Philosophy

Instructor: Chris Dorst
This course is designed to familiarize incoming graduate students with the expectations and standards of graduate level work in philosophy. In particular, it aims to develop the tools necessary to read, write, and converse about philosophy at the graduate level. We will study and discuss a wide range of papers, drawn from many areas of philosophy and written in a variety of philosophical styles. For six of the twelve meetings, one or two students are assigned to introduce the text assigned and lead the class discussion. When there are two presenters in a single week, it is the responsibility of the two presenters to divide the material to be presented appropriately. Students will be asked to write a short paper every week in which they are not assigned to present the material. The paper should be roughly two pages, and can discuss any aspect of the reading. Papers are due at the start of each class.

Syllabus

Instructor: John Palmer
This course is a graduate survey of the philosophy of Aristotle. Its dual aim is to prepare students to teach Aristotle at the undergraduate level and to provide a foundation for more advanced study of particular facets of his thought.

Syllabus

Instructor: Amber Ross
The overarching question of this course are:

• “What is a Self?”
• “How does a Self emerge?”
• “What is the relation between Self and Consciousness?”

The ways that we will address these questions will be informed by philosophical theory as well as social science. There are several qualities that seem thematic to much of the philosophical, social psychological, and other theoretical and empirical work that shape current understanding of the self. The course is organized around these qualities, and the questions and assumptions they imply:

• What is a Self?
  • Reflexivity – we are the object of our own awareness
    • Is the self a substance? A concept? An illusion? (Models of the Self)
    • Is the self knowable? (Self-knowledge vs. Self-creation)
• How does a Self emerge?
  • Constancy – we maintain and protect a sense of self over time
    • Is memory/narrative essential to self-hood? (The diachronic and episodic self)
    • To what extent am I my beliefs and desires?
    • In what way is personal identity a social relation? A social construction?
• What is the relation between Self and Consciousness?
  • Subjectivity – each of us has a particular perspective
    • Must a “who” have a point of view?

The primary objective of the course is to think through and discuss these questions and assumptions and for you to come away with an informed opinion about each of them. The discussions will be based on readings, but the goal is to synthesize, to gain a meta-understanding of the positions and the problems they raise, and to practice, as a group, deconstructing and constructing the arguments that underpin these positions and problems.

These goals will be accomplished through participation in class discussion, your work on a couple of assignments, and, most substantively, in a substantive, original paper that you will work on all semester. I anticipate that you will:

1. gain an understanding of selective but central concepts in defining self and identity;
2. develop expertise in a specific domain of interest related to self and identity;
3. explore new theoretical and/or research ideas;
4. improve your scholarly writing skills;
5. gain experience revising manuscripts and “submitting” them.

Syllabus

Instructor: Ronald de Sousa
The specific topic of this course is: The Epistemology of Value. Epistemology is concerned with the acquisition and justification of knowledge. In this course, we will ask whether there is any knowledge to be had about value. We will first need to ask: What is a value? How does it relate to a thing’s having value, and to a person’s valuing something? Are there different kinds of value? How do they relate to each other? In particular, is moral value a distinct kind of value? Are there objective truths about values? Or are they mere projections of our emotional attitudes? What is the role of reasons in our conception of reason? Do reasons constitute values, or are reasons derived from values? While many of our moral and other values are learned in kindergarten, they are typically debated in what appears to be rational discourse. But the power of rational argument to change such attitudes is limited. It is often noted that political stances are “emotional” rather than rational. Some have even claimed that all rational justification is mere post-hoc rationalizaton. We will conclude with some considerations about the role of argument in persuasion in matters of value, with specific reference to the ways in which rational argument fails to persuade.

Syllabus

Instructor: Jaime Ahlberg
“Equality” is both a foundational and highly contested concept in social and political philosophy. While many endorse the importance of equality as a value, there is little agreement on its meaning as a political idea and its role in social justice. Debate is thus ongoing about the nature of the concept, its relationship to other moral and political concepts (such as freedom, partiality, and community, for example), and its overall value.

In this seminar we will explore contemporary discussion surrounding these issues. Topics will include the nature of equality, possible relationship(s) of equality to justice, the currency of equality (‘equality of what?’), the subjects of equality (‘equality among whom?’), and objection to equality as a value. By the conclusion of the seminar students should expect to be familiar not only with the shape of these debates, but also with some of the most influential work in contemporary political philosophy.

Syllabus

Instructor: Stewart Duncan
This is a graduate seminar on the philosophy of Descartes. Our central primary text will be the Meditations, including the Objections and Replies that were published with it. For the first third of the semester, we will focus on our own reading of that text. In the rest of the semester, we will discuss a number of recent papers on aspects of Descartes’s philosophy. These address such issues as Descartes’s theory of substance; his views about the true and immutable natures of mathematical objects; the metaphysics of mind-body union; consciousness; clear and distinct perception; and the nature of the self.

Syllabus (PDF)

Instructor: Chris Dorst
This course will focus on the relationship between the metaphysics of laws of nature and the metaphysics of time. We will begin by surveying some classical and contemporary positions in each field. With respect to laws, we will look at various Humean and anti-Humean positions; with respect to time, we will look at presentism, the growing block, and eternalism, as well as arguments about whether relativity motivates eternalism. Then we’ll turn to some recent work concerned with the relationship between laws and time. In this latter part of the course, we’ll explore questions like the following:

• To what extent do various accounts of laws presuppose a position about the metaphysics of time?
• In a block universe, what singles out one of the dimensions as temporal? Could this be a function of the laws?
• How should we understand dynamical laws in a relativistic setting?
• Is there a fundamental direction of time? To what extent is the answer to this question informed by adopting Humeanism or anti-Humeanism about laws?

Syllabus (PDF)

Instructor: Molly Gardner
This is a graduate seminar on issues in bioethics and biotechnology. We will consider a number of issues loosely organized around the themes of creating, extending, and ending lives. Such issues include abortion, assisted reproduction, reproductive cloning, human enhancement, life extension, euthanasia, and creating and killing nonhuman animals. We will contextualize these issues within a variety of philosophical frameworks including utilitarianism, deontology, and pluralistic accounts of right and wrong. We will also consider and evaluate certain patterns of reasoning that show up in many of these debates. Such patterns include slippery-slope arguments, appeals to a distinction between what is natural and what is artificial, and appeals to various formulations of what is often referred to as “the precautionary principle.”

Syllabus (PDF)

Instructor: Jonathan Rick
Ours is an age in which, for the right price, almost anything can be bought and sold. It is an age where the mechanism of the Market reigns supreme in organizing the production and distribution of nearly everything we might value (and, indeed, also much of what we don’t). Ours is not merely a market economy but a market society: The principles of market exchange increasingly govern more and more of our social life, well beyond even the buying and selling of material goods. Living in a market society, like any society, has its benefits and burdens. The aim of this course is to interrogate the value of living life on the open market – or, put alternatively, life organized within the political economic framework of Capitalism. These will be our governing, guiding questions: What exactly is a market society or Capitalist Political Economy? What are its principled origins and moral psychological underpinnings (for this latter question, we will focus primarily on the moral ‘economy’ of esteem and its relation to self-interested motivation)? What are the moral successes and moral limitations of market capitalism? What alternatives are there to Market Capitalism? Our readings be primarily historical, focusing on the political economic writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx. Some contemporary sources will also be considered as well.

Syllabus (PDF)