DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

Winter 2021 Class Schedule

Winter 2021 class Schedule

Winter 2021 course descriptions

Courses Primarily for Undergraduate Students

PHIL 109-20: First-Year Seminar: "Propaganda"

Democracy works when people are able to make conscientious informed decisions about the kind of society they want to live in. Thinkers from antiquity to the present have been concerned with the various ways that this ability can be undermined by propaganda, both in purported democracies and in explicitly authoritarian regimes. On the other hand, many radical thinkers have suggested that propaganda isn't always bad, and is perhaps a necessary component of liberatory social and political movements. In this course, we will be asking three central questions: What is propaganda? How does propaganda function in the world today? and finally, how can a just society deal with propaganda's negative effects/

PHIL 109-21: First-Year Seminar: "Plato's Republic"

PHIL 110: Introduction to Philosophy

In this course, we will be exploring several traditional topics within philosophy. These include knowledge and reality, free will, the existence of God, personal identity, ethics, and social issues, and the (in)significance of death.

PHIL 220: Introduction to Critical Theory

In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, paying particular attention paid to methods they devise and deploy in their treatment of moral and religious phenomena. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings. 

PHIL 250: Logic II

This second course in logic explores ways to extend, reduce, and think about classical logic to meet various philosophical challenges. Some questions to be addressed are: are there minimal conditions for the acceptability of a logical system? Can we formulate logics suited to vagueness? Or an anti-realist metaphysics? Or talk of necessity and possibility? Or talk of things true "for all properties"? To address these we will examine: the notions of soundness and completeness, many-valued logics, intuitionistic logic, modal logic, and second-order logic. 

PHIL 254: Introduction to the Philosophy of Natural Science

The course will introduce students to deep philosophical issues raised by modern natural science of metaphysical and epistemological nature. From a reflection on methodological questions, it will approach the question of realism. We will be guided by nested "what does it take"-questions. For example: What does it take for a system of sentences to count as a good scientific theory? What does it take for a scientific theory to be testable by observational and experimental data? What does it take for certain series of experiences to count as data or observations, or evidence? What does it take for a given theory to be better supported by the available evidence than its competitors? What does it take for a given theory to yield an understanding of known phenomena in an area of knowledge? What does it take for such an explanatory scientific theory to be credited with reference to underlying structures of reality? We will begin with a discussion of scientific norms that allow rejecting theories as pseudoscientific, and to resist science-denialism. We will then elaborate these norms by looking back at the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17 th century and the treatment of certain problems in the contemporary literature, like the problem of induction, the problem of the underdetermination of theory choice by the available data, the problem of rationality and conceptual change, and (perhaps) the problem of realism.

PHIL 261: Introduction to Political Philosophy

An introduction to some of the core problems of political philosophy through a study of major historical and contemporary figures. Topics to be discussed include: the sources and limits of legitimate political authority; the meaning of central political values like liberty, equality, and solidarity; and the sources of political stability in a multicultural society. 

PHIL 269: Bioethics

This course is an analysis of ethical and political issues related to health and health care. Topics to be considered include human research, abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, and public health ethics. We will devote special attention to ethical issues arising due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

PHIL 273-2: Brady Scholars Program: The Moral Life

 What does morality require of us? Does acting morally amount to consistently bringing about the best consequences that we can? Or are there other important considerations that we should take into account when thinking about how to act well? When we are trying to figure out how to act, what questions should we be asking ourselves? Drawing on both classic and contemporary readings in philosophy, as well as our own experiences, we will ask what it means to live a moral life in different spheres and situations. Do we have, or can we justify, special obligations to our friends and family? Do our professional and other roles shape what we have reason to do? How do we understand our obligations towards strangers? Is there some unified way to understand the reasons that should guide us in all of these spheres, or do they operate independently?

PHIL 310: Studies in Ancient Philosophy: "Pleasure and the Good Life"

This class focuses on developing skills that are central to humanities classes. These include: skills in reading a text closely and critically, skills in writing clearly and in constructing a well-defended argument, and skills in productive group discussion. And since this tutorial is designed to be a course in the history of philosophy, there will be both historical and philosophical objectives.

Historical objectives: Plato and Aristotle’s texts are often hard to read and interpret. The style, organization, and context of production of these texts are quite different from contemporary readings. Our goals as historians will be to read these texts closely and interpret them charitably, taking into account the historical context in which they were produced, and to understand what Plato and Aristotle are saying, why they are saying these things, and who their interlocutors are.

Philosophical objectives: Both Plato and Aristotle make sophisticated distinctions, analyze concepts, offer arguments and counter-arguments, present evidence, and attempt to refute their opponent’s views. Our goals as philosophers will be to discover the main problems and questions that occupied philosophers in this period in the domains of value theory, psychology, and ethics. We will learn to identify, analyze, map, and reconstruct the arguments and views advanced in these texts, with a view to understanding these author’s positions, and their motivations for proposing them. Finally, we will learn to assess these proposals and arguments, and evaluate whether they are plausible and coherent.

By the end of this class, you will have developed and refined the following general skills: (i) how to read difficult philosophical material; (ii) how to identify and reconstruct arguments; and (iii) how to produce and clearly articulate your own arguments, both in writing and orally in class.

PHIL 313-1: Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: The Analytic

This course provides a thorough reading of the conception of empirical knowledge laid out in the first part of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (the Analytic). The seminar will also relate Kant's arguments to issues in more recent philosophical debates. Kant qualified his philosophy as "transcendental idealism and empirical realism". According to Kant, it evades the choice between saying that we must have an unconceptualized access to reality in itself in order to have factual knowledge on the one hand, and saying that the reality our factual knowledge represents is determined by our concepts (so that it is hard to say in what way reality is a mind-independent constraint on belief). Kant suggests that this is a non-issue if there is only one universal set of concepts constitutive of all (genuinely fact-enabling) human experience. But the course of scientific progress since reveals this as a big (and unfulfilled) IF: in light of the diversity of experience and of the sciences, it is not easy to insist that there is only one set of forms of all possible objects of experience, one set of categories to form judgments, one set of principles to form natural laws. But the problem confronted in Kant's epistemological analysis persists --for each of the variegated forms. Can Kant's conception of experience and empirical knowledge still help us understand how we can claim to know mind-independent reality despite the shaping of our knowledge by our cognitive apparatus? Also, contemporary philosophy of mind centers on the questions of consciousness and of the relation between mind and reality. E.g.: how can a world-independent mind cognitively access or refer to a mind-independent reality (as opposed to either only accessing it as its own construct or merely supposing that the contents of the mind represent non-mental reality)? Kant's account of empirical knowledge criticizes all attempts at articulating a special source for self-knowledge by saying that the contentfulness of inner representations presupposes experience with outer reality while self-consciousness is nothing but awareness of a unified cognitive agency. But Kant also dismisses all attempts at knowledge of reality in itself as forgetting the constitutive influence of cognitive structures on such knowledge, which have their origin in the self. He thus argues that much of the problems of mind and reality depend on mistaken conceptions of both: reality as such and a directly present foundational 'inner' self, he demonstrates, can't be objects of knowledge at all (=are non-objects). But does this dissolve the problems (as Kant thought) or rather make them cognitively insolvable (as many of Kant's critics thought: he ends up saying, they thought, that reality is nothing but the construct of our representations, and thus denying mind-independent reality as a fiction)?

PHIL 315: Studies in French Philosophy

This course offers an overview of the work of one of the most influential late-twentieth-century French philosophers, Michel Foucault. Focusing on his studies of madness, sex, the medical gaze, prisons and other disciplinary institutions, the search for truth, knowledge, and liberation, students will gain an understanding of Foucault's most important concepts - concepts that over the last four decades have become central categories of inquiry and critique in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. These include archaeology, discipline, biopolitics, power-knowledge, resistance, governmentality, and genealogy. The course is reading intensive. In addition to weekly excerpts, you should plan to read two of Foucault's major texts throughout the quarter.

PHIL 318: Studies in Contemporary Philosophy: "Epistemic Injustice"

 In this course, we will explore how social oppression bears on knowledge: who has it, who can claim it, how we respond to such claims, and how this in turn affects subsequent social relations between (groups of) people. We will focus on this through the lens of the notion of epistemic injustice, as proposed by Miranda Fricker and as subsequently developed by Jose Medina.

PHIL 353: Philosophy of Language: "Language in Context"

 In this course, we will focus on philosophical questions about the way that meaning is shaped by the context in which language is used. Things we may touch on include indexicality, the semantics/ pragmatics distinction, implicature, relevance, and the nature of context itself.

PHIL 373-2: Brady Scholars Program: The Civically Engaged Life

This is the second of a two-quarter sequence for 4th year Brady Scholars.

Courses Primarily for Graduate Students

PHIL 410/LAWSTUDY 511: Special Topics in Philosophy: "Legal Epistemology"

In this course, we will examine some of the central issues that arise in evaluating the probative force of evidence in criminal law, especially when it involves an assessment of the credibility of participants in judicial proceedings. Topics to be discussed include the nature of legal proof, character evidence, confession evidence, eyewitness testimony, the beyond a reasonable doubt standard, alternative approaches to legal evidence and proof, punishment, plea deals, and gender and race. The course will be run as a seminar.

PHIL 423: Studies in Contemporary Philosophy: "Habermas' Theory of Communicative Rationality"

 In this seminar, we will examine Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality. This theory aims to explain the possibility of providing rational answers not only to empirical questions of fact but also to moral and political questions. It articulates a broad notion of rationality that goes beyond the model of instrumental rationality, which is predominant in the social sciences. This broader notion of rationality provides the basis for a critical theory of contemporary societies. Given this ambitious goal, the scope of this theory reaches into almost all philosophical fields: from moral and political theory to philosophy of language, philosophy of law, etc. In the seminar, we will work out the philosophical core of the theory as well as its main consequences in other fields. 

PHIL 401-2: 1st Year Proseminar: "The Metaphysical Theory of Art: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger"

In this course, we will study three great proponents of the metaphysical theory of art in the German philosophical tradition. The first of these is Arthur Schopenhauer, who viewed aesthetic experience as a release from empirical, individuated identity. The second is Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his earlier writings characterized art as the true metaphysical activity of man, and as offering the only true justification of existence, but who eventually rejected the philosophical presuppositions of this view. And the last is Martin Heidegger, who saw art as the becoming and happening of truth. The focus of the class will be on the complicated relationship between art and metaphysical truth.

PHIL 402-2: Second Year Proseminar: "Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory"

In this class we will consider the uses, and possible abuses, of ideal theory in moral and political philosophy. When we do ideal theory we approach a normatively significant question by first idealizing along some dimension. We assume for the sake of theory construction, eg, that everyone will operate according to the principles that a view recommends, or that we are not in a situation of massive scarcity, or that there are no significant historical injustices for which we need to correct. Proponents of ideal theory do not believe that it answers the normatively significant questions that we have about our non-ideal circumstances. But they do generally believe that ideal theory makes a necessary contribution to our understanding of these issues. We will consider examples of approaches to particular moral and political questions that treat ideal theory as prior to non-ideal theory, methodological debates about the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory, and related issues about how we should address pressing normative questions in the real, highly non-ideal, world. We will read, among others, John Rawls, Liam Murphy, Tamar Schapiro, Elizabeth Anderson and Charles Mills.