Spring

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.

Topic: The Human Being in Moral Imagination

What is it to recognize someone as a human being? Standard answers to this question presuppose that recognizing another as human is a matter of coming to know something about them, e.g. that they belong to the species homo sapiens or that they are the bearer of a certain capacity. On this view, to recognize someone as human is not yet to make an ethical determination: it is one thing to apply the sortal concept “human” and another to ask what is owed to those beings who fall under the concept. In this course, we will explore an alternative view on which the recognition of another human being is already, just as such, the taking up of an ethical orientation. In the course of our exploration, we will consider the significance of such everyday facts as that we have names and faces, that we have inner lives which may be rich or shallow, that we honor our dead, and that we often love or hate one another in ways that make us unreasonable. What bearing do such facts have on our understanding of what it means to lead a human life, and what does this mean for a philosophical account of recognition? In addition to the specific topics mentioned above, we will consider the question in its formal aspect, as regards the logical character of the relation that holds between any two human beings. Readings will include selections from Cora Diamond, Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, Raimond Gaita, Stanley Cavell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Buber, and Immanuel Levinas.

This course will consist of a focused reading of Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics. Our aim will be to understand Aristotle’s theory of knowledge, the significance of experience, and the nature of reasoning. Readings will include some of the Platonic antecedents of Aristotle’s work, including the Theaetetus and Sophist. (B)

We discuss the nature and philosophical implications of the practice of interpretation, focusing especially on the interpretation of philosophy. We will address questions such as: what is interpretation, and at what does it aim? What counts as success or failure? Is the interpretation of philosophy itself a form of philosophy? What is the ethical significance of interpretation? This course will involve a practical element. In addition to reading texts on the theory of interpretation, we will spend time in and out of class developing interpretations of selected philosophical texts. (B)

This course will consist of a close study of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding alongside Leibniz’s chapter-by-chapter response to Locke in his New Essays on Human Understanding. Locke’s Essay is the great manifesto and development of empiricism, and Leibniz’s New Essays is a detailed, sustained rebuttal of Locke’s book. As such, it is both a fascinating work by one of the giants of rationalism and a text that provides an opportunity to take seriously the idea that philosophy develops through dialogue. Topics to be discussed include innate ideas, necessary truths, reason, experience, substance, essence, personal identity, the nature of mind and body, and freedom, among others. We will also ask larger questions about the nature of the rationalist and empiricist traditions to which these philosophers belong – e.g., the extent to which empiricism is indebted to the experimental sciences, and whether rationalism is best understood as a doctrine concerning the sources of human knowledge or as a metaphysical claim about the intelligibility of being. (B)

The films of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman are among the most powerful, complicated and philosophically sophisticated portrayals of moral and religious, and failed moral and religious, life in the twentieth century. Bergman is especially concerned with crisis experiences and with related emotional states like anguish, alienation, guilt, despair, loneliness, shame, abandonment, conversion, and the mystery of death. We will watch and discuss eight of his most important films in this course with such issues in mind: Wild Strawberries (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960), Winter Light (1963), Persona (1966), Shame (1968), Cries and Whispers (1973), Autumn Sonata (1978), Fanny and Alexander (1982). (A)