2024-2025

In this course we will read, write, talk, and think about good and bad, right and wrong, in human life and conduct.  In doing so, we usually will be preoccupied with questions about the relation between morality and reason.  Almost everyone agrees that doing what morality asks or requires (and refraining from doing what morality prohibits) usually means losing out on at least some opportunities to do as one likes. There is normally something one would rather do than, say, keep a promise.  The most detailed accounts of reason in action, however, suggest that reason is meant to help us fare well.  Faring well is often a matter of managing to do well for oneself, often by finding ways of doing as one likes. If morality works against the pursuit of self-interest, and reason helps to further pursuit of self-interest, it looks as though there is a fundamental conflict between reason and morality, between acting well and faring well. (A)

Though unfinished, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is one of the most influential contributions to 20th century philosophy. In it, Heidegger proposes nothing less than an exposition (in fact, a restatement) of the question of Being — a question whose subject matter is inherently intertwined with the concerns and affairs of the inquirer. Systematizing and indeed radicalizing ideas from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Husserl, Being and Time is at the same time a critique of the Western philosophical tradition’s neglect of the Seinsfrage. We will proceed systematically through Being and Time, seeking to understand as well as to contextualize its basic moves, motivations, and key arguments. (IV)

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 course provides an introduction to logic for students of philosophy. It is aimed at students who possess more mathematical training than can be expected of typical philosophy majors, but who wish to study logic not just as a branch of mathematics but as a method for philosophical analysis. (B) (II)

In the first part of the course, we’ll be discussing an argument to the effect that: in order for radical skepticism about empirical knowledge not to be intellectually obligatory, we must understand ourselves as enjoying a very particular kind of self-consciousness. In the remainder of the course, we’ll be trying to get into view what an adequate account of that sort of self-consciousness might look like. (B) (II)

We will consider the popular question: “What is love? And why does it hurt so bad?” Our systematic point of departure will be the analysis of love in contemporary analytic philosophy. In the second part of the class, we will turn to the dialectic of love as it presents itself in Hegel’s work and its critical reception in Feminist Philosophy. The conundrum we encounter will be the following. On the one hand, Hegel’s speculative concept appears to render intelligible the modern ideal of love that feels well familiar from inside intuition but doesn’t seem to be quite captured by the received analysis of love. In one way or another, the analytic accounts on offer seem to imply a tension between two aspects that intuitively both belong to the concept of true love: being with the beloved and realizing the freedom traditionally thought to be essential to being a person. Hegel’s speculative account is meant to resolve the apparent tension. As he has it, love’s bond is a liberation: love sets you free. His articulation of this thought promises to make sense of the intuitively familiar and yet on the reflection deeply puzzling idea that it is precisely the devotion to the other through which one finds oneself. On the other hand, the explanation Hegel offers appears to entail his problematic views on patriarchy. We will investigate whether this is just Hegel’s fault or perhaps the contradiction in which we live. Against this background, we will return to Aristotle and the question whether and why we need friends and lovers for the good life. (I)

The aim of this course is to explore the tensions and convergences between two of the most profoundly important areas of environmental philosophy. "Ecocentrism" is the view that holistic systems such as ecosystems can be ethically considerable or "count" in a way somewhat comparable to human persons, and such a philosophical perspective has been shared by many prominent forms of environmentalism, from Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic to Deep Ecology to the worldviews of many Native American and Indigenous peoples. For some prominent environmental philosophers, a commitment to ecocentrism is the defining test of whether one is truly an environmental philosopher. "Environmental Racism" is one of the defining elements of environmental injustice, the way in which environmental crises and existential threats often reflect systemic discrimination, oppression, and domination in their disproportionate adverse impact on peoples of color, women, the global poor, LGBTQ populations, and Indigenous Peoples. Although historically, some have claimed that ecocentric organizations such as Greenpeace have neglected the problems of environmental injustice and racism in their quest to, e.g., "save the whales," a deeper analysis reveals a far more complicated picture, with many affinities and alliances between ecocentrists and activists seeking environmental justice. (A)

An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.