Metaphysics

This course is an introduction to some traditional philosophical problems about space and time. The course will begin with a discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes.  We will then look at the debate between Newton and Leibniz concerning the ontological status of space and time, and will examine reactions to this debate by thinkers such as Mach and Poincare. Finally, we will discuss the question of what sense is to be made of the claim that space is curved, looking at the writings of Poincare, Eddington, Einstein, Grunbaum, and others. Students will be introduced to the basics of the special and general theories of relativity, at a qualitative level. (II) (B)

Naturalism is a view that many philosophers say they accept. The view seems to have a bearing on virtually every area of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, and ethics. What is the view? What is to be said for, or against, it?

According to one prevalent philosophical conception, thoughts and/or propositions are to be understood as able to represent time without themselves possessing a temporal character. We shall consider some challenges to this prevalent concept and explore a competing conception, according to which thoughts and/or propositions are to be understood as possessing an intrinsically temporal form. It will emerge as one important consequence of this competing conception that the philosophical study of temporality coincides with the study of the predicative form of thought or propositionhood.

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.

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)

The course is an historical survey and conceptual introduction to fundamental philosophical questions concerning the nature of the logos (judgments, proposition) that have stood at center of philosophy since the contributions of Plato and Aristotle .   This survey will give us an opportunity to reflect on the idea of philosophical history and the nature its continuity.  We shall discuss theories of the logos in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Medieval and Early modern philosophy, Kant and German idealism, Frege and Wittgenstein.

This course will be devoted to the confrontation of two of the most important masterpieces of Continental Philosophy: Being and Time of Heidegger and Totality and Infinity of Levinas. In this course we shall try first to focus on the Heideggerian project of a “deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence”. Against Heidegger, Levinas maintains that ontology cannot be fundamental—the question of being at the core of Heidegger's project cannot just be directed to one's own tacit understanding of being.  If the question of being is an actual question, its addressee must be an Other.  Levinas teaches that metaphysical experience of otherness cannot be captured in Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Nevertheless, Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics” challenges Levinas’s idea of a Metaphysical Experience that could be entirely free of  Ontology and Phenomenality (in the Heidegger's senses of these terms). Against Levinas he defends the the idea that the Other cannot be identified to a Metaphysical Presence (as it is for Levinas) but necessarily coincides with an Absence and a Trace. We will try to identify and to criticize such a reduction of the Levinas' Metaphysics to the so-called "Metaphysics of Presence" identified and deconstructed by Heidegger and Derrida. Through the analysis of the philosophical conflicts between Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida about metaphysics, the fundamental goal of this course will be to defend a sense for Metaphysics after the so-called “End of Metaphysics."

In what sense, if any, do the laws of logic express necessary truths? The course will consider four fateful junctures in the history of philosophy at which this question received influential treatment: (1) Descartes on the creation of the eternal truths, (2) Kant's re-conception of the nature of logic and introduction of the distinction between pure general and transcendental logic, (3) Frege's rejection of the possibility of logical aliens, and (4) Wittgenstein's early and later responses to Frege. We will closely read short selections from Descartes, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and ponder their significance for contemporary philosophical reflection by studying some classic pieces of secondary literature on these figures, along with related pieces of philosophical writing by Jocelyn Benoist, Matt Boyle, Cora Diamond, Peter Geach, John MacFarlane, Adrian Moore, Hilary Putnam, Thomas Ricketts, Sebastian Rödl, Richard Rorty, Peter Sullivan, Barry Stroud, Clinton Tolley, and Charles Travis.

This course will examine historical and contemporary approaches to the relation of ontological dependence, focusing on Aristotle, Descartes, and among more recent authors, Kit Fine. Questions to be discussed will include: What is ontological dependence and how does it differ from other dependence relations, e.g., causation or priority in definition? How does this relation bear on notions such as substance and essence, and vice versa? What is the historical trajectory from Aristotle onwards concerning these questions? (B) (III) (IV) (V)

Topic: Rules, Autonomy, and Metaphysics of Normativity (instructor: T. Tiisala)
It is a philosophical commonplace to use the expression ‘space of reasons’ to highlight the normative character of rationality in contrast to a notion of nature as a system of causal (or probabilistic) laws. Yet one may wonder whether this distinction entails a dualistic metaphysics, where two spheres of reality are so separated that a connection between them becomes unintelligible. In this course, we will examine a strategy to avoid such a dualism by explaining the normative standards of reasoning in terms of what is sometimes called ‘attitude-dependence’. In other words, we will focus on the idea that subjects who reason also constitute the norms of reasoning by holding each other responsible to some standards of correctness in thought and action. In particular, we will examine and elaborate the explanatory resources of this strategy, whose emergence we will trace to Kant’s notion of autonomy, in connection with the following three challenges. (1) The normativity of reasoning cannot be generally understood in terms of a self-conscious activity of rule-following, because in that case any rule for the application of a rule would require another rule for its own application, and infinitely so. (2) It cannot be completely up to one to decide which normative standards one is bound to, because that would preclude the possibility of error and thus also obliterate normativity. (3) Proposals that seek to overcome these two challenges by modeling reasoning as a discursive practice, accounting for its normative structure on the basis of social statuses of commitment and entitlement, are incompatible with the traditional way of understanding freedom as rational constraint and power as constraint due to an external force. Finally, we will investigate the limits of the explanatory strategy that relies on attitude-dependence by asking to what extent the attitudes on which it makes norms depend can be plausibly understood as elements in the natural history of the human species. We will read texts by Rousseau, Kant, Sellars, Ryle, Brandom, McDowell, Foucault, Canguilhem, Dennett, and others.

Topic: Reasons, Motivation, and Morality (instructor: N. Ben Moshe)

We often say things like “he ought to do so-and-so” or “she has a reason to do such-and-such”. But what do we mean when we talk about what people ought to do or about their reasons for action? What is the relation between people’s reasons and their motivations? Are there reasons which exist independently of our motivations? Or are all reasons somehow dependent on the motivations which we happen to have or which we would have if we were fully rational? Related questions extend into the realm of morality: Are there reasons which are specifically moral in nature? If so, how are they related to our motivations? Finally, is one irrational or in error if one does not act on moral reasons, or can there be a perfectly coherent, non-mistaken villain? In this course we will discuss some of the central meta-normative and meta-ethical positions regarding the nature of normative and moral reasons: Thomas Nagel’s realism, Christine Korsgaard’s Kantian anti-realism, Sharon Street’s Humean anti-realism, and Michael Smith’s hybrid of Humean-Kantian realism. We will introduce these positions by discussing Hume’s and Kant’s views on motivation and moral motivation, as well as the distinction between internal and external reasons and between motivating and normative reasons. We will also consider the nature of specifically moral reasons - in particular, reasons stemming from the motive of duty - and their alleged categorical force. Additional authors include Donald Davidson, Philippa Foot, Barbara Herman, John McDowell, Derek Parfit and Bernard Williams.