Search for Spring 2023 courses on Albert.
PHIL-GA 1000; Proseminar; Wednesday 4:00-7:00; David Chalmers/Matt Mandelkern
This course is for first year PhD students in the Philosophy Department only.
PHIL-GA 1004; Advanced Intro to Ethics; W 1:15-3:15; Sam Scheffler
This course is intended to introduce students to some of the major positions and debates in ethical theory. It will be structured around a close reading of a few important contemporary texts.
This course is only open to NYU Philosophy graduate students. Students in other programs must get prior permission from the instructor to enroll.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.
PHIL-GA 1103; Adv Intro Philosophy of Mind; R 6:15-8:15; Ned Block/Matthias Michel
Advanced Intro to Consciousness
We will investigate active philosophical debates about consciousness: Is there a “hard problem” of consciousness and if so, can it be solved? Is consciousness an illusion? Can consciousness be studied scientifically and if so, what are the obstacles to so doing? Can we measure consciousness? Do non-human animals like fish and insects have conscious experiences? What about artificial intelligence systems like the large language models that have been attracting so much attention? What are the functions of consciousness, if any? Does unconscious perception exist? Is conscious experience limited to what you attend to, or does it overflow the limits of attention? Is it really true that we don’t see colors in the periphery of the visual field? Do our experiences represent “rich” properties, such as causation and facial expressions, or only ‘thin’ properties such as colors and shapes? Does conscious perception involve cognition? How could we discover the neural bases of consciousness, and what would that tell us? How can we tell the difference between perception and mental imagery? How do you even know that you’re conscious, and how do you know what your experiences are like—could you be wrong about that? What are the prospects for integrated information theory, recurrent processing theories, higher order thought approaches and global workspace approaches? We will discuss these central problems, and find out what theories of consciousness have to say about them.
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 2295; Research Seminar on Mind & Language; Monday 5:00-6:00/Tuesday 4:00-7:00; Cian Dorr/Hartry Field
Probability & Decision
This course will be on probability and decision, with the usual Mind and Language format: each week, after the first three, we’ll have a distinguished visitor with one or more papers to be read in advance, and discussed during the session. In the first three weeks the instructors will introduce some of the issues that should provide a useful background to the visitors’ papers.
Schedule of visitors
Feb 14 Kevin Dorst
Feb 21 Wayne Myrvold
Feb 28 Jeff Russell
March 7 Dmitri Gallow
March 21 Kenny Easwaran
March 28 Yoaav Isaacs
April 4 Miriam Shoenfield
April 11 Julia Staffel
April 18 Snow Zhang and Alexander Meehan
April 25 Lara Buchak
May 2 Catrin Campbell-Moore
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 2296; Philosophy of Language; R 10:00-12:00; Chris Barker/Matt Mandelkern
Pragmatics
An influential picture in linguistics and philosophy distinguishes between semantics, which is the study of conventionalized aspects of meaning, versus pragmatics, which is the study of how agents use linguistic tools to coordinate on information, order each other around, insult each other, and so on. Since Grice’s seminal William James lectures, a standard idea in pragmatics is that domain-general rational constraints on language use play a crucial role in explaining how sentences can get enriched beyond their literal contents (for instance, how we fill in the gap between the literal meaning of ‘John ate some cookies’ and the communicated meaning that he didn’t eat all of them), as well as why some sentences shouldn’t be used (think: ‘Sue is at home and Sue is at home’). In this seminar, we will explore phenomena which seem to go beyond this Gricean way of thinking, and suggest that pragmatics is a weirder field than it first seems to be. Topics include embedded implicature, Maximize Presupposition, obligatory implicatures, and constraints (and non-constraints) on redundancy. These topics have all been used to motivate rules based on linguistic structure whose effects do not always align with Gricean rationality---how much of pragmatics should we reclaim on behalf of semantics?
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 2320; History of Philosophy; T 1:15-3:15; Jessica Moss/Iakovos Vasiliou
Topics in Ancient Ethics
We will study Plato’s and Aristotle’s views of practical wisdom and related topics through close readings of selections from Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics, and other texts. Except for NYU and CUNY philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for History of Philosophy.
PHIL-GA 3004; Topics in Metaphysics; Monday 10:15-12:15; Paul Horwich
Realism and Anti-Realism
The plan for this graduate seminar is to consider -- with the respect to a variety of domains (including ethics, physics, history, mathematics, and aesthetics) -- the disputes between those philosophers who self-identify as ‘realists’ about the particular domain in question, and those who self-identify as “anti-realists” about it.
More specifically, we’ll examine, in the case of each of those domains, what supporting considerations are offered on either side. And we’ll assess how compelling we think those considerations are.
In addition, we’ll be concerned with the extent to which the arguments offered for realism within the different domains are structurally parallel to one another (and similarly for the arguments offered against realism).
Finally, we’ll consider -- in light of that information – whether it’s possible draw a general conclusion about what it is to be a realist about domain, D (independently of which particular one it is); and what it is to be an antirealist about D.
Amongst the philosophers whose work on these issues we’ll be addressing are: Paul Boghossian. Justin Clarke-Doane, Michael Dummett, Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, Sharon Street, and Crispin Wright.
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 3005; Topics in Ethics; Thursday 1:15-3:15; Sharon Street
Metaethics and the Self
At first glance, it might seem that philosophical questions about the nature of objectivity in ethics can safely be pursued in relative isolation from philosophical questions about the nature of the self. It might seem, in other words, that one can take for granted a relatively unexamined everyday notion of individual selves and safely pursue metaethical questions about what (if anything) makes it the case that such selves should treat one another ethically. This natural assumption might be reinforced by the observation that many standard debates in metaethics (e.g., among naturalists, non-naturalists, expressivists, error theorists, and the like) are often pursued without much debate or discussion about the nature of the self. I’ve come to think that this is a mistake, however; I’ve come to think that in fact, questions about ethical objectivity and questions about the self are inextricably intertwined, and that it might even be the case that ethical truth is best understood as a species of truth about the self (having to do, roughly, with a lack of difference between self and other). In this seminar, we will explore various ways in which questions about ethical objectivity and questions about the self could be interrelated. As part of this, we will spend some time looking at Buddhist and Vedantic views of the self, and how such radical views on the metaphysics of the self might relate to questions in metaethics.
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.
PHIL-GA 3010; Topics in Philosophy of Mind; Tuesday 10:15-12:15; Veronica Gomez Sanchez
Concepts and Intentionality
This seminar will explore some connections between the problem of intentionality and the psychology of concepts. We will focus on the following questions: in virtue of what does a concept come to express a property? Can we hope for a uniform meta-semantics for conceptual and non-conceptual representations? Do meta-semantic views constrain psychological theories of concept deployment and concept learning (and if so, how)?
Along the way, we will touch upon a number of foundational topics in philosophy of cognitive science: the nature and explanatory role of representation/reference relations, the status of concept as a natural kind, computational models of categorization and inductive reasoning, developmental evidence for conceptual change, and the epistemic assessment of concepts.
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 3400; Third Year Workshop; Friday 10:15-12:15; Laura Franklin-Hall
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.
PHIL-GA 3601; Work in Progress Seminar; Wednesday 3:30-5:30; Daniel Viehoff
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.