Spring

Topic: Loving Animals

In this course we will read and discuss texts in the contemporary philosophical literature on love, asking questions such as What is the nature of love? What is the relation between love and morality? Do we love for reasons? Who can love? and What are the possible objects of love? Our overarching theme, though, will be one that has been largely neglected in this literature: loving animals. Alongside the philosophical literature on love, we will read/watch and discuss (scientific and anecdotal) studies in the emotional lives of animals, memoirs of human-animal relationships, and documentary films focusing on bonds between humans and animals. Drawing on these materials, we will take a critical approach to the mainstream philosophy of love and ask: Is it possible to love an animal? Can animals love (you back)? and What can love tell us about animals?

Topic: Creativity and the Logic of Discovery

In this course we will explore epistemological issues surrounding the process of discovery. Our investigation will be guided by three questions: (1) Does the stage of inquiry concerned with generating hypotheses or, broadly speaking, novel ideas possess a discernible rational structure? (2) What (if any) general rules, methods, cognitive attitudes, and epistemic standards might be appropriate to this activity across different domains? (3) How should insights about the discovery process inform the way we reason in our everyday contexts? We will think about, for example, what C.S. Peirce called “musement” or “pure play”, a creative activity that he thought to be crucially important for producing the ideas that are converted into scientific and philosophical study. The notion of creativity and the relation it bears to a logic of discovery will also loom large in our discussion of other related topics, which will include: concepts from Gestalt psychology; objectivity and bias in observation; tacit knowledge and know-how in theoretical contexts; usage of metaphor and analogy in representing phenomena in scientific reasoning; and strategic guesswork involved in mathematical problem-solving.

The theme for 2019-20 is “Migration and Citizenship.” Confirmed speakers as of 1/19 include David Miller, Joseph Carens, Ayelet Shachar, Adam Hosein, Adam Cox, Aziz Huq, and Seyla Benhabib, who will also be the Dewey Lecturer on January 15.

This is a seminar/workshop many of whose participants are faculty from various related disciplines. It admits approximately ten students. Its aim is to study, each year, a topic that arises in both philosophy and the law and to ask how bringing the two fields together may yield mutual illumination. Most sessions are led by visiting speakers, from either outside institutions or our own faculty, who circulate their papers in advance. The session consists of a brief introduction by the speaker, followed by initial questioning by the two faculty coordinators, followed by general discussion, in which students are given priority. Several sessions involve students only, and are led by the instructors. Students write a 20-25 page seminar paper at the end of the year. The course satisfies the Law School Substantial Writing Requirement. Students must enroll for all three quarters to receive credit.

We will study Hegel’s Elements of Philosophy of Right. The book is an absolute classic of practical philosophy. Its ambition is nothing less than to provide a systematic treatment of the unity of action theory, ethics and political philosophy. Hegel’s theory is considered by many as the highpoint and completion of practical philosophy in the post-Kantian German Idealism. And it is essential for the development Marxism and Critical Theory. It is a crucial treatise to study – not only for those interested of the history of ethics and political theory, but for anyone reflecting on the logic and origins of the kind of society we live in. At the same time, the book is hardy an easy read. For one, the genre of text is quite peculiar: it was written for as a condensed “Leitfaden”  for the students listening Hegel’s lectures. Moreover, the range of topics discussed under the heading of the Philosophy of Right – as well the order in which they are presented – seems quite from a contemporary perspective.

Hegel’s guiding thought is that the power of practical reason and freedom can only be understood through its actuality. What stands at center of his treatise is thus the idea of practical reality, encapsulated in his famous slogan that “the rational is actual and the actual is rational.” Hegel’s point is that the domain of the practical is a stratum of being that is not a reality given to the mind, but one that reason apprehends as its own work in virtue of bringing it into being. This thesis has two sides: On the one hand, it means that there are aspects of reality whose very existence depends on our understanding of them as rational. On the other hand, it means that the norms of rationality cannot be understood independently of their realization in practice. Various features of our contemporary intellectual climate make it difficult for us to grasp this idea. Hegel’s slogan is often taken as a peculiar excess of Absolute Idealism that just reflects a conservative attitude towards the status quo. However, the central topics for a Marxist critique of right and western liberalism – such as alienation, exploitation and imperialism – can already be found in Hegel’s account on bourgeois society. (V)

Literature:

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, ed. by A.W. Wood,, trans. by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press

Immanuel Kant’s “critical” turn set off a revolution in 19th-century philosophy. We will trace its effects and the reactions against it. Our focus will be the conception of ethics and the philosophy of right. Kant’s main project was to show that the laws of morality and right are internal to the very ideas of practical reason and autonomy. On the one hand, we will study Post-Kantian German Idealist attempt to complete the enlightment project: J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel argue that since the idea of freedom cannot be understood independently of its actuality, one has to give an account of the necessity of its realization in the material world. On the other hand, we will investigate the (constitutive(?)) blindspots of this tradition and its abstract conception of the subject. In this connection we will study the critical works of Karl Marx, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Human rights are claims of justice that hold merely in virtue of our shared humanity. In this course we will explore philosophical theories of this elementary and crucial form of justice. Among topics to be considered are the role that dignity and humanity play in grounding such rights, their relation to political and economic institutions, and the distinction between duties of justice and claims of charity or humanitarian aid. Finally we will consider the application of such theories to concrete, problematic and pressing problems, such as global poverty, torture and genocide. (A) (I)

In this class we will investigate what it is for a society to be just. In what sense are the members of a just society equal? What freedoms does a just society protect? Must a just society be a democracy? What economic arrangements are compatible with justice? In the second portion of the class we will consider one pressing injustice in our society in light of our previous philosophical conclusions. Possible candidates include, but are not limited to, racial inequality, economic inequality, and gender hierarchy. Here our goal will be to combine our philosophical theories with empirical evidence in order to identify, diagnose, and effectively respond to actual injustice. (A)

I shall discuss the subject on the basis of 4 lectures Leo Strauss gave on “Jerusalem and Athens” and “Reason and Revelation” in the period 1946-1967.

“In wonder is the beginning of philosophy,” wrote Aristotle; Descartes also thought that those deficient in wonder were also deficient in knowledge. But the relationship between wonder and inquiry has always been an ambivalent one: too much wonder stupefies rather than stimulates investigation, according to Descartes; Aristotle explicitly excluded wonders as objects of inquiry from natural philosophy. Since the sixteenth century, scientists and scholars have both cultivated and repudiated the passion of wonder. On the one hand, marvels (or even just anomalies) threaten to subvert the human and natural orders; on the other, the wonder they ignite fuels inquiry into their causes. Wonder is also a passion tinged with the numinous, and miracles have long stood for the inexplicable in religious contexts. This seminar will explore the long, vexed relationship between wonder, knowledge, and belief in the history of philosophy, science, and religion.

The imagination of many contemporary intellectuals—including philosophers, physicists, and cognitive scientists of various stripes—is gripped by problems surrounding consciousness. Most notably, philosophers have been entirely stumped by the question of how something like conscious awareness arise in a material world. In this course we shall investigate the assumptions that lie behind this question, in order to penetrate the aura of mystery surrounding it. A central theme of the course shall be that, in order to tackle the puzzles surrounding consciousness, we shall need understand self-consciousness better. (B)