Graduate

Courses: Spring 2005

2041/37966 Studies in Aristotle: The "Poetics"

Cullyer | Wednesday 2:00-4:30

Cross-listed with Classics 2314/37961 and HPS 2673/37974

Aristotle's "Poetics" is a dense and controversial work. In this seminar, through careful reading of the text and of relevant secondary criticism we will investigate some of the most important philosophical issues raised by this work. How does Aristotle respond to and critique the charges made by Plato's Socrates, namely that there is no true art of poetic composition, and that some poetry, especially tragedy, is ethically corrupting? Why is mimesis (representation or imitation) so fundamental to human nature? Is the function of tragedy, and poetry in general, to shape our capacity to reason practically and to regulate our emotions? How does Aristotle go about defining tragedy and how successful is his definition? In seminar we will be considering Aristotle's text in English, but there will be an additional Greek reading group. This is the second semester of a year long sequence of courses on Greek tragedy and Aristotle's "Poetics". However, completion of the Fall semester course on Greek tragedy is not a prerequisite for this seminar. CLASS 2314/PHIL 2041/HPS 2673 is expected to have a total enrollment of 10.

2070/44950 Ancient Philosophy

Moss | Monday 10:00-12:30

Cross-listed with Classics 2301/41508

A close reading of the central books of Plato's Republic: the distinction between Forms and the ordinary world, and the similes of the Sun, Line and Cave. We will investigate the ontology laid out in these passages, and the corresponding distinctions between cognitive capacities. What does it mean that the ordinary world is 'less real' than the world of Forms? That it is a world of 'becoming, not being?' That ordinary things or qualities are copies, shadows, or images of Forms, or 'participate' in them? That the objects of knowledge are distinct from those of belief? We will also ask how Plato's metaphysical and epistemological distinctions map onto his division of the soul, and thereby investigate their ethical significance. Readings: Republic V-VII and excerpts from Republic X, the Phaedo, Symposium and Parmenides, supplemented by secondary literature (e.g. Allen, Fine, Frede, Ross, Reeve, White, Vlastos). Students will give in-class presentations as preparation for writing papers. Prerequisites: graduate status and some familiarity with Plato's Republic.

2171/44955 Kantian Ethics

Rescher | Wednesday 9:30-12:00

The primary aim of this seminar will be to examine the basic structure of Kant's moral philosophy as it is expounded in three central texts: the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, and the Doctrine of Virtue (the second part of the Metaphysics of Morals). Special attention will be devoted to the concepts of obligation, law, will, practical reason, autonomy (or freedom), and virtue. This course is intended for graduate students in the philosophy department. Other students need the permission of the instructor.

2225/44963 Quine

Massey | Friday 9:30-12:00

Willard van Orman Quine sits astride 20th century philosophy as a colossus. His views about definition, singular terms, meaning, synonymy, existence, identity, quantification, ontology, simplicity, translation, empirical meaning, logic, modality, theories, truth, naturalization of epistemology, and ontological relativity shaped philosophical reflection in the 2nd half of the 20th century and remain enormously influential. In this seminar, the student participants and I will take a comprehensive -- but also a deep -- look, at Quine's major writings on the foregoing topics. Students will be expected to make seminar reports and to write a substantial paper on a topic agreed upon with me. I've asked student participants to buy five of Quine's books, all available new as inexpensive paperbacks and even more inexpensively as used books, namely: From a Logical Point of View The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays Ontological Relativity and Other Essays Theories and Things From Stimulus to Science We'll look at some writings not found in the above books, e.g., "Chapter Two" of Word and Object, but I'll make a copy of such materials available to students who do not own them. (I'm working on the Quine entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, so I may make minor changes to this description as the Spring Term approaches.) This course is intended for graduate students in the philosophy department. Other students need the permission of the instructor.

2230/44968 Marx

Thompson | Wednesday 2:00-4:30

Description available from department at a later time.

2300/44973 Ethics (Core)

Setiya | Thursday 2:00-4:30

This course will be a survey of core issues in philosophical ethics, under three headings: MORAL THEORY (act- and rule-utilitarianism, agent-relativity, Kantian constructivism, contractualism and anti-theory), PRACTICAL REASON (internal and external reasons, instrumentalism, rationalism and amoralism) and META-ETHICS (realism, anti-realism, and ethical naturalism). This course is intended for graduate students in the philosophy department. Other students need the permission of the instructor. Students will be expected to keep up with the required reading.

2335/44978 Topics in Contemporary Philosophy

Gupta | Tuesday 10:30-1:00

Course topic: Empiricism and Experience. Empiricism is the view that our knowledge is founded on experience. More specifically, it is the view that the rationality of our conception of the world issues from experience. The seminar will focus on the question what precisely is the contribution of experience to knowledge. In other words, what is the given in experience? Philosophical literature provides several accounts of the given. We shall discuss the principal accounts and the theories of knowledge they yield. Towards the end of the seminar, I will try out a view about experience that I have been developing over the past few years. According to this view, experience makes a rational contribution to knowledge, but it does not (directly) inform us about the world. That is, the given is not propositional in form. I am led to this view by some logical work on interdependent concepts. My hope is that by abandoning the propositional given we shall gain a thicker conception of the contribution of experience, one that allows us to see the rationality of our commonsense picture of the world as founded on experience. I expect the readings for the seminar will include works by Berkeley, Hume, Russell, Broad, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, McDowell, A. D. Smith, and others. This course is intended for graduate students in the philosophy department. Other students need the permission of the instructor.

2421/44984 Topics in Philosophy of Language

Brandom | Tuesday 2:00-4:30

This is a research seminar in the philosophy of language. The course examines the idea of pragmatic metalanguages: metalanguages in which it is possible to specify the use of some other vocabulary. Of particular interest is the case where an expressively weaker vocabulary is pragmatically sufficient to specify the use of an expressively stronger vocabulary. Some of the vocabularies to be considered include: indexical/non-indexical, modal/non-modal, normative/non-normative, intentional/non-intentional, logical/non-logical, observational/theoretical. A new meta-theoretic apparatus will be presented to discuss the relations between such vocabularies, and it will be applied to these cases and others. The material presented will be re-worked to form the basis of my 2006 Locke Lectures at Oxford. This is a first time through this new material. Some previous study of philosophy of mind/language an advantage.

2480/44989 Metaphysics

Dorr | Monday 2:00-4:30

This seminar will be concerned with questions about the nature of necessity and possibility, in their different varieties. We will primarily be aiming to make progress with the questions whether some of these modal notions are "primitive", and if not, how they might be explained in nonmodal terms. But many other questions will arise along the way, including questions about the notions of analyticity, logical truth, existence, essence and ontological dependence.

2500/17099 Advanced Logic (Core)

Gupta | Thursday 10:30-1:00

Cross-listed with ISSP 2470

This course introduces students to some of the fundamental results of classical propositional and first-order logics: Deduction Theorems, Soundness and Completeness Theorems, and Compactness Theorems. If we have time, we shall take a brief look at Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. Recommended text: Introduction to Mathematical Logic (fourth edition) by Elliott Mendelson. Prerequisites. P1500 or equivalent; that is, familiarity with the notation and proof techniques of classical first-order logic. Philosophy graduate students must get permission from graduate secretary in the philosophy department. All other students must see the professor.

2625/44991 Recent Topics in Philosophy of Science: Topics in Early Modern Philosophy

Wilson | Tuesday 7:00-9:30

Cross-listed with HPS 2622/39456

This seminar will survey a range of topics connected with the constitution of matter, especially insofar as it is claimed to be distributed as a continuous, flexible mass. We shall begin with a brief look at several Nineteenth Century views (those of Pierre Duhem, inter alia) for orientation, because some of the key issues are expressed quite clearly there and then we will devote several weeks to Descartes, Newton and Leibniz (to the degree we can manage). In the second half of the course we shall read Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Science in conjunction with an unpublished manuscript of Michael Friedman's called Kant's Construction of Nature. In this regard, I am a complete novice, but I believe I can fill in the scientific background to Friedman's discussion fairly ably. No technical background will be required or assumed, but I hope we will gain a better appreciation of important issues lying along the boundary between physics and philosophy that are not always properly understood.

2626/44996 Topics in Philosophy of Physics

Belot | Monday 5:00-7:30

Cross-listed with HPS 2626/39451

The twin themes of this course will be symmetries of physical laws and the representation of time in physics. We'll spend some time discussing a manuscript that I am preparing on these topics and some time discussing classic papers. (This will be a research seminar.) This course is intended for graduate students in the philosophy and history and philosophy of science departments. Other students need the permission of the instructor.

2645/45009 Topics in Philosophy of Psychology

Machery | Friday 9:30-12:00

Cross-listed with HPS 2645/47798

This seminar will discuss recent topics in philosophy of psychology, with a special focus on concepts. We will focus on the most important issues in the current philosophy of concepts: concept composition, neo-empiricism, concept nativism, animal concepts etc. We will also read some of the main articles that have been written in the psychology of concepts since the 70's and we will survey the main developments in this field.

2681/45004 Realism

Ruetsche/Earman |Thursday 6:00-8:30

Cross-listed with HPS 2669/39430

The archetypal scientific realist believes in the literal truth of our best scientific theories. Some anti-realists (e.g. instrumentalists) contend that she thereby misconstrues the nature of the content of scientific claims; other anti-realists (e.g. van Fraassen) contend that she thereby overestimates their justification. Thus issues of scientific realism engage the most fundamental questions about the nature of scientific theories and their justification. In this course, we will consider the classic arguments for and against realism (e.g. the 'miracles argument,' underdetermination of theory by observational evidence, Putnam's model-theoretic argument, the pessimistic metainduction), as well as several relatively new-fangled positions in and on the realism debate (e.g. structural realism, the Natural Ontological Attitude). We will discuss the observational/theoretical distinction, the (spurious?) contrast between the 'semantic' and the 'syntactic' views of theories, and varieties of empirical equivalence. Throughout we will try to keep track of the extent to which maneuvers typically undertaken in high-level scientific realism debates, debates which abstract away from the details of individual theories, can be implemented with respect to particular scientific theories