Undergraduate

What is a mind? How does the mind relate to one’s brain and body? In what sense can nonhuman animals or computers think? How does our subjective experience relate to the objective world? Versions of these questions have been the focus of reflections on the mind since the beginning of philosophy, which have been grouped under the banner of ‘philosophy of mind’. In this class we will examine central questions in the philosophy of mind, looking to theories that contemporary philosophers have given about the nature of the mind, and their relationship to the increasingly detailed accounts of the natural world that physical and biological sciences provide. Key topics to be investigated are the mind-body problem, as well as its implications for our understanding of consciousness, intentionality, mental content, and personal identity. (B)

Pessimism is often seen more as an attitude than a philosophy. It is the disposition of the complainer, the one who fails to appreciate life’s silver linings. In this course, we will consider the work of several thinkers who saw pessimism quite differently. For these thinkers, pessimism was a serious philosophical problem, perhaps even the most serious philosophical problem of all: namely, the problem of life’s value to the one who lives it. Our discussion will focus on Schopenhauer, Mill, Camus, Unamuno, and their contemporary successors. Each of these thinkers confronted a different set of worries about life’s value. We will try to understand and assess these worries. In the process, we will develop tools to productively think about what makes life worth living. (A)

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)

This course explores the relation between racialized being and humanity, with a focus on blackness. The histories of enslavement and colonization have been understood, fundamentally, as processes of dehumanization. The course seeks to address questions such as these: What is the conceptual basis of dehumanization, i.e. what (metaphysical, ethical, psychological, historical) conceptions of “human” act as the standards by which to measure the human deficiency of Black racialized peoples? What are the different meanings of the view that Blackness lacks being, when said by colonialists and when said an anti-racist intellectuals? What, in each case, is the exact argument? Is such an argument descriptive or also prescriptive? If the former, does it describe a mutable sociopolitical situation or a metaphysical truth? If the latter, what forms of conduct does the argument call for? What is an adequate response to dehumanization? Should one claim the status of the human, transform it, or reject it altogether? There are different answers to any of the questions in the literature. This course is a short survey of that literature.

This course introduces some of the most important and influential accounts of science to have been produced in modern times. It provides an opportunity to discover how philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have grappled with the scientific enterprise, and to assess critically how successful their efforts have been. Authors likely include Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Robert Merton, Steven Shapin, and Bruno Latour. (B)

This lecture-discussion course will focus on the nature of historical explanation and the role of narrative in providing an understanding of historical events. Among the figures considered are Gibbon, Kant, Humboldt, Ranke, Collingwood, Acton, Fraudel, Furet, Hempel, Danto. (B) (III)

This lecture-discussion course will consider the main figures in the history of biology, from the Hippocratics and Aristotle to Darwin and Mendel. The philosophic issues will be the kinds of explanations appropriate to biology versus the other physical sciences, the status of teleological considerations, and the moral consequences for human beings. (B) (II)

There is perhaps no better introduction to Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of human nature than his still influential commentary on Aristotle’s classic treatment of soul and its powers, the De anima. Writing the commentary was in fact part of Thomas’s preparation for the section on man in the Summa theologiae. Naturally he also had other sources, but he drew much of his method and many of his terms and principles from Aristotle’s work. Our default text consists of English translations of the commentary and of the nearly word-for-word Latin rendering of the De anima that Thomas used. We will work through the entire text; our main goal will be simply to understand it. (B) (IV)

Aquinas regards justice as the preeminent moral virtue, and in the Summa theologiae he devotes more Questions to it than to any other virtue (II-II, qq. 57-79). With occasional help from other passages of his, and with an eye to his sources (especially Aristotle) and to later thinkers, we will first work through his general accounts of the object of justice (ius—the just or the right), justice as a virtue, the nature of injustice, and the distinction between distributive and commutative justice. Then, as time permits, we will discuss selected texts on more specific topics such as judicature, restitution, partiality, murder, theft, verbal injuries, fraud, and usury. (A)

The aim of this course is to explore the tensions and convergences between two of the most profoundly important areas of environmental philosophy.  “Ecocentrism” is the view that holistic systems such as ecosystems can be ethically considerable or “count” in a way somewhat comparable to human persons, and such a philosophical perspective has been shared by many prominent forms of environmentalism, from Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic to Deep Ecology to the worldviews of many Native American and Indigenous peoples.  For some prominent environmental philosophers, a commitment to ecocentrism is the defining test of whether one is truly an environmental philosopher.  “Environmental Racism” is one of the defining elements of environmental injustice, the way in which environmental crises and existential threats often reflect systemic discrimination, oppression, and domination in their disproportionate adverse impact on peoples of color, women, the global poor, LGBTQ populations, and Indigenous Peoples.  Although historically, some have claimed that ecocentric organizations such as Greenpeace have neglected the problems of environmental injustice and racism in their quest to, e.g., “save the whales,” a deeper analysis reveals a far more complicated picture, with many affinities and alliances between ecocentrists and activists seeking environmental justice. (A)