Autumn

Topic: Moral Luck (instructor: P. Brixel)
Late in his career, the English philosopher Bernard Williams wrote, ‘Philosophy, and in particular moral philosophy, is still deeply attached to giving good news.’ In particular, he thought that the philosophical tradition that we have inherited is attached to the consoling thought that how well we live is in the most important respects under our control. This thought can be defended on the basis of a pair of commitments: that how well we live from a moral point of view is under our control, and that moral considerations are the most important considerations. Williams challenged both of these commitments, arguing that morality does not have the supreme importance traditionally attributed to it and that moral value is not immune to luck—that there is such a thing as ‘moral luck’. In this course, we will examine these ideas. More specifically, we will cover three topics: 1. In the first part of the course, we will examine the idea that certain activities or onditions are of supreme importance, all other things being worthless in omparison. This idea is associated with the ancient thought that the virtuous person cannot be harmed. In relation to this idea, will discuss the meaning and the possibility of tragedy. 2. In the second part of the course, we will examine the idea that moral value is immune to luck. We will discuss the problem of moral luck due to incomplete control over the morally significant consequences of one’s actions (‘consequential luck’), moral luck due to incomplete control over morally significant aspects of one’s character (‘constitutive luck’), and moral luck due to ignorance of the moral significance of what one is doing (‘moral ignorance’). 3. Throughout the course, we will aim to gain clarity about the metaphysics of agency, control, luck, and the self.

Topic: Contemporary Liberalism (instructor: J. Butcher)

Liberalism is the dominant tradition of political thought in contemporary political philosophy, and its vocabulary is the lingua franca of the political discourse of Western political societies. One of the chief commitments of liberalism is that a just society is necessarily a free society. Otherwise put, liberalism conceives of citizens as having an overriding interest in some type of freedom. But this abstract commitment is susceptible to a wide variety of competing and incompatible specifications. In this course, we will examine the ways in which various liberal political philosophers have specified the notion of freedom and conceived of its role in the just society. The guiding questions of the course are: (1) What does it mean to say that citizens have a fundamental interest in freedom, and (2) What obligations of justice does this fundamental interest generate on the part of the state? We will begin by reading a sizeable portion of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (weeks 1-3), which contains his argument that citizens have a right to a set of basic liberties that cannot be given up even if it is in citizens’ economic interest to do so. In week 4, we will consider an objection to Rawls’s argument advanced by H.L.A. Hart and Rawls’s response. Next, we will consider various alternatives to Rawls’s approach (weeks 5-6), namely those of Joseph Raz, Philip Pettit, and Martha Nussbaum. These alternatives conceive of freedom as autonomy (the capacity to make certain choices), non-domination (freedom from dependence on the choices of others), and capability (the opportunity to develop one’s capacities to become a fully functioning human being), respectively.  We will then move onto a view called political liberalism (weeks 7-9). This view holds a conception of freedom according to which a citizen is free when he is capable of endorsing the legal framework of his society - in particular the way this framework employs coercive power against and determines the life chances of citizens. We will conclude (week 10) with Joseph Raz’s influential criticism of this view.

Topic: Philosophical Conceptions of Pleasure in Classical Antiquity (instructor: D. Jagannathan)

What is pleasure? In what way is it valuable? How does pleasure relate to action, passion, and the good life? These are the questions we shall investigate in this course by working through the leading theories of pleasure in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy from Aristippus of Cyrene through Plato and Aristotle down to the Stoics and the Epicureans. In addition to proceeding chronologically and seeing how later thinkers respond to or refine the arguments of earlier ones, the course will take up three broad themes: (i) the value of pleasure, (ii) what sorts of pleasures there are and whether pleasure is unified, and (iii) how pleasure figures in goal-directed behavior in us and in animals. The final week of the course will be devoted to the reception of ancient ideas about pleasure in two modern thinkers, John Stuart Mill and Gilbert Ryle. Some experience working with Plato and Aristotle is desirable; no knowledge of Greek or Latin is required.

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.

This course centers on a close reading of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, with some attention to his writings on the history of ancient conceptualizations of sex. How should a history of sexuality take into account scientific theories, social relations of power, and different experiences of the self? We discuss the contrasting descriptions and conceptions of sexual behavior before and after the emergence of a science of sexuality. Other writers influenced by and critical of Foucault are also discussed.

This course explores the question ‘What is art?’ when applied to visual works of art. Another way of forming the question is: ‘What differentiates a work of art from something which is not a work of art?’. The course follows several attempts to answer this question including the representational, expressive, formal, emotive, conventional and historic theories. In the second part of the course, we will address the question: ‘How do we best understand a work of art?’. We will see how these questions are related. Each topic in this course will focus on a single work of art so that the philosophical reading will be understood and evaluated in light of a guided analysis of the work in question.

An exploration of some of the central questions in metaethics, moral theory, and applied ethics. These questions include the following: are there objective moral truths, as there are (as it seems) objective scientific truths? If so, how can we come to know these truths? Should we make the world as good as we can, or are there moral constraints on what we can do that are not a function of the consequences of our actions? Is the best life a maximally moral life? What distribution of goods in a society satisfies the demands of justice? Can beliefs and desires be immoral, or only actions? What is “moral luck”? What is courage? (A)

Graduate students planning to go on the job market in the fall of 2014. Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.

This course will be based on a direct confrontation between Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological works. The main goal of this course will be to reintroduce the concept of immanence in a phenomenological sense beyond its critique by the philosophies of existence – of the so-called extatic dimension of human existence. The main goal of this course will be then to introduce two Sartre’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenological masterpieces (mainly Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego (la Transcendance de l’Ego) and Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation  (L’Essence de la manifestation)). Does the discovery of our intentional or existential openness to the world implies necessarily the renunciation to the notion of immanence or do we have to elaborate a phenomenological meaning for the concept of immanence in order to go further in the comprehension of the transcendent nature of our being? This will be the leading question of our seminar.

Linguists and philosophers have traditionally examined the role of language and thought as a medium for (mis)representing objective facts about the world we are living in. However, language is also an important tool for sharing subjective perspectives with others, and clearly not all thoughts are objective. Taking subjectivity as a sui generis phenomenon that does not reduce to another instance of descriptive talk and thought has repercussions that go beyond the traditional distinction between linguistics and philosophy: it impacts philosophical attempts to understand the nature of normative thoughts no less than the way linguists tend to think to about the nature of linguistic meaning. This is the first in a two-course sequence that addresses the exciting resulting challenges in a systematic manner, to be offered jointly by Professors Chris Kennedy and Malte Willer. The first course will be taught by Malte Willer and focus on foundational philosophical issues surrounding subjectivity in language and thought, including issues pertaining to normativity and general considerations about the shape a theory of natural language meaning must have to take the phenomenon of subjectivity seriously. The second course will be taught by Chris Kennedy in the Winter Quarter, 2015 and focus on linguistic issues surrounding subjectivity, including a rich variety of empirical questions and the impact that treating subjectivity as a sui generis phenomenon has for theoretical linguistics. Despite their slight differences in focus, both courses are interdisciplinary by design and will appeal to linguists and philosophers alike. Students may take either one of these courses for credit without taking the other for credit. The two-course seminar is also the launching event for a three-year interdisciplinary working group on the nature of subjectivity in language and thought, led by Chris Kennedy and Malte Willer and funded by the generous support of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. (II) 

An examination of the works of some of the most significant twentieth-century philosophers of Judaism. In the first part of the seminar we will examine the philosophical, theological, and ethical foundations of Modern Orthodox Judaism. The principal readings will be Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Emergence of Ethical Man and Aharon Lichtenstein's By His Light. The second part of the seminar will focus on the post World War II emergence of a new philosophy and theology of Judaism in France. Primary readings will come from Emmanuel Lévinas, Léon Askénazi, Alexandre Safran, and Henri Meschonnic. Special attention will be given to the relation between philosophical argument and analysis, and theological conception and method.

The British Utilitarians were social radicals who questioned conventional morality as a basis for both personal and public choice and proposed an alternative that they believed to be both more scientific and more morally adequate.  In part because of the widespread acceptance of pieces of their views in economics and political science, the original subtlety and radical force of the views is often neglected.  This seminar, focusing on John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, aims to examine sympathetically what classical Utilitarianism may still offer to philosophical ethics, and to see how the strongest criticisms of Utilitarianism measure up to the texts of its founders.  Although it is hardly possible to study Utilitarianism as an ethical theory without attending to its political role, we shall focus for the most part on ethics, and on two works above all: Mill’s Utilitarianism and Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, combining these with Mill’s The Subjection of Women, his Autobiography, and several key essays.  Along the way we shall be investigating the views of Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick about animal suffering, women’s equality, and sexual orientation.  Among the critics of Utilitarianism, we shall consider writings of Bernard Williams, John Rawls, Amartya Sen, Jon Elster, Elizabeth Anderson, and John Harsanyi.