Spring

In this class we are going to study and critically discuss fundamental components of Aristotle’s ethics, concentrating on wisdom and its role in the practice of the other virtues. Does Aristotle improve on the intellectualist assumptions made by Socrates? What is his conception of practical rationality, what teleologies does it involve? What is the place of practical reason in human nature? Does Aristotle give an adequate account of the difference between technical reasoning on the one hand and deliberation with a view to acting on the other? How do reasons / motives affect the ethical quality of conduct? How are individual virtues of character related to patterns of motivation? How do the wise know how to act?

Human rights are claims of justice that hold merely in virtue of our shared humanity. In this course we will explore philosophical theories of this elementary and crucial form of justice. Among topics to be considered are the role that dignity and humanity play in grounding such rights, their relation to political and economic institutions, and the distinction between duties of justice and claims of charity or humanitarian aid. Finally we will consider the application of such theories to concrete, problematic and pressing problems, such as global poverty, torture and genocide. (A) (I)

The aim of the course will be to consider some of the most influential treatments of skepticism in the post-war analytic philosophical tradition—in relation both to the broader history of philosophy and to current tendencies in contemporary analytic philosophy. The first part of the course will begin by distinguishing two broad varieties of skepticism—Cartesian and Kantian—and their evolution over the past two centuries (students without any prior familiarity with both Descartes and Kant will be at a significant disadvantage here), and will go on to isolate and explore some of the most significant variants of each of these varieties in recent analytic philosophy.  The second part of the course will involve a close look at recent influential analytic treatments of skepticism. It will also involve a brief look at various versions of contextualism with regard to epistemological claims.  We will carefully read and critically evaluate writings on skepticism by the following authors: J. L. Austin, Robert Brandom, Stanley Cavell, Thompson Clarke, Saul Kripke, C. I. Lewis, John McDowell, H. H. Price, Hilary Putnam, Barry Stroud, Charles Travis, Michael Williams, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This will be an advanced lecture course open to graduate students and undergraduates with a prior background in analytic philosophy. (B) (III)

This course will investigate the theory of human history developed by Marx and Engels - Historical Materialism, as it came to be known. Though we will primarily focus on texts by Marx and Engels, we will begin by considering some of Hegel’s writing on history, and we will end by looking at different attempts to explain, apply, and develop the theory within the Marxian tradition. (A) (IV)

This course will provide a rapid-fire survey of the philosophical sources of contemporary literary and critical theory.  We will begin with a brief discussion of the sort of humanism at issue in the critique—accounts of human life and thought that treat the individual human being as the primary unit for work in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.  This kind of humanism is at the core of contemporary common sense.  It is, to that extent, indispensable in our understanding of how to move around in the world and get along with one another.  That is why we will conduct critique, rather than plain criticism, in this course: in critique, one remains indebted to the system under critical scrutiny, even while working to understand its failings and limitations.  Our tour of thought produced in the service of critique will involve work by Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Freud, Fanon, Lacan, and Althusser. We will conclude with a couple of pieces of recent work that draws from these sources.  The aim of the course is to provide students with an opportunity to engage with some extraordinarily influential work that continues to inform humanistic inquiry.

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.

Students are required to submit the college reading & research course form.

Topic: What is a “Science of Logic” for Hegel? (instructor: T. Evnen)
This course is designed to introduce students to the philosophical aims and method of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Hegel often referred to the Logic as his most important work; by providing Hegel’s account of certain fundamental concepts—his concept of the concept, his account of self-consciousness and pure knowledge, and his idea of “absolute method”—the Logic serves both as a statement of what, for Hegel, philosophy is and, at least in a certain sense, as the ground upon which his philosophical system rests. Unfortunately, however, the Logic also has a strong claim to being Hegel’s most difficult work. We will attempt to ameliorate this difficulty a bit by beginning with an oblique approach to the text that situates it in its philosophical context. Specifically, we will seek to understand the Logic as a response to a determinate set of philosophical concerns that Hegel took himself to find in Kant—an approach to the text that is  made possible by the fact that Hegel himself evidently understood the Logic not only as the culminating text of his own philosophical system, but also as the culmination of a philosophical project inaugurated by Kant.In particular, we will develop the relationship between Hegel’s “speculative logic” and Kant’s “transcendental logic” by examining three lines of thought in Kant: 1) Kant’s account of spontaneity (and of the relationship between understanding and sensibility) in the B-Deduction of the First Critique; 2) Kant’s transcendental idealism as it is presented and motivated in certain passages of the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Dialectic; and, 3) Kant’s treatment of the idea of an “intuitive understanding” in §77 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Any one of these topics could rightly be the subject of its own course, but of necessity our concern here will be to focus narrowly on the difficulties and insights that Hegel himself finds in them. (Our narrow focus also means that prior familiarity with Kant’s philosophy will not be presupposed).In the latter half of the course, we will approach the Logic directly. We will orient ourselves by beginning with selections from the introductory materials (as well as a few of the concluding passages) of both the Encyclopedia Logic and the Science of Logic. These are the places in the text that contain Hegel’s most explicit reflections on his philosophical aims and methodology. From there, we will dive into the thick of the text and examine (as “case studies”) Hegel’s treatment of the progression from teleology to life to cognition.

Topic: Logic and Thought (instructor: G. Nir)

How does logic relate to thought? A course in Elementary Logic teaches us formal methods of evaluating arguments, but does it purport to tell us anything about how we actually reason?  Through a discussion of central issues in the philosophy of logic, this course will explore ways in which this question may receive a positive answer. We will concern ourselves particularly with the kind of philosophy of mind that logicians like Frege and Wittgenstein took themselves to offer.   The course has four parts. We will start by looking at the conception of logic advocated by Frege and Wittgenstein, according to which logic is primarily concerned with thought, its structure, form, uses and laws.  In the second part of the course, we will ask whether puzzles which beset formal logic must also plague thought, inasmuch as the later is understood as endowed with logical form. We will then try to capture what is unique in the concern of logic with thought by contrasting it with the kinds of concern that science, in particular psychology, has. Finally, we will look at two other approaches to the relation of logic and thought which differ markedly from the one we developed so far, and contrast their virtues with what we will call the constitutive conception of logic.

Topic: What is a “Science of Logic” for Hegel? (instructor: T. Evnen)
This course is designed to introduce students to the philosophical aims and method of Hegel’s Science of Logic. Hegel often referred to the Logic as his most important work; by providing Hegel’s account of certain fundamental concepts—his concept of the concept, his account of self-consciousness and pure knowledge, and his idea of “absolute method”—the Logic serves both as a statement of what, for Hegel, philosophy is and, at least in a certain sense, as the ground upon which his philosophical system rests. Unfortunately, however, the Logic also has a strong claim to being Hegel’s most difficult work. We will attempt to ameliorate this difficulty a bit by beginning with an oblique approach to the text that situates it in its philosophical context. Specifically, we will seek to understand the Logic as a response to a determinate set of philosophical concerns that Hegel took himself to find in Kant—an approach to the text that is  made possible by the fact that Hegel himself evidently understood the Logic not only as the culminating text of his own philosophical system, but also as the culmination of a philosophical project inaugurated by Kant.In particular, we will develop the relationship between Hegel’s “speculative logic” and Kant’s “transcendental logic” by examining three lines of thought in Kant: 1) Kant’s account of spontaneity (and of the relationship between understanding and sensibility) in the B-Deduction of the First Critique; 2) Kant’s transcendental idealism as it is presented and motivated in certain passages of the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Dialectic; and, 3) Kant’s treatment of the idea of an “intuitive understanding” in §77 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Any one of these topics could rightly be the subject of its own course, but of necessity our concern here will be to focus narrowly on the difficulties and insights that Hegel himself finds in them. (Our narrow focus also means that prior familiarity with Kant’s philosophy will not be presupposed).In the latter half of the course, we will approach the Logic directly. We will orient ourselves by beginning with selections from the introductory materials (as well as a few of the concluding passages) of both the Encyclopedia Logic and the Science of Logic. These are the places in the text that contain Hegel’s most explicit reflections on his philosophical aims and methodology. From there, we will dive into the thick of the text and examine (as “case studies”) Hegel’s treatment of the progression from teleology to life to cognition.

Topic: Logic and Thought (instructor: G. Nir)

How does logic relate to thought? A course in Elementary Logic teaches us formal methods of evaluating arguments, but does it purport to tell us anything about how we actually reason?  Through a discussion of central issues in the philosophy of logic, this course will explore ways in which this question may receive a positive answer. We will concern ourselves particularly with the kind of philosophy of mind that logicians like Frege and Wittgenstein took themselves to offer.   The course has four parts. We will start by looking at the conception of logic advocated by Frege and Wittgenstein, according to which logic is primarily concerned with thought, its structure, form, uses and laws.  In the second part of the course, we will ask whether puzzles which beset formal logic must also plague thought, inasmuch as the later is understood as endowed with logical form. We will then try to capture what is unique in the concern of logic with thought by contrasting it with the kinds of concern that science, in particular psychology, has. Finally, we will look at two other approaches to the relation of logic and thought which differ markedly from the one we developed so far, and contrast their virtues with what we will call the constitutive conception of logic.

What can psychoanalysis teach us about human psychological development in general and human sexual development in particular? Can the development of both men and women be captured in one general psychoanalytic framework or are two different explanatory schemes required? How has psychoanalysis evolved since Freud in the way it accounts for femininity, women’s psychological development and the role of the mother in her child’s development? In this course, we will examine leading psychoanalytic accounts of human development, as well as feminist critiques and applications of these accounts. In the first part of the course, we will study some of Sigmund Freud’s classical texts which deal with sexual development, while discussing the relations between repressed ideas, bodily symptoms and the talking cure, as well as the seduction hypothesis, infantile sexuality and the Oedipal Complex. We will also consider some of Freud’s late writings about female sexuality and femininity, as well as early critiques by Karl Abraham, Karen Horney, and Helen Deutsch regarding Freud’s views on feminine development. In the second part of the course, we will discuss Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of human development, focusing on his characterization of both pre-Oedipal development and the Oedipal Complex. We will then examine three leading French feminist accounts: Simone de Beauvoir’s attempt to reconcile femininity and agency, Luce Irigaray’s critique of Freud and Lacan and her own account of feminine subjectivity, and Julia Kristeva’s use of the semiotic and her alternative account of the pre-Oedipal period. In the third part of the course, we will examine key psychoanalytic ideas from the object relations theories of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, while paying close attention to their emphasis on the mother’s role in child development. We will then study Nancy Chodorow’s incorporation of object relations into feminist theory in her well-known book The Reproduction of Mothering, as well as more recent applications of Kleinian and Winnicottian ideas to feminist theory.