History of Analytic Philosophy

This is a two-part course, taught in the Winter and the Spring. Students may take one part without the other. Part II of Forms of Knowledge will be organized around the second half of Stanley Cavell’s major philosophical work, The Claim of Reason. We will focus on the following topics: the possibility of a private language, knowledge of other minds, recognition, alienation and the second person. In these connections, we will also read work by Thomas Reid, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Cook, Alan Donagan, George Pitcher, G. E. M. Anscombe, John McDowell, Vincent Descombes, Richard Moran, Anita Avramides, Stephen Mulhall, and others. 

This course will look carefully at some of Sellars’s most important philosophical writings, focusing especially his classic monograph Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind and various closely related writings, with an eye toward those aspects of his treatment of topics that have continued to prove influential in recent philosophy. We will end the course with a closer look at Sellars’s interpretation of Kant, with special attention to how his own philosophy builds on and reworks a number of Kantian themes. Throughout the course, we will attend to those contemporaneous philosophers whom Sellars himself engaged most with (e.g., Lewis, Ayer, Schlick, Chisolm) in order better to understand his criticisms of them, as well as to those philosophers who over the past several decades have contributed most to the revival of Sellars’s thought (e.g.  Rorty, Brandom, McDowell) in order to compare and assess the very different strands of Sellarsian philosophy currently on offer in the contemporary journal literature.

This course is designed to provide MAPH students – especially those interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy – with an introduction to some recent debates between philosophers working in the analytic tradition. The course is, however, neither a history of analytic philosophy nor an overview of the discipline as it currently stands. The point of the course is primarily to introduce the distinctive style and method – or styles and methods – of philosophizing in the analytic tradition, through brief explorations of some currently hotly debated topics in the field. 

This is a two-part course, taught in the Winter and the Spring. Students may take one part without the other. The first part will be organized around the first half of Stanley Cavell’s major philosophical work, The Claim of Reason. We will focus on the following topics: the role of criteria in epistemology, skepticism about knowledge of the external world, the nature of agreement in judgment, and the relation between meaning and use. In these connections, we will also read work by G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, H. H. Price, J. L. Austin, Thompson Clarke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Barry Stroud, and others.

(IV)

This seminar will be a graduate survey course on the history of the first half of the analytic philosophical tradition. The course will aim to provide an overview of developments within 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. (V)

Gottlob Frege is often called the father of analytic philosophy, but the real reason to study him is not his historical significance, but, rather, that in his work one encounters a philosophical intelligence of the very first order. This course is an introductory survey of his most important ideas, in philosophy of mathematics, logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. To help us in our project of understanding and assessing these ideas we will read discussions of Frege by Michael Dummett, Tyler Burge, Joan Weiner, Nathan Salmon, Michael Resnik, Danielle Macbeth, Hans Sluga, Patricia Blanchette, John Searle, Crispin Wright, and others. (B)

The goal of this course is to have MAPH students explore the historical origins of analytic philosophy. Beginning with Frege, we will look at the development of analytic philosophy through the work of figures such as Russell, Wittgenstein, looking also at the rise and fall of positivism and the philosophical traditions that emerged afterwards with figures such as Quine, Kripke, Putnam and beyond. At the end of the course, MAPH students should have a more solid understanding of the central issues that have shaped modern American-European analytic philosophy, and some of the important ways in which this tradition diverges from contemporary continental philosophy.

This seminar will be devoted to a close reading and discussion of certain portions of Kant's First Critique, focusing especially on the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding. We will explore a handful of proposals for how to understand the project of the First Critique that turn especially on an interpretation the Transcendental Deduction, including especially those put forward by Henrich, Kern, Rödl, Sellars, Strawson, Stroud, and McDowell. The aim of the course is both to use certain central texts of recent Kant commentary and contemporary analytic Kantian philosophy to illuminate some 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 recent epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

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)