Graduate

This course will be an introduction to Bayesian epistemology. (B) (II)

This course will examine Plato’s theory of knowledge in his “late” dialogues—especially Plato’s ideas about the philosopher’s pursuit of knowledge in the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus. We will focus on the method of “dialectic” and its connection to the so-called method of “collection and division” as essential philosophical tools in Plato’s late writing. Topics will include natural kinds, the relationship between natural and social science, and the metaphysical views that form the backdrop of Plato’s methodological writings.  We will also spend some time discussing related dialogues, such as the Theaetetus, Phaedrus, and Timaeus, as well as contemporary work on natural kinds. (B) (III)

We will begin by trying to explicate the manner in which science is a rational response to observational facts. This will involve a discussion of inductivism, Popper's deductivism, Lakatos and Kuhn. After this, we will briefly survey some other important topics in the philosophy of science, including underdetermination, theories of evidence, Bayesianism, the problem of induction, explanation, and laws of nature. (B) (II)

(IV)

In the class, we will study Hegel’s the first part of Philosophy of Mind: the account of “subjective spirit.” In the introduction, Hegel says that Aristotle’s books on the soul are the only work of speculative interest on the topic. We will consider the relation to De Anima where Aristotle considers three kinds of life or soul: vegetative, perceptive, and thinking soul. For this purpose, we will look at the end of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and then study the three sections of “subjective spirit”: the account of anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. Topics will include the role of habit or second nature in human life, the relation between self-consciousness and recognition, and the unity of theoretical and practical reason. (IV)

Literature:

G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, A revised version of the Wallace and Miller translation. ed. by Michael Inwood, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010

The first half of the seminar will introduce major themes of Marx's philosophy-historical materialism, aspects of his economics relevant to his critique of capitalism, Marx's early theory of human nature and flourishing, and the theory of ideology (especially as applied to morality and law)-while the second half will consider the reception and development of Marx's ideas in 20th-century Continental European thought, with a particular focus on the theory of ideology (e.g., Lukacs, Gramsci, Sartre, Althusser) and the application of that theory to art and aesthetics (e.g., Adorno, Benjamin, Lifshits). (IV)

This class will explore dependent type theory, with a focus on the identity relation. Different ways of thinking of the identity relation will be examined, culminating in a presentation of the Univalence axiom and a discussion of its role as a potential foundation for mathematics. (B) (II)

The ‘I think’ traditionally stands at the center of philosophical reflection. Yet there is a minority strand in the history of philosophy which has advocated that the second person pronoun is no less central. Human beings are social creatures. For this reason, addressing another as ‘you’ in communication is no less fundamental to human rationality than giving expression to oneself through saying ‘I.’ A guiding idea of the proposed seminar will be that, properly conceived, self-consciousness and recognition of another are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. In seeking to make out this claim, the seminar will explore the different aspects of the role of address in human life. It will take its point of departure from two guiding ideas: (1) the second-person present indicative form of interpersonal nexus is no less important for understanding human thought and action and logically no less fundamental than the corresponding first-person form, and (2) what is logically peculiar to the former form of thought is best brought to the fore if one examines what second-person thought in both its theoretical and practical guises have in common. The plan for the seminar is to alternate between examining problems in theoretical philosophy whose proper solution requires attention to the role of the second person and counterpart sorts of problem in practical philosophy. Under the first heading, we will explore the role of address and joint consciousness in speech act theory, the topic of shared understanding in the philosophy of language acquisition, and the problem of the apprehension of another human being as it arises in the epistemology of other minds. Interpolated between these topics, we will weave in and out of counterpart forms of philosophical difficulty arising out of reflection upon the place of the second-person in practical philosophy: in understanding the human striving for honor, in relations of justice, as well as in friendship and love. (I) (II)

The tendency in contemporary philosophy is to conceive of a linguistic sign as a composite notion to be analyzed in terms of kind of mere physical mark or acoustic noise to which something further — a meaning or use — is assigned or added in order yield a meaningful linguistic symbol. This course will explore figures in the history of philosophy and linguistics who opposed such a conception – figures, that is, who thought that the capacity to recognize linguistic signs presupposes some prior comprehension of their real possibilities of use. Readings will be from Frege, Hilbert, early and later Wittgenstein, Franz Boas, Roman Jacobson, Morris Halle, David Kaplan, Sylvan Bromberger, and others. (B) (I)

The history of philosophy, from antiquity to the early twentieth century, is littered with classic works bearing titles such as The Principles of Logic, The Foundations of Logic, A Theory of Logic, and so on. Most of the major philosophers in this tradition – Aristotle, Avicenna, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, etc. – devote at least one whole treatise to Logic, and in most cases several. These works are, like their other writings, composed of sentences – sentences of Greek, Arabic, Latin or German prose. The object of such works is to elucidate notions such as thought, judgment, negation, inference, and inquiry. Starting in the late 19th- and early 20th century a new kind of work in the theory of logic appeared – published by authors such as Boole, Peano, Frege, Russell, Hilbert, etc. These works contained comparatively little prose and a great many quasi-mathematical symbols in which formulae, axioms, theorems, proofs, etc. were set forward. The latter sorts of work had an enormous influence on how the nature of the discipline of logic itself came to be understood and how its relation, on the hand, to mathematics, and, on the other, to the rest of philosophy, came to be re-conceived. This, in turn, led – through the work of authors such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, etc. – to a series of efforts to challenge the ascendancy of the logico-mathematical conception of logic. The seminar will explore the relation between these two different conceptions of logic. We will be interested in ways in which these conceptions, at least in the hands of some authors, were carved out in a manner that allowed them at least to appear to coincide with one another, as well as ways in which they either tacitly diverged or openly conflicted with one another. The ideas set forth in two works by Wittgenstein – his early Tractatus and his later Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics – will shape our approach to these issues. The readings for the course will include canonical texts from the classic tradition of thought about logic from Aristotle through Kant and beyond, as well as targeted selections from those of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries whom he is most concerned to criticize (especially Frege, Russell, and Hilbert). The seminar will also feature various sidelong glances at parallel developments in the Continental tradition in authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Jakob Klein, and others. (III)