Autumn

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.

People differ from one another, and some of those differences really matter—for working together, for understanding each other, and for shaping who we are. Which differences have philosophical significance, and why? This course explores both the obvious social categories—race, gender, class, culture—and the more elusive, fine-grained differences that challenge the conceit of a universal human nature. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and literary texts, we’ll investigate how conversation can bridge (or deepen) these gaps, ultimately asking what it means to truly understand someone whose experience may be radically unlike our own.

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.

What can reflection upon artificial intelligence teach us about human thought? This question may be asked and understood in many ways. Our concern will be philosophical: the insight we seek is into the nature and structure of thought as it is for the one thinking, as it informs, shapes, or constitutes the life of a thinking being. This course will lay the groundwork for pursuit of our question by (1) introducing and examining the idea of a model of a human intellectual capacity (2) outlining the basic concepts needed for understanding the architecture of the currently most noteworthy form of artificial intelligence—the class of language models known as GPTs, (3) introducing some of the philosophical ideas needed for analyzing the forms of thought that go into human linguistic communication, and finally (4) endeavoring to bring all of these elements together. (B)

(I)

Aquinas regards justice as the preeminent moral virtue, and in the Summa theologiae he devotes more Questions to it than to any other virtue (II-II, qq. 57-79). With occasional help from other passages of his, and with an eye to his sources (especially Aristotle) and to later thinkers, we will first work through his general accounts of the object of justice (ius—the just or the right), justice as a virtue, the nature of injustice, and the distinction between distributive and commutative justice. Then, as time permits, we will discuss selected texts on more specific topics such as judicature, restitution, partiality, murder, theft, verbal injuries, fraud, and usury. (A)

An examination of ancient Greek philosophical texts that are foundational for Western philosophy, especially the work of Plato and Aristotle. Topics will include: the nature and possibility of knowledge and its role in human life; the nature of the soul; virtue; happiness and the human good.

Karl Marx’s account of “those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails” remains one of the most influential yet contentious theories ever committed to paper. Often invoked in times of turmoil, his name has come to mean different things to different people. Yet it is not always clear in fact just what his theory is, doubtless in part because his writings are quite challenging to read. In this course, students will engage fundamentally with Marx’s writings to gain a clear idea of his theory for themselves. We will do so by reading volume 1 of Marx’s Capital as well as selections from volumes 2 and 3 and Theories of Surplus Value. We will approach Marx own his own terms, considering context and comparison with other highlights from the history of political economy only where they are relevant. Topics which we will address include Marx’s view of “alienation”, “commodity fetishism”, and “class struggle”, but also labor, employment, money, capital, profit, and crisis.

We will be reading Paul Reiter’s new translation of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Princeton 2024), which students must bring to every class. The course will be held in English and there are no prerequisites. But students should read Marx’s short essay, “Wage Labor and Capital”, to prepare in advance of our first meeting. (A)

Topic: Personhood and Moral Status

Contemporary accounts of ethics often include a notion of “moral status” or “moral considerability.” Beings with moral status are those whose interests must be taken into account in ethical decision-making, or who matter for their own sake. Among the various levels of moral status that a being can have, the highest is “full moral status.” Beings with full moral status are often also referred to as (in a particular sense) “persons.” Persons are taken to have a special or perhaps unique ethical significance.

In this course we will survey the contemporary literature on personhood and moral status to attempt to answer two questions: “What makes a being a person?” and “What ethical implications do different theories of personhood have?”

In trying to answer the first question, we will consider different accounts of the grounds of or criteria for having full moral status: accounts based on cognitive capacities, on morally significant relationships, and on species membership. We will investigate whether personhood is a property that the same being can gain or lose, or whether it is the case that “once a person, always a person.”

To answer the second question, we will look at consequentialist and non-consequentialist ways of understanding personhood and full moral status. We will examine challenges to the notion that all human beings are persons from moral status revisionists like Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan, and responses to them from writers like Agnieska Jaworska, Eva Kittay, and Anselm Mueller. We will also consider the implications of the different theories we’ve discussed for issues like abortion, disability rights, and the treatment of animals.

In this class we explore the philosophical foundations of human rights, investigating theories of how our shared humanity in the context of an interdependent world gives rise to obligations of justice. Webegin by asking what rights are, how they are distinguished from other part of morality, and what role they play in our social and political life. But rights come in many varieties, and we are interested in human rights in particular. In later weeks, we will ask what makes something a human right, and how are human rights different from other kinds of rights. We will consider a number of contemporary philosophers (and one historian) who attempt to answer this question, including James Griffin, Joseph Raz, John Rawls, John Tasioulas, Samuel Moyn, Jiewuh Song, and Martha Nussbaum. Throughout we will be asking questions such as, "What makes something a human right?" "What role does human dignity play in grounding our human rights?" "Are human rights historical?" "What role does the nation and the individual play in our account of human rights?" "When can one nation legitimately intervene in the affairs of another nation?" "How can we respect the demands of justice while also respecting cultural difference?" "How do human rights relate to global inequality and markets?" (A)