Spring

This course provides an introduction to the major ethical positions from the Enlightenment era, with primary focus give to Hume, Smith, Rousseau, and Kant. These positions have shaped our popular thinking about ethics, moral psychology, and moral education. They also continue to directly inform dominant views in contemporary philosophy. As we read through selections from major works, we will be guided by questions about the foundations of morality and the nature of moral motivation. For example, what is the source of our distinction between good and bad? Is our moral judgment grounded in reason or the senses? How can we make sense of motivation to do the right thing, sometimes even at great personal cost? As we will see, the answers to these questions are directly tied to the larger question of how to understand human nature and the relationship between our capacity to reason and our capacity to feel.

Students writing senior essays register once for PHIL 29901, in either the Autumn or Winter Quarter, and once for PHIL 29902, in either the Winter or Spring Quarter. (Students may not register for both PHIL 29901 and 29902 in the same quarter). The Senior Seminar meets all three quarters, and students writing essays are required to attend throughout.

Topic: The Immorality of Art (instructor: C. Kirwin)
Can art lead us to virtue-and, if so, can it also lead us to vice? Should art be in the service of morality and the greater good of society, or should the artist pursue only "art for art's sake"? Can a work of art be morally bad but still artistically good? To investigate these and related questions, we'll begin at the beginning, with Plato's famous attacks on art and artists, and then look at several key texts from the history of the philosophy of art, focusing on the question of the relationship between art and morality as it is explored in these works. Towards the end of the course, we will start to relate our findings to issues in our contemporary culture, studying some feminist critiques of the aesthetic concept of beauty, as well as aesthetic developments driven by oppressed groups striving for emancipation through art. Throughout the course, we shall be looking at various artworks-including examples of painting, sculpture, literature, music, film, and photography-that connect up to the themes that we discuss.

Topic: On Freedom and Its Absence (instructor: P. Brixel)

The aim of this course is to explore the idea of freedom in political philosophy. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, we will try to determine the relations between freedom, choice, desire, and the good by examining empiricist, existentialist, rationalist, and capability-based approaches to the definition of freedom. In the second part, we will ask what kinds of obstacles constitute constraints on freedom. Is freedom simply the absence of human interference, or the absence of domination, or can we be unfree even if we are not interfered with or dominated? In the third part, we will deploy what we have learned so far in an investigation of specific questions about freedom or unfreedom in relation to labor. Does the value of freedom impose restrictions on what work should be like? Do workers under capitalism enter the labor-contract unfreely? Is leisure necessary for freedom? This investigation will deepen our understanding of the various philosophical conceptions of freedom and unfreedom.

Topic: The Immorality of Art (instructor: C. Kirwin)
Can art lead us to virtue-and, if so, can it also lead us to vice? Should art be in the service of morality and the greater good of society, or should the artist pursue only "art for art's sake"? Can a work of art be morally bad but still artistically good? To investigate these and related questions, we'll begin at the beginning, with Plato's famous attacks on art and artists, and then look at several key texts from the history of the philosophy of art, focusing on the question of the relationship between art and morality as it is explored in these works. Towards the end of the course, we will start to relate our findings to issues in our contemporary culture, studying some feminist critiques of the aesthetic concept of beauty, as well as aesthetic developments driven by oppressed groups striving for emancipation through art. Throughout the course, we shall be looking at various artworks-including examples of painting, sculpture, literature, music, film, and photography-that connect up to the themes that we discuss.

Topic: On Freedom and Its Absence (instructor: P. Brixel)

The aim of this course is to explore the idea of freedom in political philosophy. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, we will try to determine the relations between freedom, choice, desire, and the good by examining empiricist, existentialist, rationalist, and capability-based approaches to the definition of freedom. In the second part, we will ask what kinds of obstacles constitute constraints on freedom. Is freedom simply the absence of human interference, or the absence of domination, or can we be unfree even if we are not interfered with or dominated? In the third part, we will deploy what we have learned so far in an investigation of specific questions about freedom or unfreedom in relation to labor. Does the value of freedom impose restrictions on what work should be like? Do workers under capitalism enter the labor-contract unfreely? Is leisure necessary for freedom? This investigation will deepen our understanding of the various philosophical conceptions of freedom and unfreedom.

Right after WWII a new way of living emerges in France: Existentialism. Existentialism becomes the name for the feeling of the Freedom recovered after France occupation by Germany. But more than a simple revolution in customs it lies on a new metaphysics of the human experience. This new metaphysics of Human's finitude is popularized by Sartre's manifesto: "Existentialism is a Humanism". The main goal of this course will be to introduce students to French Existentialism in taking as a center of our investigation Sartre's philosophy. We will try to clarify its main origins and concepts in insisting first on the meaning of the philosophical conflict between Christian Existentialism (inspired by Kierkegaard) and Atheist Existentialism (inspired by Feuerbach and Kojeve). We will also insist on the importance of Heidegger for the formation of the French Existentialism. Once this background clarified we will focus on Sartre's philosophy and on Sartre's relations to literature throughout Sartre's art of portraying from an existentialist point of view and methodology, some major French writers like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet and Flaubert. These investigations will give us a privileged key in order to make sense of the Existentialism fundamental claim following which Human life must be understood as an existential engagement towards the Impossible goal of being God. From an existentialist point of view as a matter of fact: God is no longer the principle of existence (as it is in Classical Metaphysics and Theology) but the Goal that finite existence tries to embody in vain.

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 determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life". We will conclude with an examination of three very different critics of the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical theory: Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is intended as a list of rights the protection of which all human beings should enjoy. However, in its preamble, the Declaration mentions "reason" and "conscience" as universal attributes of human beings, thus expressing a certain conception of what a human being is. Does this conception serve well all human beings? What about cognitively or intellectually disabled persons? More specifically, when thinking about particular human rights, like the right to privacy, political participation or education - how are these rights supposed to be protected for cognitively and intellectually disabled persons? These are the questions we will consider in this class.

This course explores the Western philosophical tradition of reasoned reflection on religious belief. Our questions will include: what are the most important arguments for, and against, belief in God? How does religious belief relate to the deliverances of the sciences, in particular to evolutionary theory? How can we reconcile religious belief with the existence of evil? What is the relationship between religion and morality? In attempting to answer these questions we will read work by Plato, Augustine, Anselm, Hume, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as 20th century discussions in the 20th Century analytic tradition. (B)

This course will introduce students to the analytic tradition in philosophy. The aim of the course is to provide an overview of the first half of this tradition, starting from the publication of Frege's Begriffsschrift in 1879 and reaching up to the publication of Ryle's The Concept of Mind in 1949 and the posthumous publication of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in 1953. The course will focus on four aspects of this period in the history of analytic philosophy: (1) its initial founding phase, as inaugurated in the early seminal writings of Gottlob Frege, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus; (2) the inheritance and reshaping of some of the central ideas of the founders of analytic philosophy at the hands of the members of the Vienna Circle and their critics, especially as developed in the writings of Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and W. V. O. Quine, (3) the cross-fertilization of the analytic and Kantian traditions in philosophy and the resulting initiation of a new form of analytic Kantianism, as found in the work of some of the logical positivists, as well as in the writings of some of their main critics, such as C. I. Lewis; (4) the movement of Ordinary Language Philosophy and Oxford Analysis, with a special focus on the writings of Gilbert Ryle and the later Wittgenstein. (B)