Autumn

What is art? Why should we care about it? The predicament of modernism is that we can no longer rely on our traditional answers to these questions. Modernism, says the philosopher Stanley Cavell, is “a moment in which history and its conventions can no longer be taken for granted…the beginning of the moment in which each of the arts becomes its own subject, as if its immediate artistic task is to establish its own existence.” The artist in the modernist predicament cannot make art without trying to answer these questions for themselves. But without history and convention to help us answer these questions, how do we know what would, and what could, count as answers? What is it for art to exist and why should we hold onto its importance?

In this class, we will investigate art, philosophy and the modernist predicament through a study of Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? along with works by Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, T.S. Eliot, Kierkegaard and others. We will also listen to the music of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, John Cage, Ligeti and more. Ultimately, we will ask: Do we still share in the difficulties of modernism? Or are the difficulties of art and philosophy in our modern world something else entirely?

Topic: Dialectic

Dialectic is a central concept for some of the most influential philosophers of the western tradition – most prominently Plato and Hegel, for each of whom it can seem synonymous with philosophy itself – but has received surprisingly little attention as a topic unto itself. Indeed, with its close associations with paradox, contradiction, and the apparent rejection of logical laws, the very idea of dialectic has come into ill-repute, dismissed by figures as diverse as Heidegger and Russell as a kind of sophistry or obscurantism; moreover, the concept has been employed in such a variety of contexts, from metaphysics to the philosophy of history, that it can be difficult to discern whether it constitutes a single topic at all. In this course we shall trace the history of dialectic from its origins in the dialogues of Plato, through its revival in Kant’s critical philosophy, to its best-known form in Hegel’s logic, with the aim of drawing out a common strand uniting these diverse historical manifestations, namely an understanding of dialectic as in first instance a form of philosophical logic reflecting an underlying concern with the possibility of philosophical method. We shall also examine the relation between this and other influential conceptions thereof and consider some prominent criticisms of the idea of dialectic; time permitting, we shall conclude with a discussion of what, if anything, a conception of dialectic in the context of contemporary philosophy might look like.

Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.

This course will look carefully at some of Sellars’s most important philosophical writings, focusing especially his classic monograph Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind and various closely related writings, with an eye toward those aspects of his treatment of topics that have continued to prove influential in recent philosophy. We will end the course with a closer look at Sellars’s interpretation of Kant, with special attention to how his own philosophy builds on and reworks a number of Kantian themes. Throughout the course, we will attend to those contemporaneous philosophers whom Sellars himself engaged most with (e.g., Lewis, Ayer, Schlick, Chisolm) in order better to understand his criticisms of them, as well as to those philosophers who over the past several decades have contributed most to the revival of Sellars’s thought (e.g.  Rorty, Brandom, McDowell) in order to compare and assess the very different strands of Sellarsian philosophy currently on offer in the contemporary journal literature.

The Eudemian Ethics is one of Aristotle’s two major works about the nature of human happiness. Although not as famous as its Nicomachean counterpart, it is filled with distinctive, fascinating, and philosophically appealing discussions about virtue (including the super-virtue, “noble-goodness”), deliberation, luck, friendship, and the relation of all of these to “living well.” It also contains important discussions about philosophical methodology and ethical teleology. We will read our way through some of the EE’s most interesting arguments, taking advantage of the many recent articles written about them.

Kant’s first Critique, and the Critical philosophy as a whole, appeared relatively late within Kant’s own philosophical career. An understanding of Kant’s philosophical trajectory during the 1750s, 1760s, and through 1770 is an essential foundation for grasping the problems and positions that appear in Kant’s most famous work. Readings will include the Nova Dilucidatio, the essay on negative magnitudes, and the Inaugural Dissertation. 

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

This is a workshop for 3rd year philosophy graduate students, in which students prepare and workshop materials for their Topical Exam. 

This course is designed to provide MAPH students – especially those interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Philosophy – with an introduction to some recent debates between philosophers working in the analytic tradition. The course is, however, neither a history of analytic philosophy nor an overview of the discipline as it currently stands. The point of the course is primarily to introduce the distinctive style and method – or styles and methods – of philosophizing in the analytic tradition, through brief explorations of some currently hotly debated topics in the field. 

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in the Autumn Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in the Winter Quarter. The Senior Seminar meets for two quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.