Autumn

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.

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

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: 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.

The theme for 2019-20 is “Migration and Citizenship.” Confirmed speakers as of 1/19 include David Miller, Joseph Carens, Ayelet Shachar, Adam Hosein, Adam Cox, Aziz Huq, and Seyla Benhabib, who will also be the Dewey Lecturer on January 15.

This is a seminar/workshop many of whose participants are faculty from various related disciplines. It admits approximately ten students. Its aim is to study, each year, a topic that arises in both philosophy and the law and to ask how bringing the two fields together may yield mutual illumination. Most sessions are led by visiting speakers, from either outside institutions or our own faculty, who circulate their papers in advance. The session consists of a brief introduction by the speaker, followed by initial questioning by the two faculty coordinators, followed by general discussion, in which students are given priority. Several sessions involve students only, and are led by the instructors. Students write a 20-25 page seminar paper at the end of the year. The course satisfies the Law School Substantial Writing Requirement. Students must enroll for all three quarters to receive credit.

In the first part of the course, we’ll be discussing an argument to the effect that: in order for radical skepticism about empirical knowledge not to be intellectually obligatory, we must understand ourselves as enjoying a very particular kind of self-consciousness. In the remainder of the course, we’ll be trying to get into view what an adequate account of that sort of self-consciousness might look like. (III)

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

This course provides a historical survey of the philosophy of time. We begin with the problems of change, being and becoming as formulated in Ancient Greece by Parmenides and Zeno, and Aristotle’s attempted resolution in the Physics by providing the first formal theory of time. The course then follows theories of time through developments in physics and philosophy up to the present day. Along the way we will take in Descartes’ theory of continuous creation, Newton’s Absolute Time, Leibniz’s and Mach’s relational theories, Russell’s relational theory, Broad’s growing block, Whitehead’s epochal theory, McTaggart’s A, B and C theories, Prior’s tense logic, Belnap’s branching time, Einstein’s relativity theory and theories of quantum gravity. (B) (II)

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)