Spring 2022 Graduate Course Descriptions

Search for Spring 2022 courses on Albert.

 

PHIL-GA 1000; Proseminar; Wednesday 12:00-3:00; Hartry Field/Crispin Wright

This course is for first year PhD students in the Philosophy Department only.

 

PHIL-GA 1002; Topics in Ethics & Political Philosophy; Thursday 4:00-6:00; Samuel Scheffler

Rawls and Race

The first part of this seminar will be an intensive introduction to the work of John Rawls.  In the second part, we will examine controversies about the philosophical significance of Rawls’s failure to provide much explicit discussion of race, racism, or racial justice.  We will also consider some wider debates about liberalism and race.  We will read work by Charles Mills, Tommie Shelby, Elizabeth Anderson, and Samuel Freeman.

This course is a small discussion seminar; except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.

This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.

 

PHIL-GA 1250; Rationalism in the 17th Century; Thursday 11:00-1:00; Don Garrett

Advanced Intro to 17th Century Rationalism

Rationalism is widely regarded as the dominant philosophical movement, school, or tendency in seventeenth-century Europe, especially on the Continent. Often contrasted with empiricism, it is taken to defend the epistemological preeminence of reason over sense experience, a strong distinction between intellect and imagination, the innateness of at least some ideas, the ontological argument for the existence of God, resistance to brute facts, and the value of metaphysical system-building. This course will examine some of the central epistemological and metaphysical concepts, doctrines, and arguments of some of the most important and fascinating figures associated with early modern European rationalism: René Descartes, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anton Wilhelm Amo, Nicolas Malebranche, Baruch de Spinoza, Anne Conway, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Topics include doubt and certainty, substance/mode metaphysics, foundations for mechanistic physics, mind-body dualism, vision in God, occasionalism, substance monism, determinism and necessitarianism, panpsychism, teleology and teleological explanation, possible worlds, and idealism.

Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.

This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for History of Philosophy.

 

PHIL-GA 2295; Research Seminar on Mind & Language; Monday 5:00-6:00/Tuesday 4:00-7:00; Paul Horwich/Crispin Wright

The topic for Spring 2022 will be Metaphilosophy. This will be understand broadly so as to encompass general questions about the capabilities, limits and proper methods of philosophy, and about the extent and kinds of progress that it has been able to make, but with a restriction in scope to Analytical Philosophy and to the most influential ideas about these metaphilosophical questions that have featured in its beginnings more than a century ago, and in the course it has run through the last century and since.

The seminar will meet 14 times, between 4pm and 7pm, on every Tuesday from January 25^th to May 3^rd, with the exception of March 15^th. 

For a typical session of this course, the members of the seminar will have received, a week in advance, copies of published work (or work in progress) from a thinker at another university. After studying this reading-assignment, the students discuss it with one of the instructors at a preliminary meeting from 5-6 on the Monday before the colloquium. At the Tuesday session, the instructors begin by raising questions about the work. The author will then responds to them, and also to questions from others in the audience.

SCHEDULE

25 Jan.      1. General Intro - on historic and contemporary agendas and methods (CW & PH)

1 Feb.        2. Frege, Russell, logical analysis, and the birth of analytic philosophy (Peter Sullivan)

8 Feb.        3. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the limits off meaning, and the nature of philosophy (Jose Zalabardo)

15 Feb.      4. Carnap’s logical empiricism (Vera Flocke)

22 Feb.      5. Quine’s philosophical naturalism (David Papineau)

1 March     6. Wittgenstein’s anti-theoretical metaphilosophy (Paul Horwich)

8 March     7. Ordinary language philosophy (Krista Lawlor)

22 March   8. Dummett on the distinction between realist and antirealist domains of discourse (Crispin Wright)

29 March   9. The relative priority of language and metaphysics (Chris Peacocke)

5 April       10. Philosophical pragmatism (Michael Willliams)

12 April      11. Philosophical intuitions and the import (if any) of X-phi (John Bengson)

19 April      12. Conceptual engineering (Amie Thomasson)

26 April     13. Progress in philosophy (Tim Williamson)

3 May         14. The method of cases, thought-experiments, and conceptual analysis (Anna-Sara Malmgren)

This course is open to Philosophy graduate students at NYU. Students in other NYU programs or at other universities must get prior permission from the instructors to attend.

This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.

 

PHIL-GA 3005; Topics in Ethics; Tuesday 1:15-3:15; Peter Unger

Experimentally Studying People's Moral Convictions

Though we’ll read most of Professor Unger’s Living High and Letting Die, most of the course will go, in several ways, far beyond anything to be found there.

Here are some 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.

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.

This course is aimed at NYU graduate students in Philosophy and Psychology. Students in consortium PhD programs in Philosophy or Psychology are permitted to enroll. Advanced undergraduate students require permission of the instructor before enrolling.

This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.

 

PHIL-GA 3009; Topics in Philosophy of Science; Thursday 1:15-3:15; Laura Franklin-Hall

Sex, Gender and Race

In this course we will address recent work in the metaphysics of sex, gender and race, asking questions such as: in virtue of what is an individual a member of a sex? A gender? Or a race? Are sexes, genders and races real? In what ways do sex, gender and race interestingly depend on our conceptual schemes, our social practices, or our normative commitments? The course will be split into three broad units (sex, gender and race), with some meeting time dedicated to issues of relevance across domains (e.g., theories of classification and of reference).

This course is a small discussion seminar; except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.

This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.

 

PHIL-GA 3011; Topics in Philosophy of Physics; Tuesday 11:00-1:00; Tim Maudlin

Philosophy of Time

Time is the single most ubiquitous structure of contingent reality. Even Descartes, who raised skeptical worries about the existence of spatial reality, never questioned that his immediate conscious experience unfolds in time. Oddly, many modern physicists and philosophers of physics nonetheless assert that the passage of time and the intrinsic directionality of time is an “illusion”, or at best some emergent feature from a fundamentally undirected basic reality.

I think this entire literature rests on mistakes. Part of that goes back to McTaggart’s peculiar argument for the “unreality” of time, part to a misinterpretation of the significance of a symmetry called “time reversal invariance” in some of the proposed laws of physics. We will examine these arguments and discuss both what sort of temporal structure the universe may have and how to represent that structure in mathematical physics.

This course is open to all students in any NYU graduate program without special permission.

This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.

 

PHIL-GA 3400; Third Year Workshop; Thursday 6:20-8:20; Laura Franklin-Hall

This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.

 

PHIL-GA 3601; Work in Progress Seminar; Wednesday 1:15-3:15; Daniel Viehoff

This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.

 

PHIL-GA 1008; Topics in Bioethics; Monday 6:45–8:45; Matthew Liao

Neuroethics
Cross-listed with GPH-GU 2026 - 001

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. 

This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.

 

PHIL-GA 3309; Enlightenment Constitutionalism; Tuesday 4:25–6:25; Jeremy Waldron

Cross-listed with LAW-LW.12700.001

This seminar is devoted to a study of the roots of modern constitutionalism in (mainly) 18th century political thought. Mostly it will be devoted to structural constitutionalism rather than rights-based constraints: as an exception, there will be some limited discussion of religious toleration. We will begin with the Lockean idea of disaggregating ideas like monarchy into separate powers and then examine the proposition (in Hume and Madison) that a constitution (i.e., a set of connections between separated powers) can be designed like a machine, which is capable of working even though the motivations of the politicians inhabiting it are not perfect. The seminar will also look at the relation between constitutional structure, on the one hand, and ideas like the rule of law, representation, revolution, and the proper conduct of foreign policy. The seminar will provide deep background for an understanding of the framing of the US Constitution and constitutionalism generally. The reading load will not be heavy: some primary reading for each of the main authors and topics, together with one or two secondary readings for each week. Students will write memo’s for class for each of ten sessions (their choice which ones) and a paper at the end of the semester on one of the topics or one or more of the authors we have studied.

 

PHIL-GA 3901; European Political Thought: The Intellectual Origins of the Far Right and the Far Left; Monday 12:30–2:30; Tamsin Shaw

Art & Politics in Europe
Cross-listed with EURO-GA 3901-003

In this course we will look at the relationship between art and politics from the 18th century until the present in Europe. This will involve examining the way in which artists have responded to political thought, as well as the role that political thinkers have seen for art, beginning with Rousseau‘s “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.” We will examine the role of art in European fascism and the way in which subsequent artistic traditions were affected by the most momentous events of the 20th century. This means we will have to ask how art can respond to the Holocaust and to war on a global scale. We will also look at censorship as a way of understanding the political power of art. We will include not just the visual arts, but also music, opera, film and literature.