Search for Spring 2020 courses in Albert.
PHIL-UA 6; Global Ethics; M/W 11-12:15; Anthony Appiah
This course aims to accomplish two things. The first is to introduce three broad traditions of normative thinking about social issues from around the globe: a Confucian tradition, one based in Islamic legal traditions, and one derived from European liberalism. The second is to address three current areas of normative debate: about global economic inequality, about gender justice and human rights. We shall explore these first-order questions against the background of the three broad traditions. Our aim will be to understand some of differences of approach that shape the global conversation about these issues that concern people around the world.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 7; Consciousness; T/TH 3:30-4:45; Ned Block
The philosophy and science of consciousness. Topics covered may include: The concept of a neural basis of consciousness and how we could discover what it is; whether there are different kinds of consciousness; the relation between consciousness and attention, cognitive accessibility, intentionality and agency; the function of consciousness; the unity of consciousness; whether the representational contents of perception are just colors, shapes and textures or include "rich" properties such as facial expressions and causation; whether dreams are conscious experiences that occur while dreaming rather than at the moment of awakening. The course will also cover some theories of consciousness such as mind/body dualism, behaviorism, functionalism, physicalism and theories of consciousness as representation. Among the topics discussed will be some famous thought experiments, such as whether there could be an inverted spectrum in which colors we both call ‘red’ look to you the way colors we both call ‘green’ look to me; and whether Wittgenstein's views of the mind make room for an inverted spectrum; zombie thought experiments; Jackson's example of the scientist raised in a black and white environment who sees red for the first time and learns something about color vision that she could not find out from textbooks. Readings from philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers and neuroscientists such as Victor Lamme and Stanislas Dehaene
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 21; History of Modern Philosophy; T/TH 12:30-1:45; Don Garrett
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, revolutionary developments in science, politics, and religion led to the transformation of old philosophical questions, methods, and theories, and to the generation of new ones. To a remarkable extent, these two centuries of philosophical thought in Europe provide many of the distinctive concepts, questions, methods, and theoretical approaches that help to structure global philosophy in the twenty-first century. This course will explore some of the early modern period’s most significant contributions to, and its liveliest debates within, the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and ethics. In doing so, it will analyze the philosophical systems of René Descartes, Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume, together with critical responses to them by such important contemporaries as Pierre Gassendi, Antoine Arnauld, Nicolas Malebranche, Elizabeth of Bohemia, Samuel Clarke, Pierre Bayle, Anne Conway, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Thomas Reid, Mary Shepherd, George Campbell, and Immanuel Kant.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 30; Kant; T/TH 2-3:15; Jacob McNulty
This course seeks to provide an overview of Immanuel Kant’s most famous work, the Critique of Pure Reason. Our focus will be Kant's transcendental idealism, a doctrine he thought would revolutionize philosophy. This idealist doctrine holds that we can only ever know reality as it appears to us, and never reality as it is in itself. Kant thought his idealism was necessary to uphold the claims of modern mathematics and natural science. He also believed his idealism to be an improvement on the two dominant schools of Early-modern philosophy, rationalism and empiricism. After an initial overview of Kant's transcendental idealism, we will consider his attempt, in the first part of the book ("Aesthetic") to argue that space and time are, in some sense, mind-dependent. We will then consider his attempt, in the second part ("Analytic"), to show that the causal order of nature is similarly mind-dependent. Finally, we will turn to the third part of the book ("Dialectic") where Kant presents an idealist critique of traditional metaphysics. For Kant, the failures of traditional metaphysics result from the uncritical assumption that human beings are capable of knowing things as they are in themselves. We conclude by examining the deeper motivation for Kant's idealism: his interest in explaining the possibility of human freedom and moral responsibility.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 41; Nature of Values; T/TH 3:30-4:45; Sharon Street
This course’s central question is how to understand the nature of value, especially moral value, in a way that coheres with our best scientific understanding of the world. If a stranger risks her life to save a child who has fallen into the path of an oncoming subway train, we think her action has great value. But what is it for an action (or an object, character trait, or way of life) to have value? And how does the existence of value “fit,” if it fits at all, into our picture of the world as described by science? Are there objective truths about what’s good and bad, right and wrong, moral and immoral? Or is value always “subjective,” in the eye of the beholder? Is it possible to understand purported evaluative truths such as “the good is what promotes happiness” on the model of scientific truths such as “water is H2O”? Or is the subject matter of evaluative discourse utterly different from that of scientific discourse? Are statements about right and wrong capable of being true or false, or are they nothing but sophisticated ways of saying “boo” and “hooray” to conduct we disapprove or approve of? This course will provide a survey of the leading philosophical views on these questions. Readings will include works by Moore, Ayer, Mackie, Railton, Sturgeon, Gibbard, Nagel, Korsgaard, and others.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 50; Medical Ethics; T/TH 3:30-4:45
Cross-listed with UGPH-GU 52
Examines moral issues in medical practice and research. Topics include euthanasia and quality of life; deception, hope, and paternalism; malpractice and unpredictability; patient rights, virtues, and vices; animal, fetal, and clinical research; criteria for rationing medical care; ethical principles, professional codes, and case analysis (for example, Quinlan, Willowbrook, Baby Jane Doe).
PHIL-UA 70-001; Logic; M/W 12:30-1:45; Benjamin Holguín
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 9:30-10:45; Eric Tracy
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 2-3:15; TBD
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 78; Metaphysics; M/W 4:55-6:10; Stephen Schiffer
Metaphysics is concerned with philosophical issues about the fundamental nature of reality, and we will study such issues as free will, causation, personal identity, God, necessity and possibility, essence and existence, time, vagueness and indeterminacy, particulars and universals, relativism and anti-realism.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 80; Philosophy of Mind; T/TH 11-12:15; Gabbrielle Johnson
This course introduces students to the philosophy of mind. In it, students will explore critical philosophical views concerning the relationship between the mind and the physical world, the nature of consciousness, as well as the mysteries of the unconscious mind. The course will be divided into two units. In the first unit, we’ll start with the most basic questions concerning mental states, namely, what is a mind and in virtue of what does a being have one? After broadly surveying and contrasting various philosophical views attempting to answer these questions, we’ll home in on two fundamental features of the mind: consciousness and cognition. Regarding consciousness, we’ll explore the mystery of how subjective experience arises from physical processes. Regarding cognition, we’ll explore the information processing that allows us to reason about and navigate through the world around us. In the end, we’ll explore the possibility of unconscious cognition—mental states of which subjects are not aware—and the implications this possibility has for the objectivity of perception and thought.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 94; Philosophy of Physics; M/W 3:30-4:45; Tim Maudlin
Quantum theory is one of the most controversial theories ever developed: although it can be used to make very precise and accurate predictions, there is little agreement about what it implies about the nature of the physical world. In this class we will consider the conceptual problems that confront the theory and several quite different ways to deal with those problems.
No previous knowledge of the physics is presupposed, but students should be prepared to do some algebra and learn some mathematics along the way.
*There are mandatory recitations associated with this course. Please visit Albert to view the schedule.
PHIL-UA 102-001; Topics in Ethics and Political Philosophy; T/TH 4:55-6:10; Peter Unger
This course will be organized around several main topics, though we will discuss some other matters as well.
One topic 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. Much of the discussion of this issue will be organized around material provided in the instructor’s book, Living High and Letting High, as well as material by others conflicting with much of what’s in that work.
Another main issue will concern what we may correctly say about the behavior of someone who never harms anyone in any way at all, doesn’t even badly affect a puppy dog, but contributes a very great deal to the toxic outdoor air pollution killing almost 3 million people each year. He or she certainly doesn’t ever kill anyone at all, not even very, very indirectly. The person doesn’t even have any effect at all, not even a terribly indirect one, on any puppy dog, or on even as much as just a kitty cat. What’s bad, then, in what they are doing?
A third topic will concern what may be learned by work in experimental psychology about the moral values and convictions of smart, sensitive and sensible people – people like us. And, how might what we may learn there aptly affect how we think about people, including ourselves, and people’s behavior, including our own activity or passivity.
PHIL-UA 102-002; Topics in Ethics and Political Philosophy- Normativity; TH 12:30-3; Paul Boghossian
This course will look at the prospects for defending a realist view of normative truths. Normative judgments are judgments that are in some sense prescriptive or evaluative, rather than descriptive. Examples include judgments about morality (what ought we to do), rationality (what ought we to believe), and aesthetics (what ought we to appreciate). We will look at the nature of the normative. We will examine the reasons why many philosophers have been skeptical that there could be objective facts about the normative. We will explore whether a relativist view of such judgments can be made to work. Finally, we will examine the prospects for defending a realist, objectivist view of such facts in each of the three normative domains specified.
Readings will be drawn from such writers as Mackie, Parfit, Street, Cuneo, Scanlon, Thomson, Harman, Hanson, Boghossian.
PHIL-UA 104; Topics in Language and Mind; M/W 9:30-10:45; Crispin Wright
This course will concentrate on a small number of central questions in recent philosophy of language and some connected issues in philosophy of mind. Topics to be covered include skepticism about meaning, with special reference to writings of Quine and Kripke; what it is to understand a language, with special reference to the work of Davidson, Dummett and Wittgenstein; the paradoxes of vagueness; the competing accounts of singular thought deriving from Frege and from Kripke; Kripke’s famous argument against the identification of mental states with physical ones; and some puzzles about the first person, ‘I’. Assessments will include a mid-term paper, and a take-home final exam. Depending on the numbers enrolling, the class may be run in seminar style.
PHIL-UA 122; Greek Thinkers; M/W 11:00-12:15; Marko Malink
Cross-listed with CLASS-UA 700
This is an introduction to central themes in ancient Greek philosophy. We will discuss topics such as fate, freedom, contingency, necessity, the nature of being, substance, and the nature of knowledge. The focus will be on the philosophers Plato, Aristotle, and Chrysippus. Students will develop the skills required to study ancient philosophical texts on their own. We will spend a significant amount of time interpreting fairly short passages, thinking about how to discern more clearly the questions being raised and the answers and arguments being given. We'll also practice standard philosophical skills such as clarifying concepts, noticing distinctions, and analyzing and evaluating arguments.
PHIL-UA 123; Readings in Chinese Philosophy; M/W 2-3:15; Ethan Harkness
Cross-listed with EAST-UA 722
PHIL-UA 201; Advanced Seminar; W 2-4; Zoë Johnson King
This seminar will cover a selection of topics currently under active discussion in philosophy, with an emphasis on social and political questions. 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.