Spring

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)

Leo Strauss's Socrates and Aristophanes (1966) discusses not only the most important and most influential of all comedies, The Clouds, but also all the other comedies by Aristophanes that have come down to us. The book is the only writing of Strauss's that deals with the whole corpus of a philosopher or poet. And it is the most intense and most demanding interpretation of Aristophanes a philosopher has presented up to now.

In Socrates and Aristophanes Strauss carries on a dialogue with Aristophanes on the wisdom of the poet, on the just and unjust speech, on philosophy and politics, on the diversity of human natures, and on an œuvre that asks the question: quid est deus? what is a god?

In this course we will devote roughly equal time to these profoundly influential, appealing, and often dueling, philosophical schools.  Our focus will be on their theories of nature, and especially of human nature; their views of pleasure, fear, and their role in human life; their accounts of virtue and of friendship; and, above all, their arguments for their differing conceptions of the human good: pleasure (according to the Epicureans) or “living in agreement with nature” (according to the Stoics).  Readings will include selections from Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, and Epictetus. (A)

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

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the responses to it, focusing on the changing conception of philosophical ethics. Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals rejects any appeal to nature or religious authority grounding all ethical obligations in the very idea of freedom or autonomy conceived as something that is for everyone. At the same time, Kant’s own work and much of the tradition that follows seems deeply shaped by racism, sexism, and elitism. We will investigate this tension in the tradition that led inter alia to the modern university. We will discuss works by Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, G.W.F. Hegel, Harriet Taylor Mill, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

The concept of alienation is central to the practical philosophy of Hegel and Marx. Following the work of the latter, the notion became a basic critical concept of social theory: under certain social conditions human agents are said to be alienated from their own agency. When the notion of alienation is discussed in contemporary analytic action theory and ethics, it tends to appear primarily as a tension or contradiction within the mind: as an estrangement from one’s own desires or from demands, norms, or ideals one is aware of. This internalization stands in stark contrast to the considerations that appear under that heading in the work Hegel and Marx. Here, the whole discussion is framed through the idea that one can only know one’s own agency through its realization in the world. Consequently, the problem of alienation appears as the impossibility of seeing oneself in one’s work.

Given the conceptual frameworks on offer in contemporary analytic action theory, it is not clear whether one can make sense of a critique of social conditions along these lines. The current debate on knowledge of one’s own actions divides into two main camps. The one side defines the human condition as one where one necessarily encounters one’s deeds just like other events in world: as alien and given from without. The other side defines intentional action as necessarily known by its subject from within or self-consciously. In consequence, there seems to be no space for a critique of alienation: either because it seems inevitable or because it seems impossible. One of the central questions of the seminar will be how one has to understand human agency such that alienation is conceivable.

On closer inspection, what Marx’ calls “alienation” seems to be ultimately a privation of the kind of practical knowledge that Aristotle calls “practical wisdom” (phronesis) and the correlated form of agency that he calls praxis. We will discuss Marx’ account in relation to Aristotle’s and Hegel’s developments of these concepts as well as in relation the discussion of practical reasoning, practical knowledge, and practical truth in the work of contemporary philosophers such as G.E.M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Christine Korsegaard, Gilbert Ryle, and Michael Thompson. Marx famously distinguishes four dimensions of alienation: the workers is said to be alienated (1) from their products, (2) from the act of production, (3) from the human form of life, and (4) from their fellow human beings. We will consider the respective practical categories and the correlated forms of practical cognition. (I) (III)

In one of his most widely read pieces of writing—the chapter of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding called “Of Identity and Diversity”—John Locke writes: “[S]ince consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person…”  Locke’s account of personal identity has puzzled, annoyed, and inspired readers since it was published in the second edition of his Essay, in 1694. One aim of this course will be to find a coherent reading of it, one that considers objections that later writers—most famously Butler and Reid—made to it as well as some recent readings of it. Part of the point of this endeavor will be to see what, if anything, we still can learn from Locke concerning what a person is. A second aim of the course will be to arrive at an understanding of consciousness that makes sense in light of what we’ve learned about persons and personal identity from Locke. (III)

A close reading of Alfred North Whitehead's seminal work.