Undergraduate

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?

In this course we’ll investigate philosophical problems underlying contemporary political controversies about immigration. Together, we’ll discuss questions such as the following: What gives one group of people the right to forcibly exclude other people from coming to reside somewhere? Is there such a right at all? What moral authority do existing borders have? What role should the idea of “the nation” play in our thinking about immigration? Indeed, what exactly are nations? And is there a compelling case for the exclusion of immigrants that depends on a commitment to preserving a national culture? All of these questions touch on fundamental issues in political philosophy: the nature of citizenship and its relationship to culture, the source of legitimate authority, the justifiability of state coercion, the content and ground of human rights.

The class will be devoted to the themes and lines of philosophical thought set forth in the instructor’s recent book ‘Thinking and Being’ (HUP, 2018). We shall work through the Parmendian puzzles concerning falsehood and negation in trying to find what are the bearers of truth and falsehood, and what is philosophical logic. Readings will include texts by Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Frege, Russell, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. 

Aristotle’s approach to ethics is sometimes termed intellectualist, meaning that it has no room for a notion of the will, understood as a principle of human action distinct from intellect or reason. Such a notion, it is said, gained currency only centuries later, at least partly through influences alien to Greek philosophy. St Augustine is often cited as one of the thinkers most responsible for the notion’s becoming prevalent. St Thomas Aquinas, however, presents a highly articulated theory of human action that appears to integrate a robust conception of the will, and one heavily indebted to Augustine, into a largely Aristotelian framework. We will read and discuss substantial passages from these three authors bearing on the question of the will, in the hope that seeing them side by side can help to get at what they really mean and what the philosophical merits of their views are. (A) (IV)

Topic: Austin in Context

Few works of 20th century philosophy have enjoyed as fruitful an afterlife as J.L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, which not only heralded in a new set of objects of scrutiny in the Philosophy of Language in the Anglo-American tradition, but also was taken up in that tradition’s many abroads – spawning debates in structuralist semantics on the continent, in social and political theory, in the methodological literature of the humanities, or in contemporary feminist philosophy and gender studies. In this class we shall (a) try to understand how key concepts such as ‘performative’, ‘illocutionary act’, or ‘felicity’ were coined in response to pressures arising from early 20th century philosophical debates about issues in epistemology and moral theory, and (b) try to track how the operating logic of such concepts changes when they are taking out of their native habitat and set to work in some of the radically different contexts mentioned above.

Topic: The Development of the Mechanistic World-View

In this seminar, we will investigate the development of the mechanistic form of explanation – a crucial strand of the scientific revolution that profoundly shaped and still shapes how human beings see the world. This involves looking at how the mechanistic form of explanation was spelled out in René Descartes and tracing the problems with that and attempts at solutions in thinkers like Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, Damaris Cudworth, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Anne Conway, Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant.

Besides getting to know how the mentioned philosophers thought about a central philosophical issue and seeing how problems in philosophy arise and are attempted to get solved, I want to mention two further points of focus of this seminar. One of these will be on the notion of explanation. That is, on the question when we consider to have explained something and when not. This is pertinent in e.g. the issue of whether the concept present in Newton of action-at-a-distance allows for understanding or not. This goes hand in hand with the question when a philosophical account of a phenomenon has been given and when not.

Another focus will be on the issue of conceptual change. For one, whether and if so how the concept of mechanism and concepts like inertia or force changed when discussed by a later thinker treated in this seminar. Understanding these issues is also important for trying to understanding the larger question of how the human conception of the world changed with the scientific revolution.

Topic: Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories

The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding is the focal point of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and one of the most fascinating, puzzling, and suggestive passages in the history of philosophy. In it, Kant attempts to show that the a priori concepts of any finite thinker – the pure concepts of the understanding or ‘categories’ – necessarily apply to, and describe, empirical objects. Along the way Kant provides fascinating insights into such philosophical topics as self-consciousness and the self, judgment, knowledge, laws of nature, objectivity and subjectivity, perception, space, and time.      

This course will be a close reading of the B-edition Transcendental Deduction, along with other portions of the Critique of Pure Reason necessary for understanding the Transcendental Deduction. The early weeks of the course will be devoted to getting Kant’s program and problem into view; the remainder of the course will be spent slowly working through the B-edition Transcendental Deduction. Students should come away from the course with an understanding of the problem of the Transcendental Deduction, a grasp of Kant’s argumentative strategy, and a sense of the Transcendental Deduction’s place in the book as a whole.   

Topic: Self-Knowledge and Self-Alienation

From its inception, Western philosophy has been concerned with self-knowledge. Socrates urged his interlocutors to adopt the Delphic imperative “Know Thyself” and famously claimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Nowadays, we tend to take the importance of self-knowledge for granted, but what really is self-knowledge? We are ordinarily able to ascribe mental states to ourselves (such as: I’m in pain, I believe you’ll come, I love him, I intend to leave, etc.) and we seem to do so without having to rely on evidence. As is often claimed, we seem to have a privileged access to, and a special kind of authority while speaking about, our own minds. Does that make self-knowledge a distinct form of knowledge? Is it different from the way we know worldly objects or other people’s psychological states of mind? If so, does the difference lie in the objects of self-knowledge, or rather in the manner in which we know them? Can we fail to know our own states of mind, or become alienated from them? If so, what do such failures amount to, and should we be blamed or held responsible for them? What could motivate us to be out of touch with our own mental states? We shall address these questions by examining selections from historical figures such as Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre. The main text of this class, however, is Richard Moran’s Authority and Estrangement – An Essay on Self-Knowledge, and we shall read it closely and consider different ways in which contemporary philosophers have responded to it.

Topic: Legal Positivism and Its Critics

The debate between legal positivists and their critics, sometimes called “natural law theorists,” occupies center stage in the philosophy of law. Roughly, legal positivists affirm, and natural lawyers deny, that what it is to be a law is independent of what it is to be a morally good law. In this course, we will survey the leading arguments in analytic jurisprudence on both sides of this debate. We will study the work of Julie Dickson, Ronald Dworkin, John Finnis, H.L.A. Hart, and Joseph Raz, among others.  The goals of the course are (1) to provide a framework in which to contextualize law school coursework, for students who go on to pursue a JD; and (2) to provide a foundation for specialized research in the philosophy of law, for students who go on to pursue a PhD.

Topic: Aristotelian Teleology

Aristotle’s teleology is often regarded as his most innovative contribution to Western philosophy, especially in the realm of natural science. In this course, we will explore questions related to Aristotelian teleology. What the relationship between teleology and the four-causal theory? What is the relationship between teleology and natural necessity? How universal is Aristotle’s teleology? What are the limits to teleological explanation? What are the alternatives, both ancient and modern, to teleological explanation? Readings from both primary texts and modern authors. No Greek required.