Undergraduate

We will begin by trying to explicate the manner in which science is a rational response to observational facts. This will involve a discussion of inductivism, Popper's deductivism, Lakatos and Kuhn. After this, we will briefly survey some other important topics in the philosophy of science, including underdetermination, theories of evidence, Bayesianism, the problem of induction, explanation, and laws of nature. (B) (II)

(A) (I)

Plato honors Parmenides with the title "father Parmenides", presumably for being the founder of philosophy as the "logical" study of being and thinking. In this course we shall discuss the struggle of ancient and modern philosophers to come to terms with this powerful heritage — in particular, we shall focus on the elaboration, reception and criticism of Parmenides' theses that being and thinking are the same, and that talk of negation or falsity is incoherent or empty. Among the philosophers whose work we shall discuss are Plato, Aristotle, Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein.

(I)

All human beings fear death, and it seems plausible to think that a lot of our actions are motivated by it. But is it reasonable to fear death? And does this fear do good (motivating creative projects) or harm (motivating greedy accumulation, war, and too much deference to religious leaders)? Hellenistic philosophers, both Greek and Roman, were preoccupied with these questions and debated them with a depth and intensity that makes them still highly influential in modern philosophical debate about the same issues (the only issue on which one will be likely find discussion of Lucretius in the pages of The Journal of Philosophy). The course will focus on several major Latin writings on the topic: Lucretius De Rerum Natura Book III, and extracts from Cicero and Seneca. We will study the philosophical arguments in their literary setting and ask about connections between argument and its rhetorical expression. In translation we will read pertinent material from Plato, Epicurus, Plutarch, and a few modern authors such as Thomas Nagel, John Fischer, and Bernard Williams. (IV)

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in either the Autumn or Winter Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in either the Winter or Spring Quarter. (Students may not register for both PHIL 29901 and 29902 in the same quarter.) The senior seminar meets all three quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in either the Autumn or Winter Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in either the Winter or Spring Quarter. (Students may not register for both PHIL 29901 and 29902 in the same quarter.) The senior seminar meets all three quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.

Logic, traditionally conceived, aims to study the laws of thought. This makes it seem as though logicians share a concern with psychologists; but in fact, the proposal that logical laws can be studied empirically - also known as psychologism - came under attack by philosophers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The idea that logic is presupposed by all thinking was taken to disallow its empirical study, and to render the methods of psychology irrelevant to logic. For most of the 20th century, this philosophical position made sense to psychologists; at the very least, they did not seriously raise the question whether thinkers are actually rational in the sense prescribed by logic. This assumption has gradually been rejected; since the 70s, human rationality has become a central object of study for psychologists, with a focus on the defective logical patterns of thought that humans tend to exhibit. At the same time, in philosophy, the collapse of the analytic-synthetic distinction and the naturalistic turn gave way to a new conception of the relation between logic and psychology. Nowadays several fruitful research programs in the psychological study of reasoning and rationality exist side by side, and alongside them, many philosophers and logicians make room for psychological considerations. In reaction to the new sciences of rationality and to the new psychologism in logic, new forms of antipsychologism have also emerged; we will evaluate several such arguments and ask how psychologists and psychologically minded philosophers cope with them. We will conclude our inquiry with a look at the contemporary debate regarding the normative status of logic and its relation to thought.

Topic: Self-Consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (instructor: T. Schulte)

The chapter 'Self-Consciousness' is one of the most widely discussed sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit and contains some of the most famous passages of Hegel's entire corpus. Indeed this portion of Hegel's text has been interpreted by scholars to be the source of a wide variety of issues that are pertinent to social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, action theory and philosophy of religion. This course consists in a close reading of this chapter of the Phenomenology and considers the relevance of some of these wide-ranging philosophical topics to what Hegel declares is the distinctively epistemological aim of his project: "an investigation into the truth of knowledge." We begin by considering the epistemological project of the work as a whole, looking to the introduction and how Hegel's phenomenological method is a response to skepticism. Then we will turn to the three main topics of the Self-Consciousness chapter. The first is what is considered to be the "practical turn" of the Phenomenology in which knowledge is taken to be an ends-directed activity, something that Hegel thinks is realized immediately in the organic unity of living things. The second topic is recognition and its attempted realization in the infamous "Master-Slave Dialectic." The third topic is alienation and Christianity as it relates to Hegel's "Unhappy Consciousness." Our question with respect to all three topics will be: How does Hegel find his treatment of these topics to be part of a progression toward understanding knowledge? Along the way we will consider authors that influenced Hegel, such as Kant, and authors that were influenced by Hegel, such as Marx. In addition we will read secondary literature from authors such as Kojève, Siep, Brandom, Honneth, Neuhouser, Pippin and Lukács.

Topic: Moral Enhancement and Responsibility (instructor: D. Telech)

Our aim will be to examine how we would and should hold responsible — i.e., praise and blame (but, especially praise) — persons whose actions and attitudes are partly products of biotechnological intervention/enhancement. It is widely held that agents are morally assessable for behavior expressive of their "quality of will," largely in independence of the will's formative circumstances. Does it matter to us, however, whether the quality of one's — including one's own — will is 'passively' improved through external means? (What if the improvement is permanent?) After situating our topic within a larger and slightly older discussion about "human enhancement", we will consider central questions in the debate over the ethics of moral enhancement, drawing from closely related literature on affective, cognitive, and empathic, enhancement. We will evaluate several proposals of what "moral enhancement" is, and examine arguments for the view that we have obligations to enhance ourselves morally. Next, we'll consider various skeptical challenges, some of which question the very coherence of the idea of "moral enhancement", others of which question its permissibility and desirability (e.g., from considerations of "authentic" selfhood). On the basis of our conclusions about the conceptual and ethical issues discussed, we will be better equipped to produce a picture of the "reactive attitudes" that we might, and perhaps should, adopt towards a range of "morally enhanced agents". Our readings will be drawn from the work of a variety of moral philosophers and bioethicists, including: Neil Levy, Farah Focquaert, Nicholas Agar, Birgit Beck, Guy Kahane, Emma Gordon, Erik Parens, Thomas Douglas, Charles Taylor, Adrienne Martin, Kelly Sorensen, David Wassernman, Julian Salvulescu, Ingmar Persson, Sarah Chan, John Harris, and Robert Sparrow.