Search for Spring 2022 courses on Albert.
PHIL-UA 2; Great Works in Philosophy; T/R 4:55-6:10pm; Rosalind Chaplin
This course is an introduction to philosophy through the study of influential writings in its history. We will cover a range of questions in epistemology, value theory, and metaphysics, focusing especially on the following: What is knowledge, and what can we know? What is it to live a good life, and does happiness conflict with virtue? What is the nature of causation, and can we know that there is causality in the world? What is human freedom, and do we have good reason to believe we are free? Texts covered may include the works of Plato, Aristotle, the Pāli Canon, Sextus Empiricus, Al-Ghazālī, René Descartes, Émilie du Châtelet, David Hume, Lady Mary Shepherd, and Immanuel Kant, among others.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 3; Ethics and Society; T/R 12:30-1:45pm; Sophia Dandelet
What does it take to live well? We will explore this question from several angles, with a focus on the challenges to living well that accompany our particular social and political moment. Questions we will take up include: What is integrity, and why is it important? What might autonomy look like for people who have internalized oppressive social norms? Does porn harm women? Could being anti-racist involve not just doing certain things, but reasoning in certain ways about others? As we investigate these questions, we will hone our skills of reading, writing, and discussing philosophy.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 6; Global Ethics; M/W 3:30-4:45pm; K. Anthony Appiah
This course aims to accomplish two things. The first is to introduce three broad traditions of normative thinking about social issues from around the globe: a Confucian tradition, one based in Islamic legal traditions, and one derived from European liberalism. The second is to address three current areas of normative debate: about global economic inequality, about gender justice and human rights. We shall explore these first-order questions against the background of the three broad traditions. Our aim will be to understand some of differences of approach that shape the global conversation about these issues that concern people around the world.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 21; Early Modern European Philosophy; M/W 11:00am-12:15pm; Don Garrett
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, revolutionary developments in natural 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 offer versions of 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 early modern Europe’s most significant contributions to—and its liveliest debates within—the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and ethics. In doing so, it will analyze the philosophical systems of René Descartes, Benedict (Baruch) 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, Marin Mersenne, Antoine Arnauld, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Nicolas Malebranche, Anton Wilhelm Amo, Étienne Bonnet, Pierre Bayle, Anne Conway, John Toland, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, John Harris, Damaris Masham, Samuel Clarke, Edward Stillingfleet, Thomas Reid, Mary Astell, Andrew Baxter, Thomas Brown, Mary Shepherd, James Gregory, George Campbell, James Oswald, and Adam Smith.
*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 11:00am-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 70-001; Logic; M/W 8:00-9:15am; Vincent Peluce
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; T/R 8:00-9:15am; Vincent Peluce
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; M/W 2:00-3:15pm; Veronica Gomez Sanchez
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 74; Modal Logic; T/R 2:00-3:15pm; Matthew Mandelkern
Modal logic is an extension of classical logic which has been developed for reasoning about intensional operators like ‘it is necessary that’, ‘it is possible that’, ‘Susie believes that’, ‘It was the case that’, ‘If … then …’. We will explore the foundations and applications of modal logic, starting with possible worlds semantics, proof theory, and soundness and completeness. Then we will look at various philosophical applications, including to the theories of conditionals, modals, tense, and attitudes, exploring alternative semantic foundations along the way.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: Logic (PHIL-UA 70)
PHIL-UA 76; Epistemology; T/R 9:30-10:45am; Xueyin (Snow) Zhang
Epistemology is the study of knowledge and justification. Many of us take for granted that we know things like: we are not dreaming right now, the Sun will rise tomorrow, the Earth is not flat, wearing masks is effective in preventing the spread of coronavirus, etc. But do we really know them? If so, how? More generally, how should we reply to the skeptical challenge, while properly taking into account our own fallibility? What does rationality require of us in an increasingly polarized society, where it has become ever more difficult to tell facts from fiction and knowledge from opinions? In this course we will look into these and other questions.
*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; M/W 12:30-1:45pm; Veronica Gomez Sanchez
This course is about the relationship between the mind and the brain. Among other things, we will discuss how mental phenomena like consciousness and thought might be reconciled with the image of the world we get from the natural sciences (including physics, chemistry, and biology).
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course in philosophy
PHIL-UA 88; How Science Works; M/W 9:30-10:45am; 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.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 101; Topics in the History of Philosophy; T/R 3:30-4:45pm; John Richardson
The course will treat selected figures in American philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries, paying particular attention to the Transcendentalist and Pragmatist 'movements'. Among those studied will be Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Peirce, James, Du Bois, and Dewey.
Prerequisite: one course from those listed in Group 1: History of Philosophy on our General Course Offerings page. May be repeated once for credit as topics change.
PHIL-UA 102; Topics in Ethics & Political Philosophy; R 2:00-4:30pm; Paul Boghossian
Normative judgments are prescriptive or evaluative, rather than descriptive. Examples include judgments about morality (what ought we to do), rationality (what ought we to believe), and aesthetics (what ought we to appreciate). We will look at the nature of the normative. We will examine the reasons why many philosophers have been skeptical that there can be objective facts about the normative. We will explore whether a relativist view of such judgments can be made to work. Finally, we will examine the prospects for defending a realist view of such facts in each of the three normative domains.
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 201; Junior Honors Proseminar; R 10:00am-12:00pm; Paul Horwich
To be taken by honors program students in the spring of their junior year.
In the first part of the semester, students study a variety of potential topics for honors theses, as determined in part by the interests of those enrolled. (Some possibilities:-- “”What is truth?”; “Are there absolute facts as to what we do is, or is not, morally right?”; “How can something not merely exist, but necessarily exist?; “Are experiences nothing but states of the brain?”)
Later in the semester, students present and discuss their own original work, leading toward the development of a detailed and substantial honors thesis prospectus.
Each student must submit a thesis prospectus at the end of the semester. Its approval by the course instructor and a prospective faculty advisor is required to pass the course.
Prerequisite: admission to the department’s honors program – which will only be granted to philosophy majors with a grade-point average of 3.65 or higher in philosophy and overall, and who have taken at least five philosophy courses, of which two are numbered higher than PHIL-UA 8. Email jm5706@nyu.edu for enrollment permission.