Winter

The seminar will be a consideration of some problems about what it is to encounter, recognize, and understand another subject — a mind that is not one’s own. Questions to be considered include:

1. ​What role, if any, does our understanding of our own minds plays in grounding our understanding of other minds?

2. ​In what ways does our knowledge of other persons depend on perception? What role does perception of bodies play in our awareness of other minds? Can we perceive the mental states of another person, or must we always make an inference from something exterior and visible to something interior and invisible?

3.​ Does understanding other minds require possession of a “theory of mind”? To what extent is our understanding of other minds appropriately conceived as a kind of theoretical understanding?

4. ​How is our capacity to understand other subjects related to our capacity to stand in relations of “mutual recognition” with other subjects? Is the idea of another mind fundamentally the idea of a “second person”, a “you” to my “I”?

5. ​What is the relation between understanding other minds and feeling concern for other persons? Is our capacity for shame, empathy, a sense of justice, etc. grounded on our understanding of other minds, or do such forms of concern for others themselves ground our understanding of what another mind could be?

Practices of enslavement are common in recent human history. Focusing on transhistorical practices offers a unique opportunity to learn about the communities in which they occur, comparative aspects of slavery, and how slavery and labor are bound up in all aspects of a society, from the economy to politics to art and culture. This course will be about the entanglements of slavery and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome and their transhistorical implications. The main questions of the course include: What were the realities of slavery at the time that prominent ancient philosophers lived? How did they engage with these realities in their philosophical works, both in obvious and non-obvious ways? What were the legacies of ancient philosophical writings about slavery in later discussions of slavery in Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere? How can contemporary perspectives on slavery help us to understand the institution? And what can be learned about how slavery is represented in different cultures by focusing on ancient Greek and Roman philosophers? The course is organized around key ancient texts and topics in ancient and contemporary slavery studies. 

In this seminar we will discuss the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, and psychoanalytic understandings of human well-being.  Readings will be drawn from work by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Hans Loewald, and others   

We'll read and discuss Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Our central concerns will include: (1) Wittgenstein's metaphilosophy, (2) meaning and rule-following, (3) privacy and expression. (B) (II)

An investigation into what philosophy and linguistics can teach us about LLMs, and vice versa. (B)

This will be a close reading of Sartre’s great early work, Being and Nothingness (1943), focusing on his account of consciousness, freedom, anguish, and bad faith, as well as his conception of basic relations to other persons such as desire, shame, and love. We may also spend some time considering the development and critique of Sartre’s ideas in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and in her classic work of philosophical feminism, The Second Sex.

We will study the foundations of Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. Our central text will be his Critique of Practical Reason. We will also draw on key passages from his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, his Metaphysics of Morals, his Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, and his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.

In this course we examine questions such as: What is a city? What (if anything) is distinctively good about city life? Cities have been criticized for being dirty, polluted, overcrowded, ugly, lacking in opportunities to connect with nature, chaotic, alienating, and dangerous—to the extent that these criticisms are accurate, can they be addressed without abandoning urban life altogether? And what are the makings of a just city, if such a thing is possible? To tackle these problems we will read authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Rousseau, Emerson, Dickens, Marx and Fanon, among others.