Graduate

What does it take to be a good person?  How should we think about good and bad in human life?

One prominent strand of thought on these questions is focused on strengths of character, drawing from work by Aristotle.

Rather than working directly from Aristotle's writings about ethics and politics, we will think about the aspects of his metaphysics that bear on thought about human nature and good human conduct.  We will consider his views on substances, causality, and life as a framework for our thinking.

Having thought about humans in general, we will focus our attention on what makes a human being an exemplary one of its kind—virtue—and what makes for a sound human community.  In this work, we will pay special attention to contemporary philosophical work that is openly indebted to Aristotle.

At the start of the quarter, we’ll distinguish an investigation of remembering, understood as something that a person does, from the kind of subpersonal inquiry into mechanisms of encoding, storage, and retrieval that figure in cognitive scientific accounts of “memories” (in one sense of this term that will need elucidation). Our investigation will be of the former sort. In pursuing it, we’ll explore connections between remembering and consciousness, i.e., between the sort of conscious awareness that I ordinarily enjoy of my current thoughts, feelings, experiences, etc., on the one hand, and the sort of awareness I have of my past thoughts, feelings, and experiences (i.e., those that I've not forgotten), on the other. Amongst our aims will be to gain an understanding of: (1) what Locke gets right when he suggests that “consciousness can be extended backwards to [a] past Action or Thought”; (2) what Freud gets right when he suggests that a person may come to remember, and so be able to give voice to, an experience that had previously been unconscious; and (3) how a person’s relations to her past are formally different from the relations a non-linguistic animal can bear to its past.

Although this course has no official prerequisites, it is not an introduction to philosophy. You’ll have an easier time in it if you’ve already studied some epistemology or metaphysics and, ideally, spent some time engaged with the work of Wittgenstein or Freud. (B) (IV)

This course will be an intensive introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant.

This course is a survey of recent work in feminist political philosophy. We’ll focus on three interrelated themes: objectification; the relation of gender oppression to the economic structure of society; and the problem of “intersectionality,” that is, the problem of how to construct adequate theories of gender injustice given that gender “intersects” with other axes of oppression, e.g. race and class. Authors we’ll read include: Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Bartky, Angela Davis, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Serene Khader. (A)

Plato’s theory of forms is perhaps the first complete philosophical idea in the Greek tradition. It is so fundamental to the activity of philosophy, that the entire subject might be summarized as “a series of alternatives to Plato’s theory of Forms.” We sketch out the development of this theory from its earliest presentations in dialogues like the Republic through Plato’s own reconsideration of the theory in Parmenides, to the late presentations of the theory in Sophist and Philebus. (B)

Advanced Study: Philosophy

Advanced Study: Philosophy

Advanced Study: Philosophy

A close reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ, along with Jonathan Beere’s Doing and Being. (III)

Preparing papers to submit to journals for review and revising papers in response to the feedback received from journal editors and referees is an essential part of professional academic life, and students applying for academic positions with no publications to their name are at a disadvantage in today’s highly competitive job market. The Department of Philosophy has therefore instituted the Paper Revision and Publication Workshop to provide our graduate students with support and assistance to prepare papers to submit for publication in academic philosophy journals. The workshop was designed with the following three aims in mind:

1. to provide students with a basic understanding of the various steps involved in publishing in academic journals and to create a forum in which students can solicit concrete advice from faculty members about the publishing process;

2. to direct and actively encourage students to submit at least one paper to a journal for review on a timeline that would allow accepted submissions to be listed as publications on a student’s CV by the time they go on the academic job market; and

3. to create and foster a departmental culture in which the continued revision of work with the ultimate aim of publication in academic journals is viewed as an essential aspect of the professional training of our graduate students and in which both faculty and students work together to establish more ambitious norms for publishing while in graduate school.