Graduate

For each second of John’s life, consider the claim that he is young at that second. Many of these claims will be clearly true: he is young at all of the seconds that make up the first year of his life. Many of these claims will be clearly false: he is not young at all of the seconds that make up his 89th year. If all of these statements are either true or false, it follows that there was a last second at which it is true to say that he is young, and a first second at which it is true to say that he is not young. But that seems wild! One second can’t make the difference between a young person and an old person.

This is one of the central problems raised by the phenomenon of vagueness. This course will examine a variety of philosophical issues raised by the phenomenon of vagueness in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, epistemology, and metaphysics. Among other things, we will discuss: the philosophical significance of vagueness, the relationship between vagueness and ignorance, decision-making under indeterminacy, and the question of whether vagueness is an essentially linguistic phenomenon. (B)

A close reading of Timothy Williamson’s “Knowledge and its Limits,” along with some response articles from “Williamson on Knowledge.”

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 seminar will engage in a close reading of Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  The aim will be to develop an understanding of topics such as: living in clichés without realizing it, subjectivity and objectivity, ethics, eternal happiness, guilt, humor, irony and different manners of being religious.  We shall also consider the meaning of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship. 

In this class we'll think about a family of problems that arise concerning moral knowledge. What is the nature of the connection - if indeed there is one - between knowing what you ought to do and actually doing it? Is moral knowledge sufficient, or necessary, for virtue? Was Socrates right to think that weakness of will ('akrasia') is impossible? How is moral knowledge acquired, and how can it be passed on between people? Are there such things as moral experts, and if so, should we defer to their judgments concerning what we ought to do? To support our thought about these topics, we'll read a range of texts from throughout the history of philosophy, beginning with Plato and continuing to authors from the present day.

Emotions figure in many areas of the law, and many legal doctrines (from reasonable provocation in homicide to mercy in criminal sentencing) invite us to think about emotions and their relationship to reason. In addition, some prominent theories of the limits of law make reference to emotions: thus Lord Devlin and, more recently, Leon Kass have argued that the disgust of the average member of society is a sufficient reason for rendering a practice illegal, even though it does no harm to others. Emotions, however, are all too rarely studied closely, with the result that both theory and doctrine are often confused. The first part of this course will study major theories of emotion, asking about the relationship between emotion and cognition, focusing on philosophical accounts, but also learning from anthropology and psychology. We will ask how far emotions embody cognitions, and of what type, and then we will ask whether there is reason to consider some or all emotions "irrational" in a normative sense. We then turn to the criminal law, asking how specific emotions figure in doctrine and theory: anger, fear, compassion, disgust, guilt, and shame. Legal areas considered will include self-defense, reasonable provocation, mercy, victim impact statements, sodomy laws, sexual harassment, shame-based punishments. Next, we turn to the role played by emotions in constitutional law and in thought about just institutions - a topic that seems initially unpromising, but one that will turn out to be full of interest. Other topics will be included as time permits. (A) (I)

In this course we'll read through philosophical work by Iris Murdoch spanning her whole career, along with several of her novels. Topics covered will include: Murdoch's criticism of the moral and practical philosophy of her time; her encounter with the work of Sartre and the existentialists; her engagement with the dialogues of Plato; her later work in moral psychology; and her discussions of aesthetics and the relation between art and philosophy. Primary philosophical readings will be taken from the collection 'Existentialists and Mystics,' and her last work 'Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.'

Philosophical conceptions of nature as developed by Kant and some of the major subsequent thinkers – Schelling and Hegel in particular – share three characteristics which make them alien to how philosophers nowadays tend to think about nature:

(1) According to Kant, Schelling and Hegel there is such a thing as a philosophy of nature properly speaking, i. e. a kind of philosophical engagement with nature that does not as such amount to philosophy of natural science. (2) Philosopical knowledge of nature cannot, however, be gained by directly taking nature as a topic. It can only be achieved subsequent to an investigation into the form of cognition as such. (3) While philosophical investigation can teach us something about nature that can only be known philosophically, philosophy of nature must nevertheless take natural science seriously, i. e. it must both clarify how empirical science of nature is possible and take precaution not to contradict anything that is known, empirically, about nature.

Against this background, we will deal with three main questions: We will first ask for how the transition from a broadly (epistemo-)logical investigation into the form of cognition to the philosophy of nature as it occurs in the works of Kant and Hegel is to be understood. We will then inquire into their conception of the proper method of a philosophy of nature by looking at how they introduce the very first categories of nature – space, time, matter, and motion. We will finally adress the question whether a philosophy of nature of the general type advocated by these thinkers might still be viable today, given the advance of natural science since the times in which they wrote.

This course is a study of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle's most widely read philosophical treatise on the best life for human beings. In it he offers enduringly relevant answers to question such as: What is happiness? How can studying ethics promote happiness? What is the relationship between being happy and being morally good? What features are characteristic of the morally good person? What role does friendship play in the happy life? What about goods like honor, health, pleasure, and money? To what extent do we have control over our actions, character, and happiness? What level of intellectual activity is required for happiness? To what extent can one engage in such activity without being morally good? (A) (IV)

Humans are said to be rational animals. What does rationality, understood as a capacity, consist in? And what is practical rationality, understood as a qualified way of thinking, feeling, and acting? – In this course we are going to consider a roughly Aristotelian framework for answering these and related questions. The place of reason in human nature is characterized by a complex teleology: its employment is both purpose and instrument. To make use of reason is, centrally, to infer, i.e. to think and act for reasons. The roles of reasons are various: they validate, justify, prompt and guide, explain … To act on a reason is, typically, to do something for the sake of some end. This is so, in particular, in the context of more or less technical reasoning. But the most basic and ultimate reasons, the ones by heeding which we act justly or unjustly and, more generally, well or badly, seem not to be of this form. How then do they enter the constitution of a good human life?