PHIL

Right after WWII a new way of living emerges in France: Existentialism. Existentialism becomes the name for the feeling of the Freedom recovered after France occupation by Germany. But more than a simple revolution in customs it lies on a new metaphysics of the human experience. This new metaphysics of Human's finitude is popularized by Sartre's manifesto: "Existentialism is a Humanism". The main goal of this course will be to introduce students to French Existentialism in taking as a center of our investigation Sartre's philosophy. We will try to clarify its main origins and concepts in insisting first on the meaning of the philosophical conflict between Christian Existentialism (inspired by Kierkegaard) and Atheist Existentialism (inspired by Feuerbach and Kojeve). We will also insist on the importance of Heidegger for the formation of the French Existentialism. Once this background clarified we will focus on Sartre's philosophy and on Sartre's relations to literature throughout Sartre's art of portraying from an existentialist point of view and methodology, some major French writers like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet and Flaubert. These investigations will give us a privileged key in order to make sense of the Existentialism fundamental claim following which Human life must be understood as an existential engagement towards the Impossible goal of being God. From an existentialist point of view as a matter of fact: God is no longer the principle of existence (as it is in Classical Metaphysics and Theology) but the Goal that finite existence tries to embody in vain.

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's "critical" philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy. We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of what philosophical ethics might hope to achieve. We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which the project of grounding all ethical obligations in the very idea of rational freedom is announced. We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of rational freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life". We will conclude with an examination of three very different critics of the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical theory: Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is intended as a list of rights the protection of which all human beings should enjoy. However, in its preamble, the Declaration mentions "reason" and "conscience" as universal attributes of human beings, thus expressing a certain conception of what a human being is. Does this conception serve well all human beings? What about cognitively or intellectually disabled persons? More specifically, when thinking about particular human rights, like the right to privacy, political participation or education - how are these rights supposed to be protected for cognitively and intellectually disabled persons? These are the questions we will consider in this class.

This course explores the Western philosophical tradition of reasoned reflection on religious belief. Our questions will include: what are the most important arguments for, and against, belief in God? How does religious belief relate to the deliverances of the sciences, in particular to evolutionary theory? How can we reconcile religious belief with the existence of evil? What is the relationship between religion and morality? In attempting to answer these questions we will read work by Plato, Augustine, Anselm, Hume, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as 20th century discussions in the 20th Century analytic tradition. (B)

This course will introduce students to the analytic tradition in philosophy. The aim of the course is to provide an overview of the first half of this tradition, starting from the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift in 1879 and reaching up to the publication of Ryle's The Concept of Mind in 1949 and the posthumous publication of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in 1953. The course will focus on four aspects of this period in the history of analytic philosophy: (1) its initial founding phase, as inaugurated in the early seminal writings of Gottlob Frege, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus; (2) the inheritance and reshaping of some of the central ideas of the founders of analytic philosophy at the hands of the members of the Vienna Circle and their critics, especially as developed in the writings of Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and W. V. O. Quine, (3) the cross-fertilization of the analytic and Kantian traditions in philosophy and the resulting initiation of a new form of analytic Kantianism, as found in the work of some of the logical positivists, as well as in the writings of some of their main critics, such as C. I. Lewis; (4) the movement of Ordinary Language Philosophy and Oxford Analysis, with a special focus on the writings of Gilbert Ryle and the later Wittgenstein. (B)

In this course we will explore some of the central questions in epistemology and metaphysics. In epistemology, these questions will include: What is knowledge? What facts or states justify a belief? How can the threat of skepticism be adequately answered? How do we know what we (seem to) know about mathematics and morality? In metaphysics, these questions will include: What is time? What is the best account of personal identity across time? Do we have free will? We will also discuss how the construction of a theory of knowledge ought to relate to the construction of a metaphysical theory-roughly speaking, what comes first, epistemology or metaphysics? (B)

In this class we will investigate what it is for a society to be just. In what sense are the members of a just society equal? What freedoms does a just society protect? Must a just society be a democracy? What economic arrangements are compatible with justice? In the second portion of the class we will consider one pressing injustice in our society in light of our previous philosophical conclusions. Possible candidates include, but are not limited to, racial inequality, economic inequality, and gender hierarchy. Here our goal will be to combine our philosophical theories with empirical evidence in order to identify, diagnose, and effectively respond to actual injustice. (A)

Howard Stein's impressive body of work is notable for its tight integration of history of science with philosophy of science. Topics include: theories of spacetime structure (Newtonian and relativistic), the conceptual structure of quantum mechanics, the methodology of science in general and the character of scientific knowledge, and the history of physics and mathematics. Readings by Stein will be supplemented by primary historical texts and secondary philosophical literature, including selections from a forthcoming edited collection on Stein. (II)

The being we will study in this course is a subject of thinking/judging and therefore in a sense, all things (Aristotle, De Anima), at the same time she is a determinable substance whose determinations include moods, sensations, feelings, intentions, actions. We shall explore the apparent tension between these two descriptions of our being - as a subject-being and as a substance-being - and search for an understanding that resolves it. Readings include sections from: Aristotle, Kant, Hegel. Sartre, Heidegger, Wittgenstein.

In addition to having reasons for belief (theoretical reasons) and reasons for action (practical reasons), we also, sometimes, have reasons for feeling the way we do. For example: I feel angry because of the injustice someone did, or sad because of the loss I suffered, or grateful because of the benefit someone provided me. In this class we will ask what kinds of reasons those are: what is a reason to feel? We will also want to know how rational such emotions are: are there features that are central to our emotional life that we miss out on or misdescribe when we attend soley to its rational structure? We will also consider a puzzle that arises about the temporality of reasons for feeling: if my reason for being angry (or sad or grateful) is what you did, and it will always be true that you did it, do I have a reason to be angry (or sad or grateful) forever? If not, why not? In addition to discussing what might be true of the rationality of emotions considered as a class, we will also spend some time addressing questions specific to a given emotion. For example: What is an apology? Does gratitude require actual benefit or only positive intention? When we are sad about a loved one's death, do we mourn for ourselves, or for her? Are there reasons for feeling jealous, disgusted or stressed? (I)