Autumn

At the time of Michel Foucault’s death in 1984, both his fame and his capacity to inspire controversy were at their height. Foucault’s views on power, knowledge, and genealogy were widely influential during his lifetime. Forty years after Foucault’s death, interest in Foucault is once more on the rise. The purpose of this class is to provide a philosophical introduction to Foucault’s ideas. Topics to be discussed include madness and social construction, the historical preconditions of knowledge, genealogical critique, reform’s perilous potential, and the “technologies of the self”. Particular attention will be given throughout to how Foucault engages with Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. We will end by examining Foucault’s reception in the work of Judith Butler, as well as contemporary criticisms of Foucault. (A)

This class will be a survey of major themes in contemporary philosophy of science. Topics will include inductivism, Popper's deductivism, Kuhn’s conception of science, and Bayesianism. Towards the end of the course as a case study we will look at the debate about whether the existence of multiple universes should be considered a genuine scientific hypothesis. (B)

An introduction to philosophical thought about the nature of language. The questions we will address include: What is meaning? What is truth? How does language relate to thought? How do languages relate to each other? What is metaphor? What is fiction? The focus will be on classic work in the analytic tradition (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, Austin, Grice, Davidson, Donnellan, Putnam, Searle, Kaplan, Kripke) but we will also read, and relate to this modern work, some current work in the philosophical literature and some seminal discussions of language in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. (B)

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.

The course will start by looking at the intellectual connections of several major figures in 18th and 19th century philosophy of religion. We will examine David Hume’s “Essay on Miracles” and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, John Stuart Mill’s “The Utility of Religion,” Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, and selections from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. In the last third of the course we will examine more recent writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Emmanuel Levinas. The goal of the course is to present and to assess different ways in which philosophers have conceived of and argued for or against religious belief. (IV)

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.

In the Physics, Aristotle lays out the general concepts and principles governing his teachings about the natural world.  His approach is both philosophically sophisticated and quite different from that of modern science.  We will work through substantial selections from Books I-III, with the help of Aquinas’s glosses, which make them more digestible without diluting them.  Topics include the subject and procedure of natural science, the relation of that science to metaphysics and mathematics, matter and form as principles of change, the concept of nature, causality, chance, teleology, the nature of motion, action and passion, and the categories of being. (B)

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

In this seminar we engage in an in-depth examination of a focused philosophical topic—in a manner akin to that of a graduate seminar. Readings are challenging, but there is no presumption of prior expertise in the course topic.

This will be a study of Kant’s third and final Critique, his Critique of Judgment.  We will attempt to survey they book as a whole, including Kant’s influential account of the nature of judgments of beauty and sublimity, as well as his theory of “teleological” judgment and its place in our understanding of the natural world.  We will also seek to comprehend and assess Kant’s claim that these studies constitute essential contributions to a critique of our cognitive power of judgment, a critique which is crucial to the completion of his larger “critical” project surveying the scope and limits of human cognition as a whole. (IV)