will be on the Transcendental Analytic and especially the Transcendental Deduction. We will begin, however, with a brief tour of some of the central claims of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Some effort will be made to situate these portions of the first half of the Critique with respect to the later portions of the book, viz. the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method. Although the focus of the course will be on Kant’s text, some consideration will be given to some of the available competing interpretations of the book. The primary commentators whose work will thus figure briefly in the course in this regard are Lucy Allais, Henry Allison, Stephen Engstrom, Johannes Haag, Robert Hanna, Martin Heidegger, Dieter Henrich, John McDowell, Charles Parsons, Sebastian Roedl, Wilfrid Sellars, Peter Strawson, and Manley Thompson. Our interest in these commentators in this course will always only be as a useful foil for understanding Kant’s text. No separate systematic study will be attempted of the work of any of these commentators. Of particular interest to us will be topics like Kant’s criticisms of traditional empiricism, the distinction between sensibility and understanding, and his account of the relation between intuitions and concepts. The aim of the course is both to use certain central texts of recent Kant commentary and contemporary analytic Kantian philosophy to illuminate some of the central aspirations of Kant’s theoretical philosophy and to use certain central Kantian texts in which those aspirations were first pursued to illuminate some recent developments in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (B) (V)

In this course, we will prove the soundness and completeness of deductive systems for both sentential and first-order logic. We will also establish related results in elementary model theory, such as the compactness theorem for first-order logic, the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem and Lindstrom’s theorem. (B) (II)

This course will study John Rawls’s two great works of political philosophy, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, trying to understand their argument as well as possible. We will also read other related writings of Rawls and some of the best critical literature.  Assessment will take the form of an eight-hour take-home final exam, except for those who gain permission to choose the paper option, who will write a 20-25 page paper. (I)

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

Hegel's chief theoretical work is called The Science of Logic. An abridged version is the first part of the various versions of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. We shall read and discuss representative passages from both versions, and attempt to understand Hegel's theory of concepts, judgment, and inference, and the place or role of such an account in his overall philosophical position. Several contemporary interpretations of these issues will also be considered. (V)

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.

This course will be devoted to recovering an understanding of practical reason that was developed over the course of a long tradition in practical philosophy, extending from Plato and Aristotle up through Kant. The primary text will be Kant’s Critique of practical Reason, but readings will also include selections from Kant’s other writings and from recent literature relating to practical reason. The main aim will be to understand the idea that reason has a practical application, which constitutes a capacity for a distinct type of knowledge, practical knowledge, whose object is the good. Topics that will need to be investigated include (on the epistemological side) reason and rational knowledge and the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge, and (on the psychological side) perception and desire, and feeling and action.