Philosophy MA Courses 2013 – 2014
Stony Brook University
FALL 2013:
IN MANHATTAN:
Ed Casey:
PHI 505: IMAGE AND WORD IN ART: LYOTARD AND DERRIDA
This seminar will take up the question of the conditions and limits of verbal discourse in
contrast with, and in relation to, the domain of images in art. A primary text will be the
new translation of Lyotard's classic, Discourse, Figure. This will set the stage for
considering Derrida's various efforts to address language (especially as writing and protowriting) as it links up with the domain of images (including the role of traces in the
constitution of images). Here the main text will be his Grammatology. The primary arts
in question will be graphic and visual -- drawing and painting, but also poetry in its
spatial inscriptions.
(Tuesday evenings, 6:00 - 9:00)
Anne O’Byrne:
PHI 507: Art and Genocide
In this course we will investigate how philosophy and art can help us plumb the depths of
the phenomenon of genocide. The questions we will ask fall into three groups. First, what
sorts of communities—ethnic? social? religious? political? racial?—are considered
susceptible to genocide and how do these communities come to be? What role do the arts
have in forming such identity groups? Second, how do social and political contexts
develop to the point where genocidal violence—understood as an attempt to destroy a
shared world—becomes possible? Third, what role does art have in rebuilding the world
after such violence?
Harvey Cormier:
PHI 508: Jazz and Philosophy
In this course we investigate a variety of philosophical issues connected with jazz,
America's art form. Those issues include questions about art, nation, progress, the
individual in society, high culture, popular culture, democracy, meritocracy, tradition,
modernism and its aftermath, judgments of value, and, of course, race.
Texts include the collection of recordings called Jazz: A Smithsonian Anthology, along
with writings of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Ralph Ellison, Theodor Adorno, James Lincoln
Collier, Clement Greenberg, Whitney Balliett, Philip Larkin, Alfred Appel, and Robin D.
G. Kelley.
ON MAIN CAMPUS:
David Dillworth:
PHI 571: Peirce’s Triadic Semiotics
Mondays 12 – 3 PM
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Now arguably the centerpiece of the American philosophical tradition, Peirce’s
semeiotics (theory of triadic sign-transference in an informational universe)
circumscribes the range of forms of dyadic hermeneutics. In Peirce’s words, dyadic
hermeneutics—stemming from Descartes, Locke, and Kant and exemplified in many
interpretive programs of the contemporary academy—operates “by chopping with an
axe.” In historico-pedagogical perspective, Peirce’s triadic theory drew from a
transatlantic background in Goethe and Schiller in relation to Kant and realistic-idealistic
elaborations in Schelling and Hegel; closer to home, Emerson, in the generation before
Peirce, became a chief conduit of these ideas, and William James contributed his own
indispensable descriptions toward a trivalent theory of experiential signification.
Course segments:
1. Readings in Emerson’s Nature (1836), and such essays as “The Method of
Nature,” “The Over-soul,” and “Circles” (1841); “The Poet” and “Nature” (1844);
“Fate, “Beauty,” and “Illusions” (1860); and such poems as “The Sphinx,” “The
World-Soul,” “Bacchus,” and “Wood-notes.” Emerson’s Transcendentalist
writings portray the perceptual signs of nature as symbolically sacramental. They
form the literary precedent to Peirce’s semeiotic doctrine of the mind’s instinctbased capacity for transparent sign-functions in the sciences and arts.
2. Overlapping Emerson’s career, the young Peirce published post-Cartesian and
post-Kantian epistemological essays such as “Some Consequences of Four
Incapacities” (1867), “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas
Clear” (1868); he developed three phenomenological and metaphysical categories
in “A Guess at the Riddle” (1887-88) and five Monist series papers (1891-94); he
expanded his system by articulation of three normative categories (Esthetics,
Ethics, Logic) in an overall classification of the sciences (1903). Later-phase
writings included “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” and “An Essay
toward Reasoning in Security and Uberty.” These essays further grounded his
trivalent semeiotics (the first branch of Logic), which he framed in terms of icons,
indices, and symbols and the latter in terms of emotional, dynamical, and logical
interpretants, by which he advanced his thesis, indebted to Emerson, that “the
universe is perfused with signs.”
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In such later writings as Essays in Radical Empiricism and Some Problems of
Philosophy James complemented Emerson and Peirce in essential ways. James
had a genius for expressing the metamorphoses of experience as creative relations
in continuous, including cosmically co-conscious, transitions. It is difficult to
parse the precise differences between Peirce and James. In the main James’
psychological descriptions covered the same ground as Peirce’s mature system,
complementing the latter’s more sharply cut phenomenological and semiotic
categorizations.
Readings drawn from:
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Emerson, Essays and Lectures, The Library of America.
Peirce, Essential Writings, Indiana U. Press, vol. 1 & 2.
Wm. James, 1902-1910 Writings, The Library of America.
Donn Welton:
PHI 509: Phenomenology of Self and Persons: Body, Affectivity and the Generation of
Values
Mondays 4 – 7 PM
After a brief survey of several foundational ideas in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and
Binswanger, two thirds of this seminar will focus on the newly published translation of
The Ego and the Flesh by Jacob Rogozinski. The author himself will be at Stony Brook
for two weeks in October; he will lead at least two of our sessions and we will join others
that he might offer during his stay. The final third will shift from the theory of the self to
theory of the person and use several seminal essays by Ricoeur to guide us in our
thinking.
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SPRING 2014
In Manhattan:
Megan Craig:
PHI 507: Late Wittgenstein: Color, Certainty, and Belief
Tuesdays: 12 – 3 PM
This course investigates the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of Wittgenstein’s late work.
Our discussions will focus around Wittgenstein’s use of color and color examples
throughout various texts, the relationship between phenomenology, psychology, and
logic, the ethical implications of language acquisition and Wittgenstein’s concepts of
“language games” and “family resemblances,” and the differences/similarities between
certainty and belief. We may also touch on the religious aspects of some of
Wittgenstein’s late remarks, as well as the relationship between his work and other
philosophical/artistic theories of color, language, and perception. We will be doing close
readings of parts of The Philosophical Investigations, all of Remarks on Colour, and
sections of On Certainty and The Blue and Brown Books, in addition to relevant
secondary literature. This is a writing intensive seminar.
Required Texts:
Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations
Remarks on Colour
On Certainty
The Blue and Brown Books
Robert Crease:
PHI 508: Dance and the Lived Body
If painting, as Merleau-Ponty writes, is the art that shows us how things become things
and world becomes world, dance may be said to be the art that shows us how bodies
become bodies. It is the art that, as Merce Cunningham writes, gives you no objects, nor
things to hang on the wall to look at, nor texts to read, but only “that single fleeting
moment when you feel alive”. Dance explores and exposes the body in its temporality,
finitude, and mortality. Its medium is the ecstatic body, always already beyond itself in
the world and with the world in us. This course examines the origin and nature of
dancing, and explores it as a medium in which to rethink embodiment. The course also
examines why philosophers’ evasion of dancing as a topic is at once a scandal, mystery,
and opportunity. Topics entwined with dancing include improvisation, play, rhythm,
style, bipedality, and apprenticeship learning. Required texts include Maxine SheetsJohnstone, The Corporeal Turn.
Eva Kittay:
PHI 521: Disability and Ethics
The norm of the agent in philosophical thought has been fully functioning and fully able.
Disability is used largely as a metaphor to underscore some philosophical point in an
argument. But in any given society there will be those with disabilities and the exclusion
of their perspective and concerns are no longer viewed as viable. Furthermore, thinking
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about disability has opened important questions about presumptions of the independent
self-sufficient moral actor, conceptions of moral culpability, the idea of moral
personhood, the adequacy of political theories to embrace disabled citizens, and to the
very nature of the ties that bind us. The problems embraced range from metaphysical
questions about personhood to questions of legal status and human rights. In this course
we will explore the nascent but quickly growing literature on disability and its
intersection with philosophical questions. We will also inclue material from literature,
film and disability studies to enhance our philosophical exploration.
Hugh Silverman (on Main Campus):
PHI 505/ PHI 420: Derrida Reading Heidegger
Cross-Listed Courses (on Main Campus):
John Lutterbie:
PHI 508/ THR 635: Theories of Performance: The European Avant-Garde
The question of creativity is posed focusing on the European Avant-Garde (Symbolism to
Surrealism). This subject will be approached through theories of embodied cognition, and
using manifestoes and performances of the European Avant-Garde as case studies.
Students will write a paper that examines the context in which a particular performance
tradition arose.
Steven Smith
PHI 507/ MUS 555: Adorno: Music, Experience, Life
Wednesdays 2 – 5 (Seminar Room of the Music Library)
This seminar will read the musical thought of Theodor Adorno through the concerns of
his early philosophy, focusing especially on what he calls natural history. Since the first
wave of Adorno reception in American music studies, Adorno has generally been
regarded as practicing a form of musical hermeneutics, which decrypts musical objects in
order to show the ways in which their form reflects the historical state of the society in
which they are produced. Moreover, Adorno’s texts have most often been treated as
theoretical instruments in the service of historical inquiry, rather than as objects of
historical inquiry in themselves. This course, however, will study Adorno in his
relationship with the historical moment in which his mature thought first crystalized. It
will thus regard him less as a thinker of hermeneutics (which he critiqued fiercely), and
more as a thinker of life and experience, themes that echoed through a number of
discursive spaces in early twentieth-century Europe.
We will pursue three goals over the course of the semester. First, this seminar will offer
a broad introduction to Adorno’s musical thought, attending to his now-canonical
musicological reception, but also asking how the reading we develop can challenge
accepted interpretations of his thought. Second, it will treat the resonance between
Adorno’s musical thought and his early philosophy as a prism through which to read the
intellectual terrain of early twentieth-century Europe more broadly. Our discussion of the
musical implications of Adorno’s idea of natural history will thus entail discussing also
the relationship between music and certain strains of vitalism, phenomenology,
psychoanalysis, and transcendental psychology. In addition to Adorno’s own writings, as
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well as secondary writings on Adorno’s thought, we will thus also read texts by Bergson,
Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Stumpf, and others. Third, just as the construction of a
hermeneutic Adorno has served as an instrument for musicological inquiry, we will ask
how—and whether—the construction of a natural historical Adorno, concerned with
questions of life and experience, can respond to questions that have grown relevant for
contemporary music studies.
Course Requirements:
Weekly attendance and reading
One in-class presentation
One research paper (roughly 20 pages)
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