Autumn

Many of the toughest ethical and political challenges confronting the world today are related to environmental issues: for example, climate change, loss of biodiversity, the unsustainable use of natural resources, pollution, and other threats to the well-being of both present and future generations.  Using both classic and contemporary works, this course will highlight some of the fundamental and unavoidable philosophical questions presented by such environmental issues.  What do the terms “nature” and “wilderness” even mean, and can “natural” environments as such have ethical and/or legal standing?  Does the environmental crisis demand radically new forms of ethical and political philosophizing and practice?  Must an environmental ethic reject anthropocentrism?  If so, what are the most plausible non-anthropocentric alternatives?  What counts as the proper ethical treatment of non-human animals, living organisms, or ecosystems?  What fundamental ethical and political perspectives inform such approaches as the “Land Ethic,” ecofeminism, and deep ecology?  Is there a plausible account of justice for future generations?  Are we now in the Anthropocene?  Is “adaptation” the best strategy at this historical juncture?  How can the wild, the rural, and the urban all contribute to a better future for Planet Earth? (A)

An introduction to the concepts and principles of symbolic logic. We learn the syntax and semantics of truth-functional and first-order quantificational logic, and apply the resultant conceptual framework to the analysis of valid and invalid arguments, the structure of formal languages, and logical relations among sentences of ordinary discourse. Occasionally we will venture into topics in philosophy of language and philosophical logic, but our primary focus is on acquiring a facility with symbolic logic as such.

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.

This course is a first introduction to American Pragmatism. We will examine some of the seminal philosophical works of the three most prominent figures in this tradition: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Our main aim will be to extract from these writings the central ideas and principles which give shape to pragmatism as a coherent alternative to the two main schools of modern philosophical thought, empiricism and rationalism. (B) (III)

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

It is often said in contemporary literature that the difference between different types of democracies, like democratic Republic and Constitutional Monarchy, is a superficial one compared to the true relevant divide of modernity between democratic societies and non-democratic societies. The problem with such a divide is that it entails the reduction of Modern Constitutional Monarchies to decorative regimes - in other words to a variety of Republic. 

The goal of our seminar is to go back to the French post-revolutionary period in order to examine what has been called the « British moment » of the French Intellectual History because of its quest for the foundation of a Liberal and Constitutional Monarchy in France. 

That period deals with the difficult intellectual challenge for French thinkers to overcome Absolutism in favor of Democracy without rejecting Monarchy as such. 

The « British moment » of the French Intellectual History represents then a transitional - and mostly forgotten -moment between the old regime and the contemporary French Republic. Such a particular moment of French History can be decomposed into three main sub-moments and opens three main intellectual, historical and philosophical sequences: 1789 and the debates about the role of the Monarch in the context of « Popular Sovereignty ». The important thinkers of that period we are going to read are J. Necker and Madame de Staël (and some of Rousseau). 

Then 1814, when after Napoleon’s fall France restored the Monarchy through the form of a Constitutional Monarchy. France’s intellectual life will be divided between Conservative Monarchists like Bonald and Chateaubriand and Liberal Monarchists like Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville whose thoughts are going to prepare the advent of the Liberal period of French Monarchy after 1830’s Revolution. The goal of our careful readings of Rousseau, Necker, Staël, Bonald Chateaubriand, Constant, Tocqueville and others will be to make sense of what became in current debates about democracy mostly incomprehensible: in which way the nature of the democratic regime makes a difference to the concept of democracy one speaks about.

In the preface to the first edition of Capital, Marx describes his theoretical standpoint as one from which “the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history.” With a view to understanding Marx’s theoretical standpoint we will “go back,” in Marx’s words, “to the great investigator who was the first to analyze the value-form, like so many other forms of thought, society and nature. I mean Aristotle.” Aristotle’s influence on Marx is well-known and frequently attested by Marx himself. We will explore that influence as it manifests itself in Marx’s views on a variety of topics—e.g. on human nature and history; on labor, leisure and the good life; on slavery and freedom; on value and exchange; on property and wealth; on justice; and on alienation.

We propose a cursive reading of the section I of the masterpiece of Heidegger Being and Time looking for the very connection, as our very leading question, between the idea of being in general and the discovery of the being of human being named by Heidegger - Dasein.