German Idealism

This seminar will do a careful reading and investigation of Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle on the intellectual virtues, in particular phronesis and sophia. We shall consider how the intellectual virtues differ from the ethical virtues. We shall do a careful reading of Heidegger's discussion of this material in his book Plato's Sophist and we shall compare it closely with Aristotle's own discussion in Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Topic: Self-Consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (instructor: T. Schulte)

The chapter 'Self-Consciousness' is one of the most widely discussed sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit and contains some of the most famous passages of Hegel's entire corpus. Indeed this portion of Hegel's text has been interpreted by scholars to be the source of a wide variety of issues that are pertinent to social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, action theory and philosophy of religion. This course consists in a close reading of this chapter of the Phenomenology and considers the relevance of some of these wide-ranging philosophical topics to what Hegel declares is the distinctively epistemological aim of his project: "an investigation into the truth of knowledge." We begin by considering the epistemological project of the work as a whole, looking to the introduction and how Hegel's phenomenological method is a response to skepticism. Then we will turn to the three main topics of the Self-Consciousness chapter. The first is what is considered to be the "practical turn" of the Phenomenology in which knowledge is taken to be an ends-directed activity, something that Hegel thinks is realized immediately in the organic unity of living things. The second topic is recognition and its attempted realization in the infamous "Master-Slave Dialectic." The third topic is alienation and Christianity as it relates to Hegel's "Unhappy Consciousness." Our question with respect to all three topics will be: How does Hegel find his treatment of these topics to be part of a progression toward understanding knowledge? Along the way we will consider authors that influenced Hegel, such as Kant, and authors that were influenced by Hegel, such as Marx. In addition we will read secondary literature from authors such as Kojève, Siep, Brandom, Honneth, Neuhouser, Pippin and Lukács.

Topic: Moral Enhancement and Responsibility (instructor: D. Telech)

Our aim will be to examine how we would and should hold responsible — i.e., praise and blame (but, especially praise) — persons whose actions and attitudes are partly products of biotechnological intervention/enhancement. It is widely held that agents are morally assessable for behavior expressive of their "quality of will," largely in independence of the will's formative circumstances. Does it matter to us, however, whether the quality of one's — including one's own — will is 'passively' improved through external means? (What if the improvement is permanent?) After situating our topic within a larger and slightly older discussion about "human enhancement", we will consider central questions in the debate over the ethics of moral enhancement, drawing from closely related literature on affective, cognitive, and empathic, enhancement. We will evaluate several proposals of what "moral enhancement" is, and examine arguments for the view that we have obligations to enhance ourselves morally. Next, we'll consider various skeptical challenges, some of which question the very coherence of the idea of "moral enhancement", others of which question its permissibility and desirability (e.g., from considerations of "authentic" selfhood). On the basis of our conclusions about the conceptual and ethical issues discussed, we will be better equipped to produce a picture of the "reactive attitudes" that we might, and perhaps should, adopt towards a range of "morally enhanced agents". Our readings will be drawn from the work of a variety of moral philosophers and bioethicists, including: Neil Levy, Farah Focquaert, Nicholas Agar, Birgit Beck, Guy Kahane, Emma Gordon, Erik Parens, Thomas Douglas, Charles Taylor, Adrienne Martin, Kelly Sorensen, David Wassernman, Julian Salvulescu, Ingmar Persson, Sarah Chan, John Harris, and Robert Sparrow.

Topic: Self-Consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (instructor: T. Schulte)

The chapter 'Self-Consciousness' is one of the most widely discussed sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit and contains some of the most famous passages of Hegel's entire corpus. Indeed this portion of Hegel's text has been interpreted by scholars to be the source of a wide variety of issues that are pertinent to social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, action theory and philosophy of religion. This course consists in a close reading of this chapter of the Phenomenology and considers the relevance of some of these wide-ranging philosophical topics to what Hegel declares is the distinctively epistemological aim of his project: "an investigation into the truth of knowledge." We begin by considering the epistemological project of the work as a whole, looking to the introduction and how Hegel's phenomenological method is a response to skepticism. Then we will turn to the three main topics of the Self-Consciousness chapter. The first is what is considered to be the "practical turn" of the Phenomenology in which knowledge is taken to be an ends-directed activity, something that Hegel thinks is realized immediately in the organic unity of living things. The second topic is recognition and its attempted realization in the infamous "Master-Slave Dialectic." The third topic is alienation and Christianity as it relates to Hegel's "Unhappy Consciousness." Our question with respect to all three topics will be: How does Hegel find his treatment of these topics to be part of a progression toward understanding knowledge? Along the way we will consider authors that influenced Hegel, such as Kant, and authors that were influenced by Hegel, such as Marx. In addition we will read secondary literature from authors such as Kojève, Siep, Brandom, Honneth, Neuhouser, Pippin and Lukács.

Topic: Moral Enhancement and Responsibility (instructor: D. Telech)

Our aim will be to examine how we would and should hold responsible — i.e., praise and blame (but, especially praise) — persons whose actions and attitudes are partly products of biotechnological intervention/enhancement. It is widely held that agents are morally assessable for behavior expressive of their "quality of will," largely in independence of the will's formative circumstances. Does it matter to us, however, whether the quality of one's — including one's own — will is 'passively' improved through external means? (What if the improvement is permanent?) After situating our topic within a larger and slightly older discussion about "human enhancement", we will consider central questions in the debate over the ethics of moral enhancement, drawing from closely related literature on affective, cognitive, and empathic, enhancement. We will evaluate several proposals of what "moral enhancement" is, and examine arguments for the view that we have obligations to enhance ourselves morally. Next, we'll consider various skeptical challenges, some of which question the very coherence of the idea of "moral enhancement", others of which question its permissibility and desirability (e.g., from considerations of "authentic" selfhood). On the basis of our conclusions about the conceptual and ethical issues discussed, we will be better equipped to produce a picture of the "reactive attitudes" that we might, and perhaps should, adopt towards a range of "morally enhanced agents". Our readings will be drawn from the work of a variety of moral philosophers and bioethicists, including: Neil Levy, Farah Focquaert, Nicholas Agar, Birgit Beck, Guy Kahane, Emma Gordon, Erik Parens, Thomas Douglas, Charles Taylor, Adrienne Martin, Kelly Sorensen, David Wassernman, Julian Salvulescu, Ingmar Persson, Sarah Chan, John Harris, and Robert Sparrow.

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. His revolution polarized the philosophical community, meeting with eager forms of inheritance as well as intense and varied resistance — and, as we shall see, usually both within a single thinker’s response to Kant. This class will seek to understand the nature of Kant’s philosophical innovations and the principle sources of his successors’ (dis-)satisfaction with them. This class will seek to introduce students to the outlines of Kant’s “critical” philosophy, well as its subsequent reception, as the first two generations of post-Kantian thinkers grappled with and reacted to his ideas. The first half of the course will be devoted to a careful reading of portions of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; while the second half will focus on various aspects of its reception, transformation, and rejection at the hands of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. The course as a whole will focus on the following five topics: (1) the dialectical relation between skepticism and dogmatism in philosophy, (2) the difference between our theoretical and practical cognitive powers, (3) the proper account of the “finititude” of these powers, (4) the tendency of human reflection to overstep the boundaries of its legitimate employment, (5) what a satisfying treatment of the four preceding topics reveals about what philosophy is and what it can and cannot accomplish.

This seminar will be a close reading of Kierkegaard's classic text, written under the pseudonym of "Anti-Climacus". Among the topics to be discussed are the nature and forms of despair, hopelessness and hopefulness, faith, sickness, guilt and sin. (V)

The purpose of this course is to introduce the main themes and the method of phenomenology, by focusing on the 1913 standard exposition of the « idealist turn » of Husserl. By an internal and close reading of this text, one will discover that phenomenology does not consist first in a doctrine or a set of theoretical propositions, but mostly and above all in a series of intellectual operations, intended to allow things to appear as themselves, and not as what we commonly assume they are.

In this seminar I shall present a new reading of Nietzsche’s most famous work. Thus Spoke Zarathustra combines philosophy and poetry, wisdom and prophecy, solitude and politics, speech and deed, preaching in riddles and parody of the Gospel. The work is a challenge to faith in revelation and a task for philosophical interpretation. In the spring of 2014 I interpreted books I and II. Books III and IV I shall teach this spring. This procedure may be justified in light of Nietzsche’s own procedure: He published each of the books before the following book was written and in fact without announcing that one, two or even three books would follow the first one. At the beginning of the seminar I shall summarize my interpretation of books I and II.

We shall read “Letter on Humanism” and discuss Heidegger’s understanding of philosophy as originary ethics (i.e., ethics of being) in which the traditional division between practical and theoretical philosophy is canceled. We shall also focus on Heidegger’s discussion of language and the being of human beings in this essay.

Topic: Aristotle’s Physics (instructor: A. Brooks)

By Aristotle’s time, the intelligibility (and even the possibility) of a natural world had come under widespread philosophical attack. Aristotle is the first philosopher to defend the science of nature against these attacks, and at the same time the first philosopher to develop a systematic understanding of change and the natural world. This course is a reading of selections from Aristotle’s Physics, with the aim of touchng on all of its major themes, and investigating in depth some of Aristotle’s most important theses. Our reading of the Physics will be structured around four challenges to the possibility of a natural science: the Eleatic dilemma, Zeno’s puzzles about change, Plato’s ‘moment of change’ problem, and the problem of how causal chains can terminate. We will work out the details of Aristotle’s solutions to these problems, with particular attention to how they are related, and how his solutions contribute to his conception of nature.

Topic: Nietzsche On Skepticism, Nihilism, and the Affirmation of Life (instructor: R. Eichorn) Nietzsche famously declared that he “distrust[s] all systematizers... The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” This has not deterred any number of commentators from trying to find some kind of philosophical system in what Alexander Nehamas has referred to as the “dazzling obscurity” of Nietzsche’s texts. In this course, we will explore the idea that the unity of Nietzsche’s thought (to the extent that it is unified) derives not from a philosophical doctrine or principle (such as the will to power), nor from a system built up of such doctrines or principles, but rather from a preoccupation with a set of interrelated cultural and existential crises. The catch-all term for these crises is nihilism. In the first half of the course, we will explore nihilism historically, by tracing Nietzsche’s account of (a) the socio-evolutionary emergence of the ‘human,’ (b) the rise of philosophy and Judeo–Christianity, and finally (c) the triumph of what Nietzsche calls the ‘ascetic ideal.’ In the second half of the course, we will explore the ambivalent place of philosophical skepticism in Nietzsche’s thought, specifically, its role as both a symptom of and the cure for nihilism—as both a negation and an affirmation of life.

Topic: Gilles Deleuze: Difference and Repetition (instructor: A. Werner) There is an obvious fact which has played an important role in philosophy: the fact that when we think about the world, it is indeed the world which figures in our thoughts. Many philosophers – for example, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John McDowell – claim that making sense of this fact involves appealing to the irreducibly conceptual structure of thought. According to these philosophers, that the order of thinking and the order of the world are in some important sense the same is spelled out at the most fundamental level in terms of our ability to think about the world using concepts. Because of this, each of them attempts to overcome the skepticism-inducing idea of a sub-conceptual interface between thought and the world it thinks about. Like many other philosophers, Gilles Deleuze also aims to make sense of the fact that the order of thinking and the order of the world are the same. However, unlike the philosophers mentioned in the previous paragraph, he seeks to do so precisely by identifying a sub-conceptual realm which appears as a pre-conceptual element of thought and a non-conceptualizable element of the world. The pre-conceptual element of thought which he identifies is not some kind of skepticism-inducing interface between the world and our thinking of it: rather, it is one side of a sub-conceptual realm which is common to both thought and the world. Deleuze's work is immensely exciting because he agrees with the philosophers mentioned above that positing a sub-conceptual interface between thought and the world is philosophically disastrous, while nevertheless affirming that there is a philosophical explanation of the common origin of the structure of thought and the world which appeals to the sub-conceptual. A fascinating consequence which he draws is that thought and the will are not as such aimed at the true/the good. Thought and the will can aim at the true/the good, but this is not how they are most fundamentally constituted. The result is an a priori account of both the actuality and the necessity of false thoughts and bad actions. We will spend the course reading Deleuze's book Difference and Repetition in the hopes of understanding his arguments for the sub-conceptual and for the rejection of the image of thought and the will as true/good. To assist us in this project, we will occasionally draw upon secondary literature (from authors like Levi Bryant, Henry Somers-Hall, and Paul Patton) and we will also occasionally read selections from other writings by Deleuze (especially The Logic of Sense). Questions we will explore include: Are there sub-conceptual differences and repetitions? Are the concepts of difference and repetition intelligible independently of an account of conceptual structure? Can they be used to ground an account of thought's conceptual structure? Does the attempt to find a sub-conceptual element of thought and the world devolve into skepticism? Does Deleuze want us to give up on the projects of thinking true thoughts and performing good actions? If not, how are we able to think truly and act well on his view? Finally, at the end of the course we will consider Deleuze's view of philosophy by looking at selections from the book What is Philosophy? (by Deleuze and Felix Guattari). One of the first things that strikes any reader of Deleuze is how fluid his terminology and arguments appear to be. This fluidity seems to be in some kind of important relationship to his philosophical theory, which attempts to explain the pre-conceptual fluidity of thought and the world. Nevertheless, his work is full of arguments which employ concepts. If philosophy is supposed to be in contact with a sub-conceptual realm, how should we evaluate it? What kind of argumentative resources should it draw upon? What is its task? A note about philosophical pre-requisites: Deleuze's writing is difficult, principally because he draws on many different sources in D&R (both philosophical – Duns Scotus, Kant, Nietzsche, etc. – and non-philosophical – different novelists, painters, biologists, and mathematicians, as well as Freud, Tarde, Saussure, etc.). This course will not presuppose any prior knowledge of the philosophical and non-philosophical traditions from which Deleuze draws, or any prior knowledge of the philosophical terrain (France in the 60's) in which Deleuze wrote. Antecedent familiarity with the traditions Deleuze is in dialogue with may allows students to explore connections between Deleuze's work and the work of others more fully, but it is neither necessary nor expected. The content of the course only presupposes an interest in the philosophical project of explaining the relationship between mind and world.