Autumn

This course is designed to give students a broad and rapid introduction to the philosophical and other sources that inform contemporary literary and critical theory. We will cover a lot of ground very quickly. The variety of humanism at issue in our work will be the sort that informs common sense or, as one of our authors might put it, ordinary understanding of the things that strike many of us as obvious about ourselves and other people. The critique will not make anything stop seeming obvious. But it will provide some tools for thinking differently about contemporary commonsense understandings of human life. We will conclude by seeing the way this material shapes work by two prominent recent critics, Slavoj Žižek and Lauren Berlant.

The topic for 2018-19 will be "Enlightenment liberalism and its critics," the critics coming from both the left and the right. Enlightenment liberalism was marked by its belief in human freedom and the need for justifications on any infringements of that freedom; by its commitment to individual rights (for example, rights to expression or to property); and by its faith in the rational and self-governing capacities of persons and their basic moral equality. The Workshop will begin in the fall with several classes just for students to discuss foundational readings from liberal thinkers like Locke, Kant and Mill (we may also have some outside speakers taking up Kantian and Millian themes). In the Winter quarter, we will consider critics from the left, notably Marx and Frankfurt School theorists like Herbert Marcuse. In Spring, we will turn to critics from the "right" such as Nietzsche (who rejects the moral equality of persons) and Carl Schmitt. There will be sessions with the students discussing primary texts and then sessions with outside speakers sometimes interpreting the primary texts, sometimes criticizing the critics of liberalism, and sometimes developing their ideas.

It's been ten years that a growing interest for Phenomenology is manifest in the field of the contemporary philosophy of mind, especially amongst others phenomenologists, for Sartre. We will try to discuss most of the contemporary approaches of Sartre and try to understand what could be an actual and sustainable sartrean position today in the debates turning around the notion of self-consciousness.

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

The workshop involves discussion of general issues in writing the essay and student presentations of their work. Although students do not register for the Summer quarter, they are expected to make significant progress on their preliminary essay over the summer.

The goal of this course is to have MAPH students explore the historical origins of analytic philosophy. Beginning with Frege, we will look at the development of analytic philosophy through the work of figures such as Russell, Wittgenstein, looking also at the rise and fall of positivism and the philosophical traditions that emerged afterwards with figures such as Quine, Kripke, Putnam and beyond. At the end of the course, MAPH students should have a more solid understanding of the central issues that have shaped modern American-European analytic philosophy, and some of the important ways in which this tradition diverges from contemporary continental philosophy.

Most of us seek to be reasonably good people leading what we take to be successful and satisfying lives. There is a mountain of evidence suggesting that most of us fail to live up to our own standards. Worse, we often fail to mark our own failures in ways that could help us improve ourselves. The context in which we try to live good lives is shaped by the vicissitudes of the global economy. The global economy is obviously of interest to those of us studying economics or planning on careers in business. Aspiring entrepreneurs or corporate leaders have clear stakes in understanding practical wisdom in the economic sphere. But anyone who relies upon her pay - or someone else's - to cover her living expenses has some interest in economic life.

In this course, we will bring work in neo-Aristotelian ethics and neo-classical economics into conversation with empirical work from behavioral economics and behavioral ethics, to read, write, talk, and think about cultivating wisdom in our economic dealings. While our focus will be on business, the kinds of problems we will consider, and the ways of addressing these, occur in ordinary life more generally - at home, in academic settings, and in our efforts to participate in the daily production and reproduction of sound modes of social interaction. (A)

What is courage? Is it: doing what you should do, even when you are afraid? Can you be courageous without being afraid? Can you be couragoues and know that you are doing the right thing? Can you be courageous if you are not in fact doing the right thing? Can you have precisely the correct amount of fear and still fail to be courageous? Could you be courageous if you weren't afraid to die? Courage is, arguably, the queen of the virtues. In this class, we will use some Socratic dialogues (Laches, Protagoras, Republic, Phaedo) and some Aristotelian treatises (Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics) as partners in inquiry into the answers to the questions listed above. (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.