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Graduate Courses Fall 2005
G83.1000
Proseminar
Roger White/James Pryor
Monday 11-2
The main aim of this course is to provide new graduate students in the department with an opportunity to work on the skills involved in reading, writing and discussing philosophy. The readings will cover a range of major themes in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. All and only first-year graduate students will take this course.
G83.1101
Advanced Introduction to Epistemology
Stephen Schiffer
Monday 4-6
We’ll begin with Descartes’ skeptical argument to show that it’s impossible to have any justified beliefs about the external world. We’ll then critically assess the various attempts to show that the argument is unsound, and doing this will constitute a critical survey of the leading accounts of how our perceptual and other empirical beliefs might be justified. Then we’ll look at the way in which the skeptical argument invites different responses when construed as an argument to show that we can’t know anything about the external world. Among the things to be considered here are various old and new accounts of what it is to know something, and how those accounts bear on the question of skepticism. After that we’ll consider the relation of the Cartesian argument to other skeptical arguments—notably, induction, other minds, and the past—and the prospects for knowledge and justified belief if there isn’t anything determinately wrong with the Cartesian or other skeptical arguments. The last quarter of the seminar will focus on the nature and possibility of a priori justification and knowledge. The work for the course will be two short papers, one due around the middle of the semester, the other a week before the semester’s grades are due, with an option for one longer paper for non-first-year students.
G83.1210
20th Century Continental Philosophy: Heidegger
John Richardson
Thursday 1:30-3:30
The course will be divided between Being and Time, and a selection of Heidegger’s later writings. We’ll spend the first 8 weeks or so on Being and Time, acquiring its new vocabulary and examining its pragmatic, existential, and temporal accounts of human being. We’ll spend the last 6 weeks on a variety of Heidegger’s later essays, and perhaps also on parts of his ambitious ‘secret’ book, the Beiträge (current English translation: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)). Main topics regarding the later writings will be Heidegger’s accounts of truth, language, and (of course) being.
G83.2226
Metaphysics
Peter Unger
Wednesday 2-4
The course will be organized around Professor Unger's attempt to articulate a metaphysics of concrete reality that's analytically adequate for, but that's also speculatively bold enough to, make some progress with the problems that get most first drawn into philosophy, and that always comprise the subject's heart: problems of appearance and reality, problems of personal identity, problems of mind and body, problems of free will, and more. Over a period of eight years - until December of 2004 - this attempt received very many improving formulations, culminating in All the Power in the World, a book in Press at the OUP since the very beginning of 2005. A bit more than half of this work is posted on Unger’s NYU Webpage. Absolutely all of All the Power will be distributed to the class, for discussion during the course of the Semester. The metaphysical tome draws heavily on, and it's a response to, several central figures of Modern Philosophy: Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Several 20th century figures also influence the work, notably Bertrand Russell, David Lewis, C.B. Martin, Roderick Chisholm, Peter van Inwagen, and David Armstrong. As well as reading the ten chapters of All the Power, we'll read collateral selections from several of these influential thinkers, and from several other thinkers, much of which we’ll also discuss during the course of the term.
G83.2227
Ancient Philosophy of Mind
Matt Evans
Monday 2-4
The ancient Greeks were the first to raise and struggle with many of the central questions in the philosophy of mind. Our goal will be to understand and evaluate their attempts to answer these questions. We will begin with the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides, and then work through the views of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Topics of special interest will be: the relation between the mental and the physical; mental causation; the problem of intentionality and mental content; mental conflict and motivated irrationality; and the nature of sensation, perception, belief, and desire.
G83.3004
Topics in Metaphysics: Truth (website username "liar," password announced in class)
Hartry Field
Tuesday 3-5
The seminar will deal with various general issues about truth, such as: the roles that the notion of truth serves; the role of
propositions in a theory of truth; the status of the equivalence between "‘p' is true" and "p" (and/or between "it is true
that p" and "p"); the role of compositionality principles in a theory of truth; the role of truth or truth conditions in a theory of
meaning, and in explanation of behavior, successfulness of action, etc.; "immanent" v. "transcendent" conceptions of truth;
the role of truth in an account of logic; truth and indeterminacy; whether normative claims can be straightforwardly true; whether
(and to what extent) truth or determinate truth in mathematics outruns provability.
G83.3006
Advanced Seminar in Percepts and Concepts
Block/Strevens
Wednesday 4:30-6:30
This course is about percepts and concepts, and the differences between them. It will cover phenomenal concepts, recognitional concepts, empiricist accounts of consciousness, evolutionary approaches, animal cognition, and ideas drawn from the psychological literature on concepts.
G83.3004-002
Topics in Metaphysics
Crispin Wright
Monday 7-9
Wednesday 7-9
'Relativism' still commonly carries the connotation of a global and probably incoherent subjectivist stance (Protagoreanism). However recent philosophy has seen a substantial increase in sophisticated local relativistic proposals about a number of problematical issues, including not only the perennial war zones of value and taste but the nature of knowledge and epistemic possibility, truth about past and future, and the nature of the boundary between a vague expression and its complement. Broadly speaking, these proposals are designed to effect no-fault reconciliations of conflicting claims, but they have also been proposed to explain patterns in our apparent corrections and withdrawals of assertions about the relevant subject matters. Contextualism is broadly the thesis of the relativity of semantic content to context in ways exceeding what can be accounted for by the presence of indexicals and demonstratives. A famous instance of contextualism, developed by writers such as DeRose and Cohen, argues that the content of knowledge attributions is relative to the standards and priorities of the attributor, so that Moore and a Sceptic talk past each other when they respectively affirm and deny the knowledge of an ordinary thinker that he has hands. A quite different view to many of the same purposes, argued by MacFarlane, is that it is the truth, rather than the content of knowledge claims that is so relative—that knowledge is in the eye of the attributor, so to speak. And both these views stand opposed to the so-called Subject-Sensitive Invariantism of writers such as Stanley and Hawthorne, who argue that the intuitions which drive them are better explained by locating the relativity they seem to involve as pertaining to the subject of the knowledge claim in question, rather than the attributor.
The course will review these issues and disputes in relation to the subject matters noted above, and will attempt to develop a road-map of the differing possible positions, the data which allegedly motivate them, and the principal contributions to the recent literature. An overarching concern will be with the intelligibility of even local relativisms about truth and with whether there are any data that distinctively call for them, in contrast to their contextualist and invariantist rivals, or indeed call for any of these views.
The Seminar will meet for seven sessions in each of the semesters, Mondays and Wednesdays 7-9pm, starting Monday September 12 and finishing Monday October 3; then starting again on Wednesday January 18 and finishing Wednesday February 8. Course requirement: one term paper, to be submitted by Monday May 1.
G83.3007
Philosophy of Action
David Velleman
Tuesday 12-2
We will read major works in 20th-century philosophy of action, including: G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention; selections from Donald Davidson's Essays on Actions and Events; and selections from Harry Frankfurt's The Importance of What We Care About. Further readings will be determined by the interests of the group. For some possibilities, see the bibliography at http://www.nyu.edu/classes/velleman/philosophy_of_action/.
Students will write three 5-8 page papers during the course of the semester.
G83.3011
Philosophy of Physics: Probability and Physics
Jill North
Thursday 3:30-5:30
Many of our best physical theories posit probabilities: they assign probabilities to possible future states of a system given the current state. They then make predictions and give explanations of events by referring to these probabilities. We will consider the question: What are physical probabilities? Can we construe them as objective features of the world? If so, what features of the world are they? Are they fundamental, or should they be derived from something else? And what if the dynamics are deterministic, as in classical statistical mechanics and Bohmian quantum mechanics: can we construe the probabilities of these theories as objective? That is, can there be objective chances other than 0 or 1 in a deterministic world? Finally, what is the connection between the chances given by physics and our degrees of belief? We will begin with a brief survey of the mathematics and philosophy of probability. During the semester, we will review the way in which probabilities appear in classical statistical mechanics, different theories of quantum mechanics, and quantum statistical mechanics, as questions about the probabilities of these theories come up.
G83.3400
Thesis Seminar
Paul Horwich
Thursday 7-9
G83.3302
L06.3517
Colloquium in Law, Philosophy and Political Theory
Thomas Nagel/Ronald Dworkin
Thursday 4-7
Wednesday 2-4 (extra session for students only)
The colloquium will discuss work in progress by a different person each week. The speakers scheduled for the term are:
Seana Shiffrin, UCLA
William Talbott, University of Washington
Kathleen Sullivan, Stanford
Charles Larmore, University of Chicago
Thomas Nagel, NYU
Ronald Dworkin, NYU
Benedict Kingsbury, NYU
Tommie Shelby, Harvard
Elizabeth Harman, NYU
David Dyzenhaus, Toronto
Liam Murphy, NYU
Mattias Kumm, NYU
Stephen Macedo, Princeton
Each week's paper is updated on the Colloquium site (http://www.law.nyu.edu/clppt/program2005/description.html) at least a week in advance, and participants are expected to have read it.
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