Spring

"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.

Traditionally, contradiction is taken to be possible only as the disagreement between two judgments at least one of which is false. In the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant claims to have discovered in us an ineliminable proclivity for holding contradictory metaphysical views. Hegel praises Kant for this discovery but criticizes him for locating the origin of this proclivity merely in us and not also in the things as they are in themselves. Breaking with tradition, Hegel thus holds that there are contradictions that are not merely subjectively, but also objectively necessary. In this class we reconstruct and discuss the arguments for each view. For both Kant and Hegel, the dialectic implies a certain conception of the unity of theoretical and practical reason; special attention will be given to this implication and to the difference between the Kantian and the Hegelian conception of this unity. (A) (B) (IV)

Leo Strauss did not write an autobiography. However, he did mark out his path of thought through autobiographical reflections on the decisive challenges to which his oeuvre responded. The philosophically most demanding confrontation that Strauss presented on the question of how he became what he was is the so-called Autobiographical Preface of 1965, which he included in the American translation of his first book, “Spinoza’s Critique of Religion” (originally published in 1930). Two decades earlier, in the lecture The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy (1940), he made a first autobiographical attempt to publicly ascertain himself and determine his position. And in 1970 he published the concise retrospective A Giving of Accounts.

The seminar will make these writings – which illuminate the significance of Nietzsche and Heidegger for Strauss and address his early engagement with revealed religion and politics, in a constellation ranging from Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig to Karl Barth and Carl Schmitt – the subject of a close reading. Selected letters to Karl Löwith, Gershom Scholem and others will be used as supplementary texts.

Animals are in trouble all over the world.  Intelligent sentient beings suffer countless injustices at human hands: the cruelties of the factory farming industry, poaching and trophy hunting, assaults on the habitats of many creatures, and innumerable other instances of cruelty and neglect.  Human domination is everywhere: in the seas, where marine mammals die from ingesting plastic, from entanglement with fishing lines, and from lethal harpooning; in the skies, where migratory birds die in large numbers from air pollution and collisions with buildings; and, obviously, on the land, where the habitats of many large mammals have been destroyed almost beyond repair.  Addressing these large problems requires dedicated work and effort. But it also requires a good normative theory to direct our efforts. 

This class is theoretical and philosophical.  Because all good theorizing requires scientific knowledge, we will be reading a good deal of current science about animal abilities and animal lives.  But the focus will be on normative theory.  We will study four theories currently directing practical efforts in animal welfare: the anthropocentric theory of the Non-Human Rights Project; the Utilitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill, and Peter Singer; the Kantian theory of Christine Korsgaard; and an approach using the Capabilities Approach, recently developed by Martha Nussbaum.  We will then study legal implications and current legal problems, in both domestic and international law.

The observation that ordinary uses of predicates such as “tasty” and “beautiful” trigger an acquaintance inference—they suggest that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item under consideration—has received immense attention by philosophers as well as by linguists in recent years. The goal of this seminar is to arrive at a comprehensive and systematic understanding of this phenomenon. We will explore the significance of the acquaintance inference in semantics and philosophy of language (in particular for our understanding of the interaction between literal meaning and discourse pragmatics) but also for aesthetics and meta-ethics. From the linguistics side, we will explore intricate questions surrounding the projection properties of acquaintance inferences as well as issues surrounding “subjective” attitude verbs. The guiding hypothesis of this interdisciplinary seminar is that natural language predicate expressions lexically specify what it takes for their use to be properly ‘grounded’ in a speaker’s state of mind—what state of mind a speaker must be in for a predication to be in accordance with the norms governing assertion—and that these grounding constraints may compositionally interact with other other natural language expressions in interesting ways. (II)

This will be a course on the problem of other minds. We will try to understand what the problem is supposed to be by considering two formulations of it. One formulation is epistemological and has to do with how we can know (1) that there exist others like oneself, and (2) about those particular others. Another formulation is conceptual and concerns the question of where one gets the idea of another subject. Readings will be from philosophy addressing these topics.

Topic: The Meaning of Disability

What is disability? In what sense is disability a marker of human difference and in what sense is it a marker of misfortune? What is it to live well with disability in our care for ourselves and our care for one another? Aristotle offers, in his ethics, perhaps the richest framework we have for thinking about these questions. Yet his account of human flourishing is in apparent tension with much of contemporary thought about disability. This course will grapple with our Aristotelian inheritance around disability. What can Aristotle help us see clearly about disability? What modifications to his account are needed—or should we throw out his thinking altogether? The course will proceed in four parts. We will start by trying to get clear on Aristotle’s thinking about what it is for things to go well (or not) in a human life, and what this thinking means for traits we call disabilities. Next we will examine contemporary critiques of traditional approaches to disability, broadly from a disability rights perspective, drawing not just on academic writing but also on memoir and documentary film. We will then bring these two strands together by exploring neo-Aristotelian efforts to harmonize a Aristotelian spirit with contemporary commitments around disability. Finally, we will turn our attention to mourning and ask how it might matter in living well in our experiences with disability. Throughout, special attention will be given to intellectual and developmental disability.

Topic: Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus argues in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that to be a true philosopher, one must be a uniquely subjective thinker. While subjectivity has traditionally been associated with a lack of objectivity (and thus a negative attribute), Kierkegaard aims to recover this concept. For him, rather, to be subjective is to be the sort of person who does not merely read or study philosophy, but to be someone who lives differently as a result of it. Thus, our aim in this course is to read the Postscript as Climacus would have it read. In asking about the nature of subjectivity, commitment, religion, and action, our goal will be ever on our own lives and how they ought to be lived.

René Descartes is widely regarded as a (and perhaps the) foundational figure in modern philosophy, and he made seminal contributions to mathematics, natural science, and metaphysics. In this course we will work towards attaining a synoptic view of his thought. Our work together will be structured around a close, systematic reading of his Meditations on First Philosophy (i.e., on metaphysics), although we will read widely in the Cartesian corpus. Topics to be discussed include substance and mode; the nature of body; mind-body union; sensation; motion; causation; God and the infinite; and the will, among others. We will occasionally look to the medieval tradition to which Descartes was indebted, as well as to responses to his work by his contemporaries. Secondary sources will include writings by Lilli Alanen, Christia Mercer, Tad Schmaltz, Dan Garber, Anat Schechtman, Paul Hoffman, Marleen Rozemond, and John Carriero. (B)

Theme: Advanced Topics in General Jurisprudence

The Workshop will explore in more depth issues touched upon in the basic course on “general jurisprudence” at the Law School.  General jurisprudence is that part of philosophy of law concerned with the central questions about the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the nature of legal reasoning.   Students who have taken Leiter’s “Jurisprudence I” course at the law school are welcome to enroll.  Students who have not taken Jurisprudence I must contact the Professor Leiter with information about their prior study of legal philosophy.   Detailed familiarity with Hart’s The Concept of Law and Dworkin’s criticisms of Hart is essential.   Scheduled speakers for the Workshop include Thomas Adams (Oxford), Mark Greenberg (UCLA), Giorgio Pino (Rome III), Louis Duarte D’Almeida (Lisbon), Daniel Wodak (Penn), and the Law & Philosophy Fellow Alma Diamond, among others.