Search for Fall 2022 courses on Albert.
PHIL-UA 1; Central Problems in Philosophy; T/R 3:30-4:45pm; Pablo Zendejas-Medina
An introduction to the methods and subject matter of philosophy through the study of central questions, such as: Do we have free will? Is the mind distinct from the body? How can we know anything about the world? What does it mean for a person to continue to exist, or to die, and does it matter? We will examine answers to these, and other, questions drawn primarily from contemporary works, but also from the history of philosophy.
PHIL-UA 2-001; Great Works in Philosophy; M/W 3:30-4:45pm; Anja Jauernig
This course provides a general introduction to western philosophy through the study of some of the most important and influential writings in its history. The questions to be discussed include the following: Can we know if there is an external world? Can we know the future? Can we prove the existence of God? If God is good and omnipotent, why is there evil in the world? Is the mind distinct from the brain? What is the self? Do we have free will? What does it take to live and act well? Does life have meaning? We will read selections from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Lucretius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Cavendish, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Mill, James, Freud, and Camus.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 2-006; Great Works in Philosophy; M/W 3:30-4:45pm; Michelle Dyke
This course provides a general introduction to western philosophy through the study of some of the most influential writings in its history (up to the present day). Some of the questions to be discussed include the following: Can we know that there is an external world outside of our minds, or are there any reasons for skepticism? Can we prove the existence of God? Can we know anything with absolute certainty? What is the self? Are we free to act, and believe, at will? What obligations do we have to other people? What makes for a just society? We will discuss answers to these questions from authors including Epicurus, Descartes, Pascal, Locke, Hume, Mill, James, Rawls, Nozick, and Korsgaard.
PHIL-UA 5; Minds and Machines; T/R 2:00-3:15pm; David Chalmers
This course will be an introduction to some central issues in philosophy through the lens of modern technology. We will consider issues such as "How do we know about the external world?", "What is the relationship between mind and body?", "How can we know about other minds?", and "Can machines be conscious?", in part by thinking hard about technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 8; Philosophical Approaches to Race and Racism; T/R 11:00-12:15pm; K. Anthony Appiah
This course has two themes. The first is an exploration of the concept of race. This is a question in social ontology, which is the philosophical study of the nature of social entities. The second is an examination of some of the normative and conceptual issues surrounding the most morally significant of the ways in which “race” has mattered for social life, namely as the concept that defines the object of the attitudes, practices, institutions and beliefs we call “racist.” We shall ask what racism is, what sorts of things can be racist, and what makes racism wrong. The course also aims to be an introduction to the ways in which philosophers approach such ontological and normative questions. We shall see that answering the questions in social ontology may require knowledge of history and the social sciences. We shall also see that addressing the normative questions will often require us first to answer ontological ones. We shall end with a discussion of some possible responses to racism. In particular, we shall explore the question whether (and, if so, in what sense) the state ought to be colorblind; and whether (and, again, if so, in what sense) we ought ideally to be colorblind in our own private lives. Many disciplines are useful in thinking about questions of race and racism. This course offers you a chance to learn about the distinctive contributions of philosophy.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 20; Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy; T/R 11:00am-12:15pm; Gabriel Shapiro
Examines some of the most important philosophical ideas and developments in Ancient Greece and Rome. Covers major writings by Plato and Aristotle, and a selection of writings by such thinkers as the Presocratics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 39; Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy; M/W 4:55-6:10pm; John Richardson
After a brief look at Nietzsche to set the stage, we will read and discuss a selection of German and French philosophers working in phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, and postmodernism. We'll spend the most time on Heidegger and Sartre, with lesser attention to Husserl, Beauvoir, Habermas, Foucault, and one or two others.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 40; Ethics; T/R 2:00-3:15pm; Sanford Diehl
An introduction to the philosophical study of morality. Topics to be considered may 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.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 70-001; Logic; M/W 8:00-9:15am; Vishnya Maudlin
An introduction to the basic techniques of sentential and predicate logic. Students learn how to put arguments from ordinary language into symbols, how to construct derivations within a formal system, and how to ascertain validity using truth tables or models.
PHIL-UA 70-002; Logic; M/W 12:30-1:45pm; Daniel Brinkerhoff Young
An introduction to the basic techniques of sentential and predicate logic. Students learn how to put arguments from ordinary language into symbols, how to construct derivations within a formal system, and how to ascertain validity using truth tables or models.
PHIL-UA 70-003; Logic; T/R 4:55-6:10pm; Daniel Brinkerhoff Young
An introduction to the basic techniques of sentential and predicate logic. Students learn how to put arguments from ordinary language into symbols, how to construct derivations within a formal system, and how to ascertain validity using truth tables or models.
PHIL-UA 72; Advanced Logic; T/R 12:30-1:45pm; Cian Dorr
In this course we will tackle a series of deep and beautiful results about the in-principle limits on what can be calculated, described, and proved by finite beings, culminating in Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (first published in 1931). The results in question are of great importance for a wide variety of investigations involving systematic theory-building, since they imply that on many questions, the complete truth is too complex to be captured by any systematic theory of the sort that a finite being could formulate. Moreover, working up to them is a great way of acquiring a range of broadly useful skills and technical tools having to do with the construction and evaluation of precise statements and deductive arguments. The course will necessarily be pretty demanding, but nothing will be presupposed beyond an introductory course in logic.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: Logic (PHIL-UA 70)
PHIL-UA 78; Metaphysics; M/W 3:30-4:45pm; Veronica Gomez Sanchez
Metaphysics is concerned with philosophical issues about the fundamental nature of reality. This course covers various metaphysical topics including free will, causation/laws of nature, time, and personal identity.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 80; Philosophy of Mind; T/R 3:30-4:45pm; Ned Block
This course examines the question of whether AI can be sentient or sapient through the lense of the conflict between computational and biological approaches to the mind. The first half of the course will be on sapience, i.e. machine intelligence and thought, and the second half will be on sentience, i.e. what it is like to perceive and think. The approach to sapience will start with classic issues in the philosophy of AI, the Turing Test, the blockhead, Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and functional role semantics as the answer to Searle. The functional role semantics point of view will be applied to GPT-3, PaLM, Dall-e-2 and other large language models. The second half of the course on sentience will consider the inverted spectrum hypothesis, whether there is more informational capacity in consciousness than in cognition, higher order theories of consciousness and phenomenal consciousness vs access consciousness.
We will ask whether computational and biological approaches are complementary or whether they conflict; that is, whether the mind is fundamentally computational or whether it is fundamentally neural or whether it can be fundamentally both.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 85; Philosophy of Language; M/W 9:30-10:45am; Matthew Mandelkern
Meaning is ubiquitous. Stripes can mean that a snake is poisonous; discoloring on leaves can mean that a tree is blighted. Some kinds of meaning are linguistic: these words communicate something to you thanks to the remarkable human ability to produce, comprehend, and record meanings, in an endlessly generative manner. We will explore what linguistic meaning is, how it is possible, and how we use it to communicate and think. We will explore questions like: Does meaning involve reference to individuals, and if so, how? How do we represent time in language? How do we represent alternative (possibly non-actual) possibilities? How do we follow, and exploit, the rules of conversation to use meanings to express non-literal contents? What is the relationship between thought and language? What is the relationship between human and formal languages? Between human and non-human communication? Between language, logic, and paradox?
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: Logic (PHIL-UA 70) and one introductory course
PHIL-UA 88; How Science Works; M/W 11:00am-12:15pm; Michael Strevens
What is science? How does it work? Is there a scientific method? We will use a mix of logical argument, history, and sociology to investigate these questions. We will read the philosophers of science Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, as well as the early modern thinker Francis Bacon, and we will look at the history of scientific inquiry into the structure of the solar system, gravitation, the nature of heat, the question of the age of the earth, evolutionary theory, continental drift, and some modern physics including quantum theory. We’ll travel into the lab with sociologists of science such as Harry Collins and Bruno Latour, as well as taking a more high-level look at the social organization of science and at the problems involved in “following the science” when formulating public policy to deal with climate change and covid-19.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 102; Topics in Ethics & Political Philosophy; R 2:00-4:30pm; Peter Unger
Experimentally Studying People's Moral Convictions
Though we’ll read most of Professor Unger’s Living High and Letting Die, most of the course will go, in several ways, far beyond anything to be found there.
Here are some of those ways:
We will go over experiments done to learn about what are some of the most basic moral convictions of (the great majority of) people relevantly like ourselves - contemporary rather highly educated people, mostly educated along lines that have prevailed in the West for the last 50 years or more.
What factors most heavily determine how it is that (most) people like us assess the moral status of this or that agent’s behavior, in one or another situation. Was the behavior at least morally all right? Or, was it badly wrong; or what?
Some of the experimental work studied will have been done only by others – the most recent will have been done by the instructor and his collaborators, the latter being, at least in the main, experimental psychologists.
Prerequisite: Ethics (PHIL-UA 40), The Nature of Values (PHIL-UA 41), or Political Philosophy (PHIL-UA 45). May be repeated once for credit as topics change.
PHIL-UA 103-001; Topics in Metaphysics & Epistemology; T/F 12:30-1:45pm; Paul Horwich
The following issues will be addressed:
1. What is truth? What are facts? And how are the concepts of TRUE and FACT related to one another?
2. What is it for a statement to be, not merely true, but necessarily true? And what is it for a statement to be in fact false, but possibly true? What distinguishes the different kinds of necessity: -- logical, physical, ethical, epistemological, etc?. And are some of them in some sense “stronger” than others?
3. Philosophers often describe themselves as either “realists” or as “anti-realists” about this or that subject matter – such as the different subject matters of physics, of arithmetic, and of ethics. But exactly what is realism?
4. Does reality include facts that aren’t part of the natural world – that is, aren’t located in space of time, and don't have any causes or effects?
5. What is probability? How can we tell how probable something is? And what is the epistemological significance of probability?
6. Is there such a thing as the direction of time?
Prerequisite: Epistemology (PHIL-UA 76), Metaphysics (PHIL-UA 78), or Philosophy of Science (PHIL-UA 90). May be repeated once for credit as topics change.
PHIL-UA 103-002; Topics in Metaphysics & Epistemology; T 2:00-4:30pm; Laura Franklin-Hall
The Metaphysics of Race, Gender, and Sex
This course will explore the nature of three families of human kinds: races, genders, and sexes. During our first two sessions we review theories of classification and kinds, asking what differentiates artificial or gerrymandered kinds and categories (e.g., pests) from those that appear to be ‘natural’ or ‘real’ (e.g., protons). Following this, we will consider the origins and present contours of our race, gender and sex categories. In each case, we will ask a variety of questions, including: do members of a given race/gender/sex share an essence? If so, are these essences biological? Social? Bio-social? Are race/gender/sex kinds natural kinds? What role, if any, do values play in setting their contours? The course will require students to engage with research from the biological and social sciences pertinent to these questions.
Prerequisite: Epistemology (PHIL-UA 76), Metaphysics (PHIL-UA 78), or Philosophy of Science (PHIL-UA 90). May be repeated once for credit as topics change.
PHIL-UA 202; Senior Honors Thesis Workshop; W 2:00-4:00pm; Paul Horwich
To be taken by honors program students in the fall of the senior year. Students write an honors thesis under the direction of an approved faculty advisor while participating in a weekly thesis-writing discussion workshop directed by the course instructor. An oral thesis examination administered by the faculty advisor and another appointed faculty member follows submission of the final thesis. Submission of the final thesis and the oral thesis examination may be deferred to the beginning of the following spring semester if desired, although students who plan to use the thesis as a writing sample for graduate school applications are especially advised to complete the process during the fall semester.
Prerequisite: admission to the department’s honors program and completion of Junior Honors Proseminar (PHIL-UA 201). Email jhm378@nyu.edu for enrollment permission.