Spring

Do we have free will? What is free will anyway? Does it require an ability to do otherwise? Is free will compatible with a scientific conception of the world? Can people ever be justifiably blamed, praised, or punished for their actions, given all the ways we’re influenced by external forces? In this course on free will, we’ll look at some contemporary perspectives on these questions. The course will have three parts. First, we’ll look at reasons why we might not have free will. Next, we’ll consider how we could have free will. Finally, we’ll ask whether and for what it matters whether we have free will.   
Readings will come from Harry Frankfurt, Derk Pereboom, Kadri Vihvelin, P.F. and Galen Strawson, Susan Wolf, Rodrick Chisholm, Manuel Vargas, Thomas Nagel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, among others.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy is based on an account of moral psychology, an account that is highly critical of the present—critical of current institutions and of its product, namely, our present moral psychology—while also, at moments, hopeful for the future. The seminar begins by presenting Rousseau’s political philosophy as a development of and a contrast to earlier social contract theories, in particular, to Thomas Hobbes’s view. We then examine both Rousseau’s and a few contemporaries’ moral psychologies to determine whether the political philosophy that Rousseau favors is feasible and/or desirable.

What is the relationship between physical processes in the brain and body and the processes of thought and consciousness that constitute our mental life? Philosophers and others have puzzled over this question for millennia. Many have concluded it to be intractable. In recent decades, the field of cognitive science--encompassing philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines--has proposed a new form of answer. The driving idea is that the interaction of the mental and the physical may be understood via a third level of analysis: that of the computational. This course offers a critical introduction to the elements of this approach, and surveys some of the alternative models and theories that fall within it. Readings are drawn from a range of historical and contemporary sources in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. (B) (II)

Philosophers engaged in what we call “critical theory” have traditionally been committed to one or another version of the thought that theory can be emancipatory. Over the last decades – arguably centuries – this commitment to a critical theory has developed into a lively philosophical tradition with a series of core texts at its foundation. In this course, we will carefully read through the most influential works within this tradition, focusing especially on what has become known as the Frankfurt School and its origins. Our readings will include works by Hegel, Freud, Fanon, Marx, Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, among others. Overarching themes of our discussion will be the relations between knowledge and emancipation, theory and practice. (A)

The Gay Science is the only work that Nietzsche wrote and published before and after the Zarathustra experiment of 1883–1885. It first appeared in 1882, ending with the last aphorism of Book IV and anticipating verbatim the opening of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In 1887 Nietzsche republished The Gay Science and added a substantial new part: Book V looks back to “the greatest recent event” announced by The Gay Science of 1882, “that ‘God is dead’.”

I shall concentrate my interpretation on books IV and V, the only books of The Gay Science for which Nietzsche provided titles: “Sanctus Januarius” and “We Fearless Ones.” And I shall pay special attention to the impact of the Zarathustra endeavor which separates and connects these dense and carefully written books.

The seminar will take place in Foster 505 on Monday/Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. – 1:20 p.m.*, during the first five weeks of the quarter (March 24 – April 23, 2025).

Issues attending the concepts of negation, limit, and intentionality (construed as thought’s capacity to be answerable to reality) are typically approached in isolation one from another. The course will pursue the contrary hypothesis: namely, that the puzzles arising in connection with these three concepts form a nexus, so that none of them can be comprehended apart from the relations that it entertains with the two others. In order to motivate and substantiate this hypothesis, we will exhume and revive a philosophical tradition that runs from Plato to Wittgenstein through Kant and Sartre and whose defining feature lies in the upholding of this approach. We will examine how the three notions come into play in what Wittgenstein calls “the mystery of negation”: “This is not how things are, and yet we can say how things are not.” Bringing out their nexus requires accounting for the unity and univocity of the concept of negation across two ways of using negation that seem to pull in opposite directions: in the one case, “not-p” makes use of “not” in order to reject p as false (as in “The shirt is not red”), which requires that p lies within the limits of the realm of the intelligible; in the other case, “not-p” makes use of “not” to reject p as nonsensical (as in “The sweet is not a colour”), as if excluding p from the realm of the intelligible. (B)

Readings will include texts by Plato, Maïmonides, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Frege, and Wittgenstein.

The thoughts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are intertwined throughout their philosophical developments. Both take their departure in phenomenology’s central insight that the mind transcends itself toward the world and the attending dissolution of the false problem of how the mind can hook up onto the world. As Sartre once put it: “Each of us was trying to understand the world insofar as he could, and with the means at his disposal. And we had the same means – then called Husserl and Heidegger – as we were similarly disposed.” (“Merleau-Ponty vivant”) At the same time, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were both dissatisfied with the accounts that Husserl and Heidegger provided of the relations between perception, language and action. German phenomenology, they argue, stumbles over the problems of other minds and history. However, their respective diagnoses are fundamentally divergent, and so are the alternative accounts that they seek to articulate. The aim of the course is to introduce students to the thoughts of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty by attending to the life-long philosophical debate between them. It is driven by the hypothesis that each of the two authors is at once the most penetrating reader and the deepest critic of the other. Although the course will recurrently present their philosophies against the background of concepts and problems bequeathed by the analytic tradition and in the light of recent debates in analytic philosophy (we will revisit the Dreyfus-McDowell debate regarding the place of conceptual capacities in perception, the McDowell-Pippin debate about agency, and contemporary debates about self-knowledge revolving around the so-called “Transparency principle”), it departs from the current analytic reception of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in that it does not confine itself to their early works but delves into their mature works as well.

According to our ordinary thought and talk, many sorts of things can be, and often are, biased: people, groups (the biased committee), inanimate objects (the biased coin), sources of evidence (biased samples, biased testimony, biased surveys), mental states (biased perceptions, biased beliefs), the outcomes of deliberation (biased decisions, biased evaluations), and algorithms. The course will be divided into two parts. In the first part of the course, we will ask what it means to say that someone or something is biased. Among other things, we will ask whether people are biased in the same way as surveys are biased, and whether surveys are biased in the same way as algorithms are biased. In the second part of the course, we will examine some specific forms of bias in reasoning: hindsight bias, confirmation bias, status quo bias, among others. What, exactly, are the cognitive mechanisms underlying these biases? And are they always irrational? 

Trans experience raises interesting philosophical questions about how people understand and misunderstand each other as gendered beings, how our internal senses of ourselves relate to the way society perceives us, and how to re-imagine our ideas of a good or normal body.  This graduate seminar explores some of these questions through readings in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy that center trans and feminist perspectives. (I)

Topic: The Critique of Ontotheology

According to Martin Heidegger, metaphysics has failed to confront its own basic question, namely that of the meaning (or truth) of being, on account of an occlusion of the significance of two distinctions. The first distinction is between onto-logic and theo-logic, or between, on the one hand, what, formally, beings are as such, and, on the other hand, the explanatory principle that accounts for it that beings as a whole exist at all. Heidegger claims that metaphysics characteristically attempts to overcome this distinction in a unified “onto-theo-logical” account of the being of beings. The second distinction is between, on the one hand, the being of beings (a topic common to onto-logic and theo-logic), and, on the other hand, being as such. Heidegger claims that metaphysics characteristically forgets this second distinction as it struggles to overcome the first.

This course will critically consider Heidegger’s influential and sweeping “deconstruction” of the tradition, reading historical texts alongside Heidegger’s essays and commentaries, with a view to: understanding the relationship between these two distinctions; assessing the extent to which the distinctions can be drawn univocally (or analogically) across dramatic historical changes in the way philosophers have understood the fundamental concepts of metaphysics; weighing (against the testimony of the tradition and against alternative narratives) the plausibility of Heidegger’s claim that the distinctions have been mistreated or neglected and thus that the question of being has gone unasked; and testing the resources Heidegger purports to uncover for ameliorating this state of affairs. Heidegger thinks a proper appreciation of the question of being will have deep cultural, existential, and theological consequences for us; we will consider, finally, what these consequences may be. This will require in turn reflecting on how such themes as anxiety, fallenness, grace, and thankfulness could be implicated in the question of being, as well as on how being as such can be understood to take place as an event. In addition to Heidegger’s own works, readings may include short texts by Aristotle, Avicenna, Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Reinhold, Hölderlin, Hegel, Rosenzweig, Derrida.