Undergraduate

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.

Seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza was expelled from his Jewish community at the age of twenty-three, and has been publicly reviled for much of the last 350 years. But how could a philosopher—let alone one who is famous, more than anything else, for his metaphysics—provoke such a visceral reaction? In this course, we’ll examine many of Spinoza’s metaphysical doctrines which caused such controversy, as well as their impact on our understanding of religion and human nature. Topics to be discussed include: revelation and miracles as natural events; pantheism; substance monism; necessitarianism; mind and body as “one and the same thing”; and teleology.

A survey of the thought of some of the most important figures of this period, including Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

In this class, we will read a number of Platonic dialogues and use them to investigate the questions with which Socrates and Plato opened the door to the practice of philosophy. Here are some examples: What does a definition consist in? What is knowledge and how can it be acquired? Why do people sometimes do and want what is bad? Is the world we sense with our five senses the real world? What is courage and how is it connected to fear? Is the soul immortal? We will devote much of our time to clearly laying out the premises of Socrates' various arguments in order to evaluate the arguments for validity.

In this course, we will read, write, and think about central issues in moral philosophy. This survey course is designed to give a rapid introduction to philosophical ethics (largely in the Anglo-North American tradition (although not entirely as a product of Anglo-North American philosophers). We will begin with work by Immanuel Kant and Henry Sidgwick and conclude with important twentieth century work in metaethics and normative ethics (one thing that we will consider is the distinctions between metaethics, normative ethics, and the various fields united under the rubric 'applied ethics'). (A)

Since Russell's discovery of the inconsistency of Frege's foundation for mathematics, much of logic has resolved around the question of to what extent we can or cannot prove the consistency of the basic principles with which we reason. This course will explore two main efforts in this direction. We will first look at proof-theoretic efforts towards demonstrating the consistency of various foundational systems, discussing the virtues and limitations of this approach. We will then closely examine Godel's theorems, which are famous for demonstrating limits on the extent to which we can formulate consistency proofs. Much has been written on the implications of Godel's theorems, and we will spend some time trying to carefully separate what they really entail from what they do not entail. Assessment will be by regular homework sets. (B) (II)

An introduction to psychoanalytic thinking and its philosophical significance. A question that will concern us throughout the course is: what do we need to know about the workings of the human psyche - in particular, the Freudian unconscious - to understand what it would be for a human to live well? Readings from Plato, Aristotle Freud, Bion, Betty Joseph, Paul Gray, Lacan, Lear, Loewald, Edna O'Shaughnessy and others.

This course will provide an introduction to Bayesian Epistemology. We will begin by discussing the principal arguments offered in support of the two main precepts of the Bayesian view: (1) Probabilism: A rational agent's degrees of belief ought to conform to the axioms of probability; and (2) Conditionalization: Bayes's Rule describes how a rational agent's degrees of belief ought to be updated in response to new information. We will then examine the capacity of Bayesianism to satisfactorily address the most well-known paradoxes of induction and confirmation theory. The course will conclude with a discussion of the most common objections to the Bayesian view. (B) (II)

(A) (I) (V)

An introduction to the techniques of modern logic. These include the representation of arguments in symbolic notation, and the systematic manipulation of these representations in order to show the validity of arguments. Regular homework assignments, in class test, and final examination. Course not for field credit.