Search for Fall 2019 courses in Albert.
PHIL-UA 1; Central Problems in Philosophy; M/W 9:30-10:45; Gabbrielle Johnson
This course will provide an introduction to some of the classic and enduring problems in philosophy and to the methods that philosophers use for tackling them. Our readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be structured around four central questions: What is knowledge? What is the relationship between the human mind and the physical body? Is our world causally determined, and does that preclude the possibility of free will? What is required for moral responsibility? We will compare historical discussions of each of these issues with work by more recent philosophers.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 3; Ethics and Society; M/W 9:30-10:45; Jacob McNulty
This course is an introduction to academic philosophy through selected topics in ethics and politics. It aims not only to familiarize students with methods of philosophical writing, but also to introduce them to great works in the field. The thematic focus of the course is social inequality. When, if ever, are inequalities in wealth, power and status justified? Is inequality inevitable, given human nature? What, exactly, would social equality demand of us and how might it be achieved? Do people just oppose inequality because they envy the more fortunate? Authors considered may include classical liberals, libertarians, socialists, feminists, anarchists, and even some activists, jurists, and politicians. Readings are short selections from larger works, so that students are exposed to a variety of sources. Authors considered may include Plato, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mikhail Bakunin, Frederick Douglass, Simone de Beauvoir, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Tim Scanlon, Elizabeth Anderson, Charles Mills, and Axel Honneth. A working hypothesis of the course will be that radical traditions reject the way inequality is conceptualized in the liberal tradition.
PHIL-UA 4; Life and Death; T/TH 9:30-10:45; Benjamin Holguín
An introduction to philosophy through the study of issues bearing on life and death. Topics may include the definition and value of life; grounds for creating, preserving, and taking life; personal identity; ideas of death and immortality; abortion and euthanasia.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 5; Minds and Machines; T/TH 3:30-4:45; 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 20; History of Ancient Philosophy; T/TH 3:30-4:45; Jessica Moss
An introduction to Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy. We will study the PreSocratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Sceptics, exploring their answers to questions about the nature of reality, the nature and possibility of knowledge, and how one should live.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course
PHIL-UA 32; From Hegel to Nietzsche; T/TH 11-12:15; John Richardson
The course will focus on four figures: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Nietzsche. We will also give briefer attention to a few others, in particular to some of Hegel’s immediate predecessors.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course
PHIL-UA 40; Ethics; M/W 9:30-10:45; David Velleman
A historically oriented introduction to moral theory. Readings are: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. Three papers and a final exam.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course.
PHIL-UA 70-001; Logic; M/W 12:30-1:45; Philippe Yahchouchi
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 6:20-7:35; 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 70-003; Logic; T/TH 8-9:15; 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 73; Set Theory; T/TH 4:55-6:10; Kit Fine
The course will cover the basics of set theory. The required text is ‘Set Theory: A First Course’ by D W Cunningham and published by Cambridge University Press 2016 (available from NYU bookstore). We will more or less go through the chapters of the book in order. Among the topics to be covered are: the axioms of set theory; Boolean operations on sets; set-theoretic representation of relations, functions and orderings; the natural numbers; theory of transfinite cardinal and ordinal numbers; the axiom of choice and its equivalents; and the foundations of analysis. If time permits we may also consider some more advanced topics, such as large cardinals or the independence results.The emphasis will be on the technical material, although there will also be some philosophical discussion. Students will be required to do exercises each week. Roughly half of these assignments will be handed in and graded. Each week there will be a review section run by the TA. There will be a mid-term exam and a final exam. The two exams will count for 20% and 30% of the final grade, respectively, the assignment for 50%. The course will start from scratch; no background in mathematics or logic is strictly required. However, a background in logic will be helpful; and a certain degree of technical sophistication will be essential.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: Logic (PHIL-UA 70)
PHIL-UA 76; Epistemology; M/W 4:55-6:10; Jane Friedman
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course
PHIL-UA 85; Philosophy of Language; M/W 11-12:15; Paul Horwich
“Socrates was poisoned.” By making those marks on a piece of paper or by mouthing the corresponding vocal noises we can make a claim about someone who lived in the distant past. How is that possible? How do our words come to mean what they do? How do they manage to pick out or latch onto particular portions of reality, even ones with which we’ve never had any contact? How does language enable us to convey thoughts – some of them true -- about everything from black holes, to the hopes of a friend, to properties of prime numbers? For that matter, what is meaning? What is truth? And what is thinking? This course will explore these and other philosophical questions about language through a reading of seminal works by 20th-century thinkers, including Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, and Chomsky.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
Prerequisite: one introductory course
PHIL-UA 90; Philosophy of Science; M/W 11-12:15; Tim Maudlin
We will follow the trajectory of the logical empiricist movement, from its inception with the anti-metaphysical manifesto of Carnap through the various logical and technical challenges it faced to its final demise. We will then look at a few of the succeeding ideas of the next few decades.
Readings include Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, and papers by Carnap, Quine, Hempel and Goodman.
Prerequisite: one introductory course
PHIL-UA 101; Topics in the History of Philosophy; T/TH 11-12:15; Jessica Moss
Rational Animals in Ancient Philosophy
Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were interested in the question of what distinguishes humans from other animals, psychologically, epistemologically, and ethically. Broadly speaking, they agreed on a theory that is still widely accepted today: humans alone have reason. But what does this mean? How did they define reason? How is connected to the ability to use language? Why did they think some humans incapable of reason (as Aristotle thought about the people he called “natural slaves”)? And why did they think that reason makes us so ethically special – the only animals that can be virtuous, and that can be happy? We will read works by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.
Prerequisite: History of Ancient Philosophy (PHIL-UA 20) or History of Modern Philosophy (PHIL-UA 21).
PHIL-UA 102; Topics in Ethics and Political Philosophy; M/W 4:55-6:10; Anthony Appiah
In the third chapter of his famous essay On Liberty—which is called “On Individuality, as One of the Elements of Wellbeing”—John Stuart Mill seeks to defend and articulate individuality as an ideal. Roughly, Mill believes that each of us should play the central part in planning and managing our own lives. This ideal of individuality is often said to be modern and Western in its origins. Certainly it finds expression in many places in contemporary Western cultures, such as ours. But it is essentially an idea in the ancient field of ethics, as Aristotle understood that term, because Aristotle meant by ethics something like “normative reflection on the making of our lives.” Making a life requires not only attention to our obligations to other people (and, of course, to animals and, perhaps, various aspects of the natural world) but also the evaluation of projects—among them friendship, marriage, career, vocation—whose success or failure will determine whether our lives, taken as a whole, are successful. In this course we will explore Mill’s idea of individuality, a notion that belongs to ethics in this sense, as articulated in On Liberty. We shall do so by reading and discussing both fiction and philosophy.
Prerequisite: Ethics (PHIL-UA 40), The Nature of Values (PHIL-UA 41), or Political Philosophy (PHIL-UA 45).
PHIL-UA 103; Topics in Metaphysics & Epistemology; T/TH 12:30-1:45; 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 201; Advanced Seminar; TH 2-4; Paul Horwich
This seminar will cover a selection of topics currently under active discussion in philosophy. It is designed to expose future honors students to possible topics for an honors thesis, but it is not limited to those planning to enter the honors program. The seminar is open to all philosophy majors with a grade-point average of 3.65 or higher in philosophy and overall. It has a prerequisite of two prior courses numbered higher than PHIL-UA 7.
Prerequisite: Two prior courses numbered higher than PHIL-UA 7. Email strevens@nyu.edu for enrollment permission.
PHIL-UA 202; Honors Thesis Workshop; M 4-6; Stephen Schiffer
A seminar taken in fall of senior year. Students begin developing their thesis projects by presentations in the seminar, which is led by a faculty member. Students also begin to meet individually with a separate faculty adviser. See the description of the honors program in the “Program” section.
Email strevens@nyu.edu for enrollment permission.