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Graduate Courses Fall 2009

This course is for first year PhD students in the Philosophy Department only.

This course is intended to introduce students to some of the major positions and debates in ethical theory. It will be structured around a close reading of several important contemporary texts.

This course explores some of the most important issues of bioethics with a special emphasis on their relation to broader philosophical concepts and problems. Topics include autonomy, consent, and personal identity; research and the ethics of risk; the permissibility of ending life and abortion; reproductive choices, the non-identity problem, and genetic interventions; quality of life and disability; the allocation of life-saving resources, and the social consequences of emerging technologies and population policy.

We will look at a range of central questions in the philosophy of language as addressed by the following: Grice, Quine, Davidson, Kaplan, Lewis, and Stalnaker.

After general questions about goods and evils of living and dying, the course will focus on early stages of human life and lives from conception to late childhood. Specific topics include: the special value(s) of embryos, fetuses, neonates, and children; motives for conception and genetic screening for sex and disabilities; objections to embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and parthenogenesis; prenatal monitoring, experimentation, and risk; priorities in “maternal-fetal conflicts;” abortion, infant euthanasia, and adoption; anomalous aging, illness, and life expectancy; disparities in child and maternal mortality statistics; environmental obligations to existing and possible children, present and future generations; state and religious control of conception, pregnancy, birth, and children's lives. Short weekly commentaries and two essays with revisions. Open only to Bioethics MA students, as well as to PhD, MA, and Senior Major or Honor students in Philosophy.

The "high level", or "special" sciences include biology, psychology, economics, sociology—perhaps everything but fundamental physics. Questions we will ask in this seminar include the following:

1. Are there laws in the high level sciences? If so, need they be qualified by “ceteris paribus” hedges? What is the significance of such hedges?
2. What is the relationship between the high level sciences and fundamental physics?
3. What form does causality take in the high level sciences? How is it connected to scientific explanation in the various sciences?
4. To what extent are the models and theories of the high level sciences idealized? What is the function of idealization?
5. What is the role of explicitly statistical theories in the high level sciences? In particular, what work are physical probabilities doing in population genetics, in social science, in statistical mechanics?
6. Are there fundamental differences between the methods of the high level sciences and the methods of fundamental physics? Particular attention will be given to the nature of causal discovery in the various sciences.

The topic will be the relation between the morality of individual conduct and the morality of political institutions, with specific reference to the value of equality. Rawls defends a strongly egalitarian conception of justice for institutions, without requiring comparable egalitarianism in the choices of individuals living under those institutions. G. A. Cohen rejects this as an inadequate conception of justice. Others have defended or criticized the bifurcation of political from personal morality. Readings from Rawls, Cohen, and other recent writers.

First meeting: 9th September at NYU (5 Washington Place)

Topics will include: (i) conceptions of truth and reference—including the pros and cons of deflationism; (ii) conceptions of content, meaning, and understanding—including appraisals of referential/truth-theoretic conceptions and of use conceptions (Wittgenstein and beyond); and (iii) applications of these ideas to specific philosophical domains—including the foundations of epistemic justification, the meanings of sensation terms, and the nature of paradox.

The seminar is open to philosophy graduate students from the Inter-University Doctoral Consortium. Any others wishing to attend must obtain (in advance) the permission of the instructors.

Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the mind has periodically come under heavy attacks, the more recent ones resting on challenges to the reliability of Freud’s clinical accounts of psychoanalytic therapy, on the one hand; and on the revolution in the approach to the mind brought about by neurosciences, on the other hand. While these challenges will be kept in mind and discussed when needed, the working hypothesis of this seminar will be that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory offers a complex and subtle insight into the structures of mental activity which we still stand to learn from today. In particular, Freud’s causal/developmental account of the acquisition of what he calls “ich” (ego) and “über-ich” (super-ego) as well as his explaining both in terms of an internal structuring of “es” (id) might well offer important tools to those philosophers who in recent times have been in search of ways to “naturalize” Kant’s transcendental philosophy. There are interesting connections to be drawn as well as contrasts to be acknowledged between Freud’s developmental account of “ego” and Kant’s transcendental account of our capacity to think in the first person (“I think that p…” “I ought to do X”) and its role in epistemic justification and moral motivation.

We will start by setting up some of these connections, drawing on short selections from Kant’s theoretical and moral philosophy and on Freud’s “The ego and the id.” The bulk of the seminar will then be devoted to following the development of Freud’s structural view of the mind from his early work with the psychiatrist Josef Breuer to his mature essays on meta-psychology. Readings will include selections from Studies on Hysteria, Essay for a Scientific Psychology, The Interpretation of Dreams and Essays on Metapsychology, as well as essays in contemporary philosophy of mind and moral psychology by Jonathan Lear, Samuel Scheffler, David Velleman, and others.

Rene Descartes is often said to be the father of modern philosophy in large part because his treatments of skepticism and the concept of knowledge made epistemological concerns central to philosophy in a new way, and set the terms of the debate in mainstream epistemology ever since.

In this seminar we will examine some of the central themes, concepts, and problems in Descartes’s epistemology: (I) detachment from the senses and the method of doubt, (II) the Cogito, (III) metaphysical certainty and metaphysical doubt, (IV) clear and distinct perception and the problem of the criterion, (V) conceivability, possibility, and the “real distinction” between mind and body, and (VI) the Cartesian circle.

While our aim will be primarily to understand Descartes?s philosophy in its own right, we also will be attentive to the ways in which contemporary epistemology can shed light on what Descartes was up to—and to the ways in which Descartes’s insights may still be relevant today.

In the Aufbau, Carnap argued that all truths are definitionally entailed by a very limited class of truths. Most philosophers think that the project of the Aufbau is a failure and that nothing like it can succeed. We will investigate the prospects for an Aufbau-like project, centering around what I call the Scrutability Thesis: all truths are a priori entailed by a very limited class of truths. We will also investigate connections and applications to central questions in epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy. Topics that may be discussed along the way include: the analytic-synthetic distinction, the paradox of knowability, the a priori, reference magnets, metaontology, primitive concepts, conditional probability, verbal disputes, two-dimensional semantics, attitude ascriptions, the Fregean hierarchy, conceptual change, structuralism and Newman's problem, content internalism and externalism, Kripke's arguments against descriptivism, and epistemic possibility. A number of readings will be drawn from my book manuscripts Constructing the World and The Multiplicity of Meaning.

During the last fifty years, at least, mainstream academic philosophy (which has been, and still is, analytic philosophy) has sought to offer, almost without exception, very novel, philosophically interesting, and quite general, necessary truths—even while avoiding offering—even just for a bit of intellectual contemplation—contingent propositions that are very novel, philosophically interesting and quite general proposals. It is largely for that reason, it will be argued in the seminar, that analytic philosophy has offered, almost without exception, no philosophically interesting hypotheses, or thoughts, as to the general character of (actual) concrete reality—by contrast with much earlier, and much more speculative, philosophy. From that earlier philosophy, there's been made available—for at least our intellectual contemplation—such competing hypotheses, or doctrines, as Entity Materialism (Hobbes, as now most fruitfully taken), and Entity Dualism (Descartes, and Locke, too), and Entity Idealism (Berkeley) Each of these three quite general contingent claims presents an alternative (visionary) philosophy of (actual) concrete reality—even as each happily coherent and internally consistent claim logically conflicts with each of the others. By contrast, we get nothing comparable to that—or, perhaps better, next to nothing—with the philosophical offerings of (at least) the last half-century.

One aim of the course will be to search for some other reasons for the great discrepancy between the evidently substantial character of such much earlier philosophy and, on the other side, the inanity of, or the emptiness of, contemporary mainstream philosophy, as concerns the character of concrete reality. A larger and much more positive aim will be to formulate novel hypotheses, or proposals, that, though they pertain to (still) other aspects of concrete reality—beyond what’s in dispute with Materialism, Dualism, and Idealism—will be contingent propositions that are (at least very nearly) as general as, and as philosophically interesting as, those three mutually exclusive time-honored ideas.

To gain credit for the course, students will, in the first instance, write a short paper on a topic covered during the first two-thirds of the course, due when the course is just over two-thirds complete. If that short paper is very promising, in the professor’s view, then the student will be encouraged to enrich it, and to expand it, submitting the result, as his or her final paper for the course, in the course’s last session. If the paper is deemed not so promising, then the student will write another short paper, on a very different topic covered in the course, to be submitted in the last session. The professor is concerned that there not be students who receive an Incomplete for the course, and he will penalize students whose work is late—the later the work, the greater the penalty.

Each week on Thursday a legal theorist or moral or political philosopher presents a paper to the group, which consists of students, faculty from the Law School and other departments of NYU, and faculty from other universities in/or close to New York. The choice of subject is left to the paper’s author, within the general boundaries of the Colloquium’s subjects, and the discussions are therefore not connected by any structured theme for the term as a whole, though in past years certain central topics were canvassed in several weeks’ discussion. The Colloquium aims, not to pursue any particular subject, but to explore new work in considerable depth and so allow students to develop their own skill in theoretical analysis. Each week’s paper is distributed at least a week in advance, and participants are expected to have read it.

Students enrolled in the Colloquium meet separately with Professor Dworkin for an additional two-hour seminar on Wednesday. One hour is devoted to a review of the preceding Thursday’s Colloquium discussion, and one hour in preparation for the Colloquium of the following day. Students are asked to write short papers weekly, and each student is asked to make two or more oral presentations to the seminar during the term. Each student is asked to expand one of his/her weekly papers, or oral presentations, for a final term paper.

The list of colloquium speakers next year is:

Janos Kis, Richard Epstein, Ronald Dworkin, Peter Singer & Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, Michael Smith, David Enoch, Liam Murphy, Benjamin Zipursky, Lily Batchelder, Thomas Nagel, T. M. Scanlon, A. J. Julius, Jeremy Waldron.

Enrollment in the Colloquium requires permission of the instructors. Those interested in registering should submit a request to Professor Dworkin, via his assistant Lavinia Barbu: barbul@juris.law.nyu.edu.

This course will study the use of "dignity" (and related concepts like "degradation") in modern constitutional and human rights law, both in the U.S. and elsewhere and it will consider the historical and philosophical background to this concept. We will consider its relation to topics such as the treatment of detainees, torture, the death penalty, anti discrimination law, assisted suicide, and group rights. Among other topics, we will study the following: (1) the meaning of prohibitions against inhuman and degrading treatment and against outrages on personal dignity; (2) dignity as an ideal of personal conduct and bearing; (3) dignity as the ground of human rights; (4) the use of "dignity" in constitutional discourse; (5) the differences between its use in American and European jurisprudence; (6) human dignity as an egalitarian idea; (7) dignity in relation to anti-discrimination law; (8) group dignity; (9) the relation between human dignity and older notions of dignity that were connected with rank and status; (10) skepticism about the meaning of "dignity"; (11) Kantian notions of dignity; (12) the relation between dignity and respect for persons; (13) the use of dignity in Catholic and natural law thought and its relation to imago dei; and (14) the importance of dignity as a value underpinning the rule of law.

The seminar will deal with obligations to others in Jewish Law, such as charity, saving life and different domains of care for others. We will examine biblical, Talmudic and later materials in Jewish Law, that deal with the following questions: Who is the poor and how does Jewish law define needs and deprivation, and what is the hierarchy of needs? How does Jewish law deal with the risk of humiliation which is inherent in the act of accepting help? What are the limits of sacrificing for others? Do we give what is ours, or does the obligation of giving assumes limitations on ownership? The seminar will examine communal obligations to others as well, such as taxation and organized distribution in the Talmud and Respona literature. The examintation of these questions will be done as well from a comparative perspective of approaches to theses problems in ethics, political theory and law.

Many thinkers have been pessimistic about the political consequences of secularization in Europe. In this course we will critically examine some of their arguments. We will begin with Max Weber’s classic account of secularization and explore the impact that he believes secularism must have on political authority and legitimacy. For several weeks we will engage in a close reading of Charles Taylor’s recent work, A Secular Age, in order to explore the basis of his own form of pessimism. And we will examine the arguments made by Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Jürgen Habermas, and others, in support of the view that current European political values of a liberal democratic nature are necessarily dependent on a Judaeo-Christian worldview.

Required books:

• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Parsons, Routledge, 2001; ISBN-10: 041525406X ISBN-13: 978-0415254069
• Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gerth and Mills, Oxford University Press, 1958; ISBN-10: 0195004620 ISBN-13: 978-0195004625
• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007; ISBN-10: 0674026764 ISBN-13: 978-0674026766