PHIL

The quarrel between reason and faith has a long history. The birth of Christianity was in the crucible of rationality. The ancient Greeks privileged this human capacity above all others, finding in reason the quality wherein man was closest to the gods, while the early Christians found this viewpoint antithetical to religious humility. As religion and its place in society have evolved throughout history, so have the standing of, and philosophical justification for, non-belief on rational grounds. This course will examine the intellectual and cultural history of arguments against religion in Western thought from antiquity to the present. Along the way, of course, we will also examine the assumptions bound up in the binary terms "religion" and "reason."

Bernard Williams (1929-2003) was one of the most influential Anglophone philosophers working on questions about ethics, reasons for acting, character, moral psychology, and the shape of a human life. He drew from ancient Greek philosophy, from Descartes, from Nietzsche, and from a solid core of good sense and good taste in mounting his challenges to philosophers who tried to develop systematic moral theory along either of the two lines most common in the last half of the 20th century-utilitarianism or Kantianism. His work is peppered with sharp criticisms of mainstream Anglophone ethics and astute observation of the complexities of life. Focus on his work in practical philosophy-in ethics, in moral psychology, and in political and social philosophy-will give us a glimpse into the nature of the questions and problems he helped to formulate and make acute, many of which continue to haunt analytic practical philosophy. (I)

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)

What is death, and what is its significance for our lives and how we lead them? In this course we will tack back and forth between the metaphysics of death (What is nonexistence? Are death and pre-birth metaphysically symmetrical?) and the ethical questions raised by death (Is death a misfortune-something we should fear or lament? Should we be glad not to be immortal? How should we understand the ethics of abortion and capital punishment?) Our exploration of these issues will take us through the work of many figures in the Western philosophical tradition (Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger), but we will be concentrating on the recent and dramatic flowering of work on the subject.

We will begin by trying to explicate the manner in which science is a rational response to observational facts. This will involve a discussion of inductivism, Popper's deductivism, Lakatos and Kuhn. After this, we will briefly survey some other important topics in the philosophy of science, including underdetermination, theories of evidence, Bayesianism, the problem of induction, explanation, and laws of nature. (B) (II)

(A) (I)

Plato honors Parmenides with the title "father Parmenides", presumably for being the founder of philosophy as the "logical" study of being and thinking. In this course we shall discuss the struggle of ancient and modern philosophers to come to terms with this powerful heritage — in particular, we shall focus on the elaboration, reception and criticism of Parmenides' theses that being and thinking are the same, and that talk of negation or falsity is incoherent or empty. Among the philosophers whose work we shall discuss are Plato, Aristotle, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein.

(I)

All human beings fear death, and it seems plausible to think that a lot of our actions are motivated by it. But is it reasonable to fear death? And does this fear do good (motivating creative projects) or harm (motivating greedy accumulation, war, and too much deference to religious leaders)? Hellenistic philosophers, both Greek and Roman, were preoccupied with these questions and debated them with a depth and intensity that makes them still highly influential in modern philosophical debate about the same issues (the only issue on which one will be likely find discussion of Lucretius in the pages of The Journal of Philosophy). The course will focus on several major Latin writings on the topic: Lucretius De Rerum Natura Book III, and extracts from Cicero and Seneca. We will study the philosophical arguments in their literary setting and ask about connections between argument and its rhetorical expression. In translation we will read pertinent material from Plato, Epicurus, Plutarch, and a few modern authors such as Thomas Nagel, John Fischer, and Bernard Williams. (IV)