Graduate

The seminar will consist in a close reading of two of Henry James’s great last novels, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. The novels are widely regarded as the finest examples of English literary prose, composed in James’s distinctive (and “difficult”) late style. But the novels also require intense attention to a wide range of philosophical issues. These issues arise in James’s attempt to portray human experiences of one’s own mindedness and judgements as well as experiences of others in a social context James understands as historically distinctive: the decline of authoritative European moral conventions and the adequacy of the new conventions arising in American capitalism and consumerism. (What does “decline” mean in such a context and what could count as adequacy or inadequacy?) Many of the emerging issues involve both psychological and moral dimensions: how should we understand why someone would “change his mind’ about fundamental matters of principles? What is self-deceit and why is it so prominent in the novels? How is self-deceit different from willful self-blindness and self-opacity? What counts as genuine self-knowledge? What is the relation between intelligence and virtue? What could require self-renunciation in the service of some ideal? Throughout, we shall be concerned with how the treatment of such issues in the novels could be considered a “philosophic” treatment if in literary form rather than traditional philosophical analysis.

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.

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)

A.M Turing opens his essay COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE as follows: ‘I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think."' We shall accordingly address the question “Can machines thinks?” by thinking about machines and thinking. 

Readings include: from L. Wittgenstein’s writings on mathematics (his dialogue with Turing and his response to Gödel incompleteness proof,) and Heidegger’s the Question Concerning Technology.
 

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)

An introduction to the most important elements of Heidegger's philosophy, including: his account of the distinctness of human existence, his basic ontological theory, his account of Western modernity, his philosophy of art, and his relation to other philosophers, especially to Nietzsche.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics is one of the most difficult and rewarding texts in the philosophical tradition. It attempts to lay out the goals, methods, and primary results of a science Aristotle calls “first philosophy.” First philosophy is the study of beings just insofar as they are beings (as opposed to physics, which studies beings insofar as they come to be, pass away, or change), and if completed it would stand as the most fundamental and general science. Our aim will be to understand: if and how such a science is possible, what the principles of such a science are, what being is, which beings are primary, and what are the causes of being qua being. We will discuss the Metaphysics as a whole, but focus on A-B, Γ, Z, Η, Θ, and Λ. Our approach will be “forest,” rather than “tree” oriented, preferring in most cases a coherent overview to close reading. (B)

This course is about the aims of human life. We address the question through two contrasting conceptions of life: 1) life in the sense of an ongoing activity—and its associated values of pleasure, enlightenment, and happiness, and 2) life in the sense of a biographical story—and its associated values of achievement, glory, meaning, and purpose. We will attempt to understand how these two conceptions of life are compatible, and if one or the other is prior. Readings include: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, and Jonathan Lear. (A)

This course will explore the problem of other minds, beginning with a comparison of this problem with others to which it is sometimes thought to be closely related. Our first object of comparison in this regard will be with the problem of our knowledge of the external world.  We will explore supposed similarities and differences between other minds and external world skepticism and between various philosophical responses to each. The main asymmetry between these two problems is often held to lie in the idea the that knowing another mind is a matter of knowing a special kind of content. (Human beings are not mere objects. When one knows another mind, one knows a formally distinct kind of object than a mere material thing.) We will also explore the idea that the most fundamental difference between the two problems lies not merely in the content but in the form of the knowledge. This requires treating the problem of other minds as one whose solution requires attention to the second person form—one in which, in the paradigmatic case, two subjects are known to each other. In this connection, we will explore a variety of forms of nexus—linguistic, epistemological, and ethical—in which a pair of subjects can stand in a reciprocal recognitive relation to one another. The primary readings for the course will be from Elizabeth Anscombe, Anita Avramides, Stanley Cavell, John Cook, Vincent Descombes, Martin Gustafsson, Jennifer Hornsby, John McDowell, Richard Moran, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (II)