Search for Spring 2021 courses on Albert.
PHIL-GA 1000; Proseminar; Thursday 4:00-7:00; Don Garrett/Samuel Scheffler
Online via Zoom
This course is for first year PhD students in the Philosophy Department only.
PHIL-GA 1102; Advanced Introduction to Philosophy of Language; Wednesday 1:15-3:15; Paul Horwich
Online via Zoom
This course will offer an historical introduction to some of the major positions and debates in the field – concerning: 1. Whether the meaning of a word is anything over and above what the word stands for. And, if so, what the relationship is between its meaning and the entity to which it refers. 2. Whether a word’s having the particular meaning that it does is grounded in certain non-semantic facts about the word. And – if yes – then what the method is that can be deployed to find out, in any given case, which the meaning-constituting facts are. 3. The respects (if any) in which language is a normative practice. 4. Whether we should identify the meaning of a sentence with the set of possible worlds in which the sentence is true. 5. How the meanings of the words in a complex expression (such as a sentence) help to fix the meaning of that complex expression 6. Whether there are sentences that are true solely in virtue of their meanings, and/or sentences that are true simply in virtue of our having stipulated that they be true. 7. What it is to be a vague term? And how, in light of the nature of vagueness, Sorites paradoxes should be resolved. We’ll approach these issues by discussing some of the seminal work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Kripke, Quine, Davidson, and Chomsky.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
This course is a small discussion seminar; except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 1180; Philosophical Logic; Wednesday 11:00-1:00; Hartry Field
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
An investigation of classical logic and some of its generalizations: the emphasis will probably be on the generalizations, but study of them is of importance not only in its own right but also in the light it sheds on classical logic. Topics will likely include: Classical sentential logic and some of its weakenings. (The initial focus of the weakenings will be on logics of conjunction, disjunction and negation only, but we’ll then discuss non-classical generalizations of the classical material conditional. I expect to focus on logics that keep the standard structural rules.) Natural deduction and generalized (multiple conclusion) proof procedures for them, and how to understand the latter. Soundness and completeness proofs and their significance. Adding quantifiers to classical and non-classical sentential logics (both unfreely and freely), and basic model theoretic results for such logics (completeness, compactness, Lowenheim-Skolem, maybe more); applications to non-standard models. Adding identity and definite descriptions to classical and non-classical theories; indeterminate identity. Brief introduction to the theory of truth. More on soundness proofs, or the impossibility thereof. Indeterminacy of definability. Indefinite extensibility: non-classicality in quantification. Possibly: predicate quantifiers (various ways of understanding them).
This course satisfies the Ph.D. requirement for Logic.
PHIL-GA 1270; American Philosophy; Tuesday 11:00-1:00; John Richardson
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
The course will look at a network of personal, social,and political values used by an early generation of American writers to express what they optimistically saw as a new American ideal. The writers are RW Emerson, Margaret Fuller, HD Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. The values are most centrally equality and individuality; the effort to reconcile and fuse these is one main challenge those writers face. Other topics include social identity, difference, gender, race, the self, solitude/society, nature, and (what I will call) the plain. None of those thinkers is straightforwardly a philosopher, but they all have philosophical thoughts and even arguments on these topics, which can be organized and examined. Together, they articulate a personal ideal with some affinities to later existentialist proposals, but with a democratic turn the latter don't share. The course will look at Cavell's way of making this connection, and also at a few other recent interpreters of these writers. Besides the five mentioned, we will glance at a couple other members of their generation, including the observer Tocqueville. We'll also look at responses to them by a few figures a couple generations later, including W. James and Du Bois.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for History of Philosophy.
PHIL-GA 2295; Research Seminar on Mind & Language; Monday 5:00-6:00/Tuesday 4:00-7:00; Ned Block/David Chalmers
Theories of Content
The Monday session will be taught blended (in-person/online), and the Tuesday session will meet online
The Mind and Language Seminar will focus on theories of mental content. What sort of content do mental states have, and in virtue of what do they have those contents? We will examine leading theories of content including causal and teleological theories, interpretivist theories, phenomenal theories, inferential/conceptual-role theories, and others. The course will include 9 weeks devoted to discussing the work of a visiting speaker, and 5 weeks (including three weeks at the start) devoted to background and internal seminar discussion.
- Feb 2: Background: Theories of Content
- Feb 9: Background: Causal/Teleological Theories
- Feb 16: Background: Interpretivism
- Feb 23: Nick Shea
- March 2: Robbie Williams
- March 9: Frances Egan
- March 16: Adam Pautz
- March 23: Veronica Gómez Sánchez
- March 30: Background: Phenomenal Intentionality
- April 6: Imogen Dickie
- April 13: Angela Mendelovici
- April 20: Background: Conceptual-Role Semantics
- April 27: Christopher Peacocke
- May 4: David Chalmers
The course site can be found here.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
This course requires the instructor's permission to enroll.
PHIL-GA 2296; Philosophy of Language; Thursday 11:00-1:00; Matthew Mandelkern
Online via Zoom
We will explore a variety of interrelated issues involving conditionals and epistemic modals. We'll start by looking at a range of surprising facts about how epistemic modals embed, and a variety of accounts of this. Then we'll explore the semantics of conditionals and some parallel patterns which suggest a close connection between conditionals and epistemic modals. Finally, we'll explore how this connection might help us make sense of certain peculiarities in the logic of the conditional involving tensions between the Import-Export principle, Modus Ponens, and Identity; and certain elusive regularities about the probabilities of conditionals. Time permitting, we may explore some extensions of the resulting approach to theories of anaphora. The seminar will be focused on my own take on these issues, but will also serve as an introduction to a range of intriguing phenomena in the philosophy of language.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
This course is a small discussion seminar. Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 2300; Marxist Philosophy; Wednesday 6:15-8:15; Jacob McNulty
Online via Zoom
This course concerns Hegelian and Marxist conceptions of society and history. Readings will be drawn mostly from the primary texts (Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right, German Ideology, 1844/Paris manuscripts, and Capital) but also from more recent philosophy and social theory (“analytical” Marxism, Althusser and the Frankfurt School, esp. Habermas and Honneth). Topics are likely to include: ideology; the "cunning of reason" and law of unintended consequences; the left-Hegelian critique of religion as a form of alienation, as well as the Marxist idea of alienated labor; differences between “modern” and traditional forms of life; methodological individualism v. social holism; idealist v. materialist accounts of social revolution and historical change; capitalism, the market, and exploitation; the differences between the natural and human sciences (Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften); conceptions of societies as group agents, organisms or mechanisms; notions of historical progress or regress; recognition, the 2nd person and amour propre (Rousseau); and, finally, the critique of social contract theory, the natural law tradition and atomistic conceptions of society. A guiding idea of the course will be that Hegelian and Marxist approaches to these issues, though opposed in certain fundamental respects, can be fruitfully combined.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for History of Philosophy.
PHIL-GA 2320; History of Philosophy; Tuesday 1:15-3:15; Anja Jauernig
Compassion in the History of Ethics
Online via Zoom
Compassion/empathy/sympathy centered ethical theories have received renewed interest in recent years, especially in the animal ethics literature. In this seminar, we will try to improve our understanding of the nature of compassion and similar mental phenomena/faculties and their possible role in our moral lives by way of studying various historical texts in which these issues are addressed. Topics and questions to be considered include: the nature of, and relation between, compassion, pity, (various versions of) empathy, sympathy, love and benevolence; whether compassion/empathy/sympathy have a cognitive dimension or are purely affective; whether compassion/empathy/sympathy are virtues; the possible limitations of compassion/empathy (e.g., is it possible to empathize with a pig, a shrimp, an apple tree, a Dorian column?); the “dark” side of empathy/compassion (can acting based on compassion be bad?); compassion/empathy and the self; the relation between compassion and self-interest; the metaphysics of sympathy/empathy (“all is one” or maybe not?); the role of empathy in understanding other people and knowing about other minds; the role of compassion/empathy in moral motivation, moral judgment, moral responsibility, and the moral value of actions and agents.
Our readings will be selected from the writings of the following thinkers: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Francis Hutcheson, Joseph Butler, David Hume, Adam Smith, Sophie de Grouchy, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Theodor Lipps, Vernon Lee, Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Michael Slote.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for History of Philosophy.
PHIL-GA 3001; Topics in Philosophical Logic; Wednesday 4:00-6:00; Paul Boghossian/Crispin Wright
Weekly group meetings online via Zoom, with in-person individual or small-group meetings available
The course will double as an Advanced Introduction to and Research Seminar on some of the most fundamental issues in the Epistemology of Logic, structured throughout by the distinction between the character of our justification (if any) for our logical inferential practices and the character of our knowledge (if any) of explicit logical laws. Topics to be worked through will include the general epistemological conservatism of Harman and the “Justification by Default” –type suggestions of Field and Wright, the anti-exceptionalism of Quine, Williamson and Priest and the so-called Adoption Problem for anti-exceptionalism posed by Kripke, the bearing on the epistemological issues of inferential role semantics, the role of intuition in the epistemology of logic recently defended by Bengson and Boghossian, and the significance of Lewis Carroll’s, “What the Tortoise said to Achilles”
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 3400; Thesis Research; Monday 11:00-1:00; Rob Hopkins
Online via Zoom
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.
PHIL-GA 3601; Work in Progress Seminar; Thursday 1:15-3:15; Laura Franklin-Hall
Online via Zoom
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.
IMPORTANT NOTES:
- Because of the space limitations imposed by the need for social distancing in Spring 2021, all hybrid courses listed above will accord first priority for in-person participation to NYU philosophy graduate students who are enrolled in the course for credit; only in a case of unusually high enrollment in a course would it be necessary for enrolled students to participate in some of its meetings remotely. NYU philosophy graduate students (and faculty) who wish to audit a course must obtain the prior permission of the instructor and may be required to participate remotely, either always or on a schedule, depending on space availability. Official visiting students (and visiting scholars) of the department must obtain the prior permission of the instructor and should attend remotely.
- Expected course formats are of course subject to change if required by changing circumstances.