Spring

Topic: Thinking and Speaking

According to one intuitive picture, the capacity to think is prior in nature to the capacity to express one’s thought linguistically. After all, can’t we perfectly well imagine a thinker locked in their own mind with no means of expressing themselves? Since the late 19th century, this intuitive picture has come in for sustained philosophical criticism from several directions. Thought, critics argue, is itself an essentially linguistic capacity and the very idea of a non-linguistic thinker a chimera. In this course, we will take up some of the most prominent objections to the intuitive picture with a view to evaluating their success. Among the questions that will structure our inquiry are the following: Is the relation between thought and language one of conceptual priority or mutual dependence? How should we understand the ability of language to figure as a vehicle for the communication of thought? Does it make sense to speak of language determining or constraining thought? If thought is essentially linguistic, what implications does this have for our conception of the self and its relation to society? While the focus of the course will be on approaches to these questions from within analytic philosophy, we will also draw on ideas and arguments from linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and the continental traditional. Readings will include selections from Frege, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Brandom, Sapir, Chomsky, and Foucault, among others.

Course begins in late Spring quarter and continues in the Autumn quarter.

Body modification is a way to control what is most intimately ours—our bodies.  At its best, it empowers us make choices about our own bodies, turning them into tattooed canvases, finely-honed athletic machines, or just safer and more pleasant places to live. At its worst, it is a tool that others can use to coerce us: controlling our ability to reproduce, forcing our bodies into uncomfortable shapes because society deems them “normal”, or pressuring us toward the costly and ultimately futile pursuit of beauty, youth, and thinness. This course explores the ethics of body modification, considering examples from tattooing to plastic surgery to athletic training to psychoactive drugs.

Iota is a relatively neglected book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; but it’s primary topic—unity—is an important theme running throughout the work. In this course we will make our way through it, slowly and carefully, guided by Castelli’s translation and commentary in the Clarendon Aristotle series and select secondary literature.

Preparing papers to submit to journals for review and revising papers in response to the feedback received from journal editors and referees is an essential part of professional academic life, and students applying for academic positions with no publications to their name are at a disadvantage in today’s highly competitive job market. The Department of Philosophy has therefore instituted the Paper Revision and Publication Workshop to provide our graduate students with support and assistance to prepare papers to submit for publication in academic philosophy journals. The workshop was designed with the following three aims in mind:

1. to provide students with a basic understanding of the various steps involved in publishing in academic journals and to create a forum in which students can solicit concrete advice from faculty members about the publishing process;

2. to direct and actively encourage students to submit at least one paper to a journal for review on a timeline that would allow accepted submissions to be listed as publications on a student’s CV by the time they go on the academic job market; and

3. to create and foster a departmental culture in which the continued revision of work with the ultimate aim of publication in academic journals is viewed as an essential aspect of the professional training of our graduate students and in which both faculty and students work together to establish more ambitious norms for publishing while in graduate school.

While the focus of this course will be on reading Leviathan, our broader ambition will be to understand how the account of the human being and the political developed in that text fit within Hobbes's broader philosophical and intellectual project. As such, we will also consult a number of other texts (e.g., the Elements of Philosophy) to get a sense of that project.

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through nineteenth-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of agency and morality. Kant’s famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals rejects any appeal to nature or religious authority and instead grounds moral obligations in the very idea of freedom conceived as something that is for everyone. This thought ultimately leads to the defining characteristic of nineteenth-century thought-–for the first time in the history of philosophy, history comes to be a topic for philosophy. We will study how these ideas are taken up and transformed in the works of philosophers like J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. 

Bullshit is everywhere — in politics, advertising, corporate speak, academic jargon, and data science. But what exactly is it? How does it differ from lying and deception? What features of language, institutions, and data make it so easy to produce and so hard to call out?

This course takes bullshit seriously as a philosophical topic. We begin with foundational questions: What is bullshit, and what distinguishes it from lying and deception? We then turn to language, examining how features of natural language — such as implicature, presupposition, vagueness, and euphemism — give speakers systematic resources for bullshitting while maintaining plausible deniability. The third unit considers bullshit and labor: the proliferation of "bullshit jobs," the language of corporate and bureaucratic life, and why so much modern work seems to demand it. We conclude with bullshit and data, asking how statistics, models, and algorithms can be deployed to mislead, and whether AI systems can be bullshitters in a philosophically interesting sense.

Readings draw on philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and sociology. No prior background in philosophy or formal methods is required.

This course introduces students to key concepts, texts, and figures from the phenomenological tradition as it emerged and developed in Germany and France over the late-19th and 20th centuries. Students will engage with questions of intentionality, temporality, embodiment, finitude, and meaning-making. The course will pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities between key figures. Major figures covered include Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre. (B)

This course is intended as a sequel to Sean Kelsey’s Winter quarter course on Physics I-III.3. We will pick up in Physics III with Aristotle’s account of infinity, proceeding through the rest of the Physics to discuss space, time, and void in VI, the logic and structure of change in V-VII, and the source of motion in the world in VIII. We will focus in particular on the theory of the continuum as a mark of the natural, as a limit of what is knowable, and as the basis for Aristotle's understanding of complexity.

Sean Kelsey’s course is not a prerequisite, but students should have read Physics I-III.3 prior to the first day of class.