Graduate

This seminar will introduce some of the central concepts of psychoanalysis: Mourning and Melancholia, Repetition and Remembering, Transference, Neurosis, the Unconscious, Identification, Psychodynamic, Eros, Envy, Gratitude, Splitting, Death. The central theme will be how these concepts shed light on human flourishing and the characteristic ways we fail to flourish. Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Loewald, Lacan, Melanie Klein, Betty Joseph, Hanna Segal and others.

The concept of a force is fundamental to post-Newtonian physics. But what is a force, and how did we come to think of natural phenomena in terms of forces? This course will investigate the philosophical development of the concept of force from its origins in early modern philosophy (Suarez, Leibniz) to its maturity in the philosophy and science of the 18th and 19th centuries (Kant, Newton, Hegel). In particular we will investigate Leibniz’s suggestion that “physical forces are nothing but the entelechies of the ancients,”—the idea that forces play the conceptual role of Aristotelian forms, in ancient and medieval physics. Central to our project will be the question of how the qualitative features of reality can be quantified.

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, Γ, Η, Ζ, Θ, and Λ. Our approach will be “forest,” rather than “tree” oriented, preferring in most cases a coherent overview to close reading.

 

G. E. M. Anscombe’s 1957 monograph, Intention, inaugurated the discipline known as the philosophy of action. We will study that work with occasional reference to the secondary literature. (A)

Bresson’s films are known for their minimal and highly original style, the avoidance of any reliance on theatrical conventions, the use of nonprofessional actors (“models,” he called them), unusual and “unnatural” editing techniques, distinctive pacing, and for its themes of grace, redemption, fate, moral severity, and several other philosophical and religious issues in the lives of the characters. This course will explore Bresson’s innovations as aiming at a new form of contemplative cinema, one in which style is a matter of a kind of poetic thinking (as understood by Martin Heidegger), a reflective interrogation of philosophical issues that for which traditional philosophy is inadequate. We shall watch and discuss his films: Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945); The Diary of a Country Priest (1951); A Man Escaped (1956); Pickpocket (1959); Au hazard Balthasar (1966); Mouchette (1967); Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) and L’argent (1983). Readings will include, among others, Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph and Bresson on Bresson; Paul Schrader, The Transcendental Style in Film, selected essays about particular films, and selections from Heidegger.

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 millenia. 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 alternatives 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)

Hermeneutics, or the theory of interpretation, was developed in its modern form in Germany in the 18th- and early 19th-centuries by authors like Herder, F. Schlegel and Schleiermacher.  Later in the 19th-century, there emerged what Ricouer subsequently dubbed a “hermeneutics of suspicion”—an attempt to reveal the hidden meanings beneath the surface meanings people express—in figures like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.  In the first half of the seminar, we will give a close reading of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality as an exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion, as well as consider in some detail Nietzsche’s remarks on perspectivism and interpretation.  In the second half of the seminar, we will then consider the historical background to this hermeneutics of suspicion in Romantic hermeneutics.  We will also give particular attention to the development of legal hermeneutics in Savigny and then, much later, through the work of Gadamer.   We will conclude by returning to the hermeneutics of suspicion, especially as illustrated by Marx. (I)

India has made important contributions to political and legal thought, most of which are too little-known in the West.  These contributions draw on ancient traditions, Hindu and Buddhist, but transform them, often radically, to fit the needs of an anti-imperial nation aspiring to inclusiveness and equality.  We will study the thought of Rabindranath Tagore (Nationalism, The Religion of Man, selected literary works); Mohandas Gandhi (Hind Swaraj (Indian Self-Rule), Autobiography, and selected speeches); B. R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution (The Annihilation of Caste, The Buddha and his Dhamma, and selected speeches and interventions in the Constituent Assembly); and, most recently, Amartya Sen, whose The Idea of Justice is rooted, as he describes, both in ancient Indian traditions and in the thought of Tagore. (I)

A close study of some recent philosophical classics about animal ethics and animal rights, including Christine Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis, and a manuscript of my own, Justice for Animals, that is due at the end of 2021.  We will also read some of the recent work by scientists such as Frans De Waal, Mark Bekoff, and Victoria Braithwaite on animal cognition.