Autumn

This course will be devoted to two early Essays of Levinas, Time and Other and Existence and Existents. We will try to situate these two works in the context of the French reception of German Existentialism. The major goal of this course will be to show that the concept of Otherness in Levinas’s philosophy does not entail a simple abandonment of the Heideggerian “ontological difference” but lies in a new deduction of it that entails a new concept of Time, beyond its ontological (and Heideggerian) meaning. We will try to explain how this new deduction of the ontological difference is based on the elucidation of phenomenological events that remain hidden to the so-called “phenomenological reduction” and that requires a reform of the phenomenological method that Levinas inherits from Husserl and Heidegger. Thanks to this new method, Phenomenology can be accomplished as an investigation that is able to go beyond intentional objects.

Course not for field credit. An introduction to the techniques of modern symbolic logic. The focus will be on the syntax and semantics of classical propositional and first-order quantificational logic. The course will introduce methods for determining whether a given argument is valid or invalid. We will discuss how statements and arguments of ordinary discourse can be represented within the formal language of propositional and quantificational logic. There will also be discussion of some important meta-theorems for these logical systems.

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.

Students are required to submit the college reading & research course form.

“That’s all well and good in practice...but how does it work in theory?” runs a joke made popular on the U of C campus by student t-shirts. The joke presupposes a distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge - a distinction enshrined in philosophical orthodoxy since the publication of Gilbert Ryle’s “Knowing How and Knowing That” (1945). In the 21st century, however, some philosophers have questioned this orthodoxy, beginning with T. Williamson and J. Stanley’s “Knowing How” (2001). This course will introduce intensive majors to a lively debate in contemporary philosophy, beginning with a careful reading of Ryle’s classic texts, then turning to Stanley and Williamson’s arguments that knowing how can be reduced to a form of propositional knowledge, the responses that these arguments have engendered, and ending with selections from Stanley’s extended response in his recent book Know How (2011).

In this class, we will read a number of Platonic dialogues and use them to investigate the questions with which Socrates and Plato opened the door to the practice of philosophy. Here are some examples: What does a definition consist in? What is knowledge and how can it be acquired? Why do people sometimes do and want what is bad? Is the world we sense with our five senses the real world? What is courage and how is it connected to fear? Is the soul immortal? We will devote much of our time to clearly laying out the premises of Socrates' various arguments in order to evaluate the arguments for validity. Note: This course, together with introduction to Aristotle (26200) in the Winter quarter, substitutes for and fulfills the Ancient Philosophy History requirement for the fall quarter: students can take these courses instead of taking PHIL 25000. Students must take them as a 2 quarter sequence in order to fulfill the requirement, but students who already have fulfilled or do not need to fulfill the Ancient Philosophy History requirement may take the one quarter of the course without the other.

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.

Bernard Williams (1993: 63) famously rejected the Kantian claim that, as moral agents, we should think of ourselves as legislators.  But why did Kant make this claim in the first place? The answer is first and foremost historical. In this course, we shall start by looking at the early Enlightenment context of moral thought (David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Christian August Crusius) to which Kant responds and try to locate the Kantian approach to moral theory within this context. After that, we shall read selected passages from Kant’s main writings on moral theory, the Groundwork, the Second Critique, and the Metaphysics of Morals. Finally, we shall look at some contemporary interpretations of Kant’s moral theory and – if time allows – on some contemporary moral theories that claim a Kantian heritage.

This workshop is open only to PhD Philosophy graduate students planning to go on the job market in the fall of 2012. Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter. Pass/Fail.