Early Modern Philosophy (including Kant)

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant’s “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated throughout the 19th century. The only reaction it did not elicit was one of indifference. Kant’s revolution polarized the philosophical community, meeting with eager extensions as well as intense and varied resistance – and often both within a single thinker’s response. This class will seek to understand the nature of Kant’s philosophical innovations and the principle sources of his successors’ (dis-)satisfaction with them. Kant’s central philosophical achievement was double-edged. He simultaneously celebrated human Reason as the supreme cognitive faculty while nevertheless setting for it sensible limits that were, in certain ways, far more restrictive than anyone had previously envisaged. In the practical sphere, Reason is identified as the original source of all moral principles, the wellspring of all goodness and freedom. Yet as sensible, libidinal beings, we humans are subject to desires and modes of self-deception which threaten to undermine the efficacy of reason in determining our will and which occlude our modes of self-assessment and cloud our conscience.In the theoretical sphere, human Reason not only interrogates nature, but shapes and constitutes the very structure of natural phenomena. Reason dictates the principles that govern the knowable world. Yet for precisely this reason, all our knowledge is restricted to what Reason helps to constitute: we know only appearances, but have no cognitive access to things in themselves.
This class will pursue the import and impact of Kant’s thought in the theoretical sphere, as subsequent thinkers grapple with and react to Kant’s idea that, though Reason helps to constitute the structure of the knowable, there is a realm of things in themselves of which we are necessarily ignorant. Fichte will urge that a proper appreciation of the self-conscious nature of Reason shows that nothing can extend beyond its ken. Hegel will likewise accept the preeminence of Reason, but suggest that it has a historical and interpersonal basis which afflicts it with a logical series of challenges that must be resolved before absolute knowledge is possible. And Nietzsche will argue that the claims of Reason, though legitimate, are life-denying in demonstrating our ultimate ignorance and insignificance and thus require revaluation and artistic reinterpretation in order to sustain the human spirit they epitomize.

Topic: Bodily Self-Knowledge (instructor: K. Howe)

Though few philosophers today are moved to defend anything like the mind-body dualism championed by Descartes in the Meditations, it remains an open question how instead we should characterize the relation in which we stand to our bodies. Though, in a sense, there is nothing to us over and above our bodies, still, we'd like to say, there is more to us than can be understood in terms of our bodies' physical and physiological properties. We are feeling, thinking, self-conscious beings, and, much of the time, this can seem to have little to do with our being bodily beings. There are, of course, significant moments where our mental and bodily lives meet—in, for example, perception and intentional action.It is through our bodies that we are made aware of the surrounding world and can intervene in it. But there is more than one way to think about what goes on when we perceive or act. One could conceive of it as being a way in which we make use of our bodies. This would make our bodies analogous to tools by which we gain knowledge and achieve our ends. But one could also think of perceiving and acting as moments where we, as feeling, thinking beings, are our bodies, where our mental and bodily lives are one and the same. Should we, then, think of ourselves as having bodies or as being bodies? In this course, we will approach this question through consideration of the notion of selfknowledge. Each of us stands in a special relation to our mental states and goings-on—to our beliefs, intentions, pains, etc.—in that we can usually just say what it is we're thinking or feeling. We needn't observe or make inferences from our behaviour as others must to know these things about us. Our knowledge of such states and goings-on, one could say, is thus knowledge we have as subject, as the one who is thinking, intending, or feeling. It is knowledge that we have of ourselves from the firstperson standpoint. Now, something which at least seems similar can be said for some of our bodily states. We can, for instance, usually just say where and how our limbs positioned, e.g. left arm raised above the head, bent at the elbow. We needn't look at ourselves to know this. Is this a form of selfknowledge related to the knowledge we have of our beliefs and our pains? Or is it a special form of perceptual knowledge—knowledge, that is, that happens to be of our bodies but could in principle be of bodies other than our own? To think through these issues, we will first consider a number of different approaches to self-knowledge more broadly. Then, we will consider the various positions recent authors have taken in connection with the body, especially as it figures in perception and action. Reflection on these issues should help us see whether and to what extent we should identify with our bodies. 

Topic: Hegel on Agency (instructor: B. Pierce) Hegel holds that human agency is both an individual and a social phenomenon: that the relation between subject and world that we call an action is possible only if it is also, in some sense, a relation between subjects. In this course, we will try to understand this difficult but intriguing (and highly influential) claim by reconstructing Hegel’s central arguments for it in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right. The first part of the course will be devoted to a close reading of the Reason chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. We will try to reconstruct the answer Hegel provides there to the question: what is it for some worldly happenings to count as my action? Since Hegel thinks seeing the answer to this question involves coming to see what it is for an agent to be unified both with herself and with other agents, during the second part of the course we will try to reconstruct Hegel’s view of intra- and intersubjective unity. This will involve understanding Hegel’s (in)famous distinction between morality and ethical life, for which our central texts will be drawn from the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right. The class will conclude by considering the relevance of the Hegelian position we have reconstructed for contemporary ethics.

Topic: Form and Matter in Kant’s Practical Philosophy (instructor: J. Tizzard) Kant famously claims that the moral worth of an action lies in its being motivated by the thought of duty instead of happiness or self-interest. In contrast to other ethical positions, his view is grounded on the thought that the most important feature of an action is not how the agent or anyone else stands to benefit from it, but the reason or principle that serves as the basis for its being chosen. With the articulation of the centerpiece of his view, the categorical imperative, Kant declares further that such principles are to be evaluated on the basis of their rational "form" and not their sensible “matter." The purpose of this course will be to better understand the meaning of and relationship between these concepts—form and matter—as they are used in the major works of Kant's Practical Philosophy, with a view to bringing out the very core of his position. Cultivating this understanding will involve touching upon a series of interrelated topics, including 1), Kant's understanding of the human subject as rational but sensibly dependent, and so as a subject whose practical thinking necessarily involves both form and matter; 2) the supreme principle of pure practical reason, more famously known as the Categorical Imperative, which is expressive of the form of practical reason; 3) the Highest Good, what Kant calls "happiness in proportion to virtue", which is expressive of the matter or object of practical reason; and 4) the nature of the unity of form and matter, the understanding of which requires that we examine how our rational and sensible capacities interact and condition one another in the practical context.This course will presuppose no prior knowledge of Kant’s philosophical system. It should be of use to both sympathizers and critics of Kant, as the main issues to be addressed relate directly to the standard objections brought against his view.Readings will be drawn from across Kant's major practical works. The majority of our time will be spent discussing the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), but texts such as the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) will also be consulted.

Topic: Bodily Self-Knowledge (instructor: K. Howe)

Though few philosophers today are moved to defend anything like the mind-body dualism championed by Descartes in the Meditations, it remains an open question how instead we should characterize the relation in which we stand to our bodies. Though, in a sense, there is nothing to us over and above our bodies, still, we'd like to say, there is more to us than can be understood in terms of our bodies' physical and physiological properties. We are feeling, thinking, self-conscious beings, and, much of the time, this can seem to have little to do with our being bodily beings. There are, of course, significant moments where our mental and bodily lives meet—in, for example, perception and intentional action.It is through our bodies that we are made aware of the surrounding world and can intervene in it. But there is more than one way to think about what goes on when we perceive or act. One could conceive of it as being a way in which we make use of our bodies. This would make our bodies analogous to tools by which we gain knowledge and achieve our ends. But one could also think of perceiving and acting as moments where we, as feeling, thinking beings, are our bodies, where our mental and bodily lives are one and the same. Should we, then, think of ourselves as having bodies or as being bodies? In this course, we will approach this question through consideration of the notion of selfknowledge. Each of us stands in a special relation to our mental states and goings-on—to our beliefs, intentions, pains, etc.—in that we can usually just say what it is we're thinking or feeling. We needn't observe or make inferences from our behaviour as others must to know these things about us. Our knowledge of such states and goings-on, one could say, is thus knowledge we have as subject, as the one who is thinking, intending, or feeling. It is knowledge that we have of ourselves from the firstperson standpoint. Now, something which at least seems similar can be said for some of our bodily states. We can, for instance, usually just say where and how our limbs positioned, e.g. left arm raised above the head, bent at the elbow. We needn't look at ourselves to know this. Is this a form of selfknowledge related to the knowledge we have of our beliefs and our pains? Or is it a special form of perceptual knowledge—knowledge, that is, that happens to be of our bodies but could in principle be of bodies other than our own? To think through these issues, we will first consider a number of different approaches to self-knowledge more broadly. Then, we will consider the various positions recent authors have taken in connection with the body, especially as it figures in perception and action. Reflection on these issues should help us see whether and to what extent we should identify with our bodies. 

Topic: Hegel on Agency (instructor: B. Pierce) Hegel holds that human agency is both an individual and a social phenomenon: that the relation between subject and world that we call an action is possible only if it is also, in some sense, a relation between subjects. In this course, we will try to understand this difficult but intriguing (and highly influential) claim by reconstructing Hegel’s central arguments for it in his Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right. The first part of the course will be devoted to a close reading of the Reason chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. We will try to reconstruct the answer Hegel provides there to the question: what is it for some worldly happenings to count as my action? Since Hegel thinks seeing the answer to this question involves coming to see what it is for an agent to be unified both with herself and with other agents, during the second part of the course we will try to reconstruct Hegel’s view of intra- and intersubjective unity. This will involve understanding Hegel’s (in)famous distinction between morality and ethical life, for which our central texts will be drawn from the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right. The class will conclude by considering the relevance of the Hegelian position we have reconstructed for contemporary ethics.

Topic: Form and Matter in Kant’s Practical Philosophy (instructor: J. Tizzard) Kant famously claims that the moral worth of an action lies in its being motivated by the thought of duty instead of happiness or self-interest. In contrast to other ethical positions, his view is grounded on the thought that the most important feature of an action is not how the agent or anyone else stands to benefit from it, but the reason or principle that serves as the basis for its being chosen. With the articulation of the centerpiece of his view, the categorical imperative, Kant declares further that such principles are to be evaluated on the basis of their rational "form" and not their sensible “matter." The purpose of this course will be to better understand the meaning of and relationship between these concepts—form and matter—as they are used in the major works of Kant's Practical Philosophy, with a view to bringing out the very core of his position. Cultivating this understanding will involve touching upon a series of interrelated topics, including 1), Kant's understanding of the human subject as rational but sensibly dependent, and so as a subject whose practical thinking necessarily involves both form and matter; 2) the supreme principle of pure practical reason, more famously known as the Categorical Imperative, which is expressive of the form of practical reason; 3) the Highest Good, what Kant calls "happiness in proportion to virtue", which is expressive of the matter or object of practical reason; and 4) the nature of the unity of form and matter, the understanding of which requires that we examine how our rational and sensible capacities interact and condition one another in the practical context.This course will presuppose no prior knowledge of Kant’s philosophical system. It should be of use to both sympathizers and critics of Kant, as the main issues to be addressed relate directly to the standard objections brought against his view.Readings will be drawn from across Kant's major practical works. The majority of our time will be spent discussing the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), but texts such as the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) will also be consulted.

A survey of the thought of some of the most important figures of this period, including Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

This course has two aims. First and primarily, it will introduce students to one of the most important texts (if not simply the most) in the history of philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The Critique is, of course, monumental in scope, and one cannot expect to cover it adequately in one ten-week quarter. A principled selection of passages must be made. So second, the course will focus on Kant’s method for overcoming metaphysics in the Critique. More specifically, we will think about Kant’s doctrine that the metaphysical claims and concepts prevalent at his time lack ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’. Per Kant, metaphysics as conceived by his predecessors distinctively made claims or employed concepts that referred to items that are not objects of possible experience. Part of Kant’s strategy for overcoming metaphysics thus construed seems to be to declare such reference impossible, and the claims or concepts that make it, meaningless. Thus questions lurking in the background will include: -What does Kant mean by ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’?, -Can one think a thought that is ‘meaningless’ by Kant’s lights, and what does that amount to?, -Are his strategy and method, thus described, compatible with his deployment of regulative ideas in his theoretical philosophy?, -Are they compatible with the (practical) knowledge of or belief in God, freedom, and the immortal soul Kant affirms in the first Critique and elsewhere?, -Do they leave room for the concepts and claims that make up the apparatus of Kant’s ‘transcendental argument(s)’ to count as ‘meaningful’?, -If the answer to any of the last three questions is ‘no’, how might we need to modify our understanding of Kant’s strategy and method? Or is the Critique simply inconsistent (or, at least, incomplete)? Pursuant to those aims, we shall spend more time with those parts of the text where Kant is characterizing his philosophical project (Aesthetic, Deduction, Phenomena and Noumena, Appendix to the Dialectic, Doctrine of Method) and less time on his particular arguments for and against specific metaphysical claims (the Analogies and the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideal).

This course has two aims. First and primarily, it will introduce students to one of the most important texts (if not simply the most) in the history of philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The Critique is, of course, monumental in scope, and one cannot expect to cover it adequately in one ten-week quarter. A principled selection of passages must be made. So second, the course will focus on Kant’s method for overcoming metaphysics in the Critique. More specifically, we will think about Kant’s doctrine that the metaphysical claims and concepts prevalent at his time lack ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’. Per Kant, metaphysics as conceived by his predecessors distinctively made claims or employed concepts that referred to items that are not objects of possible experience. Part of Kant’s strategy for overcoming metaphysics thus construed seems to be to declare such reference impossible, and the claims or concepts that make it, meaningless. Thus questions lurking in the background will include: -What does Kant mean by ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’?, -Can one think a thought that is ‘meaningless’ by Kant’s lights, and what does that amount to?, -Are his strategy and method, thus described, compatible with his deployment of regulative ideas in his theoretical philosophy?, -Are they compatible with the (practical) knowledge of or belief in God, freedom, and the immortal soul Kant affirms in the first Critique and elsewhere?, -Do they leave room for the concepts and claims that make up the apparatus of Kant’s ‘transcendental argument(s)’ to count as ‘meaningful’?, -If the answer to any of the last three questions is ‘no’, how might we need to modify our understanding of Kant’s strategy and method? Or is the Critique simply inconsistent (or, at least, incomplete)? Pursuant to those aims, we shall spend more time with those parts of the text where Kant is characterizing his philosophical project (Aesthetic, Deduction, Phenomena and Noumena, Appendix to the Dialectic, Doctrine of Method) and less time on his particular arguments for and against specific metaphysical claims (the Analogies and the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideal).

This course will study topics in philosophy of mind in the writings of various figures from the early modern period. Topics to be discussed may include: theories of ideas, representation, consciousness, and affects (or passions). (V)

This seminar will focus on Spinoza’s and subsequent Spinozistic metaphysics, and in particular on substance monism. We will examine the arguments that lead to such a position, its implications, as well as objections and alternatives to it. (V)

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.

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)