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Graduate Courses Spring 2009
G83.1000
Pro-Seminar
Tuesday 12-3
Jim Pryor/Michael Strevens
This course is required for, and limited to, first-year Ph.D. students in philosophy. Its main aim is to provide them with an opportunity to develop and hone the skills involved in reading, writing and discussing philosophy at a high level. The readings for the spring semester will be primarily in ethics and the history of philosophy.
G83.1006
Advanced Introduction to Environmental Ethics
Monday 4-6
Lori Gruen
The first part of the course will situate theoretical developments in practical ethics broadly, and in environmental ethics specifically. The course will then build on the theoretical materials by examining a series of cases including ethics and agriculture, corporate responsibility and environmental injustice, and the environmental health consequences of war.
G83.1177
Philosophy of Science: Scientific Realism
Wednesday 11-1
Laura Franklin-Hall
After a brief historical introduction, this course will survey the contemporary debate surrounding scientific realism. While there is no uncontroversial statement of the realist position, the debate is broadly about the proper stance to take towards mature scientific theories and the unobservable entities that they purport to describe. Why should we take scientific theories to be true, or nearly true? Why should we believe that all the entities posited by our best theories are real? Why not take such theories to be mere instruments for the systemization and prediction of observable phenomena? Or why not just suspend judgment as to the truth of the assertions that theories make about invisible entities and believe only that theories are empirically adequate?
After surveying influential papers on scientific realism that address these questions (by van Fraasen, Boyd, Putnam, Laudan, Arthur Fine, Worrall, and others), we will consider two local debates about the status of theoretical posits in biology and the historical sciences (e.g., geology and paleontology).
Although it is not officially labeled as such, this course will be offered at the level of an Advanced Introduction rather than as a highly specialized research seminar. The bulk of the semester will be spent getting acquainted, in broadly chronological order, with major positions and arguments. The last third of the class will be spent reading two recent books related to scientific realism, Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Kyle Stanford 2006) and Making Prehistory: Historical Science and the Scientific Realism Debate (Derek Turner 2007).
G83.1181
Philosophy of Mathematics
Thursday 1:30-3:30
Hartry Field
The topic of "mathematical realism" can be taken to concern either ontology or objectivity; we'll discuss both, though with more emphasis on the latter. With either focus, the natural numbers can seem to have a special place (Kronecker: "God made the natural numbers, all the rest is the work of man"). Partly this is because of close connections between number theory (or parts of it) and logic, though there are different views about the nature and extent of the connections (and about what the "logic" in question is). We'll discuss these issues, and have a bit of discussion of the significance of predicativist or more broadly constructivist programs for extending the special place of the natural numbers to the more elementary parts of the rest of mathematics. But we'll also discuss ontology and objectivity issues in parts of mathematics that go beyond this. There will be special focus on the status of undecidable sentences, and on issues about second order logic; and some focus on connections between realism and logic, and on the significance of extending mathematical theories by adding truth predicates to them. I'll try to pre-suppose little background.
G83.2285-001
Selected Topics in Ethics: Consequentialism
Monday 1:30-3:30
Dale Jamieson
We will discuss some or all of the following topics:
Methodology in moral philosophy (especially the use of thought experiments and experimental results); consequentialism, character, and moral psychology; non-maximizing versions of consequentialism; theories of well-being (especially in relation to problems in health policy); and problems regarding future generations.
G83.2285-002
Selected Topics in Ethics: Justice, Resource Allocation, and the Value of Life
Wednesday 6:30-8:30
Greg Bognar/William Ruddick
We will explore connections between some important issues in distributive justice, population-level bioethics, and public health. Since Rawls' work, political philosophers have increasingly turned away from utilitarianism, which remains, however, highly influential in bioethics and public health. We will examine several problems of resource allocation from the different perspectives of these disciplines and discuss what lessons they can learn from one another. The course will be divided into three sections: the first looks at theories of distributive justice and their application to health; the second focuses on issues of aggregation of benefits and fairness in health care resource allocation and beyond; the third discusses what factors are morally relevant to valuing lives.
G83.2296
Philosophy of Language
Monday 11-1
Seth Yalcin
We will explore some recent work in the philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics, focusing on phenomena that seem to require us to go, in interestingly different ways, beyond truth-conditions. In particular we will investigate: de re and de se attitude ascriptions; questions and the representation of subject matter in context; and aspects of the language of probability and chance. Time permitting, we will also look at deontic modalities and 'plan-laden' discourse. The focus will be the ways in which the descriptive issues can inform foundational questions, especially those about the nature of content and the structure of a theory of meaning.
G83.2296-002
Philosophy of Language: Reference
Thursday 11-1
Imogen Dickie
Topics to be covered include - how reference is fixed for proper names, demonstratives, complex demonstratives, and other kinds of referring expression; the varieties of reference failure; the use of proper names in fiction; the relation between demonstrative reference and sortal classification; the relation between grasp of referring expressions and grasp of quantifier expressions.
G83.3003-001
Topics in Epistemology
Tuesday 5-7
Crispin Wright
The course will double as exploratory and as advanced-introductory. We will focus on recent and contemporary work on scepticism about knowledge and epistemic justification, reviewing in some detail a number of challenging sceptical lines of thought, each of very great generality. Sceptical arguments should be viewed as just one species of philosophical paradox, and responses to them fashioned accordingly (rather than as if one confronted a considered and integrated philosophical position.) In any case, the first prerequisite for a satisfactory treatment of them is careful analysis of the assumptions they make, and of the way they reason from those assumptions. Too much traditional and recent discussion of scepticism suffers from presumption, or oversimplification, in this respect, taking it for granted that we all know what the sceptical arguments are and how they are supposed to work. We will also pay more careful attention than is usual to the question, what in principle could constitute a satisfactory response to such arguments. An overriding concern will be with whether they may after all prove to allow of a direct, rationalistic response - or deconstruction - or whether we must ultimately acquiesce in the naturalistic, quietist, or even merely scornful reactions that have become common in recent philosophy. Special attention will be given to the anti-sceptical resources (if any) carried by recent varieties of epistemic externalism, naïve realism and dogmatism. Topics of focus will include warrant transmission, epistemic entitlement (non-evidential rational warrant), and the broad contras between internalist and externalist conceptions of knowledge and justification.
Desirable preparatory reading: Williamson Knowledge and its Limits; Pryor "The Skeptic and the Dogmatist" and "What's wrong with Moore's argument?"; McDowell Mind and World, lectures 1-3.
G83.3003-002
Topics in Epistemology
Thursday 4:15-6:15
Farid Masrour
The main aim of this seminar is to present the state of the art in contemporary philosophy of perception. The seminar is divided into three parts: the metaphysics, epistemology and the content of perceptual experience. In the metaphysics part we discuss views such as sense datum theory, representationalism, direct realism and action based accounts of perception. The focus during the epistemology part will be on skepticism and perceptual justification. The last part of the course focuses on the question of how to understand perceptual content and its richness. General familiarity with analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind is recommended but not required.
G83.3004
Topics in Metaphysics: Metaphysical Structure
Monday 5:30-7:30
Ted Sider
"Metaphysical Structure" course description: my plan is to work through a book manuscript of mine by that name, as well as supplementary background readings. The manuscript defends realism about "structure" (joints in nature/fundamentality), and applies this to various issues in metaphysics and meta-metaphysics. I'm especially interested in questions of the form: are ontological (modal, logical) questions "substantive"?
G83.3008
Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of Mind: The Self
Wednesday 1:30-3:30
David Velleman
This seminar will focus on the topic of embodiment.
G83.3400
Thesis Seminar
Tuesday 1-3
Stephen Schiffer
L06.3722
Global Justice
Wednesday 4-6
Samuel Scheffler
The primary focus of this seminar will be on the question of whether there are principles of distributive justice that apply to the world as a whole. Other topics to be considered include: the moral significance of states, the legitimacy of partiality toward those with whom one has special ties (including ties of shared citizenship or nationality), the nature and normative significance of the global economic and institutional order, the relation between individual and institutional norms, the relation between justice and beneficence, and the extent to which affluent individuals have a responsibility to help alleviate poverty and suffering in distant lands. We will read works by most or all of the following authors: John Rawls, Thomas Nagel, Charles Beitz, Peter Singer, Richard Miller, Thomas Pogge, Samuel Freeman, A.J. Julius, Michael Blake, Kok-Chor Tan, Garrett Cullity, Andrea Sangiovanni, Joshua Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Mathias Risse, Allan Buchanan, and Liam Murphy.
Any interested Philosophy students can submit a Non-Law Student Request Form to Anupum Mehrotra.
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