2024-2025

Disasters tax efforts to make sense of human experience to the limits. Whether the death and devastation are wrought by war, plague, storm, or earthquake, disasters bring an abrupt end to life as we once knew it. Such moments shift the human urge to explain and understand into overdrive. This seminar explores the efforts to make sense of disasters, from late Antiquity to the present, in philosophy, science, literature, and theology. Readings will center on specific examples of disasters, drawing upon primary sources wherever possible.

This course explores how the theory of justice relates to political practice and change. We will examine different theories about the relationship of theory to practice, including utopianism, system failure analysis, and pragmatism. We will consider what role both the idea of a just society and an analysis of the unjust status quo plays in our theorizing about justice. Among topics to be explored include the role of the utopian horizon in practice; how to be a realist without being a cynic; whether the addressee of political philosophy is universal or particular; what the role of the oppressed is in both theorizing and bringing change; and how the political philosopher relates to agents of change. Along the way we will engage with thinkers such as Erik Olin Wright, G.A. Cohen, Elizabeth Anderson, Tommie Shelby, David Estlund, and Pablo Gilabert. Time-permitting we may also examine a few historical texts that engage directly with these questions, including Aristotle, Kant, Marx, and Lukács. (A) (I)

The third course will cover Marx’s “Paris Manuscripts” (aka “The 1844 Manuscripts,” aka “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”) and Marx’s historical writings about France, especially The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and his writings on the Paris Commune.

Do we have free will? What is free will anyway? Does it require an ability to do otherwise? Is free will compatible with a scientific conception of the world? Can people ever be justifiably blamed, praised, or punished for their actions, given all the ways we’re influenced by external forces? In this course on free will, we’ll look at some contemporary perspectives on these questions. The course will have three parts. First, we’ll look at reasons why we might not have free will. Next, we’ll consider how we could have free will. Finally, we’ll ask whether and for what it matters whether we have free will.   
Readings will come from Harry Frankfurt, Derk Pereboom, Kadri Vihvelin, P.F. and Galen Strawson, Susan Wolf, Rodrick Chisholm, Manuel Vargas, Thomas Nagel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy is based on an account of moral psychology, an account that is highly critical of the present—critical of current institutions and of its product, namely, our present moral psychology—while also, at moments, hopeful for the future. The seminar begins by presenting Rousseau’s political philosophy as a development of and a contrast to earlier social contract theories, in particular, to Thomas Hobbes’s view. We then examine both Rousseau’s and a few contemporaries’ moral psychologies to determine whether the political philosophy that Rousseau favors is feasible and/or desirable.

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

Philosophers engaged in what we call “critical theory” have traditionally been committed to one or another version of the thought that theory can be emancipatory. Over the last decades – arguably centuries – this commitment to a critical theory has developed into a lively philosophical tradition with a series of core texts at its foundation. In this course, we will carefully read through the most influential works within this tradition, focusing especially on what has become known as the Frankfurt School and its origins. Our readings will include works by Hegel, Freud, Fanon, Marx, Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, among others. Overarching themes of our discussion will be the relations between knowledge and emancipation, theory and practice. (A)

This course provides an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy and his relation to German thought, both prior to and within German idealism. In addition to carefully reading Spinoza’s own writings, we will consider rationalist alternatives to Spinoza’s metaphysics, the Pantheism controversy, and the acosmism charge. Beyond Spinoza, authors to be read include Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, and Hegel.

The Gay Science is the only work that Nietzsche wrote and published before and after the Zarathustra experiment of 1883–1885. It first appeared in 1882, ending with the last aphorism of Book IV and anticipating verbatim the opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In 1887 Nietzsche republished The Gay Science and added a substantial new part: Book V looks back to “the greatest recent event” announced by The Gay Science of 1882, “that ‘God is dead’.”

I shall concentrate my interpretation on books IV and V, the only books of The Gay Science for which Nietzsche provided titles: “Sanctus Januarius” and “We Fearless Ones.” And I shall pay special attention to the impact of the Zarathustra endeavor which separates and connects these dense and carefully written books.

The seminar will take place in Foster 505 on Monday/Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. – 1:20 p.m.*, during the first five weeks of the quarter (March 24 – April 23, 2025).

Issues attending the concepts of negation, limit, and intentionality (construed as thought’s capacity to be answerable to reality) are typically approached in isolation one from another. The course will pursue the contrary hypothesis: namely, that the puzzles arising in connection with these three concepts form a nexus, so that none of them can be comprehended apart from the relations that it entertains with the two others. In order to motivate and substantiate this hypothesis, we will exhume and revive a philosophical tradition that runs from Plato to Wittgenstein through Kant and Sartre and whose defining feature lies in the upholding of this approach. We will examine how the three notions come into play in what Wittgenstein calls “the mystery of negation”: “This is not how things are, and yet we can say how things are not.” Bringing out their nexus requires accounting for the unity and univocity of the concept of negation across two ways of using negation that seem to pull in opposite directions: in the one case, “not-p” makes use of “not” in order to reject p as false (as in “The shirt is not red”), which requires that p lies within the limits of the realm of the intelligible; in the other case, “not-p” makes use of “not” to reject p as nonsensical (as in “The sweet is not a colour”), as if excluding p from the realm of the intelligible. (B)

Readings will include texts by Plato, Maïmonides, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Frege, and Wittgenstein.