PHIL

Key contemporary debates in the philosophical literature often rely on formal tools and techniques that go beyond the material taught in an introductory logic class.  A robust understanding of these debates---and, accordingly, the ability to meaningfully engage with a good deal of contemporary philosophy---requires a basic grasp of extensions of standard logic such as modal logic, multi-valued logic, and supervaluations, as well as an appreciation of the key philosophical virtues and vices of these extensions. The goal of this course is to provide students with the required logic literacy. While some basic metalogical results will come into view as the quarter proceeds, the course will primarily focus on the scope (and, perhaps, the limits) of logic as an important tool for philosophical theorizing. (B)

There is a long and venerable philosophical tradition which not only distinguishes considerations of love from considerations of reason, but which regards the two as fundamentally opposed.  On this traditional view, “love is blind” and to allow oneself to be led by considerations of love is to risk straying from the sunlit path of rational truth.  Yet there have also been prominent dissenters to this view of love, who have variously regarded a loving engagement with the world as a precondition for the successful operation of reason, or chosen to eschew reason in favor of eros, or argued that love is capable of a unique form of insight that outstrips our powers of ratiocination. Still others claim that the logic of eros is fundamentally continuous with our rationality. Adjudicating these debates involves reflecting on how we ought to conceive of our erotic investments – i.e. what we should take such relations to consist in – and asking what role they play in our mental life. Moreover, as these conceptions may be subject to historical shifts, we must ask whether and how such changes in our self-conception may affect the very constitution of the self we are attempting to describe.  With an eye on these metadiscursive questions, we will track this dialectic between love and reason as it works itself out both in historical texts and in more recent work.  Our historical readings will draw on Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul, and Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature, among others. We will also draw on work by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Iris Murdoch (including her novel The Sea, the Sea), Jonathan Lear, and Martha Nussbaum. 

How is the concept of causation to be applied in reflection on the activities of thought? In what way or ways should thoughts be understood as causally related to each other, and in what way or ways should they be understood as causally related to elements of the material world?  We pursue these questions through the close reading of a range of historical and contemporary writings, including works by Descartes, Mill, Ryle, Winch, Anscombe, Davidson, Dretske and Hornsby.  A guiding theme will be the conflict within the tradition between two broad approaches to these questions: one that attempts to derive the role of causation in thought from reflection on what thoughts themselves imply or otherwise commit their thinkers to, and another that seeks to impose causal patterns on thought’s activity drawn from models and considerations external to it. (III)

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

A discussion of the third and final part of Hegel’s Science of Logic. (V)

The topic for Winter 2015 is “Freedom and Responsibility, Contemporary and Historical.”  We will begin by canvassing the major philosophical positions in the Anglophone literature on free will and moral responsibility over the past half-century, with readings drawn from some or all of P.F. Strawson, G. Strawson, R. Kane, H. Frankfurt, G. Watson, and others.  In the second half of the seminar we will step back to look at the treatment of these same issues by major figures in the history of philosophy, including M. Frede’s A Free Will:  Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, as well as primary texts by some or all of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre.

The Workshop will consider important philosophical defenses of free speech and critics of those rationales. Topics will include the idea of the "marketplace of ideas," autonomy interests in free speech, the harms of speech, and the problem of propaganda and other manipulative speech.  Note: 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.

Global income and wealth are highly concentrated. The richest 2% of the population own about half of the global assets. Per capita income in the United States is around $47,000 and in Europe it is around $30,500, while in India it is $3,400 and in Congo, it is $329. There are equally unsettling inequalities in longevity, health, and education. In this class, we ask what duties nations and individuals have to address these inequalities and what are the best strategies for doing so. What role must each country play in helping itself? What is the role of international agreements and agencies, of NGOs, and of corporations in addressing global poverty? How do we weigh policies that emphasize growth against policies that emphasize within-country equality, health, or education? In seeking answers to these questions, the class will combine readings on the law and economics of global development with readings on the philosophy of global justice. A particular focus will be on the role that legal institutions, both domestic and international, play in discharging these duties. For, example, we might focus on how a nation with natural resources can design legal institutions to ensure they are exploited for the benefit of the citizens of the country. Students will be expected to write a paper, which may qualify for substantial writing credit.

Linguists and philosophers have traditionally examined the role of language and thought as a medium for (mis)representing objective facts about the world we are living in. However, language is also an important tool for sharing subjective perspectives with others, and clearly not all thoughts are objective. Taking subjectivity as a sui generis phenomenon that does not reduce to another instance of descriptive talk and thought has repercussions that go beyond the traditional distinction between linguistics and philosophy: it impacts both the way that linguists tend to think to about the nature of linguistic meaning and philosophical attempts to understand the nature of normative thoughts. This is the second in a two-course sequence that addresses the resulting challenges in a systematic manner, to be offered jointly by Professors Chris Kennedy and Malte Willer. The first course will be taught in Fall 2014 by Malte Willer and will focus on foundational philosophical issues surrounding subjectivity in language and thought, including issues pertaining to normativity and general considerations about the shape a theory of natural language meaning must have to take the phenomenon of subjectivity seriously. The second course will be taught in Winter 2015 by Chris Kennedy and will focus on linguistic issues surrounding subjectivity, including a rich variety of empirical questions and the impact that treating subjectivity as a sui generis phenomenon has for theoretical linguistics. Despite their slight differences in focus, both courses are interdisciplinary by design and will appeal to linguists and philosophers alike. Students may take either one of these courses for credit without taking the other for credit. The two-course seminar is also the launching event for a three-year interdisciplinary working group on the nature of subjectivity in language and thought, led by Chris Kennedy and Malte Willer and funded by the generous support of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.