Graduate

We will study Hegel’s Elements of Philosophy of Right. The book is an absolute classic of practical philosophy. Its ambition is nothing less than to provide a systematic treatment of the unity of action theory, ethics and political philosophy. Hegel’s theory is considered by many as the highpoint and completion of practical philosophy in the post-Kantian German Idealism. And it is essential for the development Marxism and Critical Theory. It is a crucial treatise to study – not only for those interested of the history of ethics and political theory, but for anyone reflecting on the logic and origins of the kind of society we live in. At the same time, the book is hardy an easy read. For one, the genre of text is quite peculiar: it was written for as a condensed “Leitfaden”  for the students listening Hegel’s lectures. Moreover, the range of topics discussed under the heading of the Philosophy of Right – as well the order in which they are presented – seems quite from a contemporary perspective.

Hegel’s guiding thought is that the power of practical reason and freedom can only be understood through its actuality. What stands at center of his treatise is thus the idea of practical reality, encapsulated in his famous slogan that “the rational is actual and the actual is rational.” Hegel’s point is that the domain of the practical is a stratum of being that is not a reality given to the mind, but one that reason apprehends as its own work in virtue of bringing it into being. This thesis has two sides: On the one hand, it means that there are aspects of reality whose very existence depends on our understanding of them as rational. On the other hand, it means that the norms of rationality cannot be understood independently of their realization in practice. Various features of our contemporary intellectual climate make it difficult for us to grasp this idea. Hegel’s slogan is often taken as a peculiar excess of Absolute Idealism that just reflects a conservative attitude towards the status quo. However, the central topics for a Marxist critique of right and western liberalism – such as alienation, exploitation and imperialism – can already be found in Hegel’s account on bourgeois society. (V)

Literature:

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, ed. by A.W. Wood,, trans. by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press

Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of intellectual excellence or knowledge in the domain of the practical: techne and phronesis. The one is in the order of an ability, the other in the order of a tendency. The artisan knows how to build a house, but whether she decides to do so is not explained by that knowledge. The phronimos, by contrast, knows to act well such that it is not a further question whether she chooses to do so. In contemporary epistemology and action theory, these two kinds of expertise are often discussed under the heading of ‘intelligent skill’ and ‘intelligent virtue’ as irreducibly practical forms of cognition that can’t be assimilated to knowing that something is the case. Following Gilbert Ryle’s seminal discussion in The Concept of Mind, both, skill and virtue, are standardly opposed to ‘brute’ or ‘mere habit.’ The general concept of habit has received surprisingly little attention. In the seminar we will start with the discussion of habit in the Aristotelian tradition, before we turn to the contemporary debates on the two kinds of practical knowledge. Among the questions we will discuss are the following: What is the role of habit in human life? Can knowing how be reduced to knowing that? And if not, what kind of conceptual understanding does it involve? Can virtue be explained through the analogy with skill? Or does the intelligibility of latter ultimately depend on the former, as Aristotle suggest? (I)

The Foundations of Natural Right contains Fichte’s most influential contribution to philosophy: the argument that thought is a constitutively social and thus linguistic phenomenon. Self-consciousness and mutual recognition necessarily go together. There can only be an ‘I’, a thinking individual, insofar as there is a ‘You’ and thus a material medium of address. The argument is part of Fichte’s ambitious project to deduce the necessity of individual rights and directed duties from the ‘I think.’ The rather elevated starting point and the details of the purported deduction were quickly doubted and are notoriously hard to understand. But the questions raised in the course of the endeavor set the agenda for the philosophy of right in the German Idealist tradition. From the contemporary perspective, one of the most striking features of the approach is the wide range of topics that are said to belong to an investigation with that title. According to Fichte, the philosophy of right must explain both: what we owe to each other and how we know of each other. Knowledge of another person and the necessity of her rights must have the same source. To show this Fichte discusses the relation between theoretical and practical reason; the ground of the idea of the efficacy of the will in the material world; the distinct appearance of the ‘body’ of a rational being. The main part of the class will be a close reading of the first steps in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right (1796). Then we will look at later versions of the argument for the unity self-consciousness and recognition in the Wissenschaftslehre and in The System of Ethics (1798). (I)

Human rights are claims of justice that hold merely in virtue of our shared humanity. In this course we will explore philosophical theories of this elementary and crucial form of justice. Among topics to be considered are the role that dignity and humanity play in grounding such rights, their relation to political and economic institutions, and the distinction between duties of justice and claims of charity or humanitarian aid. Finally we will consider the application of such theories to concrete, problematic and pressing problems, such as global poverty, torture and genocide. (A) (I)

I shall discuss the subject on the basis of 4 lectures Leo Strauss gave on “Jerusalem and Athens” and “Reason and Revelation” in the period 1946-1967.

“In wonder is the beginning of philosophy,” wrote Aristotle; Descartes also thought that those deficient in wonder were also deficient in knowledge. But the relationship between wonder and inquiry has always been an ambivalent one: too much wonder stupefies rather than stimulates investigation, according to Descartes; Aristotle explicitly excluded wonders as objects of inquiry from natural philosophy. Since the sixteenth century, scientists and scholars have both cultivated and repudiated the passion of wonder. On the one hand, marvels (or even just anomalies) threaten to subvert the human and natural orders; on the other, the wonder they ignite fuels inquiry into their causes. Wonder is also a passion tinged with the numinous, and miracles have long stood for the inexplicable in religious contexts. This seminar will explore the long, vexed relationship between wonder, knowledge, and belief in the history of philosophy, science, and religion.

In the first part of the course, we’ll be discussing an argument to the effect that: in order for radical skepticism about empirical knowledge not to be intellectually obligatory, we must understand ourselves as enjoying a very particular kind of self-consciousness. In the remainder of the course, we’ll be trying to get into view what an adequate account of that sort of self-consciousness might look like. (III)

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

In this class we examine some of the conceptual problems associated with quantum mechanics. We will critically discuss some common interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, the many-worlds interpretation and Bohmian mechanics. We will also examine some implications of results in the foundations of quantum theory concerning non-locality, contextuality and realism. (B) (II)