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Undergraduate Courses Spring 2003

Non-Major Introductory Course  

V83.0005-001
Ethics and Society
TR 3:30-4:45 PM
Albert Piacente
Examines grounds for moral judgment and action in various social contexts. Typical topics: public versus private good and duties; individualism and cooperation; inequalities and justice; utilitarianism and rights; regulation of sexual conduct, abortion, and family life; poverty and wealth; racism and sexism; and war and capital punishment.

V83.0010-001
Central Problems in Philosophy
MW 12:30-1:45
Mark DeBellis
An intensive introduction to central problems in philosophy. Topics may include free will, the existence of God, skepticism and knowledge, and the mind-body problem.

V83.0021-001
History of Modern Philosophy
MW 11:00-12:15 AM
Peter Kung
This is a survey of 17th and 18th century European metaphysics and epistemology.  We will read Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.

Philosophy in the Middle Ages
TR 11:00-12:15
Alfred Ivry
Study of major medieval philosophers, their issues, schools, and current philosophic interests. Includes, among others, Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.

V83.0040-001
Ethics
TR 2:00-3:15
Sharon Street
An examination of some central topics in moral philosophy.  Among the questions we will consider are:  What reason is there to be moral?  Is pleasure the only ultimate good?  What makes an action right or wrong, and to what extent is this a matter of the action's consequences?  What role should the concept of virtue play in moral theorizing?  Are there such things as moral facts, and if so, how should we understand them? Is there a single true morality, or is moral truth relative to culture or the individual? 

Readings will be drawn from both contemporary and historical sources.

V83.0050-001
Medical Ethics
TR 11:00-12:15
William Ruddick
The course will examine current topics and principles in medical practice and research.  Included are: autonomy,  paternalism, and professionalism; hope, trust, and deception;  reproductive aid and abortion; clinical definitions of quality of life, harm, and death; assisted suicide and euthanasia;  clinical drug testing and peer review.    No prerequisite.

V83.0060-001
Aesthetics
TR 3:30-4:45
Scott Walden
This course will be devoted to philosophical issues relevant to the visual arts, with special emphasis placed on those raised by photography. We will examine various theories of depiction and various theories of art, and then explore the ways in which these theories intersect with issues such as photographic realism, photographic objectivity, and photographic meaning.  We will also keep an eye on the larger issue of what limits there may be to philosophical investigation in these areas. 

Readings will include works by Clive Bell, Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Jerry Fodor, Nelson Goodman, Paul Grice, Dominic Lopes, Patrick Maynard, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Savedoff, Roger Scruton, and Kendall Walton.

V83.0070-001
Logic
MW 3:30-4:45 PM
Scott Walden
Introduces the techniques, results, and philosophical import of 20th century formal logic. Principal concepts include those of sentence, set, interpretation, validity, consistency, consequence, tautology, derivation, and completeness.

V83.0072-001
Advanced Logic
TR 9:30-10:45
Rohit Parikh
This course continues the development of Propositional and First Order logic. This will include syntax, semantics, proof theory and the Completeness result of Goedel. We will also try to give a less formal and more intuitive view of some other developments including the Goedel Incompleteness results, Craig’s interpolation theorem and the issue of Truth in formal theories.

V83.0076-001
Belief, Truth & Knowledge
MW 9:30-10:45 AM
Roger White
This course is an inquiry into the nature of inquiry. We often seek answers to questions—e.g., Who was responsible for the Sept 11 attacks? Will the Knicks win tonight? 837+655=?—and take ourselves to know the answers, or have rational opinions, or to have good evidence for our views. Rather than answer these questions, we will step back and ask, What is the nature of evidence? and, What it is to know something or to be rational? In answering these questions, we will examine versions of, and responses to Skepticism: that there is very little we can know or have reason to believe.

Philosophy of Mind
TR 9:30-10:45
Christopher Peacocke
What is involved in seeing an object, hearing and understanding a friend’s utterance, or appreciating a piece of music? This course will be concerned with the philosophical issues involved in addressing these questions. Topics to be covered will, as time permits, be drawn from the following: perception, sensation and representation; the emotions; action; the self; action, awareness, and joint awareness; thought about the objective world and thought about the mental world of other people; reasons and psychological explanation; mental representation. Particular attention will be devoted to issues of interdisciplinary interest; issues overlapping with the concerns of psychology and the other cognitive sciences will be emphasized throughout.  Prerequisites: introductory logic; some background in the philosophy of language is highly desirable.

V83.0085-001
Philosophy of Language
MW 4:55-6:10
Gary Ostertag
Examines various philosophical and psychological approaches to language and meaning and their consequences for traditional philosophical problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.  Discusses primarily 20th Century authors including Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine.

V83.0103-001
Topics in Metaphysics and Epistemology
MW 2:00-3:15
Peter Unger
Prerequisite: Two course in Philosophy, including either V83.0076 or V83.0078.
What are basic concrete entities and, in concrete reality, what other entities might there also be?  Considering various answers to that question, we’ll explore several longstanding issues in metaphysics, including the nature of physical entities, the nature of mental entities, the main relations between the mental and the physical, the similarities and differences between the spatial and the temporal, the question of real choice, and problems of personal identity.

Far from being a series of lectures, the course is to consist largely of discussions, initiated by the professor but heavily involving the students.  Since there won’t be any attempt to impart a “body of metaphysical knowledge,” the won’t be any exams.  Instead, students must write a couple of lucid short papers, each on a different issue discussed extensively in class meetings.

V83.0102-001
Topics in Ethics and Political Philosophy
MW 12:30-1:45 PM
William Ruddick
Prerequisite: Two course in Philosophy, including either V83.0040, V83.0041, V83.0045, or V83.0052.
The course will focus on autonomy, paternalism, deception, self-deception and trust in various spheres (personal, institutional, professional, and political).    Readings from past and current philosophers.  Two essays.  

V83.0426-001 (same as V78.0425)
Jewish Philosophy in the Medieval World
TR 3:30-4:45
Readings in translation and analysis of representative selections from the writings of the major Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages; emphasis on Halevi’s Kuzari and Moses Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed. Special attention to the cultural context in which these works were produced.

Students may count the following  course as an elective course toward a Philosophy major.

V61.0102-001                                                  
Undergraduate Linguistics Seminar
Prof. Paul Elbourne
Prerequisite: permission of instructor 
This seminar will investigate the nature of the semantic values of sentences through an examination of sentences that report beliefs and other psychological attitudes, such as `Galileo believed that the Earth moves' . Such examples have arguably proven to be problematic for all the traditional theories of the denotation of sentences, and have prompted the emergence of new theories designed specifically with them in mind, such as the relatively recent theory that the semantic value of a sentence is its Interpreted Logical Form, a syntactic representation with each node labeled with an interpretation.

We will discuss classic and contemporary papers by philosophers and linguists. Each registered student will be required to write a research paper and to make a presentation on the topic of their paper towards the end of the semester. No final examination.

The following graduate courses are open to senior major with the instructor’s permission:

G83.2223, Epistemology (Boghossian), M 2-4

G83.2295, Mind and Language Seminar (Field/Schiffer), M 5-6, T 4-7, 30882

G83.3004, Topics in Metaphysics (Wright), TR 11-1, 31406

G83.2280, Political Philosophy (Nagel), W 1-3, 31268

G83.1004, Advanced Introduction to Ethics (Street), F 11-1, 31407

G83.2285, Ethics: Selected Topics (Kamm) TBA, 31214