Undergraduate

What is the object of mathematics? Where does mathematics derive its certainty from? Does it originate from the pure intellect or from empirical experience? Why is mathematics miraculously efficacious” in its application to nature? What is lost and gained in the development of mathematics and how does it shape our worldview? These have been central issues that philosophers since the Antiquity have occupied themselves with, and in many ways, they have shaped the trajectory of the history of philosophy. Philosophers’ answers to these questions have constantly evolved in light of the development of the mathematical sciences as well as the intellectual context of each generation. This course introduces classical texts and debates on the above-mentioned epistemological issues, including the writings of Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Helmholtz, Frege, Husserl, and beyond.

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.

An examination of ancient Greek philosophical texts that are foundational for Western philosophy, especially the work of Plato and Aristotle. Topics will include: the nature and possibility of knowledge and its role in human life; the nature of the soul; virtue; happiness and the human good.

Topic: Autonomy and Liberation

This course explores and compares two determinations of the concept of freedom in the history of philosophy. In the first half of the course, we examine Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German Idealists’ idea that to be free is to be autonomous, obeying only those laws that one has legislated for oneself. In the second half, we turn to the radical philosophies of anticapitalist Karl Marx and feminist Catharine MacKinnon. For Marx and MacKinnon, the central question of freedom is not autonomy but rather liberation: How can we transition from an unfree world to a free one? Philosophers from both halves of the course conceive of freedom as in some sense self-grounding. We will think deeply about what this means and thereby discover two potential challenges. (1) If all freedom and authority derives from autonomy, how can we make sense of autonomy itself? It seems it would need to create itself. (2) If liberation must come from ourselves, then it cannot depend on anything outside of the social world that already exists. But this means that the tools of liberation must come from the very systems that make us unfree. How is this possible? We will evaluate and compare these two challenges and see whether the philosophers can offer satisfying answers. 

Topic: A Life of One’s Own: Autonomy, Meaning and Selfhood

What does it mean to say that my life is my own, or that I am living my own life? The concept of autonomy bears directly on this issue: put very generally, if I am autonomous, I am the source of my reasons and actions. I am “my own person,” I live my life in a way that is up to me and is not distorted or manipulated by others. In this course, we will investigate what it means to be autonomous, as it bears on my ability to be “my own person” and to live “my own life.” Does the idea that my life, or my actions are my own, depend on my having a self? What does it mean for reasons and motives to be “my own”? How do I decide for myself how I should live? How should I understand the influence of others on who I am and what I decide to do? Do the demands of morality place inappropriate restrictions on my ability to decide how I should live? What, if anything, do I aim at in determining how I should live a life which is genuinely my own? We will begin by reading two accounts of agency and selfhood which explain human selves and human action interdependently, in terms of autonomy: a Humean account, by Harry Frankfurt, and a Kantian account, by Christine Korsgaard.  For both, the self is characterized structurally: what it is to be a self is for one’s beliefs, desires and intentions to be organized in a certain way. We will then explore issues that arise when we consider what it is to live one’s own life, including the nature and value of authenticity, the demandingness of morality, “selfishness” and self-effacement, and the pursuit of meaning in life. Finally, we will consider the psychoanalytic critique of morality, which will offer another perspective on these issues. Psychoanalysis emphasizes the ways in which who we are is not up to us, and that we must live with parts of ourselves we did not choose. What can psychoanalytic theory teach us about what it is to live one’s own life? Readings will be drawn from contemporary ethical theory, as well as psychoanalysis.

 
 

Topic: Plato’s Theaetetus

Plato’s Theaetetus asks the question “What is knowledge?” and examines three definitions, none of which survives Socrates’ refutation. In this class, we will be reading Plato’s text closely, aiming to understand what those definitions propose and why they fail. This text is a crucial source for Platonic epistemology and has been central in debates about the development of Plato’s thought on issues that range from the Theory of Forms to the philosophy of mind. The dialogue’s focus on our perceptual faculty gives it a place in contemporary philosophical debates about the role perception plays in the intellectual life of a human being. Some such debates that we will touch on in this class pertain to the rationality of the body, the nature of empirical cognition, and the possibility of objectivity. The dialogue’s discussion of propositional unity recalls the philosophy of logical atomism prevalent in the early 20th ce., a comparison which we will explore directly. The Theaetetus is also home to Plato’s infamous argument on the impossibility of false judgment and the comparison of the Socratic method to the craft of midwifery, as well as the image of the mind as aviary. Readings in secondary literature will draw from the philosophy of perception, particularly in its relation to judgment in the 20th and 21st centuries and, more generally, from topics in the philosophy of mind (include: McDowell, Stroud, Anscombe, Kern, Ryle); and from scholarship in ancient philosophy (include: Burnyeat, Fine, Cooper, McDowell, Lee, Nussbaum, Owen, Ryle). Interestingly, some of our authors belong in both categories. Officially about knowledge, in substance about human reason, a little bit about mathematics, and – perhaps – ultimately about ethics, the Theaetetus is one of Plato’s most puzzling and fascinating dialogues!

Topic: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

Hegel regarded his Phenomenology of Spirit as both the introduction to his entire philosophical system as a well as its first part. In this remarkable text, Hegel offers a radically unique account of the nature of human subjectivity as such (or ‘spirit’), presenting this subjectivity as at once absolute and self-determining yet at the same time essentially the product of its own ongoing history. In a dramatic progression through numerous ‘shapes of consciousness,’ Hegel develops a conceptual reconstruction of what he considers to be necessary stages in the nature of spirit and its own historical self-understanding. From his famous ‘Master-Slave dialectic’ to his critique of Romantic Irony and the clash of ‘Beautiful Souls’, Hegel attempts to display the evolution of spirit as the result of certain necessary and decisive crises within these ‘shapes of consciousness.’ According to Hegel, it is precisely in the confrontation and resolution of its own contradictions that spirit is capable of realizing that freedom and self-consciousness which he calls ‘Absolute Knowing’. The course will consist of a close reading of this exciting and enormously influential text.

Topic: Kant on Causation

The concept of causation is fundamental to the world and our cognition of it, Kant claims. Saying that experience itself would not be possible without that concept, Kant rejects Hume's claim that causation is not warranted by experience. That is to say, Kant argues that the concept of causation is constitutive to our mind in experiencing the world. However, having defended the concept of causality to be fundamental to world and mind, Kant faces the problem of determinism. This problem can be put in the following way: if everything that happens has a cause in nature from which it follows with necessity, then everything that happens is caused by that cause in nature and cannot be caused by an act of the mind like a decision. Moreover, it may seem that everything that will happen is already determined to happen in a certain way. Kant addresses this problem by showing that it rests on a misunderstanding about causation–namely, that the fundamentality of natural causation does not actually entail that everything that will happen is already determined. Seeing this furthermore makes available the position that there being a cause in nature to everything that happens does not exclude there being a different form of causation like in decisions.

In this seminar we will engage in a close reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason centered around the concept of causation. In the first part, we will retrace Kant's argument for the fundamentality of causation to the world and our mind. To that end, we will read the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason and select parts from the transcendental aesthetic and the transcendental analytic. In the second part of the seminar, we will engage with the issue of determinism as treated by Kant in the antinomies of reason. Centering the discussion around the concept of causation allows for a substantial engagement with a centerpiece of Kant's philosophy that is doable in one quarter.

Topic: Hegel's Science of Logic

Hegel's Science Of Logic is a philosophical work of rare ambition. A presuppositionless exposition of the  basic categories of thought, the text at once provides a critique of the concepts foundational to philosophical thought before Hegel, as well as the principles for the philosophical cognition of the realm of nature as well as the sphere of human freedom. In this class we will focus on the third part of Hegel's Logic in order to understand Hegel's sustained account of the nature of concepts, judgment, inference, objecthood and causation. At the same time we will try to formulate answers to the exegetical and philosophical questions that have been prominent in Hegel scholarship: What does it mean for this text to both be a work of logic as well as one of metaphysics? What do we make of Hegel's insights in light of developments in formal logic and the natural sciences since Hegel's time?

Topic: Define ‘definition’: Socratic definition and its subject-matter

Socratic philosophy consists in defining things like “courage,” “virtue,” and “love.” We will ask about this practice in general; what is Socrates doing when he asks people ‘what is’ questions? What is the subject-matter of his questioning? How do he and his interlocutors pursue their common goal? We will focus first on the “what is” question as it appears in the early dialogues. Socrates asks his questions, which he insists are prior to his interlocutors' concerns, with great urgency. But why should Socrates’ questions override other questions? Is socratic questioning about “courage,” “virtue” or “justice” prior to other questions we ask or simply different? Modern readers of Plato often accuse Socratic philosophy of moving indiscriminately between questions about terms in ordinary language, what a word signifies, and the real essence of what is so signified, the object of scientific study. Has Socrates failed to distinguish between what is prior for us and what is prior by nature? In the second part of the course we will continue to ask about definition and its object by reading parts of dialogues from the middle and later period. Our focus in this part of the course will be on the method of collection and division as a way of defining things. We will focus on the unity of definition, its relationship to forms, and the difference between scientific taxonomy and the philosophical need to comprehend the unity of beings by defining.