Spring

This will be a course on philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics. We will read excerpts from Murdoch’s text alongside key figures with whom she engages: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Weil, and Plato. (B)

Thomas Aquinas’s account of the goodness and badness that are proper to human actions—moral goodness and badness—is fundamental for his entire ethical teaching. It provides the rationale for his way of dividing human actions into kinds; it sets the reference points for his theory of virtues and vices, which he takes to be nothing other than principles of good and bad actions; it explains the moral function that he ascribes to law; and so on. The aim of this course will be to understand and think about that account. Its fullest presentation is found in Aquinas’s masterpiece, the Summa theologiae. However, the Summa’s approach to ethics is heavily metaphysical, and nowhere is this more true than in its treatment of moral goodness and badness. We shall therefore need to consult background passages from other parts of that work and other works of his, on such metaphysical topics as good and bad in general, powers and their objects, the nature of circumstances, and the relation between intellect and will. We shall also want to consider to what extent the account depends on strictly theological notions. (A)   

The philosophical ideas and methods of Immanuel Kant's “critical” philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated through 19th-century philosophy.  We will trace the effects of this revolution and the responses to it, focusing specifically on the influence of Kant’s contribution to moral philosophy and its lasting influence on discussions of ethics and political philosophy.  We will begin with a consideration of Kant's famous Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he announces his project of grounding all ethical obligation in the very idea of a free will.  We will then consider Hegel's radicalization of this project in his Philosophy of Right, which seeks to derive from the idea of freedom, not just formal constraints on right action, but a determinate, positive conception of what Hegel calls "ethical life".  We will conclude with an examination of some important challenges to the Kantian/Hegelian project in ethical and political theory: Karl Marx’s re-interpretation of the idea of freedom in the economic sphere; Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill’s radicalizations of the ideas of political liberty and equality; and the appropriation and critique of the Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom by writers on racial oppression including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis.

What is good sex? Is sexual objectification harmful? Do we have a right to sex? What is sexual consent? This course invites students to engage with these questions and many others within the literature on the philosophy of sex. The centrality of sex and sexuality in human life makes it an apt, albeit complex object of philosophical inquiry. And, whereas many thinkers advance that our sexual lives hold a major influence on most other domains on our existence, we spend little time with intellectual inquiry about sex. In this course, we will engage with some classic texts alongside some of the most exciting recent writings in the philosophy of sex. We will explore such themes and topics as the erotic, sexual desire, perversion, consent, sexual orientation, pornography, prostitution, and sex equality. We will explore these themes through various perspectives, including metaphysics, ethics, and politics. Some of the authors we will read include Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Martha Nussbaum, Timo Airaksinen, Jean-Luc Marion, Raja Halwani, Amia Srinivasan and Manon Garcia among others. (A)

What is it to be human and why does it matter? This course invites students to engage the question within the relation between theories of humanism and the histories of dehumanization as pertains to the racialization of Black people. Specific theories of the human have served as foundations of practices of dehumanization, and yet experiences of dehumanization have led to the development of new forms of humanism. In light of histories of enslavement and colonization and the related hierarchies of the human, what is the conceptual basis of the hierarchization within or exclusion from the category of the human? What does it feel like to be dehumanized and how does one adequately respond to such an experience? Some thinkers reject the concept while others reclaim it to inspire new existential outlooks on the world or political struggles. This course will explore the wide literature on these questions, supplementing written texts with other media such as film and music. We will focus on the implications of theories of humanism for the particularly human form of being, the pursuit of the good, and the organization of social life. Engagement in this course will be based on discussion, personal reflection, and the relation of course material to contemporary issues.

Although Kant wrote on theology throughout his philosophical career, contemporary scholarship often sidelines this dimension of Kant’s thinking. This seminar will focus on Kant’s theological work, with the dual aim of understanding Kant’s theological views and assessing how or whether a theological perspective affects one’s interpretation of core features of the Critical philosophy. Potential topics include Kant’s account of the divine mind and the divine will, the account of the most real being (ens realissimum) in the first Critique’s Dialectic, the criticisms of the traditional proofs of the existence of God, the role of God within Kant’s “moral metaphysics”, Kant’s relationship to Baumgarten and Wolff, Pietist themes within Kant’s theology, and connections with post-Kantian Idealist views on both intellectual intuition and theology as such. (IV)

In the course of discussing how it is that a philosophical problem arises in the first place, Wittgenstein says, “The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.” This isn’t the only place where Wittgenstein speaks as if being gripped by philosophical problems is a matter of succumbing to illusions--as if a philosophers are magicians who are taken in by their own tricks. In this course, we’ll discuss philosophy and magical performance, with the aim of coming to a deeper understanding of what both are about. We’ll be particularly concerned with Wittgenstein’s picture of what philosophy is and does. Another focus of the course will be the passion of wonder. In the Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates say, “The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” And when magicians write about their aesthetic aims, they almost always describe themselves as trying to instill wonder in others. Does magic end where philosophy begins? And what becomes of wonder after philosophy is done with it? (B) (II)

In this seminar, we read Plato’s Republic closely and in its entirety. We will attend equally to the epistemological and political aspirations of the text and we will examine its engagement with issues in the fields of psychology, aesthetics, metaphysics, and education. While this course will primarily focus on Plato’s text, the students will have the opportunity to read works from the secondary literature. (B)

This seminar will introduce some of the central concepts of psychoanalysis: Mourning and Melancholia, Repetition and Remembering, Transference, Neurosis, the Unconscious, Identification, Psychodynamic, Eros, Envy, Gratitude, Splitting, Death. The central theme will be how these concepts shed light on human flourishing and the characteristic ways we fail to flourish. Readings from Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Loewald, Lacan, Melanie Klein, Betty Joseph, Hanna Segal and others.

The topic of this class is feminist epistemology and philosophy of science. Questions we will consider include: Is rationality gendered? Are scientific conceptions of objectivity ‘masculine’? What could it mean to make such claims and how could they be justified? What should a feminist conception of knowledge look like? In addressing those questions we will explore the numerous ways that gender, gender roles, and gender identity influence the construction of knowledge and the representation of objectivity. We will investigate competing views about knowledge construction—specifically, empiricism, standpoint theory, and postmodernism—by considering, among other things, how they have informed empirical research in the social sciences, biology, and medicine. A few of the authors we will read are: Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen Longino, Louise Antony, Sally Haslanger, Donna Haraway,  Patricia Hill Collins, Catherine MacKinnon, Maria Lugones, and Oshadi Mangena. (B)