Spring

The theme for 2015-16 is “Race and Law.” Speakers will include (in addition to Darby): Elizabeth Anderson (Michigan), Justin Driver (Chicago), Sally Haslanger (MIT), Charles Mills (Northwestern), Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia), Tommie Shelby (Harvard). 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. Students must enroll for all three quarters to receive credit. Students are admitted by permission of the two instructors. They should submit a c.v. and a statement (reasons for interest in the course, relevant background in law and/or philosophy) to the instructors by e mail by September 20. Usual participants include graduate students in philosophy, political science, and divinity, and law students. Autumn, Winter, Spring.

G.W.F. Hegel, in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Spirit, writes the following: 'The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its special aspects and states, are for this reason’ — namely, because they integrate ‘Rational’ and ‘Empirical’ psychology — 'still by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic.’ He continues: 'The main aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to reintroduce unity of idea and principle into the theory of mind, and so reinterpret the lesson of those Aristotelian books’ (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part III, §378). Statements such as these are not easily mustered nowadays, not even by Aristotle's warmest admirers. Still they do prick the curiosity, and so in this course we will spend the quarter on a close reading of Aristotle’s De anima. (IV)

This course will be structured around a close reading of Sellars's seminal "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." Each week we will read between one and three major sections of that work (out of sixteen sections in all), along with relevant background material illustrating the kinds of positions that Sellars was reacting to and drawing from (including such authors as Russell, Ayer, CI Lewis, Schlick, Carnap, and Ryle), other selections from Sellars's works (including the essays in the anthology In the Space of Reasons, Science and Metaphysics, and "The Structure of Knowledge"), and relevant recent secondary literature on Sellars's thought (from authors such as Brandom, McDowell, Rosenberg, DeVries, O'Shea, Michael Williams, Lance, Kukla etc.). (III)

The workshop involves discussion of general issues in writing the essay and student presentations of their work. Although students do not register for the Summer quarter, they are expected to make significant progress on their preliminary essay over the summer.

We will begin with a sampling of theories of democracy as an ideal of justice. We will then consider recent empirical work suggesting that federal legislation in the United States is responsive only to the preferences of wealthy citizens. Juxtaposing the normative accounts of democracy and these disturbing results, we will ask whether the USA is in fact a democracy. We will be concerned with what turns on this question of classification. Is the denial or affirmation that we live in a democracy a mere rhetorical ploy? Is it a matter of only taxonomic interest? Or does the classification have important normative and practical implications for political action and thinking about justice under the nonideal condition in which we find ourselves? (I)

This course will have three foci: 1) a close reading of some of the central parts of Wittgenstein’s difficult and puzzling early work, the Tractatus, along with related writings by Wittgenstein, 2) an equally close reading of G. E. M. Anscombe’s under-appreciated classic An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus , and 3) a discussion of some of the related recent secondary literature on the Tractatus, as well as on Anscombe’s reading of it. Readings will include texts by Conant, Diamond, Frege, Geach, Goldfarb, Kremer, Ramsey, Ricketts, and Sullivan. (III)

Emotions figure in many areas of the law, and many legal doctrines (from reasonable provocation in homicide to mercy in criminal sentencing) invite us to think about emotions and their relationship to reason.   In addition, some prominent theories of the limits of law make reference to emotions: thus Lord Devlin and, more recently, Leon Kass have argued that the disgust of the average member of society is a sufficient reason for rendering a practice illegal, even though it does no harm to others.  Emotions, however, are all too rarely studied closely, with the result that both theory and doctrine are often confused.   The first part of this course will study major theories of emotion, asking about the relationship between emotion and cognition, focusing on philosophical accounts, but also learning from anthropology and psychology.  We will ask how far emotions embody cognitions, and of what type, and then we will ask whether there is reason to consider some or all emotions “irrational” in a normative sense.  We then turn to the criminal law, asking how specific emotions figure in doctrine and theory: anger, fear, compassion, disgust, guilt, and shame. Legal areas considered will include self-defense, reasonable provocation, mercy, victim impact statements, sodomy laws, sexual harassment, shame-based punishments. Next, we turn to the role played by emotions in constitutional law and in thought about just institutions – a topic that seems initially unpromising, but one that will turn out to be full of interest.  (A)Other topics will be included as time permits. 

Modal information—information conveyed by sentences such as ‘Mary might be at home’ or ‘Charles ought to give to the poor’—play an outstanding role in everyday discourse and reasoning. The goal of this class is to explain and evaluate contemporary semantic theories of modality by discussing a wide range of linguistic phenomena from the perspective of these theories. After introducing possible worlds semantics for modality developed in modal logic, we will consider current theories of modal semantics within linguistics as well as the most important empirical areas of research. Throughout, we will keep an eye on the relation between modality and other topics that are prominent in linguists and philosophy, including tense, conditionals, and discourse meaning. (B)

The problem of free will stands at the crossroads of many of the central issues in philosophy, including the theory of reasons, causation, moral responsibility, the mind-body problem, and modality. In this course we will draw on ancient, early modern, and current work to try to understand, and gather the materials of a solution to, the problem.