Winter

(B) (II)

This course meets in Autumn and Winter quarters.

Type theory is a new way of thinking about logic in which proofs are associated with computational verifications. This class will introduce students to the formal and philosophical issues involved in this way of looking at logic. The Curry-Howard correspondence will be examined in both the intuitionistic and classical context, and its significance discussed. Familiarity with the ideas of elementary logic will be presupposed. (B) (II)

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.

People differ from one another, and some of those differences really matter—for working together, for understanding each other, and for shaping who we are. Which differences have philosophical significance, and why? This course explores both the obvious social categories—race, gender, class, culture—and the more elusive, fine-grained differences that challenge the conceit of a universal human nature. Drawing on philosophical, sociological, and literary texts, we’ll investigate how conversation can bridge (or deepen) these gaps, ultimately asking what it means to truly understand someone whose experience may be radically unlike our own.

The purpose of this course is to explore the relationship between the project of human freedom—the project of liberation—and the idea of enlightenment. The main theme is a question: Is liberation simply a matter of enlightenment? That is, does freedom come from a special kind of profound knowledge? Affirmative answers to this question can be found in many places across the world and history, from Gautama the Buddha and the Stoic Epictetus to Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant. Others have insisted that enlightenment, while part of liberation, is not reducible to it: liberation is a social, economic, and political process, facilitated by a kind of realization about one’s lack of freedom, but not reducible to it. This kind of thought is also ubiquitous: from Marcus Garvey and Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis and Catherine MacKinnon. Still others have been skeptical of enlightenment: most famously, Frankfurt school theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno.

At stake in this debate is a set of fundamental questions about the human condition and what one is to do with one’s life. Why, for example, are we supposedly unfree?  After all, many people—including many of you considering enrolling in this class—have relative freedom of bodily movement, the ability to choose when and where to eat your next meal, or whom to love. But all of these thinkers agree that we—all of us, from the college student to the political prisoner to the head of state—are unfree. Why? Understanding this striking claim will help us interrogate what it means to be a human being and what aspirations we may all be committed to simply by virtue of participating in a social order. Appreciating how different thinkers agree that we are all unfree, but disagree on why or what this amounts to, will also help us get into view their different ideas of what human freedom is, how it should be achieved, and therefore what should be done now. As such, we will have the opportunity to dissect and criticize the ideas, arguments, and values that are developed in favor of one position rather than another. By the end of the course, students should be able to articulate some ideas, arguments, and values of their own with regard to liberation and enlightenment. (A)

This course provides an introduction to Spinoza’s philosophy and his relation to German thought, both prior to and within German idealism. In addition to carefully reading Spinoza’s own writings, we will consider rationalist alternatives to Spinoza’s metaphysics, the Pantheism controversy, and the acosmism charge. Beyond Spinoza, authors to be read include Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, and Hegel.

This course combines economic theory (the theory of the firm), legal theory (labor law), and labor history, with political philosophy to examine questions of justice for workers that are often ignored in academic political philosophy. The course begins by considering very basic questions from economic theory, including what markets are, and why production in the economy is organized through firms, and what economists have to say about why firms are arranged so hierarchically. Given this background, we next turns to consider injustices at the work, including worker domination, exploitation, and the casualization of employment. We consider responses including universal basic income that decouples access to goods from work; worker organization and resistance through the labor movement and tools such as collective bargaining; and finally, the reorganization of the economy to foster either shared control over firms or worker cooperatives. Along the way we consider the right to strike, the connection of race and labor, and different visions of a more just future for workers. (A)

How did philosophy come to be understood as a special concern with our language? We shall deal with this question by studying some essential chapters in twenty-first-century philosophy (Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Davidson).

Epistemology is the study of belief, and addresses questions like “what are we justified in believing?” and “when does a belief count as knowledge?”  This course will provide an overview of Bayesian epistemology, which treats belief as coming in degrees, and addresses questions like “when does rationality require us to be more confident of one proposition than another?", “how should we measure the amount of confirmation that a piece of evidence provides for a theory?”, and “which actions should we choose, based on our judgments about how probable various consequences are?” (B) (II)