PHIL-GA 1000; Pro-seminar; Wednesday 3-6; Robert Hopkins/Crispin Wright
This course is for first year PhD students in the Philosophy Department only.
PHIL-GA 1004; Adv. Intro to Ethics; Thursday 4-6; Samuel Scheffler
This course is intended to introduce students to some of the major positions and debates in ethical theory. It will be structured around a close reading of a few important contemporary texts.
This course is only open to Philosophy graduate students. Students in other programs must get prior permission from the instructors to enroll.
PHIL-GA 1008; Topics in Bioethics: Neuroethics; Monday 6:45-8:45; Matthew Liao
Neuroethics has two branches: the neuroscience of ethics and the ethics of neuroscience. The former is concerned with how neuroscientific technologies might be able to shed light on how we make moral decisions, as well as on other philosophical issues. The latter is concerned with ethical issues raised by the development and use of neuroscientific technologies. Topics include whether neuroscience undermines deontological theories; whether our moral reasoning is inherently biased; whether there is a universal moral grammar; the extended mind hypothesis; the ethics of erasing memories; the ethics of mood and cognitive enhancements; “mind-reading” technologies; borderline consciousness; and free will and addiction.
PHIL-GA 1104; Adv. Intro to the Philosophy of Space and Time; Thursday 10-12; Tim Maudlin
The nature of space and time have raised questions of perennial philosophical speculation. What is space? What is time? Is the existence of one or both ontologically parasitic on the existence of matter or of change? Could there be a completely empty space (vacuum) or a completely static lapse of time, in which nothing at all changes save “what time it is”?
We will examine these questions, first in historical context (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz) and then track the influence of physical considerations (Newton) on the debate. Lastly, we will examine what the change from classical Newtonian physics to Relativistic physics has meant, and get a sense of how General Relativity explains what we call “gravitational effects” without any gravitational forces.
No background in physics or mathematics is presumed. Students should, though, be willing and capable to solve some algebraic equations, and to try to solve real problems using basic geometrical methods.
This course is a small discussion seminar. Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 1220; 20th Century Analytical Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein; Monday 3-5; Paul Horwich
The seminar will focus on their accounts of language, meaning, truth, logic, and ontology -- tracing the influence of Frege on Russell, and of them both on Wittgenstein.
Amongst the works to be studied (at least in part):--
- Frege’s Begriffsschrift, “Function and Concept”, “On Concept and Object”, and “On Sense and Reference”
- Russell’s “On Denoting”, "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description", and “Truth and Falsehood”
- Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations
Registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 2285; Ethics: Selected Topics: Contractualism in Moral (and Political) Philosophy; Tuesday 2-4; Liam Murphy
The primary focus of this seminar will be contractualist moral theory. Our main text will be T. M. Scanlon’s What We Owe To Each Other. The seminar will start, by way of background, with review of Rawls’s contractualist approach to political theory. One of the themes throughout will be whether contractualist moral theory faces challenges not faced by traditional contractualist political theory. A second main text will be (selections from) Derek Parfit’s On What Matters. Readings will also include selections from some or all of the following authors, among others: Thomas Nagel, F. M. Kamm, Judith Jarvis Thomson, R. Jay Wallace, Pamela Hieronymi, Samuel Scheffler, David Gauthier, and Rahul Kumar.
This course is only open to Philosophy graduate students. Students in other programs must get prior permission from the instructor to enroll.
PHIL-GA 2295; Research Seminar on Mind and Language; Monday 5-6; Tuesday 4-7; Paul Boghossian/Chris Peacocke
Normative Realism
The notions of norms, justification, and entitlement play a central role in multiple areas of philosophy. They feature in the theory of meaning and content; in epistemology; in moral philosophy; and of course in the theory of rationality in general. This course will be concerned with the nature and status of norms. Should we be realists about some or all of them? What would such realism involve? Or are norms in one way or another constitutively dependent upon our practices, or on our evaluative attitudes? What are the consequences of one or another view on these fundamental issues?
In the first three weeks of the Seminar (29 January – 12 February), Paul Boghossian and Chris Peacocke will give an introductory overview of some of the principal issues. In each of the subsequent weeks, we will have a visitor who has made contributions to one of another aspect of this nexus of issues. Discussion with the visitor will always be on a Tuesday. For those taking the Seminar for credit, and others who may be interested, there will be a meeting on each Monday at 6.00pm immediately preceding that of a visitor, to identify and discuss issues raised by the visitor’s work. All Tuesday meetings will held at NYU; Monday meetings, starting in the fourth week of the Seminar, will be held at Columbia (Rooms TBA).
The schedule of visitors is as follows:
- Feb 19th: Shamik Dasgupta
- Feb 26th: Laura Schroeter
- Mar 5th: Sharon Street
- Mar 12th: Ralph Wedgwood
- Mar 19th: SPRING BREAK
- Mar 26th: Sarah McGrath
- Apr 2nd: Matti Eklund
- Apr 9th: Hartry Field
- Apr 16th: Kieran Setiya
- Apr 23rd: Michael Huemer
- Apr 30th: Gideon Rosen
- May 7th: Elliot Paul
Registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 2320; History of Philosophy: Consciousness and What Is Unconscious - From Kant to Freud and Contemporary Neuroscience; Tuesday 10-12; Béatrice Longuenesse
The term “consciousness” and the expressions “unity of consciousness” and – in contrast – “that, of which we are not conscious” are omnipresent in Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. But what does Kant mean by “consciousness” and “. . . of which we are not conscious”? We will try to answer these questions by focusing on selections from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Lectures on Logic, Anthropology, and Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
We will then examine a neglected aspect of Kant’s legacy: his influence on nineteenth century naturalistic philosophy and psychology. Questions exercising philosophers during that period include: what is the relation between perception and cognition? Are the apparent contents of perceptual states based on unconscious inferences? What is the relation between the structure of the will and the structure of cognition? We will track Kant’s influence on these and other questions by reading selections from Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and Hermann Helmholtz’s The Facts in Perception.
This lineage in Kant’s legacy leads to Sigmund’s Freud’s meta-psychological essays on the structure of mental life. In the final part of the seminar, we will read selections from Freud’s works (Studies in Hysteria, Project for a Scientific Psychology, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Unconscious, The Ego and the Id) as well as recent essays offering critical interpretations of Freud’s meta-psychological concepts in light of contemporary neuroscience.
Prior knowledge of works by Kant, Freud, or any of the other authors under discussion is welcome but not required. Seminar discussions as well as written assignments will be based on close reading of manageable selections from the authors under discussion.
PHIL-GA 3002; Topics in the Philosophy of Mathematics: Topics in Set Theory and its Philosophy; Wednesday 12:45-2:45; Hartry Field
The first part of the course will be a detailed look at some rather weak set theories (in the vicinity of Kripke-Platek set theory). Such theories are sometimes called “constructive” (though they employ a fully classical logic, and their motivation has more to do with a kind of invariance than with constructivity as usually conceived). We’ll look at whether there are strong reasons to prefer them to their usual “non-constructive” strengthenings (Zermelo-Fraenkel), but in addition, a lot of the course in these early weeks will just be getting familiar with how these theories work and what can and can’t be done in them. One moral will be that virtually all ordinary mathematics can be done in this rather modest framework, somewhat undermining a standard argument for the stronger set theories.
The latter part of the course is less determined, in part because I’m not sure how long the first part will take. (Possible topics include: the axiom of choice and weak versions thereof; some philosophical issues about the interpretation of independence results; a modified kind of “constructivity” that uses some non-classical logic; relations between weak set theories and versions of second order arithmetic.)
The course won’t officially presuppose prior work in set theory—e.g. the proofs in the weak set theory will mostly be done from scratch (paying attention to where the use of stronger axioms would simplify proofs). But while I will adjust the pace for the audience, my ideal would be to cover some set-theoretic basics rather quickly; so I’m hoping that those taking the course will have at least a bit of prior exposure to axiomatic set theory.
PHIL-GA 3003; Topics in Epistemology: Explanation Across Disciplines; Tuesday 12-2; Laura Franklin-Hall/Michael Strevens
We'll begin by looking at philosophical theories of scientific explanation, in particular, expectability, unificationist, and causal approaches. Then we'll begin to range more broadly, taking in explanation in mathematics, metaphysics, ethics, and perhaps history. We'll also have classes at various points on inference to the best explanation, the psychology of explanation, and the "metaexplanatory question" -- roughly, the question whether the explanatoriness of certain facts and relations (e.g. causation) is an objective property or something we project onto them.
This course is a small discussion seminar. Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 3004; Topics in Metaphysics: How Fine-Grained is Reality?; Wednesday 10:30-12:30; Cian Dorr
Claims of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ (‘To be a human being is to be a rational animal’; ‘To know something is to have a justified true belief in it’; ‘To be morally permissible is to maximise total happiness’…) are of central interest in many branches of philosophy. In this seminar we will be concerned with some more general, structural questions of this sort, such as:
- If for a to be F is for a to be G, is it always the case that to be F is to be G?
- Is it always true that to be F is to F or such that everything is F?
- Is it always true that to be F is to be both F and F?
- Is it ever true that to be F is to be both F and G?
We will consider several general metaphysical views about the “fineness of grain of reality”, that yield systematically different answers to questions like these. Some of these views will also have things to say about entailment, necessity, metaphysical priority, fundamentality, naturalness, and logicality: for example we will be discussing the question whether it is contingent what there is and the question whether distinct fundamental properties are always logically independent. There will also be some discussion of the distinctive challenges that ascriptions of belief and other propositional attitudes pose for theorising in this area.
This course is a small discussion seminar. Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 3005; Topics in Ethics; Thursday 12-2; Peter Unger
This course will be organized around two main issues, though we will discuss some other matters as well.
One main issue will concern what one must do, morally speaking, toward saving the lives of others, both when such saving will come at relatively little cost to one and also, as will happen only rarely, when it will cost one the loss a limb or, even, the loss of one’s life.
The other main issue will concern the value for us of living a long life, the longer the better, providing that the quality of our lives is usually quite high, and we are usually quite happy people. With this issue, we will discuss the question of the quite certain cessation of our lives, during the next century or so, and what is an appropriate attitude for us to take toward our termination.
PHIL-GA 3400-001; Thesis Research: ABD Seminar; Monday 10-12; Béatrice Longuenesse
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.
PHIL-GA 3400-002; Thesis Research: Third Year Workshop; Wednesday 3-5; Michael Strevens
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.