Spring

Pessimism is often seen more as an attitude than a philosophy. It is the disposition of the complainer, the one who fails to appreciate life’s silver linings. In this course, we will consider the work of several thinkers who saw pessimism quite differently. For these thinkers, pessimism was a serious philosophical problem, perhaps even the most serious philosophical problem of all: namely, the problem of life’s value to the one who lives it. Our discussion will focus on Schopenhauer, Mill, Camus, Unamuno, and their contemporary successors. Each of these thinkers confronted a different set of worries about life’s value. We will try to understand and assess these worries. In the process, we will develop tools to productively think about what makes life worth living. (A)

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 millenia. 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 alternatives 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)

There is perhaps no better introduction to Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of human nature than his still influential commentary on Aristotle’s classic treatment of soul and its powers, the De anima. Writing the commentary was in fact part of Thomas’s preparation for the section on man in the Summa theologiae. Naturally he also had other sources, but he drew much of his method and many of his terms and principles from Aristotle’s work. Our default text consists of English translations of the commentary and of the nearly word-for-word Latin rendering of the De anima that Thomas used. We will work through the entire text; our main goal will be simply to understand it. (B) (IV)

Perhaps it is better to give than to receive, but exactly how much giving ought one to engage in and to whom or what?  Recent ethical and philosophical developments such as the effective altruism movement suggest that relatively affluent individuals are ethically bound to donate a very large percentage of their resources to worthy causes—for example, saving as many lives as they possibly can, wherever in the world those lives may be.  And charitable giving or philanthropy is not only a matter of individual giving, but also of giving by foundations, corporations, non-profits, non-governmental and various governmental agencies, and other organizational entities that play a very significant role in the modern world.  How, for example, does an institution like the University of Chicago engage in and justify its philanthropic activities?  Can one generalize about the various rationales for philanthropy, whether individual or institutional?  Why do individuals or organizations engage in philanthropy, and do they do so well or badly, for good reasons, bad reasons, or no coherent reasons?

This course will afford a broad, critical philosophical and historical overview of philanthropy, examining its various contexts and justifications, and contrasting charitable giving with other ethical demands, particularly the demands of justice. How do charity and justice relate to each other?  Would charity even be needed in a fully just world?  And does philanthropy in its current forms aid or hinder the pursuit of social justice, in both local and global contexts?  This course will feature a number of guest speakers and be developed in active conversation with the work of the UChicago Civic Knowledge Project and Office of Civic Engagement.  Students will also be presented with some practical opportunities to engage reflectively in deciding whether, why and how to donate a certain limited amount of (course provided) funding. (A)

This is a workshop for 2nd year philosophy graduate students, in which students revise a piece of work to satisfy the PhD program requirements.

Can we choose who to be? We tend to feel that we have some ability to influence the kind of people we will become; but the phenomenon of 'self-creation' is fraught with paradox: creation ex nihilo, vicious circularity, infinite regress. In this class, we will read philosophical texts addressing these paradoxes against novels offering illustrations of self-creation. (A)

This course is an introduction to the central ideas of Wittgenstein--in philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and logic, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of religion, metaphilosophy, and other areas of the subject. We will attempt to understand, and to evaluate, these ideas. As part of this attempt, we will explore Wittgenstein’s relation to various others figures—among them Hume, Schopenhauer, Frege, and the logical positivists. (B)

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)

This course will involve a close reading of the sections devoted to the topic of rule following in two of Wittgenstein’s best known later writings, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics and Philosophical Investigations, as well an examination of some of the most influential secondary literature on those sections, including texts by Brandom, Bridges, Diamond, Dummett, Finkelstein, Floyd, Goldfarb, Kripke, McDowell, Stroud, and Wright. (III)

This course will provide an advanced introduction to the moral, social, and political philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Our guiding theme will be freedom. We will ask: What kind of freedom is required for morality? In what sense, if any, are moral laws self-legislated or laws that we give ourselves? What is the relation between our freedom as individuals and the social world around us? Under what social and psychological conditions are we free, exactly, and under what conditions are we unfree? Are workers in a capitalist society free, for example? And why should we value freedom, anyway? Our main text for the course will be Hegel's Philosophy of Right. (A) (V)