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Graduate Courses Spring 2007
G83.1002
Advanced Introduction to Political Philosophy
Wednesday 4:15-6:15
AJ Julius
Syllabus
An introduction to theories of liberty, equality, and democracy and to the problem of justifying coercively imposed political and social institutions. Among other things we'll consider the claim that the values of liberty, equality, and democracy are best explained and their contents jointly determined by the requirement that institutions be acceptable to each person on whom they’re imposed.
G83.1175
Life and Death
Wednesday 2-4
John Richardson/William Ruddick
Syllabus
The course will examine philosophical issues that arise concerning the meaning and use of concept(s) of life. Readings will be from a range of sources, analytic, Continental, scientific, and literary.
We begin with biological life (distinctions between living and non-living entities; the “units” and “levels” of life). We proceed to certain medical issues about the beginning, end, and “quality of life” (conception, brain death, pain). We then take up the “biographical” notion of a life. (Does every organism have “a life” in the same sense? Is there a natural or typical structure to a life? Is the unity of a life a matter of degree, and what does it depend on? Is narration the best way to describe or understand a life?). Finally we turn to the value of life and lives. (Does all life have value, and by virtue of what? Does human life have absolute value, or is it legitimate to compare and rank the values of different lives?)
Students will write two papers, initially in drafts to be revised in the light of criticisms from other students and the instructors.
G83.2223
Epistemology: Meaning & the A Priori
Thursday 4-6
Stephen Schiffer
Syllabus
The two over-arching questions of the seminar are the two most fundamental questions about the a priori—namely, What is it for one to be a priori justified in believing a proposition? and What is it for one to be a priori justified in coming to believe a proposition in a given way (e.g. by using a rule of inference such as modus ponens to infer a proposition from a set of premises)? Meaning—in the broad sense that includes mental as well as linguistic content—comes in because much of the seminar will be concerned to determine exactly how claims about meaning are needed to answer the two over-arching questions.
The seminar has two main goals: first, to review the history of the a priori/a posteriori debate in a way that articulates the issues about the a priori and their relation to one another, and critically to discuss some of the leading attempts to resolve those issues; and second, to make significant headway towards answering the two over-arching questions.
Most of the reading for the seminar will be made available electronically (e.g. Boghossian & Peacocke’s New Essays on the A Priori (OUP 2000) is available on Oxford Scholarship Online), and the only two books so far ordered for the seminar are L. Bonjour, In Defense of Pure Reason (CUP 1998), and T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.), Conceivability and Possibility (OUP 2002), both available in paperback. Students taking the seminar for credit will have the option of doing two short papers or one longer paper, topics to be discussed with and approved by me.
I plan to make a detailed syllabus available by January.
G83.2226
Metaphysics: Realism and Truth
Monday 7-9
Alexis Burgess
Syllabus
The goal of this seminar will be to determine which characteristics of a given philosophical position entitle it to the honorific 'realist'. In particular, we will be interested to see whether the correct account of these characteristics makes essential appeal to the notion of truth; and if so, how different theories of the nature of truth affect our understanding of realism. Our treatment of
mind-independence will therefore be secondary to discussions of such topics as: Michael Devitt's non-semantic conception of realism, meta-ontology and the problem of negative existential statements, the apparent tension between deflationism and non-factualism, and the many faces of fictionalism. Note that we will not be reading certain canonical essays by Putnam and
Dummett, because they are almost impossible to cover briefly, and because I, personally, find internal realism and realism in Dummett's sense to be unpromising qua conceptions of realism in general. Indeed, as we will see, the best account of realism may reveal that it is less like a theory or thesis, and more like a philosophical stance.
G83.2285
Ethics: Selected Topics
Thursday 1:30-3:30
Peter Unger
Syllabus
Almost all well-to-do people do little, or nothing, over the course of their lifetime, to prevent the early deaths and great suffering of people in the poorest parts of the world. Is it wrong for a well-to-do person to behave like this - perhaps about as horribly wrong as committing negligent homicide, as with fatal drunken driving? The course will center on this question, though it will also involve us in many other moral questions. In about equal measure, this will be a course in both normative ethics and in applied ethics. (By contrast, little will be said about metaethics.)
G83.2295
Mind and Language Seminar: Epistemic Rationality
Click here for course website
Monday 5-6
Tuesday 4-7
Jim Pryor/Hartry Field
The Spring 2007 Research Seminar on Mind, Language, Etc will be conducted by Hartry Field and Jim
Pryor. The seminar will
address issues about epistemic rationality. Specifically, we'll be focusing
on:
1. Work that addresses the relationship between formal systems (logic,
probability theory) and epistemic rationality as it's been more
traditionally conceived.
2. The significance of higher-order epistemic evaluations (e.g.,
evidence concerning the strength of one's evidence, evidence that others
possess certain evidence, evidence concerning one's own rationality or
reliability), possibly in relation to the problem of rational disagreement.
Open meetings with seminar visitors will take place in the Seminar Room of
the Philosophy Department on Tuesdays from 4:00 to 7:00 pm; a preparation
session, restricted to students enrolled in the course, will meet on Monday
evenings. Papers to be discussed at each Tuesday meeting will be available
one week in advance, and will be distributed at the preceding Tuesday
meeting. Copies will also be available at the Philosophy Department: Room
503 in the Silver Center (100 Washington Square East). In addition,
visitors¹ papers will be available for downloading from the course website.
Weekly Schedule
Tuesday Jan 16. Intro by Hartry and Jim
Tuesday Jan 23. Adam Elga
Tuesday Jan 30. Brian Weatherson
Tuesday Feb 6. Mark Kaplan
Tuesday Feb 13. Frank Arntzenius
Tuesday Feb 20. Richard Feldman
Tuesday Feb 27. Jim Pryor
Tuesday Mar 6. David Christensen
Tuesday Mar 13. SPRING BREAK
Tuesday Mar 20. Thony Gillies
Tuesday Mar 27. Branden Fitelson
Tuesday Apr 3. BREAK FOR PACIFIC APA
Tuesday Apr 10. Scott Sturgeon
Tuesday Apr 17. Tom Kelly
Tuesday Apr 24. Jim Joyce
Tuesday May 1. (the day after the last day of classes) Alan Hájek
G83.2320-001
History of Philosophy - Plato
Wednesday 11-1
Matt Evans
Syllabus
My aim in this course will be to develop and defend an interpretation of Plato’s metaphysics of mind. I will be arguing that Plato’s own Platonism about practical and epistemic value is motivated primarily, if not entirely, by his conviction that naturalistic accounts of thinking, experiencing, and intending cannot succeed. Such accounts must fail, in his view, because they cannot accommodate the intuition that all of our attitudes—especially those of belief and desire—have correctness conditions that are not determined by any of their (or our) dispositional properties. As I hope to show, this interpretation of Plato’s project has important consequences for our understanding of his philosophy of language, his moral psychology, and his so-called “theory of forms.” Primary readings will be drawn from the Euthyphro, Gorgias, Meno, Phaedo, Republic, Timaeus, Cratylus, Phaedrus, Philebus, and Laws. Secondary readings will be drawn from commentators both ancient (e.g., Aristotle, Epicurus, Galen) and recent (e.g., Vlastos, Frede, Irwin). Proficiency in ancient Greek will not be required. Familiarity with ancient Greek philosophy will not be required. I intend the course to be of interest not only to historians of philosophy, but also to non-historians working in metaethics or the philosophy of mind.
G83.2320-002
History of Philosophy - Kant
Tuesday 11-1
Timothy Rosenkoetter
Syllabus
This course is an advanced introduction to Kant’s moral philosophy, which will also be of interest to those with previous knowledge of Kant and his practical project. We will begin by looking at some relevant sections from the Critique of Pure Reason. The core texts are the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Emphasis will be placed on the foundations Kant’s practical project, including his views on reason in general, practical reason in particular, free will, moral motivation, moral semantics, moral metaphysics, the relation of morality to happiness and desert, and the question of why a second branch of metaphysics beyond the metaphysics of nature is needed in the first place.
G83.3003
Topics in Epistemology
Friday 12-2
Chris Meacham
Syllabus
Topics in Bayesian Decision Theory
This class will examine various issues in Bayesian Decision Theory, with an eye to complementing the material presented in Michael Strevens’s class on Confirmation Theory. Likely topics include: evaluating attempts to characterize credence and utility in terms of behavior, evaluating attempts to justify expected utility maximization and probabilism using representation theorems, evaluating dutch book arguments, both for conditionalization and in general, looking at what chance-credence principles should be like, evaluating attempts to justify chance-credence principles, looking at attempts to justify statistical mechanical chances by using things like indifference principles, and looking at how to extend Bayesianism to cover de se beliefs (how to treat sleeping beauty-type puzzles).
Linguistics as Cognitive Science
Most weeks there will be a two hour lecture on Tuesday from 9-10:45, followed by a one hour discussion session on Thursday, from 9:30-10:30. Some weeks (to be announced in advance), the lecture will be on Thursday from 9-10:45 and the discussion on Tuesday from 9:30-10:45.
Silver 414
AS OF JAN 18 (FIRST THURSDAY OF CLASS) WE'LL MOVE TO MEYER 878
Professor Alec Marantz
Syllabus
This course examines the place of Linguistics within Cognitive Science from multiple perspectives. Foundational questions for a science of linguistics will be addressed both from within linguistics and from philosophy and psychology. Issues include the nature of the evidence for constructing grammars, the interpretation of grammatical rules as cognitive or neural operations, the significance of neo-behaviorist approaches to language and computational modeling for a cognitive theory of language, the connection between linguistic theory and genetics, and the importance of socio-cultural and historical variation for understanding the nature of language. Students will be expected to engage in debate over these issues bringing to the table their own background in one of the relevant disciplines as well what they learn from the assigned readings.
G83.3400
Thesis Research
Thursday 11-1
Kit Fine
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