Junior Seminar Offerings in Recent Years

Junior Seminar Offerings in Recent Years

Fall 2014

Skepticism, Reason, and Faith:

Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal

Daniel Garber

D ESCRIPTION :

The seminar will explore a three interconnected philosophical issues and three very different styles of doing philosophy, using three classic texts in the history of philosophy. In Montaigne we will explore the case for skepticism as presented in his essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” In Descartes we will follow his Meditations , where he begins in skepticism but moves toward an ultimate validation of reason. And in Pascal’s Pensées we will examine a project that uses rational argument to induce the reader to set reason aside and follow a life of faith.

R EADINGS : Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Descartes, Meditations , and Pascal, Pensées , all available for purchase at Labyrinth.

G RADING : 70% final paper, 30% seminar participation and shorter writing assignments.

Mind & Its Place in Nature Mark Johnston

D ESCRIPTION : Can anything in the physical world be numerically identical with you, or are there simply too may equally good candidates, themselves distinct and thus non-identical, to be you, so that the rational thing to conclude is that you cannot be any one of them? We will look at the standard theories of personal identity, and investigate why they all fail, at least if the world is as we ordinarily conceive it to be.

R EADINGS will be drawn from: Martin and Barresi eds. Personal Identity (Blackwell, 2003)

G RADING : 75% final paper, 25% seminar participation

Equality and Justice Sebastian Köhler

D ESCRIPTION :

E galitarians believe that distributive justice requires the equal distribution of certain goods.

This view has some initial attractions, such as, for example, its appeal to our sense of fairness and to our sense that distributive justice should pay particular attention to the worst-off members of society. However, egalitarianism also raises certain concerns and questions. In this course we want to focus on two questions that are of central importance to egalitarianism. First, what is the good that should be distributed equally?

Should social and economic goods be distributed equally? Or should everyone receive an equal share of welfare? Or is the good that should be distributed equally something else entirely? The second question is whether an equal distribution of the relevant good best captures the concerns that lie at the heart of egalitarianism. For example, is it really plausible that a concern for the worst-off is best addressed by distributing the relevant goods equally, rather than in accordance with some other pattern, such as one which gives priority to the worst-off?

R EADINGS : Sen, “Equality of What?,” Dworkin, “Equality of Resources,” Arneson, “Equality and Equal

Opportunity to Welfare,” Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian

Essentialism,” Nagel, “The Justification of Equality,” Parfit, “Equality and Priority,” Crisp, “Equality,

Priority, and Compassion.”.

G RADING : 75% final paper, 25% class presentations, short papers, class participation.

Fall 2013


Description: Can anything in the physical world be numerically identical with you, or are there simply too may equally good candidates, themselves distinct and thus non-identical, to be you, so that the rational thing to conclude is that you cannot be any one of them? We will look at the standard theories of personal identity, and investigate why they all fail, at least if the world is as we ordinarily conceive it to be.

Readings will be drawn from: Martin and Barresi eds. Personal Identity (Blackwell, 2003)

Grading: 75% final paper, 25% seminar participation

Free Will, Responsibility, & Punishment Victoria McGeer

Description: escription:

Human beings are free and responsible agents. This is the core intuition that underlies many of our personal interactions, the structure of many of our relationships, and the design of many of our social institutions – for instance, the criminal justice system. But can this intuition be defended? Philosophers have long debated this question, but recent work in the biosciences has made this challenge very much more pressing. Can our settled human way of life persist in the face of what we are learning about the workings of mind and brain? Do such discoveries put particular pressure on our understanding of wrongdoing, blame and punishment? How should our institutions of crime and punishment respond to these concerns?

Readings: selections from: Nadelhoffer, ed. The Future of Punishment (OUP 2013)

Grading: 70% final paper (with 20% accorded to 1 st draft), 30% seminar participation & short assignments

Friendship: History and Theory Alexander Nehamas

Description: Friendship, which seemed to be central to the ethics of ancient philosophy, stopped being a subject of interest for modern philosophy. In recent years, partly because of renewed interest in Aristotle’s ethics (two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to philia, which is assumed to be identical with friendship, it has entered philosophical discussion once again. We will ask why the history of friendship has undergone these changes, which have to do with the supremacy of moral—impartial and universal—values in modern philosophical thought. For that reason, philosophers who want to pay attention to friendship today have tried to show that it is amenable to moral treatment and that it constitutes a moral value. Since I have deep doubts about this last point, I would like to discuss the connection between friendship and morality, ask whether the values of morality exhaust the range of things that make life worthwhile, and suggest that they don’t. The partial and particulars values of friendship, along with the values of character and style, and the values of art, which have not been central to philosophical ethics, need to be given renewed attention. We will try to do just that in this seminar.

Readings: Mostly from Michael Pakaluk, Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship (Hackett, 1991)

Grading: 75% final paper (first draft will also be taken into account), 25% seminar participation.

Fall 2012

Philosophy of Mind Frank Jackson

The focus will be on three questions. What — precisely — is the causal connection between the mental and the physical, and what does it tell us about the truth or falsity of physicalism? What's special about the phenomenal side of psychology, and does the "phenomenal concepts strategy" help physicalists reply to the knowledge argument? What does it take to see an object?

Readings for each question will be made available in advance.

Grading: 75% final paper (on a topic related to our three questions), 25% class participation (which will include a presentation reated to your final paper)


Can anything in the physical world be numerically identical with you, or are there simply too may equally good candidates, themselves distinct and thus non-identical, to be you, so that the rational thing to conclude is that you cannot be any one of them? We will look at the standard theories of personal identity, and investigate why they all fail, at least if the world is as we ordinarily conceive it to be.

Readings will be drawn from: Martin and Barresi eds. Personal Identity (Blackwell, 2003)


Topics in Normative Ethics Sarah McGrath

We ordinarily assume that some actions are wrong or morally forbidden (e.g., stealing money from your roommate) while others are morally permitted or even required. What factors determine the moral status of an action? Is the moral status of an action solely a matter of its consequences? If not, what else might be relevant? (For example, do the intentions behind the action make a difference?) Is there a morally significant difference between failing to help someone and harming him? We will explore these and related questions.

Readings: The primary text will be Shelly Kagan’s

Normative Ethics .

Grading: 75% final paper, 25% seminar participation.

Fall 2011

Prospects for a Non-Supernaturalistic Religion Mark Johnston

Description: Recent critics of religion (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) have supposed that religion essentially involves supernatural claims at odds with the discoveries of natural science, and so have concluded that religious belief is therefore illusion, root and branch. The seminar will examine the ways in which Judeo-Christianity is tied to supernaturalism, and explore whether there is a viable version of this religious outlook that is free of supernaturalism. In particular, we will focus on the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely belief in life after death. Exactly why should we reject that doctrine and what does this rejection mean for the prospects of religion?

Readings: The primary texts will be Saving God (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Surviving Death

(Princeton University Press, 2010). (As a warm-up exercise, before the seminar you might read Daniel

Dennett’s Breaking the Spell .)


Freedom & Responsibility Victoria McGeer

The link between freedom and responsibility has been one of the most disputed topics in the history of western philosophy: Ideas of choice and responsibility are inextricably woven into the fabric of social life at both personal and institutional levels. Intuitively, such ideas are threatened by determinism – the metaphysical thesis according to which all events (including ‘choices’ made by apparently free agents) are the inevitable consequence of pre-exisiting conditions unfolding in accord with the laws of nature. Does determinism truly threaten human agency and responsibility – and, therefore, the myriad norms of our social world? Or are the intuitions that see an incompatibility between determinism and freedom/responsibility suspect?

Readings: contemporary thinkers in philosophy and cognitive psychology, including Strawson, Frankfurt,

Watson, Wolf, Dennett, Pettit, Nichols, Wegner, Libet.

Grading: 70% final paper; 30% seminar participation/short assignments

Topics in Normative Ethics Sarah McGrath

We ordinarily assume that some actions are wrong or morally forbidden (e.g., stealing money from your roommate) while others are morally permitted or even required. What factors determine the moral status of an action? Is the moral status of an action solely a matter of its consequences? If not, what else might be relevant? (For example, do the intentions behind the action make a difference?) Is there a morally significant difference between failing to help someone and harming him? We will explore these and related questions.

Readings: The primary text will be Shelly Kagan’s

Normative Ethics .


Fall 2010

Weakness of the Will and Freedom of the Will Delia Graff Fara

First Issue: If you go to the movies instead of writing your paper that’s due the following day, does it follow that you think that on balance, going to the movies is the better thing to do? Or is it possible that you were

"weak-willed", that you did something other than what you thought it best to do? Second issue: Is free will possible if the laws of physics determine how the future will be given the way the past has been? Does it make sense to say that you could choose to do something even if you'll be forced to do it no matter what?

Sample Readings: Plato, "Protagoras", Jackson "Weakness of Will", Mele, "Akratics and Addicts"; Smart,

"Free Will, Praise and Blame", Lewis "Are We Free to Break the Laws?”.

Grading: Three shorter papers plus a short summary and critique of a classmate’s paper, 25%; Final paper

60%. Class participation 15%.

Science, Politics and Religion Daniel Garber cience is supposed to tell us the way the world is. But, in a way, religion does too. How do these two institutions and forms of knowledge relate to one another? And to what extent do scientific or religious considerations enter into politics? These three domains have been interconnected with one another for centuries. We will explore some of the interconnections both historically and systematically.

Readings: In the first part of the seminar we will discuss some historical material. We will begin with the case of Galileo and some documents relating to his condemnation for Copernicanism by the Catholic

Church. We will then look at arguments in Hobbes for the subordination of religion to the commonwealth, and in Spinoza for the separation between science and religion and for the toleration of different religions.

We will then turn to some contemporary debates concerning toleration, the role of religion in the state, and the relation between science and religion. The specific contemporary material chosen will depend on the interests of the group.

Grading:

30% seminar participation, including a 10-to-15-minute presentation on the topic of your term paper, as well as weekly, one-to-two page writing assignments on the readings for the course (which will be due by midnight of the day before we meet). 70% final paper.

Essence and Modality Sarah-Jane Leslie

Traditionally, metaphysicians took themselves to be giving accounts of /what it is to be/ a given item. What is this notion of the '/what it is to be'/ or /essence/ of a thing? Can it be analyzed in terms of the modal notions of possibility and necessity? Problems will be raised for the general idea of essence and its role in philosophy.

Readings will include works by David Lewis, Saul Kripke, Hillary Putnam and Kit Fine.

Grading:

70% final paper, 30% seminar presentations/participation.

Fall 2009

Philosophical Methodology Thomas Kelly A

Does philosophy have a method of its own? If so, what is it? What role, if any, does observation of the world and the gathering of empirical evidence play in philosophy? How does philosophical inquiry resemble and how does it differ from inquiry in other disciplines?

Sample reading list: Plato, Euthyphro ; Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

; A.J. Ayer, “The Function of Philosophy”; Roderick Chisholm, “The Problem of the Criterion”; Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True

Belief Knowledge?”; Timothy Williamson, “Evidence in Philosophy”; Peter van Inwagen, “Philosophical

Failure”. (Besides the Plato and Descartes, readings will be by contemporary philosophers.)


Disagreement Thomas Kelly B

How should we respond to the kind of persistent and intractable disagreements we find in many domains

(e.g., about morality, religion, history, and philosophy itself)? We will explore this and closely related questions by a critical examination of the work of some contemporary philosophers.

Sample reading list: Peter van Inwagen, “’It is Wrong, Always, Everywhere, and for Anyone, to Believing

Anything Upon Insufficient Evidence’”; J.L. Mackie, “The Subjectivity of Values”; Richard Feldman,

“Reasonable Religious Disagreements”; Adam Elga, “Reflection and Disagreement”; David Christensen,

“The Epistemology of Disagreement”; Roger White, “Epistemic Permissiveness”.


Metaphysics of Time Boris Kment

Is time essentially like the three spatial dimensions, or characteristically different? Is time moving in a particular direction? Is the past fixed and immutable while the future is still open? Is time travel possible?

Are past and future less real than the present?

Sample reading list

: McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time”; Dummett, “Bringing about the Past”; Williams,

“The Myth of Passage”; Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”; Shoemaker, “Time without Change”;

Markosian, “A Defense of Presentism”; Sider, selections from

Four-Dimensionalism .

Grading : 75% final paper, 25% in-class participation.

Moral Epistemology (2 sections) Sarah McGrath

Many if not all of us have at least some strong moral convictions. Some of these convictions concern controversial topics that are the subject of public debate (such as the moral permissibility of abortion); others are relatively uncontroversial (consider, for example, the view that it is morally wrong to torture innocent people). This seminar is guided by the questions of how (if at all) we can know that our moral convictions are true, how moral knowledge differs from non-moral knowledge, and what the answers to these questions tell us about the nature of morality. Readings include some classic, but mostly contemporary texts at the intersection of epistemology and ethics. Sample reading list: Plato, Laches ; selections from G.E.

Moore, Principia Ethica ; selections from J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong ; George Sher,

“But I Could Be Wrong”; Karen Jones, “Second-Hand Moral Knowledge”; Peter Singer, “Moral Experts”;

Elizabeth Harman, “Is It Reasonable to ‘Rely on Intuitions’ in Ethics?”

Grading: 75% seminar paper; 25% seminar participation.

Fall 2008

Can We Rely on Intuitons in Ethics (2 sections) Elizabeth Harman

Arguments in ethics often rely on intuitions about particular cases. Is this reasonable? Should we rely on our intuitions? Do different people have different intuitions? Do members of different cultures tend to have different intuitions? Do these differences show that we should not rely on intuitions? Do recent psychological and neurological experiments about our moral intuitions, and the role that emotion plays in them, show we should not rely on intuitions?

Readings: Examples of papers that rely on intuitions: Phillipa Foot, "Killing and Letting Die" and Judith Jarvis

Thomson, "A Defense of Abortion." Papers that challenge reliance on intuition: Joshua Knobe on brain imagining studies that show emotion is responsible for some intuitions and Tamara Horowitz on the significance of framing effects. Defenses of reliance on intuition: John Rawls on reflective equilibrium and Frances Kamm on the methodology she uses in her work.

Grading: Class presentations and class participation 20%, Short papers 20%, Final paper 60%

Kantian Ethics Desmond Hogan

The seminar will offer an introduction to Kant's central moral doctrines through a careful reading of the

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, his most influential ethical work. Topics will include Kant's moral psychology; laws, imperatives and maxims; formulations of the moral law and ethical decision principles; the interpretation of moral evil; the doctrine of right and the doctrine of virtue; realism versus constructivism in Kantian ethics today.

Readings: Mary Gregor (ed.), Kant, Practical Philosophy. New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1996. Paperback.

ISBN 0-521-65408-4 (a collection of Kant's most important ethical writings including the Groundwork)

Grading: 35% seminar participation/presentations; 65% final paper.

Freedom & Responsibility (2 sections) Victoria McGeer

The link between freedom and responsibility has been one of the most disputed topics in the history of western philosophy: Ideas of choice and responsibility are inextricably woven into the fabric of social life at both personal and institutional levels. Intuitively, such ideas are threatened by determinism – the metaphysical thesis according to which all events (including ‘choices’ made by apparently free agents) are the inevitable consequence of pre-exisiting conditions unfolding in accord with the laws of nature. Does determinism truly threaten human agency and responsibility – and, therefore, the myriad norms of our social world? Or are the intuitions that see an incompatibility between determinism and freedom/responsibility suspect?

Readings: contemporary thinkers in philosophy and cognitive psychology, including Strawson, Frankfurt,

Watson, Kane, Dennett, Pettit, Nichols, Wegner, Libet.

Grading: 70% final paper; 30% seminar participation/presentations

Behaviorism & Functionalism Joshua Sheptow I

Functionalism and Behaviorism are theories of the nature of mental states. Behaviorism, in a nutshell, holds that what it is to have a specific belief, desire, hope, fear etc. is just to be disposed to behave in certain ways.

Functionalism, which was developed in response to a series of objections to behaviorism, is subtlely different. It holds, in a nutshell, that what it is to be in a mental state of a certain type is to be in a state that stands in a complex array of causal relations to behaviors and other mental states. In the seminar we will consider the following questions: What motivated behaviorism? What motivated the shift form behaviorism to functionalism? What are the central objections to behaviorism and functionalism? Are these theories, at the end of the day, convincing accounts of the nature of mental states?

Readings from Ryle, Byrne, Putnam, Lewis, Block, and Chalmers, & others.

Grading: 75% final paper, 25% weekly assignments and participation.

Mental Causation Joshua Sheptow II

Traditionally, there has been a tension between, on the one hand, the view that mental states are nonphysical and, on the other hand, the view that mental states have physical effects. The aim of the seminar will be to explore the nature of this tension. We will begin by considering Princess Elizabeth’s critique of

Descartes’ dualism, but we will spend most of the time considering contemporary ways of articulating the tension. We will also consider how contemporary theories of the nature of mental states cope with this tension.

Readings from Descartes, Jaegwon Kim, Fred Dretske, David Chalmers, Karen Bennett, & others.

Grading: 75% final paper, 25% weekly assignments & participation.

Weakness of Will Joshua Sheptow III

The problem of weakness of will is a familiar if unwelcome part of everyday life. It occurs whenever, on the one hand, you judge that a particular course of action, say studying for a test, is what you ought to do, all things considered; and yet, on the other hand, what you actually do is something altogether different.

Indeed, what you actually do is something that you yourself acknowledge you ought not to be doing, like surfing the internet or watching television. Many have thought that the phenomenon of weakness of will poses a deep philosophical problem. The focus of the seminar will be on trying to articulate exactly what this problem amounts to. In short, the focus of the seminar is on the question: what is the philosophical problem of weakness of will?

Readings from: Plato, Davidson, Watson, Stroud, Smith, and Jackson, & others.

Grading: 75% final paper, 25% weekly assignments and participation.

Fall 2007

The Philosophy of William James Paul Benacerraf

William James wrote at the end of the 19th Century, on a great variety of topics. He was active in both philosophy and psychology, the distinction being more blurry then than it tends to be today. His book, The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy, provides an excellent starting point for the discussion of a number of issues (in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion) that are constantly with us, as can be seen from the list of its chapter titles: "The Will to Believe", "Is Life Worth Living?", "The Sentiment of Rationality", "Reflex Action and Theism", "The Dilemma of

Determinism", "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life", "Great Men and Their Environment", "The Importance of

Individuals", "On Some Hegelisms", and "What Psychical research has accomplished". The seminar will use James text as a jumping off point for discussing these issues, branching out into more contemporary treatments of the same issues. Although we will probably read the whole book [it is quite short], I don't expect that we will discuss it all; we should make a selection of what interests us most -- perhaps three or four topics — and concentrate on those. I would expect each member of the seminar to be responsible for at least one topic, to the point of building up a bibliography of suggested further readings, giving a report in the seminar, and, eventually, writing a final seminar paper. Everyone should expect to write a short paper on each of the topics.

Grading: Final Paper 67%; discussion and short papers, 33%.

Our Knowledge of the External World Daniel Garber

Description: I see a red roundish splotch in my visual field. A few moments later I have a sweet, crunchy apple-y taste in my mouth. But how can I know that there is an actual apple in the world that exists on the other side of my sensations? In this Junior

Seminar we will explore this question as it has been treated both by historical and contemporary figures.

Readings: We will begin by considering Descartes’ argument for the existence of an external world from Meditation VI, and then discuss Berkeley’s attempt to do without a world of mind-independent physical objects in his Principles . Among more recent treatments of the question we will discuss Bas van Fraassen’s version of radical empiricism and some realist responses to that view, as well as some attempts to solve the notorious brain-in-the-vat problem.

Grading: 30% seminar participation, including a 10-to-15-minute presentation on the topic of your term paper, as well as weekly, one-to-two page writing assignments on the readings for the course (which will be due by midnight of the day before we meet).

70% final paper.

Identity over Time and Personal Identity Mark Johnston

Description: What is so important about your future survival, and what does it consist in? How does the continued existence of persons differ, if at all, from that of material objects and artifacts? Is survival after death possible from a purely naturalistic viewpoint?

Readings: TBA

Grading: 40% class Presentations, 60% final paper

Due to scheduling constraints, this seminar will meet Thursday evenings at 7.30 pm. Please save the time if you are interested in attending.

Philosophy of Religion in the 17th Century Beau Mount I

Description: Seventeenth-century metaphysics is marked by the central role occupied by questions concerning God’s existence, nature, and intervention in the world. This seminar will serve as an introduction to these issues. The organization of the course will depend on the interests of the participants; possible topics include the ontological and cosmological arguments, theodicy and the problem of evil, divine concurrence, and the Cartesian doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths.

Readings: selections from Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Malebranche, along with modern commentary.

Grading: 67% term paper, 33% short exercise and seminar participation.

Philosophy of Time Beau Mount II

Description: An introduction to the metaphysics of time in 20th-century philosophy. The syllabus will be determined in large measure by the interests of the seminar participants, but possible topics include the presentism/eternalism debate, the metaphysical implications of the semantics of tense, phenomenological approaches to the question of time, the nature of temporal experience, time and causation, time travel, tense logic, and the question of temporal parts.

Possible readings: essays from William James, Edmund Husserl, J.M.E. McTaggart, C.D. Broad, Michael Dummett, A.N. Prior,

J.J.C. Smart, D.H. Mellor, David Lewis, Quentin Smith, Mark Hinchliff, Nathan Oaklander, Kit Fine, Ted Sider

Grading: 67% term paper, 33% short exercise and seminar participation.

Fall 2006

The Philosophy of William James Paul Benacerraf

Description/Readings: William James wrote around the turn of the (19th-20th) centuries, and on a great variety of topics. His book, The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy is an excellent starting point for the discussion of a number of philosophical issues that are constantly with us. Here is a list of its chapters: "The Will to Believe", "Is life worth living?", "The sentiment of rationality", "Reflex action and theism", "The dilemma of determinism", "The moral philosopher and the moral life", "Great men and their environment", "The importance of individuals", "On some Hegelisms", "What psychical research has accomplished". The seminar will use James' text as a jumping off point for discussing the issues, branching out into more contemporary treatments of the same issues. Although we will read he whole book (it is quite short), I don't anticipate treating it all even-handedly. We should make a selection of what interests us most

— perhaps three, at most four, topics. I would expect each member of the seminar to be especially responsible for one of these, to the point of building up a bibliography of suggested readings and, eventually, writing a final seminar paper on the topic. Everyone should expect to write a short paper on each of the topics.

Grading: Final paper 67%, discussion and short papers, 33%.

Causation Karen Bennett

Description: The cue ball smashing into the 8 ball caused it to fall into the corner pocket. However, the shadow of the cue ball on the wall does not cause the shadow of the 8 ball to do anything. What exactly is the difference here? What is causation? We will begin with an overview of the main sorts of views about the causal relation, and move on to address a variety of tricky cases that are both interesting in their own right, and for the light they shed on which of those views is the right one. Here are a few of the questions we will probably address. Can we--contra Hume--simply see that one event causes another? Is causation transitive? Can absences be causes? (Did my neighbor's failure to water my plants cause them to die?)

You will be expected to write a very short (1-2 pp) response to the readings each week. You will also be expected to produce a draft of your JP by the last few weeks of the semester, so that we can spend the last session or two discussing each other's drafts.

Readings: a bit of Hume, as well as classic papers by people like Lewis, Davidson, and Mackie. We will also read very recent literature by contemporary philosophers currently working on causation: e.g. Hall,

Hitchcock, Paul, Schaffer, McGrath, Siegel.

Grading: 75% final paper, 25% participation (including the weekly short assignments).

Riddles of Existence Alexi Burgess I

Description: In this seminar, we will explore four different puzzles involving the notion of existence: the ontological argument for the existence of God, the possibility of analytic existence statements in general, the problem of intuitively true negative existential statements, and the question of why there is anything at all.

Once we are acquainted with the more important work on each of these puzzles, you will be able to develop and defend your own views about one in particular.

Readings: classic papers by Quine and Carnap, such as 'On What There Is' and 'Empiricism, Semantics, and

Ontology', as well as more recent work by writers like Nathan Salmon (on negative existentials), Peter van

Inwagen (on Quinean meta-ontology), and Robert Nozick (on the mystery of existence).

Grading: 30% seminar participation, including a 10-to-15-minute presentation on the topic of your term paper, as well as weekly, one-to-two page writing assignments on the readings for the course (which will be due by midnight of the day before we meet). 70% final paper.

Kripkenstein's Monster Alexi Burgess II

Description: Are there any facts about what our words mean? All of our linguistic behavior to date appears to be compatible with an infinite number of mutually incompatible interpretations of our words. If the use that we make of our words doesn’t determine what they mean, then what else could? If meaning attributions don’t express facts, then what exactly is their function? The goal of this seminar will be to understand and evaluate Kripkenstein’s answers to these questions.

Readings: We will be reading Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language in its entirety, as well as selections from Philosophical Investigations , and articles on straight solutions to the skeptical paradox, by writers like Colin McGinn and Paul Boghossian.

Grading: 30% seminar participation, including a 10-to-15-minute presentation on the topic of your term paper, as well as weekly, one-to-two page writing assignments on the readings for the course (which will be due by midnight of the day before we meet). 70% final paper.

Topics from Naming & Necessity Michael Fara

Description: Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity is one of the most important 20th century works in analytic philosophy. We will use the text as a springboard for the investigation of several topics in philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind. Topics to be discussed include necessity and possibility, the meaning and reference of proper names, material constitution, natural kinds, and the relation between mind and body.

Readings: In addition to Naming and Necessity we will read journal articles that respond to, elaborate on, or otherwise engage with Kripke's views.

Grading: 30% seminar participation and very short papers, 70% final paper.

Mind & Body in Historical Perspective Daniel Garber

Description: The question of the nature of mind and its relation to body is one of the perennial questions in philosophy. In this seminar we will explore this question from an historical perspective. When we do so we find that the familiar questions about what minds are and how they are related to bodies leads in some surprising directions: How is the question of mind related to the more general question of life and living things? How do human beings fit into the physical world? How is the answer we give to the question about mind and body related to the question of freedom? Personal identity?

Readings: We will examine a number of classic texts, including selections from perhaps Aristotle,

Descartes, Hobbes, Locke and Hume, as well as a selection of more recent studies.

Grading: Final paper: 75% / Seminar participation: 25%

Theory of Mind & the Problem of Other Minds Sarah-Jane Leslie

Description: When do children acquire a theory of mind? What is the character of that theory? Do the empirical discoveries in the theory of mind literature supprt or undermine the philosophical idea that we begin in the egocentric predicament of awareness only of our own mind, so that we must infer the existence of other minds, perhaps by a shaky argument from analogy with our own case? How does the so-called problem of

"other minds" look once we have assimilated the empicial facts?

Readings: The readings for this course will be somewhat interdisciplinary, as they will include papers written by cognitive psychologists. We will begin by looking at classic philosophical discussions of the problem of other minds, for example Malcolm and Ayers. We will then look at current thinking in cognitive science on the nature and development of mental state concepts. Readings for this second part of the course will include work by cognitive psychologists, such as Simon Baron-Cohen, and by empirically informed philosophers, such as Steven Stich. Students will be encouraged to explote the extent to which empirical considerations bear on this philosophical problem.

Grading: 70% Final paper, 30% Presentations/Seminar Participation

Fall 2005

Action and Intention Delia Graff

Description: (I)What is it to intend to do something? Is it merely to want to do that thing; and if not, what more is required?

What’s the difference and relation between intending to read a certain book (for example) and reading that book intentionally?

(II)What is the difference between a mere event and an action—between, for example, a rock’s being pulled down a hill by gravity and its being pushed down the hill by a person or a cat? Is it that actions have agents, while mere events do not? What is it to be the agent of an event? (III)What is weakness of the will and how is it possible? When one acts in a weak-willed way, is one’s action incompatible with what one wants to do, with what one intends to do, with what one thinks best? Or does the weak-willed person reveal that his action is what he really wanted to do, intended to do, and thought best, all things considered? (IV)Under what conditions is one responsible for one’s actions?

Readings: We will focus on works by four analytic philosophers: Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, Judith Thomson and

Harry Frankfurt, but will supplement with readings by other contemporary analytic philosophers. Familiarity with basic logical notation (or willingness to acquire it) will be helpful.

Grading: 49% short homework assignments, 51% final paper

Nature Victoria Kamsler I

Description: Is nature intrinsically valuable? Is it best understood as instrumentally valuable for humans, or, perhaps, for all sentient beings? Now bracket those questions. How much of environmental ethics depends upon our ability to answer them? Must we begin there, or are there more fruitful places to start? To what extent do environmental problems raise intractable conflicts of value and interest? What happens to problems of environmental ethics when we rethink the way we make things?

Readings: from Joel Feinberg, Brian Barry, Mark Sagoff, Peter Singer, and other contemporary philosophers. We will also consider works on architecture, technology and design; art history (the history of landscapes); and global environmental governance.

Grading: 25% oral presentations during term, 75% final paper.

Political Judgment Victoria Kamsler II

Description: What is political judgment? Is it a special 'art of the statesman,' or a kind of 'common sense' related to our capacity for equal citizenship? Political judgment depends on our ability to judge particulars in the absence of a universal rule. How is this possible? Does judgment rely upon reason, or feeling, or both? Political judgment is not a rule-governed activity, nor can its methods be specified explicitly. What is the basis of the validity of political judgments? How do we determine a future course of action in practical deliberation? And what makes such determinations legitimate?

Readings: From Kant, Aristotle, Arendt, Gadamer, Isaiah Berlin, and contemporary political philosophers.

Grading : 25% oral presentations during term, 75% final paper.

Political Philosophy from Hobbes to Rawls Sean Kelly

Description: The seminar will address classic issues in political philosophy through a reading of some of the central modern texts from Hobbes to Rawls. Topics to be considered may include the nature of justice, the justification for authority, concepts of liberty, the right to property, and the role of the state.

Readings: Selected works of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Rawls, and possibly others.

Grading: 25% oral presentations during the term, 75% final paper.

The Information Content of Simple Sentences Jeffrey Kepple

Description: The seminar will focus on the behavior of proper names in the information content of straightforward (not ironic, metaphorical, etc.) sentences, beginning with basic issues from Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, proceeding to Saul Kripke’s

Naming and Necessity , and continuing through various responses to Kripke, ending with the instructor's dissertation. The character of this topic and its significance will be discussed at the introductory meeting. The seminar will aim to prepare students for writing a senior thesis next year, beginning with no expectation of prior knowledge, but moving quickly towards areas of active current research, in the process exhibiting how to identify, prepare, and present significant arguments in a professional format.

Readings: Works of Frege, Russell, John Searle, Kripke, John Perry, David Kaplan, Mark Richard, Scott Soames, Nathan Salmon, and the instructor's dissertation.

Grading: A midterm exam (30%), and a final paper (70%). Submission of an advance draft of the paper will be mandatory.

Topics in Free Will Victoria McGeer

Description: This seminar is designed in introduce students to a range of the issues raised in the debate about free will. The philosophical issues to be discussed will include more general questions bearing on mind-body relations, mental causation, and agency, as well as more specific topics such as determinism and free will, choice and responsibility, and autonomy and reason. The approach taken will emphasize connections with cognitive science and developmental psychology.

Readings: While Gary Watson’s collection, Free Will (2nd edition, OUP, 2004) will be the main source of philosophical works, readings will also be drawn from more empirical literature.

Grading: 75% final paper, 25% short written and/or oral assignments during the term

Fall 2004

Nature Victoria Kamsler




Political Judgment Victoria Kamsler

Description: What is political judgment? Is it a special 'art of the statesman,' or a kind of 'common sense' related to our capacity for equal citizenship? Political judgment depends on our ability to judge particulars in the absence of a universal rule. How is this possible? Does judgment rely upon reason, or feeling, or both? Political judgment is not a rule-governed activity, nor can its methods be specified explicitly. What is the basis of the validity of political judgments? How do we determine a future course of action in practical deliberation? And what makes such determinations legitimate?


Grading Formula: 25% oral presentations during term, 75% final paper.

The Problem of Induction Thomas Kelly

Description: Reasoning about what the future will be like on the basis of one’s experience of the past is an absolutely pervasive human tendency. In the eighteenth century, David Hume famously challenged the legitimacy of such reasoning. Given the centrality of inductive reasoning to human life, Hume’s skeptical critique has seemed to many to strike at the very core of our conception of ourselves as beings who routinely think and act in a reasonable manner. Unsurprisingly then, Hume’s critique has inspired a diverse array of responses from some of the most important philosophers of recent times. In this seminar, we will first examine Hume’s argument in some detail in order to get as clear as possible about how exactly the skeptical argument about induction is supposed to run. We will then consider some prominent twentieth-century responses to that argument, including attempts to argue that one can do without induction, that one can justify induction inductively without falling into any kind of vicious circle, that the problem can be “dissolved” by careful attention to ordinary language, and that induction can be

“vindicated” pragmatically as a method of predicting the future that will work if any method does. Along the way, we will also pay some attention to how the Problem of Induction intersects with various other philosophically important issues such as the debate between empiricists and rationalists, the relationship between philosophical skepticism and commonsense, and the nature of cause and effect.

Readings: Hume and twentieth century philosophers including Popper, Strawson, Reichenbach, Goodman and various contemporaries.

Grading: Final paper 75%, seminar participation 25%.

Nietzsche on Morality Alexander Nehamas

Description: Is morality, as Nietzsche often claims, nothing but a deceitful effort on the part of “the weak” to protect themselves against “the strong” and prevent “the strong” from acting as they want? Supposing that it is, does that give the right to the strong to act without concern for anyone else? And would that, as Nietzsche also claims on several occasions, be better for human beings as a whole? How, in any case, can we distinguish between the strong and the weak if the weak, in virtue of having established their own rules on everyone else, seem stronger than the strong?

Readings: To address these and other questions about Nietzsche’s peculiar views on morality, we will read, carefully, The Genealogy of Morality , and refer to various of his other works where he presents similar ideas

(including parts of Beyond Good and Evil , Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Antichrist ) as well as some of the secondary literature on these topics.


Philosophy in Literature Bas van Fraassen

Description: Our topic will be philosophy of science, but approached through literature, with special attention to ways in which philosophical issues appear in fiction and drama. The reading list (still tentative) includes plays and fiction — students’s suggestions will be welcome.

Readings: (Preliminary list) Plays: Tom Stoppard Rosencrantz Guildenstern Are Dead and Arcadia ;

Michael Frayn Copenhagen ; David Auburn, Proof: A Play . Novels: William Golding Free Fall ; Peter Hoeg

The Woman and the Ape ; Fred Hoyle The Black Cloud ; Russell McCormmach Night Thoughts of a Classical

Physicist . Stories: Peter Hoeg “Journey into a Dark Heat” in Tales of the Night .

Also philosophical essays on literature by e.g. Paul Feyerabend, Catherine Wilson.


Fall 2003

Environmental Ethics Victoria Kamsler




Political Judgment Victoria Kamsler

What is political judgment? Is it a special 'art of the statesman,' or a kind of 'common sense' related to our capacity for equal citizenship? Political judgment depends on our ability to judge particulars in the absence of a universal rule. How is this possible? Does judgment rely upon reason, or feeling, or both? Political judgment is not a rule-governed activity, nor can its methods be specified explicitly. What is the basis of the validity of political judgments? How do we determine a future course of action in practical deliberation?

And what makes such determinations legitimate?


Grading Formula: 25% oral presentations during term, 75% final paper.

Ben Morison Platonic Epistemology

How do we obtain knowledge of something? In the dialogue 'Meno', Plato puts forward the famous theory of recollection, according to which 'the whole of searching and learning is recollection'. In the 'Republic', Plato says (or appears to say) that knowledge is obtained by studying things which have come to be known as 'Platonic Forms'. What are these two views in more detail? Do they conflict? And how could Plato have held such apparently strange views anyway?

Selections from Plato's 'Meno', 'Republic' and 'Theaetetus', and responses from modern philosophers.

Grading: 15% written work during term; 15% seminar participation; 70% final paper

Perversity

(There will be two sections of this seminar)

David Sussman

Description: Is it possible to want to do something just because it is bad? Can people really be attracted to the painful, the ugly, or the wicked, simply as such, or must this motivation always conceal some positive evaluation of its object? How are we to understand such counter-evaluative emotions as spite, malice,

Schadenfreude , and despair? If perverse motivation is possible, does it represent some kind of pathology, and should such perversity ever lessen an agent’s responsibility for her acts?

Readings: from Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Anscombe, Davidson, Stocker, Velleman, and Raz, along with literary works by Milton, Melville, and Dostoyevsky.

Grading: 25% oral presentations during terms, 75% final paper.

Fall 2002

Metaphysics of Time Adam Elga

Does time "flow"? Do ordinary objects have temporal parts? Are there times other than the present?

Readings from contemporary philosophy and physics.

Experience of Time Sean Kelly

“What, then, is time” wonders St. Augustine in his Confessions. “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”(Confessions 11.14)

Writing around 400 A.D., Augustine’s interest in the problem of time grew out of questions he had concerning the opening lines of the Bible’s book of Genesis: “God, at the beginning of time, created heaven and earth.” But what strikes philosophers today about Augustineís theory is not its hermeneutic adequacy; rather, it is his radical “subjectivist” idea of identifying time with our experience of it. Immanuel Kant, writing at the end of the 18th century, took this idea one step further. In the transcendental deduction of the

Critique of Pure Reason he argued that time is not merely the same as the experience of time; it is moreover the condition of the possibility of any experience whatsoever. In Kant’s terminology time is the “form of inner sense”. Many contemporary philosophical accounts continue to follow an Augustinian or Kantian line: they maintain a close connection between time and its experience. In this seminar we will focus on philosophical accounts of the nature of time that take this subjectivist approach.

Readings may include selections from Augustine, Kant, McTaggert, Bergson, Husserl, Dennett, Mellor,

Campbell, and others.

Self-Knowledge Béatrice Longuenesse

Do we have access to our own self in the same way as we have access to objects outside us? Is the identity of the self recognized in the same way as the identity of objects? And so on.

We may read texts by Ryle, Nagel, Shoemaker, Birge, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others.

Aristotle’s Ethics Hendryk Lorenz

What is human happiness? Does virtue have anything to do with it? Is there such a thing as virtue, or are there just a variety of virtues? Does happiness — or virtue, for that matter — have anything to do with good luck? We'll be thinking about what Aristotle's answers to these questions are, and how credible they are.

Sample readings: Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle , Amélie Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics , R.

Crisp/M. Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics

Grading: 70% final paper, 30% class participation and oral presentations

Philosophy of Art Alexander Nehamas

Description: Though the arts have an exalted position within contemporary culture, no one is sure why — no one is even sure what art is in the first place. We will concentrate on these two questions, examine various answers, and try to propose our own. In particular, we will discussion the relations between art and morality, if any, the distinction between high and low art, and the relationship between art and beauty.

Readings: Selections from Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Schopenhauer, Bell, Greenberg, Danto, and otehrs

Grading: Final paper 65%, short paper 25%, class discussion 10%

Fall 2001

Should you believe what will make you happy? Adam Elga

Like most people who aren't depressed, you probably think that you are friendlier, sexier, more well-liked, a better leader, and a better driver than you really are. In the light of this, are you obliged to downgrade your self image by cultivating highly critical friends? (Of course, doing so would probably make you miserable.)

Grandma has decisive evidence that Joey is an axe murderer. But she would be devastated if she started believing that her little Joey is an axe murderer. Does this make it reasonable for her to think him innocent, in spite of her evidence?

Readings will be drawn from the philosophical literature on practical reasons for belief (Pascal, James,

Harman, Nozick), the psychological literature on cognitive illusions (Kahnemann, Tversky, Nisbett, Ross), and contemporary science fiction (Egan).

Grading: 20% weekly writing assignments, 15% 5-page midterm paper, 65% final paper.

The Problem of Evil David Lewis

If there is a God, and if He is wholly good, all-powerful, and omniscient, then why doesn’t He prevent all evil? We shall examine several (somewhat speculative) answers that have been put forward in recent analytic philosophy of religion.

Readings: Several papers in Adams & Adams (eds.) The Problem of Evil , and others.

Format: 2-hour meetings every other week


Plato’s Moral Psychology Hendrik Lorenz

We will be focusing on Plato‚s central work on the nature and formation of excellent character, the

Republic . Questions to be discussed include the following. Does Plato have, and offer in argument, good reason to conceive of the soul or mind as having distinct parts (or aspects)? Does he have good reason to conceive of the soul as having precisely the three parts that he comes up with: reason, spirit and appetite? Is the analogy between city and soul helpful, or indeed sustainable, both in the case of well-ordered states of city and soul, and in the degenerate and deteriorating cases described in Books 8 and 9?

Readings from Books 4, 8 and 9 of the Republic , and select items of recent secondary literature.

Grading: 25% oral presentations during term, 75% final paper.

Beauty Alexander Nehamas

Beauty has fallen on hard times lately. Whereas traditional art, music and literature self-consciously aimed at producing beautiful things representing the beauty of nature and people, the arts of the 20th century often made as self-conscious an effort to produce works that were difficult, incomprehensible, or even repulsive. It has become difficult to praise the beauty of people without offending them, since many believe that what we consider beautiful reflects wrong ideas about race and class. In the last few years, however, a renewed interest in beauty has emerged in philosophy, the arts, social thought, psychology, and even biology. We will examine this return of the beautiful, particularly in the thought of Plato, Plotinus and Augustine, who thought of beauty as the visible image of goodness and God, and that perceiving it leads to virtue and faith.

The Enlightenment, particular under the influence of Kant, separated beauty from goodness, giving arts an independent status unconnected to knowledge or virtue, raising new questions: Do the arts simply provide pleasure? Is that sufficient justification for their existence? Does beauty in people or art do anything but excite desire? How do we account for the fact, which the West gradually came to realize, that different people, races and even classes within the same society find very different things beautiful? Is beauty in any way connected with morality? Is it anything at all? Why should we be concerned with it?


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