2024-2025

The autonomous life: proponents of this ideal portray it as central to living well, while detractors consider it one of modernity’s more dangerous delusions. But what is autonomy, and why is it capable of inspiring such controversy? This class considers the twists and turns of autonomy’s fate within and beyond the German Idealist tradition. We will start by considering autonomy and freedom in the work of Kant and Hegel, as well as more contemporary philosophers such as Korsgaard who are in dialogue with them. We will then consider how their theories of autonomy are complicated and expanded by Douglass and Fanon, before moving on to autonomy’s contemporary critics from ‘postmodern’ and communitarian and religious perspectives. Themes examined will include putative links between autonomy and authenticity, between autonomy and secularity, and between autonomy and individualism. This course takes its title from Karl Ameriks’ Kant and the Fate of Autonomy. (A)

This will be a course on works by the philosopher Edith Stein. We will read excerpts from Alasdair Macintyre’s Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, as well as Stein’s work on our knowledge of other minds and studies toward a philosophy of being. (B)

In the course of discussing how it is that a philosophical problem arises in the first place, Wittgenstein says, “The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.” This isn’t the only place where Wittgenstein speaks as if being gripped by philosophical problems is a matter of succumbing to illusions--as if a philosophers are magicians who are taken in by their own tricks. In this course, we’ll discuss philosophy and magical performance, with the aim of coming to a deeper understanding of what both are about. We’ll be particularly concerned with Wittgenstein’s picture of what philosophy is and does. Another focus of the course will be the passion of wonder. In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates say, “The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” And when magicians write about their aesthetic aims, they almost always describe themselves as trying to instill wonder in others. Does magic end where philosophy begins? And what becomes of wonder after philosophy is done with it? (B) (II)

In this seminar we will explore a set of interrelated topics in the philosophy of action. These include: the purposive structure of practical reason, the nature of the relationship between means and ends, the idea of ‘practical inference’, and the place of causation in the understanding of intentional agency. Course readings comprise a manuscript by the course instructor in conjunction with a constellation of primarily contemporary writings on these topics. (I)

This will be an introductory course on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The seminar will be organized around the follow proposal: the book is meant to reveal the sort of understanding that is at stake whenever a philosophical problem arises. It teaches that such understanding is not a form of knowledge — and in particular not scientific knowledge— of whether or why something is the case. Its clarification of the sort of understanding at issue here allows for a reading according to which the Tractatus, contrary to what most commentators assume, seeks to affirm rather than to cancel philosophy. It affirms it as a fundamental concern with understanding distinct from science or from reason.

The idea that there exist different “races” of human beings is something that many—perhaps even most—people in the United States today take for granted. And yet modern notions of “race” and “racial difference” raise deep philosophical problems: What exactly is race? Is race a natural kind (like water) or a social kind (like citizenship)? If race is a social kind—i.e. something human beings have constructed—are there any good reasons to keep using it? According to many philosophers, these questions cannot be properly analyzed in abstraction from the history of modern racism and the liberation struggles racial oppression has given rise to. Together, we’ll read classic and contemporary texts on these themes by authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Charles Mills, Naomi Zack, Chike Jeffers, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Lucius Outlaw. (A)

A fundamental category through which we understand the world is the category of action. This course offers an intensive overview of the metaphysics of action. We will first cover some basics including the relationship between actions, agency, and agents, the range of action kinds, what kind of thing action is, the distinction between basic and nonbasic action, agent nihilism, and the possibility of mental action. Next, in hopes of coming to better understand the nature of action, we will look at how action relates to other phenomena such as reasons, causation, knowledge, control, and normative life. (B) (II)

We will read selections from, and secondary literature on, some early Socratic dialogues in order to engage with a set of Socratic theses on desire, motivation, and value: (1) Everyone desires the good (or: what he believes to be good?) (Meno, Gorgias, Lysis) ; (2) Everyone does what he believes (or knows?) to be best (Protagoras, Apology) (3)  It is better to be wronged than to do wrong (Gorgias, Apology) (4) Only good men do wrong voluntarily (Hippias Minor) (5) Courage/Moderation is Wisdom (Laches, Protagoras, Charmides). We will want to examine these views both for consistency; for their individual merits; and in order to see whether we can put them together into a distinctively Socratic ethical point of view. (III) 

In this seminar, we read Plato’s Republic closely and in its entirety. We will attend equally to the epistemological and political aspirations of the text and we will examine its engagement with issues in the fields of psychology, aesthetics, metaphysics, and education. While this course will primarily focus on Plato’s text, the students will have the opportunity to read works from the secondary literature. (B)

Wittgenstein wrote a letter to G. E. Moore after hearing Moore give the paper which first set forth a version of (what has come to be known as) Moore’s paradox. The version of the paradox that Moore first set forward involved imagining someone uttering the following sentence: “There is a fire in this room and I don’t believe there is.” Wittgenstein’s understanding of the importance of Moore’s paradox may be summarized as follows: Something on the order of a logical contradiction arises when we attempt to combine the affirmation of p and a denial of a consciousness of p within the scope of a single judgment. In his letter to Moore, Wittgenstein writes:

To call this … “an absurdity for psychological reasons” seems to me to be wrong, or highly misleading. It … is in fact something similar to a contradiction, though it isn’t one…. This means roughly: it plays a similar role in logic. You have said something about the logic of assertion. Viz: It makes sense to say “Let’s suppose: p is the case and I don’t believe that p is the case,” whereas it makes no sense to assert “p is the case and I don’t believe that p is the case.” This assertion has to be ruled out and is ruled out by “common sense,” just as a contradiction is. And this just shows that logic isn’t as simple as logicians think it is. In particular: that contradiction isn’t the unique thing people think it is. It isn’t the only logically inadmissible form.

The aim of the seminar is to understand why Wittgenstein thinks Moore’s paradox provides an example of something that is akin to a contradiction and how it brings out why logic isn’t as simple as logicians think it is. In Section x of Part II of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, devoted to an exploration of Moore’s paradox, we find Wittgenstein making these three remarks:

1. My own relation to my words is wholly different to other people’s.
2. If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely,’ it would not have a meaningful first-person present indicative.
3. “I believe….” throws light on my state. Conclusions about my conduct can be drawn from this expression. So there is a similarity here to expressions of emotion, of mood, etc,.

The workshop will seek to understand: how my relation to my own words is wholly different from my relation to those of other people; wherein the asymmetry lies between the use of a range of verbs (such as “believe,” “know,” and “perceive”) in the first-person present indicative form and other uses of the same verbs (e.g., in the second-person or past tense form); and how the logical grammar of these verbs is related to that of expressions of emotion, of mood, and of sensation, including expressions that takes the form of avowals. Finally, we will explore why Wittgenstein thinks a philosophical investigation of these three points ought to lead to an expansion and transformation of our entire conception of logic

In addition to readings by Moore, Wittgenstein, and related secondary literature, we will study thematically related writings by Matthew Boyle, Cora Diamond, Arata Hamawaki, Jonas Held, Michael Kremer, J. M. E. Mactaggart, Margaret MacDonald, Norman Malcolm, Marie McGinn, Eric Marcus, Richard Moran, Bertrand Russell, and Crispin Wright on first-person avowals, self-knowledge, self-alienation, and transparency. (II)