Search for Fall 2020 courses on Albert.
PHIL-GA 1000; Proseminar; Wednesday 4:00-7:00; Kit Fine/Michael Strevens
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
This course is for first year PhD students in the Philosophy Department only.
PHIL-GA 1009; Advanced Introduction to Metaethics; Wednesday 11:00-1:00; Sharon Street
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.
This course is a small discussion seminar. Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 1100; Advanced Introduction to Metaphysics; Monday 11:00-1:00; Cian Dorr
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
This course will focus on an array of key questions relating to identity, possibility, and time. Questions discussed will include: whether things can be identical but possibly distinct; whether things can be distinct but possibly identical; whether things can be distinct but have all the same properties; whether things can be distinct but have all the same qualitative properties; whether every truth is necessitated by a qualitative truth; whether propositions or properties can be distinct but necessarily equivalent; whether there are necessary truths that are not necessarily necessary; whether there are truths that are not necessarily possible; whether there are things that could have not been identical to anything; whether there are certain respects (e.g. originating matter) in which objects could not be radically different from the way they in fact are; whether there are certain respects (e.g. originating matter) in which objects could not be even slightly different from the way they in fact are; whether objects can coincide with (be in exactly the same place as, or be made of exactly the same matter as) objects distinct from themselves; how many objects coincide with any given object, and in what respects they differ; whether objects can permanently, or necessarily, coincide with objects distinct from themselves; whether there are any temporary truths; whether there are temporary necessary truths; whether there are any temporary qualitative truths; and whether there are any contingent qualitative truths.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 1192; Aristotle; Tuesday 11:00-1:00; Marko Malink/Jessica Moss
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Weekly group meetings online via Zoom, with in-person individual or small-group meetings available
This is a survey of some of the main themes of Aristotle's metaphysics. Primary readings will be drawn from Aristotle's Categories, Metaphysics, Physics, Generation and Corruption, On the Heavens, and Posterior Analytics. Topics to be discussed include Aristotle's ten categories, primary and secondary substances, ontological dependence, priority in nature, causation and explanation, essence and necessity, matter and form, actuality and potentiality, coming into being and accidental change. Throughout, special attention will be paid to the key contributions in the secondary literature on these topics. Knowledge of Ancient Greek is helpful but not required. Except for NYU Philosophy and Classics students, attendance is by permission of the instructors.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for History of Philosophy.
PHIL-GA 2280; Political Philosophy; Thursday 1:15-3:15; Daniel Viehoff
Discrimination and Subordination
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
This seminar will focus on recent philosophical work in social and political philosophy on discrimination and subordination. We will discuss existing theories of what discrimination is, and what makes is morally problematic. We will also discuss different attempts to understand social subordination, and related phenomena like social status and stigma. Towards the end of the class, we will consider some more applied issues, such as racial and ethnic profiling and algorithmic discrimination. We will likely be reading work by Elizabeth Anderson, Deborah Hellman, Rae Langton, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Sophia Moreau, Tim Scanlon, and others. (This course is aimed at graduate students in Philosophy. Students in other programs require permission of the instructor before enrolling.)
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.
PHIL-GA 3003; Topics in Epistemology; Tuesday 1:15-3:15; Hartry Field/Tim Maudlin
Philosophy of Probability – Chance and Credence
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
We will discuss chance, credence, and their relationship. Among the issues we’re likely to talk about are: chance in a deterministic world; are there chances other than chances of transition?; realism vs.instrumentalism about chance; does chance derive from credence (e.g. as Jeffrey’s “objectified credences”)?; testing hypotheses about chance; must credences obey the full probabilistic laws? indeed, must they obey anything like probabilistic laws? indeed, should we junk the idea of credence as normally understood and put something else in its place? It’s natural to take something other than credence as basic, e.g. comparative credence, or comparative conditional credence, and it is unobvious that such comparative (conditional) credences are linearly ordered. But what exactly would the laws of such look like, and is it possible to recover the successes of confirmation theory from such a weak foundation?
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 3004; Topics in Metaphysics; Thursday 11-1; Kit Fine
Online via Zoom
I intend to cover some of the papers in a collection of papers on my work in logic that is about to be published. The authors include Leon Horsten, Stephen Yablo, Daniel Rothschild, Peter Fritz, Andrew Bacon, Mark Jago, Michael Dunn, Johan van Benthem, Franz Berto, Fabrice Correia, and our own Andreas Ditter! The focus will be on the interface between logic and metaphysics rather than on the more technical aspects of logic and so the seminar should be accessible to anyone with a basic background in logic. To some extent I will be open to which of the papers we should read, but possible topics include: vagueness; aboutness; the concepts of total and partial truth; variable objects; deontic updating; propositional potentialism; counterfactuals; relevance logic; epistemic logic; and the logic of ground. I shall also provide relevant background reading.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 3005; Topics in Ethics; Tuesday 4-6; Peter Unger
Experimentally Studying People’s Moral Convictions and Reconceptualizing Moral Philosophy
Online via Zoom
- Though we’ll read most of my Living High and Letting Die, most of this course will go, in several ways, far beyond anything to be found there. Here are two 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.
Here is a question- or a group of questions - addressed by some of these experimental studies: 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. - Most ethical principles offered by philosophers, and by many others, too, have been formulated in rather simple terms, using handy phrases. For example, that is true of both:
- Other things equal, it’s badly wrong to kill an innocent person, even if it’s only with the taking of this life that the lives of other innocents, more than just one, can be saved.
- Other things equal, it is quite alright to kill an innocent person if it’s only with the taking of this life that the lives of other innocents, more than just one, can be saved.
Ambient (i.e.) outdoor toxic air pollutions kills almost 3,000,000 people a year, most of this, by far, occurring in Asia. (Most people are in Asia.) Consider the behavior of the multi-billionaire CEOs of huge Asian corporations – think mostly of India and China, the world leaders Each of them controls a giant company that produces, every year, a great deal of toxic air pollution. For good measure, focus on the CEOs of companies that don’t produce anything people really need, but make, say, very many stylish purses, or lots of alcoholic beverages.
Please notice this: Even in his or her very greatly adding to the lethal toxic pollution plaguing the world, none of these horribly indifferent moguls harms anyone at all, not even the least little bit - much less does any of them take a single innocent person’s life, or kill even as much as just one single person or, for that matter, even a single puppy dog.
But, as most of us want to say, each of them has behaved very, very badly. Why is it that these powerful multibillionaires have behaved so terribly wrongly, every last one of them having engaged in morally horrible behavior?
Maybe there’s a pretty easy and straightforward answer here – or maybe not. In either event, the attempt at an answer gets us into a way of doing ethics that’s very different from all previous work in the subject, as all that previous work says nothing about (the moral status of) the behavior of our noted CEOs. Indeed, all that old work provides no terms with which we may assess the moral status of most of the morally most horrible behavior that, for the last 40 years, or more, has been done by human beings.
In this course, we will try to provide better material, much more relevant to modern times, than that old stuff. Will we have any success? I’m pretty sure we’ll have at least a very, very little bit, but I have no idea whether we’ll have any more than that.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.
PHIL-GA 3009; Topics in the Philosophy of Science; Monday 1:15-3:15; Brad Weslake
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
This course will cover three central topics in general philosophy of science: explanation, laws and causation. The focus will be on how general issues intersect with some more applied topics in the particular sciences, with some candidates being: causal and non-causal explanation in evolutionary theory; explainability in artificial intelligence; explanation and understanding in climate modeling; the relationship between the idea that the dynamical laws of physics govern and the idea that they explain; and the relationship between the cognitive science of causal judgment and the metaphysics of causation. We will focus on the topics that those attending become most interested in. No prior knowledge of philosophy of science will be assumed.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 3400; Third Year Workshop; Tuesday 6:15-8:15; Rob Hopkins
Hybrid (regular weekly in-person meetings, with remote option)
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.
PHIL-GA 3601; Work in Progress Seminar; Monday 4-6; Marko Malink
Weekly group meetings online via Zoom, with in-person individual or small-group meetings available
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.
- Because of the space limitations imposed by the need for social distancing in Fall 2020, all hybrid courses listed above will accord first priority for in-person participation to NYU philosophy graduate students who are enrolled in the course for credit; only in a case of unusually high enrollment in a course would it be necessary for enrolled students to participate in some of its meetings remotely. NYU philosophy graduate students (and faculty) who wish to audit a course must obtain the prior permission of the instructor and may be required to participate remotely, either always or on a schedule, depending on space availability. Official visiting students (and visiting scholars) of the department must obtain the prior permission of the instructor and should attend remotely.
- Expected course formats are of course subject to change if required by changing circumstances.