Graduate

This course will be devoted to the confrontation of two of the most important masterpieces of Continental Philosophy: Being and Time of Heidegger and Totality and Infinity of Levinas. In this course we shall try first to focus on the Heideggerian project of a “deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence”. Against Heidegger, Levinas maintains that ontology cannot be fundamental—the question of being at the core of Heidegger's project cannot just be directed to one's own tacit understanding of being.  If the question of being is an actual question, its addressee must be an Other.  Levinas teaches that metaphysical experience of otherness cannot be captured in Heideggerian fundamental ontology. Nevertheless, Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics” challenges Levinas’s idea of a Metaphysical Experience that could be entirely free of  Ontology and Phenomenality (in the Heidegger's senses of these terms). Against Levinas he defends the the idea that the Other cannot be identified to a Metaphysical Presence (as it is for Levinas) but necessarily coincides with an Absence and a Trace. We will try to identify and to criticize such a reduction of the Levinas' Metaphysics to the so-called "Metaphysics of Presence" identified and deconstructed by Heidegger and Derrida. Through the analysis of the philosophical conflicts between Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida about metaphysics, the fundamental goal of this course will be to defend a sense for Metaphysics after the so-called “End of Metaphysics."

In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle presents his theory of science and knowledge (episteme). For Aristotle, scientific knowledge is typically obtained by means of demonstrations. A demonstration is a kind of deduction that proceeds from epistemically prior premisses and provides an explanation (aition) of why the conclusion is true. Aristotle examines the nature of demonstrative sciences by using the theory of syllogistic deduction developed in the Prior Analytics. For example, he argues that there can be no infinite chains of predication and hence no infinite regress of demonstrations. Thus, every chain of demonstrations terminates in unproved first principles (archai). The seminar will be a close reading of the first book of the Posterior Analytics, covering central aspects of Aristotle’s logic, philosophy of science, and epistemology. (II, III, IV)

Graduate students planning to go on the job market in the fall of 2012. Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter. Pass/Fail.

A close reading of Philosophical Investigations. Topics include: meaning, justification, rule following, inference, sensation, intentionality, and the nature of philosophy. Supplementary readings will be drawn from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics and other later writings. (B) (III)

This lecture/discussion course examines Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s intellectual development, from the time he wrote Sorrows of Young Werther through the final stages of Faust. Along the way, we read a selection of Goethe’s plays, poetry, and travel literature. We also examine his scientific work, especially his theory of color and his morphological theories. On the philosophical side, we discuss Goethe’s coming to terms with Kant (especially the latter’s Third Critique) and his adoption of Schelling’s transcendental idealism. The theme uniting the exploration of the various works of Goethe is the unity of the artistic and scientific understanding of nature, especially as he exemplified that unity in “the eternal feminine.”

Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, and Collingwood among others. (A) (I)

The course will be devoted to this book. We shall pay special attention to Heidegger’s understanding of the human being as being-in-the-world, which we shall place, historically and conceptually, in relation to ideas concerning the being of the human in German idealism and in classical Aristotelian philosophy.

The course is an historical survey and conceptual introduction to fundamental philosophical questions concerning the nature of the logos (judgments, proposition) that have stood at center of philosophy since the contributions of Plato and Aristotle .   This survey will give us an opportunity to reflect on the idea of philosophical history and the nature its continuity.  We shall discuss theories of the logos in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Medieval and Early modern philosophy, Kant and German idealism, Frege and Wittgenstein.

Painting raises philosophical questions, if only because one can wonder why some particular pieces of the overall visible may attract more visual attention than others, which appear nevertheless just besides the former.  In fact, this privilege comes mostly from the radical (although subtle) difference between common law phenomena (objects) and saturated phenomena.  Among them, the two main rival postulations are idol and icon.  Concerning the idol, one may ask what precisely is its function?  How far can it reach the thing itself even more than objective knowledge (the examples of Courbet and Cezanne will be privileged)?  Concerning the icon, one may open the road to theological questions:  how far can the invisible God be aimed at through visible images?  Is iconoclasm the only option?  What theological arguments could support the claim for icons (Nicene Council II)?  Can the concept of icon be extended to other issues than “the icon of the invisible God” (Colossians 1, 15)?

Joseph Soloveitchik was one of the most important philosophers of religion of the twentieth-century.  Firmly rooted in the tradition of Biblical and Talmudic texts and culture, Soloveitchik elaborated a phenomenology of Jewish self-consciousness and religious experience that has significant implications for the philosophy of religion more generally.  This course will consist of a study of some of his major books and essays.  Topics to be covered may include the nature of Halakhic man and Soloveitchik’s philosophical anthropology, the problem of faith in the modern world, questions of suffering, finitude and human emotions, the nature of prayer, the idea of cleaving to God.  Soloveitchik will be studied both from within the Jewish tradition and in the context of the classical questions of the philosophy of religion. (I)