Temple University
Department of Philosophy
Spring 2015 Course Descriptions
3000/4000 Undergraduate
3222 Contemporary Ethical Theory Margolis
At the present time the entire standing of ethics (or moral philosophy)) seems to be challenged by the conflict and divergence of putatively fundamental intuitions that may not be easily or convincingly reconcilable. The very idea of examining moral questions under the condition of disputed norms and values is largely ignored or marginalized in conventional treatments of such questions. How the undertaking is affected by coming to terms with such intransigencies has become an increasingly insistent worry. It’s reasonably clear that if this worry is legitimate, the nature of moral disputes cannot fail to be seriously affected. The question nags: in what ways? and with what risks or gains or losses? Part of the underlying worry concerns the resources we believe we can rightly draw on; and part concerns the very standing of morality within the space of other normatively qualified enquiries (political, aesthetic, civilizational, for instance). The course will proceed with these executive concerns in mind, based on the class’s reading of several assigned texts, we shall proceed by a mixture of lectures and modified seminar presentations.
3243 Philosophy of Law Crowe
This course is an advanced introduction to the philosophy of law. We will begin with two fundamental questions: What is the nature of our obligation to obey the law? What is it to be a society governed by the rule of law? Underlying these we will find the more basic philosophical question: What is law and how can it be distinguished from other social practices directed at ordering and improving society? We will look at some of the major schools of thought on this question, including natural law, positivism, legal realism and critical legal studies. From there we will move on to a series of problems surrounding Anglo-American conceptions of legal liability, both in civil and criminal law. Finally we will consider the nature of legal reasoning and interpretation with special attention to the problems of constitutional interpretation.

3245 Philosophy of Psychology Wolfsdorf
Throughout its history, philosophy has taken an interest in psychology. In the theory of knowledge, philosophers have been concerned with perception, belief, concepts, and reasoning.
In ethics, they have been concerned with action, feeling, and emotion. And in metaphysics, they have been interested in the nature of the mind itself and consciousness. Central to this course are topics and questions at the intersection of philosophy and contemporary empirical psychology.
The choice of topics varies from semester to semester. This semester we will be focusing on moral psychology, with a special focus on the following themes: moral motivation, desire, emotion, and responsibility. Those interested in further details are encouraged to consult the professor as well as Valerie Tiberius' Moral Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction ,
Routledge, which will be the main coursebook. The class does not presuppose a background in philosophy or psychology.
4221 Social and Political Philosophy Hammer
The world is faced with a deep and multi-faceted ecological crisis. In this course we will study the philosophy of deep ecology. According to deep ecology, living beings have inherent worth and right to protection independently of instrumental considerations and human desire. Far from being “the lord of creation,” a superior being enjoying privileged dignity and entitlement to rights, man should be viewed as part of a complex yet inherently fragile natural order. Only by learning to respect and cherish that order for its own sake can mankind hope to survive and thrive. We will ask a number of questions about this view. We will look at how it emerged, how well it can be defended, and what its implications are for human life. We will also consider less radical proposals that try to combine environmental commitments with traditional (and
“anthropocentrically grounded”) forms of respect for the dignity and autonomy of human existence.
4241 Theory of Knowledge Atkins
This class is concerned with the theory of knowledge, otherwise known as epistemology. In this course we will examine the traditional theory of knowledge, influential counterexamples to the traditional theory of knowledge, evidentialist theories of justification, nonevidentialist theories of

justification, skepticism about our knowledge of the external world, and other epistemological topics.
4268 Indian Philosophy Duckworth
This course surveys philosophical dimensions of Buddhism. We will discuss several important issues that are raised in Buddhist texts and analyze their logic, implications, and relevance.
Among the topics we will discuss are ontology (what is), epistemology (how we know), and normative ethics (what we should do), which in Buddhist terms gets expressed as: view, meditation, and action. Although there is no prerequisite for this course, this class will be demanding: you will be required to read and analyze primary texts in translation that are challenging and foreign (linguistically, conceptually, and philosophically). Since this course is thematically-driven, the readings draw from across time and space (i.e., the spectrum of the
Buddhist world, historically and geographically). At the end of the course, we will do a close reading of a polemical twentieth-century text in order to look deeper into a single Buddhist philosophical tradition within a particular cultural and historical context. Active participation in this course will give you a general knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, as well as a taste of the complexity and diversity of Buddhist philosophical traditions.
4279 Kant Ostaric
In this course we will be studying Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which i s one of the most important texts in modern philosophy. We will be discussing what, according to Kant, are the limits of our finite human understanding, how mind can be constitutive of experience, and the role of time and space in the constitution of our experience. We will further be discussing Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism and whether transcendental idealism can be an adequate answer to skepticism (for example Descartes' skepticism about the existence of the external world). We will also be discussing the relevance of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental idealism for his practical philosophy and for answering the questions of whether we have free will, whether God exists, and whether we can know that the soul is immortal.
Graduate/Undergraduate Courses
4233/5233 Problems in Aesthetics Ostaric

Ugliness, Disgust, and Nonsense: In this course we will be exploring the aesthetic categories of the ugly and disgust. We will do so by first exploring this topic through the history of aesthetics, by reading both empiricist and rationalist early modern philosophers (e.g. Hutchinson,
Shaftesbury, Baumgarten) and also Kant. We will then proceed to explore this topic through contemporary literature in aesthetics. Some of the philosophical issues that will be raised are the following. Can ugliness be a pure aesthetic category or is it a category intrinsically linked to our moral disapprovals? Is it a judgment or a feeling? Is it linked to some conception of imperfection? If it can be a pure aesthetic category, neither linked to our moral values or concepts of perfection, then is it linked to an improper employment of our laws of thought which leads to 'nonsense'?
4251/5251 Philosophy of Language Vision
We shall be going through a variety of subjects in the Philosophy of Language, including selections from the following topics: natural and conventional theories of meaning, linguistic rules, normativity, distinctions between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the theory of descriptions, semantic indeterminacy, descriptivist and direct theories of reference, innate language faculties, speech act theory, linguistic relativism, the relation of thought to language, semantic internalism and externalism, ontological commitment, and referential intentions. Our main text will be an anthology with works from twentieth/twenty-first century philosophers such as Russell, Quine, Kripke, and Davidson, among others. An anthology has yet to be chosen, but the one we choose should have a mixture of historical and contemporary authors. This may be supplemented by articles made available on Blackboard.
The plan to encourage as much class discussion of these issues, and as little straight lecture, as possible.
4271/5271 Nineteenth Century Philosophy Gjesdal
This class offers an overview of nineteenth-century European thought. We will start out with
Kant and the contemporary responses to his philosophy. From there on, we proceed through
German Idealism (Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling), romantic philosophy (Novalis and Schlegel), and existentialism (Kierkegaard). We will discuss Darwin's contribution, philosophy of science

(Comte and Dilthey), and political philosophy (including Mill and Marx). Finally, we will be reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud and see how their respective works challenge some of the most fundamental premises of Kant and idealist philosophy. The study of original, historical text will be complemented with critical, contemporary discussions of the ideas and arguments at stake. Combining a historical and a systematic approach, we will see how the legacy of the Nineteenth Century resonates in and lays the premises for contemporary philosophical discourse across the divisions of Analytic and Continental philosophy.
4277/5278 Continental Rationalism Chamberlain
Two fundamental intuitions unite the 17th century philosophers commonly known as the
Continental Rationalists: (i) there is an intelligible order to the universe and (ii) the human mind is capable of grasping this intelligible order, at least to some extent. This course will explore the work of four of the main philosophers in this tradition: René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche,
Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. Topics we will discuss include the metaphysics of substance, the nature of the mind, human knowledge, sensory perception, and the relation between mind and body.
Graduate Courses
5240 Special Topics Culture Margolis
Probably the central problem of philosophy concerns the relationship between physical nature and human culture uniquely manifested in the formation, capacities and form of life of the distinctive being we call person or self. My own conjecture is that persons are artefactual transforms of the members of the naturalized kind, homo sapiens, emergent under conjoint biological and cultural conditions, by way of the invention and mastery of true language and what such mastery makes possible. Any reasonable account of the uncultured human world requires an integrated analysis of the concepts of person, agency, language and speech, rationality, normativity, history and community at the very least. All of these are surprisingly difficult, often neglected notions; yet the differences and distinctive forms of unity between nature and culture involve these concepts precisely. A convenient way of approaching the usual scatter of the cultural world is to explore the formation of how the person affects our senses of the difference and possible unity of the physical and human sciences. The course will be

organized around these considerations and will combine lectures and a modified seminar approach, based on the class’s reading of several assigned texts.
5225 Metaethics Wolfsdorf
The Spring 2015 incarnation of Metaethics will focus on the semantics of evaluative language, in particular the meaning of "good" and predicates of personal taste such as "fun" and "tasty."
Central topics will include: context-sensitive expressions, gradability, polysemy, and genericity.
For questions or a list of representative readings, please contact the instructor.
8631 Contemporary Continental Philosophy Hammer
Martin Heidegger’s
Being and Time is a seminal text of twentieth century philosophy. Breaking with the Cartesian tradition, it proposes a radical new interpretation of the nature of human engagement and existence. Ultimately, Heidegger claims that his “existential analytic” is able to form the basis for raising the “question of Being.” After a brief overview of the essentials of
Edmund Husserl’s program for a pure transcendental phenomenology, which forms an important part of the background of this work, we will turn to Being and Time and study Division I and selected sections from Division II. In addition to interpreting the main text, we will consider some of the most influential commentaries, including Dreyfus, Haugeland, Wrathall, and
Carman.