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Undergraduate Courses Spring 2010

Intensive Introductory Courses

We’ll start by asking: what makes a life go well? What, if anything, is the meaning of life? Then, after a crash-course in ethical theory, we’ll talk about the morality of abortion and the morality of war. We’ll then return to a few more theoretical questions: why is death bad for the person who dies? Is it a bad thing to have never lived at all? (If so, bad for whom?) Would it be better for us if we were immortal? What is the appropriate attitude we should have towards death? We’ll end by considering another practical issue—suicide. A few of the questions we’ll address here: is it ever rational to commit suicide? Is it ever moral to do so? When, if ever, is euthanasia morally permitted? No background in philosophy required.

Group I: History of Philosophy

This course is an introduction to the some of the most influential European philosophers of the 17^th and 18^th centuries: Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, and Kant. We will consider and critically examine the responses these thinkers gave to various questions in metaphysics and epistemology, including the following: What is the relationship between reality and our perception of reality? What is the nature of the mind and how is it related to the body? What is the nature of physical reality? Which of our beliefs, if any, do we have good reason to maintain in the face of radical skepticism?

Sign up for one of the following sections:

• V83.0021-002 Tuesday 2-3:15
• V83.0021-003 Thursday 2-3:15
• V83.0021-004 Monday 12:30-1:45
• V83.0021-005 Wednesday 12:30-1:45

The course will study major works by the major philosophers in the existential and phenomenological movements. We will read Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, excerpts from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, and substantial portions of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. We are also likely to read some Beauvoir, and perhaps some Camus or Levinas. Requirements: 2 papers and a final exam.

Sign up for one of the following sections:

• V83.0036-002 Tuesday 12:30-1:45
• V83.0036-003 Tuesday 2-3:15
• V83.0036-004 Monday 11-12:15
• V83.0036-005 Monday 12:30-1:45

Prerequisite: Two courses in Philosophy, including either V83.0076 or V83.0078.

Religion and Morality in Nietzsche

The course will explore Nietzsche’s claims about the way in which religion shapes our moral beliefs. We will ask which elements of our moral beliefs, on Nietzsche’s view, we must give up in the absence of religion. Nietzsche tells us, for example, that Christianity is ‘a system, a carefully considered, integrated view of things’ and that Christian morality therefore ‘stands or falls with belief in God.’ We will interrogate what he means by this and similar claims through a reading of texts such as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, The AntiChrist, and Twilight of the Idols.

Prerequisite: Two courses in Philosophy, including either V83.0076 or V83.0078.

The topic of the course will be the moral philosophy of Hume and Kant.

Group II: Ethics, Value, and Society

An introduction to the philosophical study of morality. Topics to be considered will include: traditional vs. consequentialist moral outlooks; contractualism; the nature of moral motivation; the rationality of morality; the objectivity or subjectivity of ethics; moral relativism; the explanatory role of morality; the compatibility of morality with a purely naturalistic understanding of human beings. Readings will be drawn from a variety of classical and contemporary sources.

Sign up for one of the following sections:

• V83.0040-002 Thursday 12:30-1:45
• V83.0040-003 Thursday 2-3:15
• V83.0040-004 Wednesday 12:30-1:45
• V83.0040-005 Friday 12:30-1:45

When we assert that torture is wrong or that pain is bad, what are we saying? Are we describing some aspect of an evaluative realm that exists independently of what humans think and do? If so, how do we gain access to this realm? (Do we need moral antennae or ethical telescopes?) And what is the relation between truths in this realm and those in the ordinary world of mental and physical entities? If we are not talking about independent ethical facts when we call something wrong or bad, what are we doing? Are we saying anything meaningful at all, or are we merely giving vent to our emotions?

Sign up for one of the following sections:

• V83.0041-002 Wednesday 9:30-10:45
• V83.0041-003 Wednesday 12:30-1:45

When and why are states entitled to make coercively enforceable laws? When and why are citizens morally obligated to follow these laws? This course will examine these questions through a combination of historical and contemporary readings.

Sign up for one of the following sections:

• V83.0045-002 Monday 3:30-4:45
• V83.0045-003 Monday 4:55-6:10

Prerequisite: Two courses in Philosophy, including either V83.0040, V83.0041, V83.0045, or V83.0052.

Even as compared to what he or she can do, 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 and, most likely, not much about political philosophy, either.)

Group III: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Mind, Language, and Logic

Introduces the techniques, results, and philosophical import of 20th century formal logic. Principal concepts include those of interpretation, validity, implication, derivation, soundness and completeness. This course satisfies the logic requirement for NYU Philosophy majors.

This course 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. More advanced topics will be covered if time permits. This course satisfies the logic requirement for NYU Philosophy majors.

In introductory logic you learn the basics of standard propositional and predicate logic. In this course we’ll begin by taking a deeper look at standard logic. We’ll then discuss modal logic—the logic of possibility and necessity—and counterfactual conditionals. Our main approach will be that of possible-worlds semantics.

• V83.0074-002 Tuesday 12:30-1:45
• V83.0074-003 Tuesday 2:00-3:15

The first part of the course will be a general introduction to the theory of knowledge. We will look at the answers to the question ÔWhat is knowledge?’ that philosophers have developed in the attempt to provide a satisfactory response to sceptics, who think that we don’t know anything. The second part of the course will use tools acquired in the first part to discuss the following topics: knowledge based on perception; knowledge based on memory; our knowledge of our own minds; the problem of what we can know about what happens in the minds of other people.

What is there, really? In this course we will investigate the fundamental nature of reality. Why is there Something rather than Nothing? What is Time? What is Space? What is Matter? What is Consciousness? What is Perception? What is Value? What is a Person? What is Freedom? What is a Law of Nature? What is it for something to be Fundamental? Through addressing these questions we will also address the methodological question: to what extent should physics (and the hard sciences generally) inform metaphysics, and to what extent can metaphysics inform physics.

This course will concentrate on a small number of central questions in recent and contemporary philosophy of language. Familiarity with elementary formal logic will be helpful. Topics to be covered include skepticism about meaning, with special reference to writings of Quine, Kripke and Putnam; the nature of knowledge of a language, with special reference to the work of Davidson and Dummett; and the competing paradigms of singular reference deriving from Frege and from Kripke. Grades will be awarded on the basis of two mid-term papers, and a take-home final exam.

Sign up for one of the following sections:

• V83.0085-002 Friday 9:30-10:45
• V83.0085-003 Friday 11-12:15

Honors Courses

See description under Honors Program.