Spring

The Workshop will consider important philosophical defenses of free speech and critics of those rationales. Topics will include the idea of the "marketplace of ideas," autonomy interests in free speech, the harms of speech, and the problem of propaganda and other manipulative speech.  Note: 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.   There are approximately four meetings in each of the three quarters.  Students must therefore enroll for all three quarters: Autumn, Winter, Spring.

In this class, we will explore the idea that political philosophy is practical. We will address questions such as the following. What is the best interpretation of this idea? How might we defend it against skepticism? What consequences does it have for method? What is it for a political philosophy to be utopian? Is there a good and a bad way of being utopian? How are these to be distinguished? What is it for a political philosophy to be cynical? Does “human nature” place constraints on our political theorizing? What ought we to mean by “human nature” in this context? How do concepts like scarcity and abundance relate to utopian enterprise? (I)

When political power is exercised, what makes it legitimate? Political theorists have long wondered how to justify political rule, which in general is any system whereby certain people get to make decisions on behalf of others and direct them to comply with the decisions, often ensuring their compliance through the threat or use of force. What justification can be provided for the normative standing of such systems of rule? The question of legitimacy is distinct from whether political rule is just or whether it is lawful (exercised according to a constitutional order), although those questions are not entirely separable. In this seminar, we will examine the possible grounds on which we might begin to establish why and how a particular political order is legitimate. We will begin with the paradigmatic case of the state, but we will also look at sub-national and international forms of political rule. We will examine and assess the prominent kinds of answers offered to this question: the common good / social welfare, individual freedom / natural rights, the social contract, and the democratic ideal of equality. Readings will include philosophers such as Plato, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, as well as contemporary theorists such as Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and Joseph Raz.

What does it mean to develop a critical reading of a literary text (or artwork or film)? What is the object, the logic, the justification of critical judgment? This question – or package of questions –has been raised since antiquity (Aristotle), but has become especially pressing since historical variation emerged into the foreground of aesthetic consideration in the course of the nineteenth century. How can we understand the act of criticism in the absence of clearly formulated norms? If innovation predominates in literary and artistic production, then what is the critic to base her judgment on? In this class, seminar we will examine this question (and its various solutions) as it unfolds from Kant (Critique of the Power of Judgment) to Cavell, with such intermediate stations along the way as Friedrich Schlegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. The seminar will also consider para dogmatic examples of criticism (e.g., Auerbach, Frye, Barthes), while examining the very idea of a classic.

This course continues the development of a new analytical and phenomenological approach to the relationship between revelation and reason (revelatio et ratio), between theology and philosophy, as they are constructed in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and in close relationship to their patristic precursors.  Specific themes to be engaged include: relevation as paradox ; the different forms of knowledge implied in ratio (with discussion of Scheleiermacher, Hegel, Spinoza, Kant and Fichte); and the role of the Trinity between relevation and reason (with particular attention to Basil and Augustine, as well as Hegel, Schelling and von Balthasar). (II)

This course will have four foci: 1) a close reading of the verba ipsissima of Philosophical Investigations and a handful of closely related writings by Wittgenstein; 2) an overview of the history of the reception of the book and some of the most influential readings it has occasioned; 3) a discussion of a handful of recent debates in the secondary literature on some its most contested sequences of sections – including those on ostensive definition, the critique of Wittgenstein’s early work, the nature of philosophy, rule-following, practices/forms of life, the so-called private language argument, the nature of first-person authority, and the relations between meaning and use, inner and outer, criteria and mental states, sensations and discursive forms of mindedness; 4) an assessment of how best to interpret the overall aims, methods, and teachings that confer unity on the work as a whole, with special attention to the conception of philosophy at work in the Philosophical Investigations . Throughout the course, we will seek to evaluate some of the most influential options put forward in the secondary literature regarding how to read the book, with a special focus on various aspects of the controversy surrounding so-called “quietest” and “anti-quietest” interpretations of the aims and methods of the work. Readings will include texts by Albritton, Anscombe, Baker, Brandom, Browne, Cavell, Child, Cook, Diamond, Goldfarb, Hacker, Kripke, Kuusela, Malcolm, McDowell, Pitcher, Schulte, Stroud, and Wright. (III)

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

The emotions seem to have aspects of a variety of other types of mental states: they seem to disclose objective aspects of the world just as beliefs do. They seem to be motivating just as desires are. They seem to have a felt aspect just as perceptions do. And they seem to essentially involve the body, just as pains and itches do. Emotions are thus very much like Descartes’s pineal gland: the function where mind and body most closely and mysteriously interact. A topic of study in the Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern traditions, the emotions have been neglected in much of the twentieth century by philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists alike — perhaps because of the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word “emotion” and perhaps precisely because of the resistance of the phenomena to disciplinary classification. In recent years, however, emotions have become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in cognitive science. In this course we will examine the nature of the emotions from three perspectives: Philosophical, Psychological-Psychoanalytic, and Natural Scientific. The following question will serve as our guide in this investigation: are these perspective, does the capacity to feel and freedom stand in necessary opposition? We will thereby not only gain preliminary insights into the nature of the emotions, but also an understanding of the power and limitations of these perspectives in the study of the emotions in particular, and the human being in general.

In the course of discussing how it is that a philosophical problem arises in the first place, Wittgenstein says, “The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.” This isn’t the only place where Wittgenstein speaks as if being gripped by philosophical problems is a matter of succumbing to illusions--as if a philosophers are magicians who are taken in by their own tricks. In this course, we’ll discuss philosophy and magical performance, with the aim of coming to a deeper understanding of what both are about. We’ll be particularly concerned with Wittgenstein’s picture of what philosophy is and does. Another focus of the course will be the passion of wonder. In the Theatetus, Plato has Socrates say, “The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” And when magicians write about their aesthetic aims, they almost always describe themselves as trying to instill wonder in others. Does magic end where philosophy begins? And what becomes of wonder after philosophy is done with it? (B)

“Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” This course will consider the challenge posed by the existence of evil to the rationality of traditional theistic belief. Drawing on both classic and contemporary readings, we will discuss atheistic arguments from evil in both “logical” and “evidential” forms. We will analyze attempts by theistic philosophers to construct “theodicies” and “defenses” in response to these arguments, including the “free-will defense” and “soul-making theodicies.” We will also consider critiques of such theodicies as philosophically confused, morally depraved, or both; and we will discuss the problems of divinely commanded or enacted evil and of divine hiddenness.