PHIL-GA 1000; Proseminar; Thursday 4-7; John Richardson & Anja Jauernig
This course is for first year PhD students in the Philosophy Department only.
PHIL-GA 1009; Advanced Introduction to Metaethics; Tuesday 11-1, David Velleman
This course will be an Advanced Introduction to the philosophy of action. Authors read will include Anscombe, Davidson, Frankfurt, Thompson, among others.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.
PHIL-GA 1181; Philosophy of Mathematics; Thursday 1:15-3:15; Hartry Field
Mathematical Objectivity
There are two different doctrines often lumped together under the term ‘mathematical platonism’. One is the existence of mathematical objects such as numbers, sets, functions and structures. The other is the objectivity of mathematical questions, even when those questions are undecidable in our best theories. The two questions are separable, and I’d like the course to focus on the second. (One version of anti-objectivism, the view advocated in my old Science Without Numbers, also takes a stand against mathematical objects. But there are other views, e.g. some forms of mathematical conventionalism, and Joel Hamkins’ doctrine of the set-theoretic multiverse, that seem to advocate non-objectivity without denying mathematical objects. And Geoffrey Hellman’s development of Putnam’s “mathematics as modal logic” is a form of objectivism that doesn’t posit mathematical objects.)
There are also issues about the objectivity of logic that are at least superficially related. Especially since there are some mathematical theories (e.g. Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis”) that rely essentially on non-classical logic.
One issue we’ll discuss is whether we can make sense of non-objectivism about any domain (not just math and logic), and if so, how? (Some arguments of a “deflationist” sort seem to suggest that we can’t.) Another issue will be whether there are specific limits on our ability to make sense of non-objectivity in math and logic. In the case of mathematics, it is often thought that arithmetic, or at least an important fragment of it, is immune to serious doubts about objectivity. (There’s more than one possible ground for this.) Is this so? If so, does it serve as an entering wedge that forces us to accept a great deal of objectivity even about typical undecidable sentences in set theory? (Peter Koellner has argued in this vein.)
One route (far from the only one) to arguing for the objectivity of certain questions is to argue for particular answers to them, even if those answers don’t strictly follow from what has previously been accepted. Godel’s Theorem is sometimes viewed as holding out hope for this route to objectivity. While this won’t be the main focus, we’ll probably devote a couple of weeks to it.
We’ll probably also discuss attempts to use model-theoretic results to bear on objectivity, though again this will not be a major focus.
We may also discuss conventionalism in a more general setting, since some recent authors (Warren, Hellman, Shapiro) seem to be breaking the connection between conventionalism and non-objectivity.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
This course is a small discussion seminar. Except for NYU philosophy graduate students, registration is by permission of the instructor.
PHIL-GA 2285; Ethics: Selected Topics; Wednesday 4-6; Dale Jamieson/Alice Crary
Animal Ethics
Over the last few decades a rich literature has developed on ethics and animals. In this seminar we will discuss in detail two of the most substantial recent works: Christine Korsgaard's, 2018 book, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, and Shelly Kagan's 2019 book, How to Count Animals, more or less. In addition to discussing theoretical issues in this domain, we will also address the practical consequences of the views under discussion. Shelly Kagan will visit the seminar and Christine Korsgaard has been invited.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Value Theory.
PHIL-GA 2295; Research Seminar on Mind and Language; Monday 5-6/Tuesday 4-7, Crispin Wright & Paul Horwich
The Nature of Necessity
- 01/28 PAUL HORWICH: Introduction
- 02/04 KIT FINE: The varieties of necessity
- 02/11 AMIE THOMASSON: Epistemology of modality
- 02/18 GRAHAM PRIEST: Against metaphysical necessity
- 02/25 BORIS KMENT: What are modal concepts for?
- 03/03 CIAN DORR: Chisholm's paradox
- 03/10 DAVID PAPINEAU: Natural kinds
- 03/17 SPRING BREAK
- 03/24 KATHRIN KOSLICKI: Fine on essence and necessity
- 03/31 ANAND VAIDYA: Conceivability and possibility
- 04/07 PENELOPE MACKIE: Necessity and the a priori
- 04/14 TERESA ROBERTSON: Modality and essence
- 04/21 CHRISTOPHER HILL: Conceptual possibility
- 04/28 JUSTIN CLARKE-DOANE: Metaphysical and absolute necessity
- 05/05 CRISPIN WRIGHT: On the necessity of arithmetic
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for Metaphysics/Epistemology.
PHIL-GA 2320: History of Philosophy; Wednesday 6:15-8:15; Marko Malink
History of Logic
This course provides an overview of some of the main developments in the history of formal logic from antiquity to the end of the 19th century. The focus will be on discussions of logical consequence and the nature of conditionals throughout the centuries. We will begin with Aristotle's theory of the categorical syllogism, the Stoic system of propositional logic, and their reception in late antiquity. We will go on to consider Abelard's account of conditionals, and Buridan's theory of consequences. We will study parts of the logical work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Bernard Bolzano. Finally, we will consider the algebraic approach to logic developed in the 19th century in the works of Boole, DeMorgan, Jevons, Peirce, and Schroeder, as well as the critique of this approach by Frege.
This course counts toward the Ph.D. distribution requirement for History of Philosophy.
PHIL-GA 3003; Topics in Epistemology; Monday 11-1; Jim Pryor
We'll be looking mostly at literature in epistemology (but some in ethics, or straddling these fields) from the past decade, addressing higher-order norms, defeaters, akrasia, and disagreement. Questions we look at will include:
- Is there any interaction, in either direction, between your first-order reasons/evidence/justification and your beliefs or reasons/evidence/justification about what your first-order epistemic status is?
- Is it ever possible to be reasonably akratic, that is, to be justified in believing that Xing is reasonable/unreasonable, while at the same time being unreasonable/reasonable in Xing, anyway? This question is most often posed about epistemically justified beliefs about what's practically rational for you to do, but can also be posed about epistemically justified beliefs about what's epistemically rational for you to believe.
- When is it reasonable to not merely be confident that P, but to settle upon having a stable, all-out belief that P? When is it reasonable to suspend belief about P?
- What is the relation between what attitudes your reasons/evidence/justification now recommends or requires you to have, and what further investigative or deliberative activities it recommends or requires you to go in for?
- What should we think about the phenomena that prompt "wide-scope" accounts of rational norms or requirements? Can mere (that is, not necessarily justified) beliefs or ends affect what you can reasonably or rationally do or believe?
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 and Reconceptualizing Moral Philosophy
- 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 3601; Work in Progress Seminar; Thursday 11-1; David Chalmers
This course is only open to PhD students in the Philosophy Department.