Winter

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)

A.M Turing opens his essay COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE as follows: ‘I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think."' We shall accordingly address the question “Can machines thinks?” by thinking about machines and thinking. 

Readings include: from L. Wittgenstein’s writings on mathematics (his dialogue with Turing and his response to Gödel incompleteness proof,) and Heidegger’s the Question Concerning Technology.
 

Decisions about medical treatment and medical policy often have profound and complex moral implications. This course will examine such issues as paternalism, autonomy, informed consent, assisted suicide, abortion, organ markets, genetic testing, and the definition of death. The primary teacher is a philosopher, but there will be guest lectures by physicians and medical lawyers. The goal is to have state of the art, interdisciplinary conversations. (A)

Modern theories of the subject – theories that answer the questions of what we are, how we are, and how we relate to others – have their roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophers of the era, finding themselves free to diverge from classical accounts of the human and its world, pursued anew such questions as: What is the mind and how does it come by its ideas? How do we attain a sense of self? Are we fundamentally social creatures, or does the social (at best) represent a restriction on our animal drives and passions? Literature, meanwhile, examined these questions in its own distinct manner, and in doing so witnessed what many scholars recognize as the birth of the novel – a genre for which accounts of the subject are of central importance. This interdisciplinary course will read widely in Early Modern and “Enlightenment” literature and philosophy to better understand the roots of contemporary accounts of the subject and the social. Philosophical readings will include texts by John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Mary Astell, Thomas Reid, Marya Schechtman, and Stephen Darwall. Literary readings will include Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. (A)

The invention of advanced AI technology is often said to introduce a radical change in the human form of life. The course will approach this issue through the philosophy of action. At the center of the class will stand the following three questions: In what sense can artificial intelligence support a form of agency? How does human agency differ from it? And how does human agency change because of it? The class investigates these questions by drawing on the history of the philosophy of technology as well as on contemporary debates on AI in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and social theory.

The idea that human beings are tool-using animals is found in Aristotle. Two and a half millennia later, in the 19th century, philosophers were confronted with the radical transformation brought about by the ubiquity of machine production in the industrial revolution. This raised fundamental questions about the reach, form, and value of human agency. For instance, does the machine enable the realization of the utopian promise of liberation from toil, or rather the dystopian threat of the wholesale replacement of human beings? Such questions are anticipated in the work of thinkers like Hegel, Kapp, and Marx. In different ways, they taken up in the 20th by philosophers such as Arendt, Heidegger, and Marcuse.  

Parallel questions are raised today by the radical transformation brought about by artificial intelligence. With technological revolutions of the 19th Century, the importance of the human body to securing our ends was challenged. The recent emergence of AI tools as putatively superior executors of the operations of human mindedness presents a yet deeper challenge to our practical self-understanding. The class investigates the philosophical responses to this challenge by bringing together the traditional philosophy of technology, analytic action theory, cognitive science and contemporary social theory. (A) or (B) and (I) or (II)

Nietzsche claims that “genuine philosophers” (unlike “philosophical laborers” like Kant and Hegel, who simply “press into formulas” existing moralities) are creators of value, or, as he puts it, “commanders and legislators:  they say, ‘Thus it should be,’ they determine first the ‘where to?’ and ‘what for’ of a people” (Beyond Good and Evil, section 211).  If Kant and Hegel are not “genuine philosophers” in this sense, then who is?  Homer?  The Presocratics? Plato? Nietzsche?  And what values then does Nietzsche create?

The first half of the seminar will examine Nietzsche’s reasons for treating moralities as historical artifacts, that can be explained in terms of the psychological needs of particular peoples at particular times, rather than timeless or objective standards governing human conduct.  We then consider the possibility that Nietzsche is a “genuine philosopher,” a “creator of values,” and try to understand what that means.  In the second half of the seminar, we consider whether several major Greek figures--Homer, whom Nietzsche lauds; the Presocratics, whom he, likewise, admires; and Plato, about whom Nietzsche is decidedly more ambivalent--created new values.

Nietzsche readings will be from Daybreak, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, and Twilight of the Idols, as well as his early lectures on Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and “Homer’s Contest.”  From the Greeks, we will consider portions of Homer’s Iliad, Plato’s Apology and Crito, as well as selections from Heraclitus and Parmenides.

This course is a survey of recent work in feminist political philosophy. We’ll focus on three interrelated themes: objectification; the relation of gender oppression to the economic structure of society; and the problem of “intersectionality,” that is, the problem of how to construct adequate theories of gender injustice given that gender “intersects” with other axes of oppression, e.g. race and class. Authors we’ll read include: Martha Nussbaum, Sandra Bartky, Angela Davis, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Serene Khader. (A)

Plato’s theory of forms is perhaps the first complete philosophical idea in the Greek tradition. It is so fundamental to the activity of philosophy, that the entire subject might be summarized as “a series of alternatives to Plato’s theory of Forms.” We sketch out the development of this theory from its earliest presentations in dialogues like the Republic through Plato’s own reconsideration of the theory in Parmenides, to the late presentations of the theory in Sophist and Philebus. (B)