Spring

The observation that ordinary uses of predicates such as “tasty” and “beautiful” trigger an acquaintance inference—they suggest that the speaker has first-hand knowledge of the item under consideration—has received immense attention by philosophers as well as by linguists in recent years. The goal of this seminar is to arrive at a comprehensive and systematic understanding of this phenomenon. We will explore the significance of the acquaintance inference in semantics and philosophy of language (in particular for our understanding of the interaction between literal meaning and discourse pragmatics) but also for aesthetics and meta-ethics. From the linguistics side, we will explore intricate questions surrounding the projection properties of acquaintance inferences as well as issues surrounding “subjective” attitude verbs. The guiding hypothesis of this interdisciplinary seminar is that natural language predicate expressions lexically specify what it takes for their use to be properly ‘grounded’ in a speaker’s state of mind—what state of mind a speaker must be in for a predication to be in accordance with the norms governing assertion—and that these grounding constraints may compositionally interact with other other natural language expressions in interesting ways. (II)

This will be a course on the problem of other minds. We will try to understand what the problem is supposed to be by considering two formulations of it. One formulation is epistemological and has to do with how we can know (1) that there exist others like oneself, and (2) about those particular others. Another formulation is conceptual and concerns the question of where one gets the idea of another subject. Readings will be from philosophy addressing these topics.

Topic: The Meaning of Disability

What is disability? In what sense is disability a marker of human difference and in what sense is it a marker of misfortune? What is it to live well with disability in our care for ourselves and our care for one another? Aristotle offers, in his ethics, perhaps the richest framework we have for thinking about these questions. Yet his account of human flourishing is in apparent tension with much of contemporary thought about disability. This course will grapple with our Aristotelian inheritance around disability. What can Aristotle help us see clearly about disability? What modifications to his account are needed—or should we throw out his thinking altogether? The course will proceed in four parts. We will start by trying to get clear on Aristotle’s thinking about what it is for things to go well (or not) in a human life, and what this thinking means for traits we call disabilities. Next we will examine contemporary critiques of traditional approaches to disability, broadly from a disability rights perspective, drawing not just on academic writing but also on memoir and documentary film. We will then bring these two strands together by exploring neo-Aristotelian efforts to harmonize a Aristotelian spirit with contemporary commitments around disability. Finally, we will turn our attention to mourning and ask how it might matter in living well in our experiences with disability. Throughout, special attention will be given to intellectual and developmental disability.

Topic: Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus argues in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that to be a true philosopher, one must be a uniquely subjective thinker. While subjectivity has traditionally been associated with a lack of objectivity (and thus a negative attribute), Kierkegaard aims to recover this concept. For him, rather, to be subjective is to be the sort of person who does not merely read or study philosophy, but to be someone who lives differently as a result of it. Thus, our aim in this course is to read the Postscript as Climacus would have it read. In asking about the nature of subjectivity, commitment, religion, and action, our goal will be ever on our own lives and how they ought to be lived.

René Descartes is widely regarded as a (and perhaps the) foundational figure in modern philosophy, and he made seminal contributions to mathematics, natural science, and metaphysics. In this course we will work towards attaining a synoptic view of his thought. Our work together will be structured around a close, systematic reading of his Meditations on First Philosophy (i.e., on metaphysics), although we will read widely in the Cartesian corpus. Topics to be discussed include substance and mode; the nature of body; mind-body union; sensation; motion; causation; God and the infinite; and the will, among others. We will occasionally look to the medieval tradition to which Descartes was indebted, as well as to responses to his work by his contemporaries. Secondary sources will include writings by Lilli Alanen, Christia Mercer, Tad Schmaltz, Dan Garber, Anat Schechtman, Paul Hoffman, Marleen Rozemond, and John Carriero. (B)

Theme: Advanced Topics in General Jurisprudence

The Workshop will explore in more depth issues touched upon in the basic course on “general jurisprudence” at the Law School.  General jurisprudence is that part of philosophy of law concerned with the central questions about the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the nature of legal reasoning.   Students who have taken Leiter’s “Jurisprudence I” course at the law school are welcome to enroll.  Students who have not taken Jurisprudence I must contact the Professor Leiter with information about their prior study of legal philosophy.   Detailed familiarity with Hart’s The Concept of Law and Dworkin’s criticisms of Hart is essential.   Scheduled speakers for the Workshop include Thomas Adams (Oxford), Mark Greenberg (UCLA), Giorgio Pino (Rome III), Louis Duarte D’Almeida (Lisbon), Daniel Wodak (Penn), and the Law & Philosophy Fellow Alma Diamond, among others.

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. (A)

Literature:

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