Spring

In this course we will explore some of the central questions in epistemology and metaphysics. In epistemology, these questions will include: What is knowledge? What facts or states justify a belief? How can the threat of skepticism be adequately answered? How do we know what we (seem to) know about mathematics and morality? In metaphysics, these questions will include: What is time? What is the best account of personal identity across time? Do we have free will? We will also discuss how the construction of a theory of knowledge ought to relate to the construction of a metaphysical theory-roughly speaking, what comes first, epistemology or metaphysics? (B)

The notion of Human Rights has become one of the most prominent conceptions in modern political language – both as a widely popular normative standard and as the object of much criticism. In this course, we will explore some fundamental issues in the philosophical foundations of human rights alongside their implementation in international human rights law and their historical development, as well as some popular criticisms. This course will be of interest to interested in social, legal and political philosophy, international relations, as well as to students considering law school. (A)

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy.  We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing specifically on the influence of Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy and its lasting influence on discussions of ethics and political philosophy.  We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he announces his project of grounding all ethical obligation in the very idea of a free will.  We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life".  We will conclude with an examination of some important challenges to the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical and political theory: Karl Marx’s re-interpretation of the idea of freedom in the economic sphere; Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill’s radicalizations of the ideas of political liberty and equality; and the appropriation and critique of the Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom by writers on racial oppression including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.

The concept of beauty (kallos) figures prominently in Ancient Greek philosophy, a place where metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and poetics come together and through which philosophers think about the possibility of harmoniousness in our being-in-relation to others. In this seminar we will begin by reading some important passages from Plato’s dialogues (e.g., from Republic, Phaedrus, Symposium) before turning to two subsequent philosophers who were influenced by him, Aristotle and Plotinus. We will consider ideas about the relation of beauty to goodness and order, to appearance and intelligibility, and to the spectator’s reactions of wonder, pleasure, admiration, and sense of kinship. Inevitably we will spend a fair amount of time discussing their theories of poetry, but will also talk about the role of beauty in ethics and natural philosophy. (I)

Is opera an archaic and exotic pageant for fanciers of overweight canaries, or a relevant art form of great subtlety and complexity that has the power to be revelatory? In this course of eight sessions, jointly taught by Professor Martha Nussbaum and Anthony Freud, General Director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, we explore the multi-disciplinary nature of this elusive and much-maligned art form, with its four hundred-year-old European roots, discussing both historic and philosophical contexts and the practicalities of interpretation and production in a very un-European, twenty-first century city.

Anchoring each session around a different opera, we will be joined by a variety of guest experts, one each week, including a director, a conductor, a designer and two singers, to enable us to explore different perspectives.

The list of operas to be discussed include Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea, Mozart's Don Giovanni, Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Verdi's Don Carlos, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Wagner's Die Meistersinger, Britten's Billy Budd, and Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking. (A) (I)

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

The third course will cover Marx’s “Paris Manuscripts” (aka “The 1844 Manuscripts,” aka “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”) and Marx’s historical writings about France, especially The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and his writings on the Paris Commune.

Do we have free will? What is free will anyway? Does it require an ability to do otherwise? Is free will compatible with a scientific conception of the world? Can people ever be justifiably blamed, praised, or punished for their actions, given all the ways we’re influenced by external forces? In this course on free will, we’ll look at some contemporary perspectives on these questions. The course will have three parts. First, we’ll look at reasons why we might not have free will. Next, we’ll consider how we could have free will. Finally, we’ll ask whether and for what it matters whether we have free will.   
Readings will come from Harry Frankfurt, Derk Pereboom, Kadri Vihvelin, P.F. and Galen Strawson, Susan Wolf, Rodrick Chisholm, Manuel Vargas, Thomas Nagel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy is based on an account of moral psychology, an account that is highly critical of the present—critical of current institutions and of its product, namely, our present moral psychology—while also, at moments, hopeful for the future. The seminar begins by presenting Rousseau’s political philosophy as a development of and a contrast to earlier social contract theories, in particular, to Thomas Hobbes’s view. We then examine both Rousseau’s and a few contemporaries’ moral psychologies to determine whether the political philosophy that Rousseau favors is feasible and/or desirable.

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)