Search for Spring 2021 courses on Albert.
PHIL-UA 2; Great Works in Philosophy; M/W 11:00-12:15; Tim Maudlin
Philosophers through the ages have investigated all facets of the nature of reality, ethics, knowledge, language, the soul and the scope of human reason and understanding. We will carefully read a sampling of the classic philosophical works, including Plato’s dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Meno, and Republic, Aristotle’s de Anima, René Descartes’ Meditations, David Hume’s An Enquiry into Human Understanding, Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics and Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity.
We will focus on the skills of careful reading and interpretation, analysis of arguments, and dialectical discussion. We will only read primary texts, and will read them in their entirety.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 7; Consciousness; T/R 8:00-9:15; Matthias Michel
This course has two main parts. The first part is concerned with issues in philosophy of mind. The course will cover theories of consciousness such as dualism, physicalism, behaviorism, and functionalism. These theories will be introduced through thought experiments, like Jackson’s example of a scientist raised in a black and white room who sees colors for the first time, philosophical zombies, and the inverted spectrum thought experiment.
The second and main part of this course focuses on philosophical issues in the scientific study of consciousness. Topics covered will include: The concept of a neural basis of consciousness and how we could discover what it is; whether conscious experiences can be measured; whether unconscious perception exists; the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive theories of consciousness; the relation between consciousness and attention; theories of introspection and self-knowledge; the evolutionary function of consciousness; and consciousness in non-human animals.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 21; Early Modern European Philosophy; M/W 9:30-10:45; Don Garrett
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, revolutionary developments in science, politics, and religion led to the transformation of old philosophical questions, methods, and theories, and to the generation of new ones. To a remarkable extent, these two centuries of philosophical thought in Europe provide many of the distinctive concepts, questions, methods, and theoretical approaches that help to structure global philosophy in the twenty-first century. This course will explore some of the early modern period’s most significant contributions to, and its liveliest debates within, the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and ethics. In doing so, it will analyze the philosophical systems of René Descartes, Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. It will also examine a range of critical perspectives on them from such important contemporaries as Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, Antoine Arnauld, Marin Mersenne, Nicolas Malebranche, Anton Wilhelm Amo, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Samuel Clarke, Pierre Bayle, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Andrew Baxter, James Beattie, Edward Stillingfleet, Thomas Reid, Mary Astell, Ottobah Cugoano, Thomas Brown, Mary Shepherd, James Gregory, George Campbell, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart.
*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; M/W 11:00-12:15pm; Samuel Scheffler
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 45; Political Philosophy; T/R 9:30-10:45am; Daniel Viehoff
This course will focus on the value of democracy and related questions about political equality. The central question it will ask is: What’s so great about giving everyone (including people who are quite incompetent) an equal say over our laws? Might there be plausible non-democratic alternatives for arranging our political affairs? Possible answers will also help us think about some more applied issues: What's a permissible role for money in politics? Should there be institutionally enforced limits on the decisions that democratic bodies can make, of the sort associated with judicial review? What, if anything, can be said to justify disenfranchising those who have broken the law, or committed certain sorts of crimes?
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 60; Aesthetics; M/W 9:30-10:45am; John Richardson
The course will divide about evenly between historical and contemporary treatments of central topics in the philosophy of art. These topics will include: what makes something art (or an artwork); whether art has any principal aim or function; whether art's effects include some special 'aesthetic experience' what 'beauty' might be, and its role in art; the relation between beauty in art and beauty in nature; whether art conveys truth, and if so whether it conveys its own kind of truth, or conveys the same kind but in its own way. The historical authors discussed will be Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger; the contemporary readings will be analytic.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 70-001; Logic; M/W 12:30-1:45pm; Christopher Prodoehl
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 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 70-003; Logic; T/R 12:30-1:45pm; David Storrs-Fox
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 70-004; Logic; T/R 9:30-10:45am; David Velleman
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 78; Metaphysics; M/W 2:00-3:15pm; David Builes
Metaphysics is concerned with philosophical issues about the fundamental nature of reality. We will be covering various metaphysical topics concerning God, time, causation, persistence, abstract objects, material objects, and the nature of necessity and possibility.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 90; Philosophy of Science; M/W 4:55-6:10pm; Tim Maudlin
This class will consider the basic question: what is the nature of science and what differentiates scientific inquiry and method from other sorts of activities? We will read some of the most central philosophical works on this topic, including Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery, Nelson Goodman’s Fact, Fiction and Forecast, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, as well as essays by Quine, Hempel and Carnap.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 101; Topics in the History of Philosophy; M/W 3:30-4:45pm; Allison Aitken
Buddhist Metaphysics of Persons
Buddhist philosophers generally agree about what there isn’t: an enduring, unitary, and independent self. But there is little consensus across Buddhist traditions about what there is and what it’s like. In this course, we will examine several Indian Buddhist theories about the nature and structure of reality and consider questions pertaining to the metaphysics of persons on each of these theories. The Abhidharma tradition defends a reductionist ontology, according to which only material and mental fundamental constituents are ultimately real. Yogācāra philosophers instead argue for an idealist position on which whatever exists is mental in nature. Finally, Madhyamaka philosophers deploy anti-foundationalist arguments aiming to prove that nothing—whether material or mental—is fundamentally real. We will analyze and evaluate arguments from these three traditions and consider what it would look like to be a person on each of these radically different pictures of the world. Central questions will include: In the absence of an enduring self, how do the Buddhist philosophers who endorse these three differing ontological frameworks explain human agency, ethical accountability, diachronic personal identity, memory, the existence of other minds, and the phenomenal unity of our conscious experience?
Prerequisite: History of Ancient Philosophy (PHIL-UA 20) or Early Modern European Philosophy (PHIL-UA 21)
PHIL-UA 102; Topics in Ethics & Political Philosophy; T/R 11:00am-12:15pm; K. Anthony Appiah
This course has two aims: first, to explore the concept of race, some of its history, and various critiques and elaborations of it; and, second, to examine 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 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.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 103; Topics in Metaphysics & Epistemology; T/R 2:00-3:15pm; Peter Unger
Though there will be many shorter selections read and discussed, as well, this course will be primarily concerned with what’s presented in Professor Unger’s most recent book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy. This book discloses how terribly little has ever been accomplished in the core of academic philosophy – in metaphysics, and in the most metaphysical parts of, or aspects of, epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. What’s more, it exposes how terribly little has been even attempted on that most central philosophical front in the last half-century, or more. For philosophical sophisticates, this will seem shocking: Most academic philosophers are under the impression that, with the work of such brilliant thinkers as Saul Kripke, David Lewis and Hilary Putnam, mainstream philosophy has made some real contributions to our understanding of how things are, in certain quite deep and general respects, with concrete reality - with the likes of water and gold, and tables and chairs, and sentient beings, too. But, as Empty Ideas explains, that’s all just an illusion, pretty easily recognized as such, when, as the book tries to make happen, philosophical sophisticates are awakened from their dogmatic slumbers. As Professor Unger greatly hopes, you will greatly enjoy being awakened from any and all of your own dogmatic slumbers, whatever yours may be.
Prerequisite: Epistemology (PHIL-UA 76) or Metaphysics (PHIL-UA 78) or Philosophy of Science (PHIL-UA 90).
PHIL-UA 200; Spring Advanced Seminar; T 9:30-11:30am; Samuel Lee
Introduces students to a variety of topics that are appropriate for honors theses. For students not completing honors, these seminars will count as electives toward the philosophy major. See requirements in the description of the departmental honors program.
Prerequisite: open to all students with a GPA of 3.65 or higher both in philosophy and overall, whether or not they plan to apply to the honors program. For students applying to the honors program, both PHIL-UA 200 and PHIL-UA 201 are required, and at least one of these two seminars must be taken before the end of the junior year.