Spring

From Plato to the present, notions of happiness have been at the core of heated debates in ethics and politics.  What is happiness?  Is it subjective or objective?  Is it a matter of pleasure or enjoyment?  Of getting what one most wants?  Of flourishing through the development of one’s human capabilities?  Of being satisfied with how one’s life is going overall?  Is happiness the ultimate good for human beings, the essence of the good life and tied up with virtue, or is morality somehow prior to it?  Can it be achieved by all, or only by a fortunate few?  Can it be measured, and perhaps made the basis of a science?  Should it be the aim of education?  What causes happiness?   Does the wrong notion of happiness lend itself to a politics of manipulation and surveillance?   What critical perspectives pose the deepest challenges to the idea that happiness matters?  These are some of the questions that this course addresses, with the help of both classic and contemporary texts from philosophy, literature, and the social sciences.  The approach will involve a lot of more or less Socratic questioning, which may or may not contribute your personal happiness. (A)

We will study this work in its entirety, chiefly from a philosophical point of view.  The more popular, more autobiographical Books (I-IX) already offer a good deal of philosophical material; themes treated include the will, friendship, good and evil, knowledge, truth, incorporeal reality, and divine providence.  Then come the more impersonal Books (X-XIII), which present extended and sometimes impassioned inquiries into the natures of memory, time, eternity, and creation.  Latin would be helpful, but it is not required. (A)

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

This will be a course on Plato's Gorgias. (IV)

The course will have three foci in Wittgenstein’s later writings: (1) Philosophical Investigations’ famous remarks on rule-following—at least insofar as they bear upon a kind (or kinds) of skepticism concerning semantically contentful language; (2) discussions that bear upon a related kind (or kinds) of skepticism concerning psychologically contentful expression that appear shortly thereafter in Philosophical Investigations; and (3) remarks about belief, doubt, and (what might be called) quasi-logical propositions that run through On Certainty. A thought that we’ll have to grapple with, and keep returning to, is nicely articulated in this sentence from On Certainty: “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing” (§166). (II)

Philosophers have long drawn inspiration for their views about the nature of human cognition, the structure of language, and the foundations of knowledge, from developments in the field of artificial intelligence. In recent years, the study of artificial intelligence has undergone a remarkable resurgence, in large part owing to the invention of so-called “deep” neural networks, which attempt to instantiate models of cognitive neurological development in a computational setting. Deep neural networks have been successfully deployed to perform a wide variety of machine learning tasks, including image recognition, natural language processing, financial fraud detection, social network filtering, drug discovery, and cancer diagnoses, to name just a few. While, at present, the ethical implications of these new and powerful systems are a topic of much philosophical scrutiny, the epistemological significance of deep learning has garnered significantly less attention.

In this course, we will attempt to understand and assess some of the bold epistemological claims that have been made on behalf of deep neural networks. To what extent can deep learning be represented within the framework of existing theories of statistical and causal inference, and to what extent does it represent a new epistemological paradigm? Are deep neural networks genuinely theory-neutral, as it is sometimes claimed, or does the underlying architecture of these systems encode substantive theoretical assumptions and biases? Without the aid of a background theory or statistical model, how can we, the users of a deep neural network, be in a position to trust the reliability of its predictions? In principle, are there any cognitive tasks with respect to which deep neural networks are incapable of outperforming human expertise? Do recent developments in artificial intelligence shed any new light on traditional philosophical questions about the capacity of machines to act intelligently, or the computational and mechanistic bases of human cognition? (B) (II)

The first third of this course will focus on Cora Diamond’s contributions to the philosophy of logic (what a logical notation is, what logical nonsense is, wherein logical necessity consists) and the history of analytic philosophy (especially the interpretation of Frege, the Tractatus, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations), the second third on her contributions to ethics (especially about the role of argument in ethics, about the ethics of eating animals, and the relation between philosophy and literature), and the final third to her understanding of the connections as well as differences between philosophical logic and philosophical ethics (and why a proper appreciation of wherein these lie has implications for a proper philosophical comprehension of formal notions such as truth and human being, as well as for a proper account of the parallels between logical propositions such as those of the form “This is something that cannot be thought” and ethical statements such as those of the form “This is something that one must not do.”)

The aim of this first course will be to offer a careful reading of three quarters of Stanley Cavell’s major philosophical work, The Claim of Reason. The course will concentrate on Parts I, II, & IV of the book (with only very cursory discussion of Part III). We will look at other writings by Cavell insofar as they directly assist in an understanding of this central work of his. In particular, we will focus on Cavell’s treatment of the following topics: criteria, skepticism, agreement in judgment, speaking inside and outside language games, the distinction between specific and generic objects, the relation between meaning and use, our knowledge of the external world, our knowledge of other minds, the concept of a non-claim context, the distinction between knowledge and acknowledgment, and the relation between literary form and philosophical content. We will read background articles by authors whose work Cavell himself discusses in the book, as well as related articles by Cavell. We will also discuss several of the better pieces of secondary literature on the book to have appeared over the course of the last three decades. Though no separate time will be given over to an independent study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, we will take the required time to understand those particular passages from Wittgenstein to which Cavell himself devotes extended attention in his book and upon which he builds his argument. The Claim of Reason is dedicated to J. L. Austin and Thompson Clarke and its treatment of skepticism seeks to steer a middle course between that found in the writings of these two authors. We will therefore also need to read the work of these two authors carefully.  The final two meetings of the course will focus on issues in Part IV of the book which set the stage for a broader consideration of Cavell’s views on topics in philosophical aesthetics and the relation between philosophy and literature.

This course will survey Aristotle’s ethics and politics with a view to understanding their relation to one another.  

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 on the changing conception of what philosophical ethics might hope to achieve.  We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which the project of grounding all ethical obligations in the very idea of rational freedom is announced.  We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of rational freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a substantive conception of the proper organization of our social and political lives.  We will conclude by examining some important critics of the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical theory: Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, and Friedrich Nietzsche.