Spring

Advanced Study: Philosophy

The aim of this course is to explore the tensions and convergences between two of the most profoundly important areas of environmental philosophy. "Ecocentrism" is the view that holistic systems such as ecosystems can be ethically considerable or "count" in a way somewhat comparable to human persons, and such a philosophical perspective has been shared by many prominent forms of environmentalism, from Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic to Deep Ecology to the worldviews of many Native American and Indigenous peoples. For some prominent environmental philosophers, a commitment to ecocentrism is the defining test of whether one is truly an environmental philosopher. "Environmental Racism" is one of the defining elements of environmental injustice, the way in which environmental crises and existential threats often reflect systemic discrimination, oppression, and domination in their disproportionate adverse impact on peoples of color, women, the global poor, LGBTQ populations, and Indigenous Peoples. Although historically, some have claimed that ecocentric organizations such as Greenpeace have neglected the problems of environmental injustice and racism in their quest to, e.g., "save the whales," a deeper analysis reveals a far more complicated picture, with many affinities and alliances between ecocentrists and activists seeking environmental justice. (A)

The following claim will stand at the center of this seminar: Human action is the realization of thought in the world: the actualization of a conception of what is to be. This will lead us to consider answers to the following questions:  In what sense does thought come to be “actual” or “real” in the world? What role does such actualization play in our understanding of the world and of ourselves? And how does one have to conceive of judgment, inference, knowledge, and truth such that one can speak of realizing thought in the world? Against the background of these questions, we will study contemporary action theory, especially debates on practical inference and practical knowledge.

The seminar will be concerned critically to engage with certain influential approaches at the center of contemporary analytic action theory, especially those drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Anscombe and Gilbert Ryle. At the heart of the reception of Anscombe’s thought stands a dispute about what it is for an action to be intentional. The underlying assumption is that the word marks what is distinctive of human agency: we “act” in a different way than chemical substances, plants, or mere animals. When sub-rational animals are thought to belong within the domain of intentional agents, contemporary interest tends to move to a question that Ryle’s work made urgent: what it is for an action to be intelligent? The seminar will explore the consequences of the following thought: a crucial decision has already been made when one approaches the concept of human agency through the investigation of these two terms—intentionally or intelligently. While a lot of attention has been paid to how those adverbs are used in ordinary language, the verbs to which they are attached figure in the discussion as mere material for illustration to be ultimately replaced with the generic action concept variable “f.” The seminar will be concerned to advance the following criticism: contemporary philosophy of action thereby becomes meta-action theory. The differences in the kinds of things people do throughout the day turn out not really to matter to this form of theory. The seminar will explore the thought that understanding such differences – such as between moving somewhere, eating something, and making a thing – are crucial to a proper understanding of why practical knowledge is not just knowledge of action, but of the world and ourselves through action.

We will study Hegel’s Elements of Philosophy of Right. The book is an absolute classic of practical philosophy. Its ambition is nothing less than to provide a systematic treatment of the unity of action theory, ethics and political philosophy. Hegel’s theory is considered by many as the highpoint and completion of practical philosophy in the post-Kantian German Idealism. And it is essential for the development Marxism and Critical Theory. It is a crucial treatise to study – not only for those interested of the history of ethics and political theory, but for anyone reflecting on the logic and origins of the kind of society we live in. At the same time, the book is hardy an easy read. For one, the genre of text is quite peculiar: it was written for as a condensed “Leitfaden”  for the students listening Hegel’s lectures. Moreover, the range of topics discussed under the heading of the Philosophy of Right – as well the order in which they are presented – seems quite from a contemporary perspective.

Hegel’s guiding thought is that the power of practical reason and freedom can only be understood through its actuality. What stands at center of his treatise is thus the idea of practical reality, encapsulated in his famous slogan that “the rational is actual and the actual is rational.” Hegel’s point is that the domain of the practical is a stratum of being that is not a reality given to the mind, but one that reason apprehends as its own work in virtue of bringing it into being. This thesis has two sides: On the one hand, it means that there are aspects of reality whose very existence depends on our understanding of them as rational. On the other hand, it means that the norms of rationality cannot be understood independently of their realization in practice. Various features of our contemporary intellectual climate make it difficult for us to grasp this idea. Hegel’s slogan is often taken as a peculiar excess of Absolute Idealism that just reflects a conservative attitude towards the status quo. However, the central topics for a Marxist critique of right and western liberalism – such as alienation, exploitation and imperialism – can already be found in Hegel’s account on bourgeois society.

Literature:

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of Philosophy of Right, ed. by A.W. Wood,, trans. by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press

This course will be on the part of the law known as private law — the part that adjudicates disputes between private citizens where one person is alleged to have suffered harm through the wrongdoing of another. Among the questions with which we will be concerned are the following: What constitutes a legal harm in such a context? What, in the eyes of the law, counts as one person being the cause of another person’s suffering? What sort of redress or compensation may one justifiably seek for such suffering? Who has a right to decide such questions? What justifies the use of sanction or force — and when is it justified — in the enforcement of such legal decisions? The first half of this course will present a selective historical genealogy of our contemporary understanding of how to go about answering such questions. The second half of the course will be on contemporary theories of private law. The historical portion of the course will begin by examining the origins of the modern distinction between private and public law in Aristotle’s ancient distinction between corrective and distributive justice. Next we will briefly consider what private legal adjudication looks like in the absence of the state, first by reading an Icelandic Saga and then by watching John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. (A)

Disjunctivist accounts of human capacities always turn on some form of rejection of (what we will call in this course) a layer-cake assumption. One particularly widespread version of the latter sort of assumption, when asserted as a thesis about the nature of our cognitive faculties and their relation to one another, goes like this:  The natures of our sentient and rational capacities respectively are such that we could possess one of these capacities, as a form of cognition, without possessing the other. The underlying assumption is that at least one of these capacities is a self-standing cognitive capacity – one which could operate just as it presently does in us in isolation of the other. This course will begin by examining the counterpart assumption in the philosophy of language, when it is asserted as a thesis about the relation between the aspects of language we respectively apprehend through our power of sensory perception (for example, in recognizing signs) and through our power of intellectual comprehension (for example, in grasping a meaning). One tendency, for example, which we find in much contemporary philosophy of language is to conceive of the linguistic expression as a composite notion to be analyzed in terms of a kind of mere physical mark or acoustic noise to which something further — a meaning or use — is assigned or added in order to yield a fully linguistic expression. Some of the more penetrating philosophers of the past century have noticed that such a conception of language (once it is strictly thought through) appears to encounter insurmountable difficulties. This course will begin by looking at the work of some thinkers in the history of philosophy and linguistics who have challenged such a conception. We will then move on to considering further varieties of layer-cake assumptions and disjunctivist responses thereto that arise in the philosophy of language pertaining to the following further ten interrelated topics: (1) the relation between phonetics and phonology, (2) the relation between phonemes and morphemes, (3) between words and sentences, (4) between infant and adult forms of linguistic capacity, (5) between first and second language acquisition, (6) between orality and literacy in the cultural phases of the historical development of a single natural language, (7) between the pre- and post-punctuation phases in the historical development of the written form of a modern natural language, (8) between the written and spoken sign forms within a single modern natural language, (9) between a logically regimented artificial sign system and a living natural language, and (10) between diverse linguistic forms of speech and/or writing within a single cultural form of life marked by diglossia or heteroglossia. (II)

Aristotle’s Metaphysics is one of the most difficult and rewarding texts in the philosophical tradition. It attempts to lay out the goals, methods, and primary results of a science Aristotle calls “first philosophy.” First philosophy is the study of beings just insofar as they are beings (as opposed to physics, which studies beings insofar as they come to be, pass away, or change), and if completed it would stand as the most fundamental and general science. Our aim will be to understand: if and how such a science is possible, what the principles of such a science are, what being is, which beings are primary, and what are the causes of being qua being. We will discuss the Metaphysics as a whole, but focus on A-B, Γ, Z, Η, Θ, and Λ. Our approach will be “forest,” rather than “tree” oriented, preferring in most cases a coherent overview to close reading. (B)

This course explores the role that mathematics plays in Plato's philosophy with a special focus on the concept of incommensurability. We will be reading Platonic dialogues in which mathematical practice figures prominently and our goal will be to inquire into the ways that mathematical practice is similar to philosophical practice and the ways it can serve as a useful exemplar. We will also inquire into the ways that mathematics falls short of philosophy, which will give us a better sense of what the philosophical goals are. Finally, we will consider the challenges presented by mathematical incommensurability and we will investigate the ways that this concept is appropriated by Plato for philosophical purposes.

Texts will include: Meno, Republic 5-7, Timaeus, Theaetetus, Statesman. We will read some secondary literature on Plato (e.g. S. Menn, H. Benson, T. Echterling) and on the mathematics of the time (W. Knorr, J. Klein) but not every time. (B)

Paradoxes are conflicts in our own thought. Many of the most fundamental, frustrating, disturbing, and exciting concerns in philosophy and the sciences are to be found where paradoxes arise. In this course we will investigate paradoxes in logic, in metaphysics, in ethics, in action theory, in epistemology, and elsewhere. We will also try to understand the nature and sources of paradox—since the very possibility of paradoxes is, itself, a paradox. (B)

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. (B) (II)