Philosophy (PHIL-GA)

Examination of central philosophical texts as preparation for further graduate study. Topics range over most key areas of philosophy.

Seminar on different topics in ethics and political philosophy, varying regularly. Some of the following topics (as well as others of research interest to the instructor and students) may be considered: the nature of moral obligations and rights; the nature of normative reasons, normative powers, and other normative phenomena; theories of justice; theories of political legitimacy, authority, and obligations; theories of freedom and obstacles to freedom.

Introduction to logic. Topics will include the basic theory of propositional logic, fuzzy logic, multi-valued logic, boolean logic, modal logic, temporal logic, and more, including a general account of first-order predicate logic, covering the issues of validity, provability, completeness, incompleteness and logical independence, while taking every opportunity to explore fun logical paradoxes

Background course for entering graduate students

Background course for entering graduate students. The topic of the course is the nature of normativity and where to “place” it with respect to our scientific conception of the world. Positions to be considered include naturalist realism; non-naturalist realism; expressivism and quasi-realism; and constructivism.

Background course for entering graduate students. Covers a selection of topics from traditional and contemporary metaphysics. Topics may include the mind/body problem; the nature of space and time; explanation and causation; truth and meaning; realism/antirealism; the existence of universals; personal identity; the identity of events and material things; modality and essence. The emphasis is on providing the students with a background in the subject that will be of help in their subsequent work.

Background course for entering graduate students. Topics include the issue of the reducibility of knowledge, its role in explanation, and the significance of skeptical arguments about its possibility. The course covers particular kinds of knowledge, including perceptual knowledge, knowledge about the past, knowledge of other minds, and a priori knowledge.

Background course for entering graduate students. This comprehensive seminar covers the leading issues in the philosophy of language and the leading positions on those issues. Among topics discussed are the ontology of content; the relation between language and thought; explications of meaning; the relation between the semantic and the physical; problems of reference; and vagueness. The seminar is systematic and presents various issues and theories as part of an integrated whole in which those issues and theories stand in certain presupposition relations to one another. The seminar is critical and places emphasis less on who said what and more on the plausibility of the views considered.

This course will focus on three areas of the philosophy of mind: consciousness, intentionality, and perception. In each area we will discussing one article by each of the convenors and some by other authors, starting with foundational readings and progressing to current work.

Background course for entering graduate students.

A systematic introduction to German intellectual history with special emphasis on the role of art. Authors include Baumgarten, Herder, Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel.

This course will follow the trajectory of the logical empiricist movement, from its inception with the anti-metaphysical manifesto of Carnap through the various logical and technical challenges it faced to its final demise. This course will then look at a few of the succeeding ideas of the next few decades. Readings include Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery, Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations, and papers by Carnap, Quine, Hempel and Goodman

Between the 1930s and the 1970s there was a general consensus amongst logicians that the best solution to the Liar and related paradoxes was Tarskian: no language can be allowed to contain its own truth predicate. In the 1970s this consensus disappeared, and it is now more generally held that an appropriate solution should accommodate a language with its own truth predicate. How that should be done is, of course, another matter. This course will include reading and discussing a number of papers that deal with that issue from a variety of different perspectives. Topics to be discussed include: classical vs non-classical logic, definitions of truth vs axiomatic theories, fixed point constructions, dialetheism, conditionals and restricted quantification, revenge paradoxes, sub-structural solutions

This course will consider central issues in philosophy of mathematics, including whether mathematics describes a mind-independent reality, the epistemology of mathematics, whether mathematics is empirical, mathematical pluralism, mathematical conventionalism, the relation between pure and applied mathematics, and the relation of mathematics to logic.

Examination of selected topics in the works of Aristotle.

Deals in different years with some of the leading figures of the Continental tradition, such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, or with some particular movement in that tradition, such as phenomenology, existentialism, or hermeneutics.

Study of some selections from the works of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

A study of selections from the writings of the distinctive American thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from R W Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and H D Thoreau through Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman to C S Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others.

Central issues in the theory of knowledge

Traditional and contemporary theories of the relation between individuals and the state or community. Topics include political obligation, distributive justice, social contract theory, individual rights and majority rule, the nature of law, political and social equality, and liberty and coercion.

This seminar will consider the nature of law, the relation between law and morality, and related issues.

This seminar will address various problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Topics covered might include the definition and ontology of art; the status, sources and epistemology of aesthetic judgement; what, if anything, particular art-forms are distinctive in offering to the appreciator; and the nature, and role in art, of expression, representation and style.

Seminar on different topics in ethical theory and applied ethics, varying yearly

This seminar is concerned with questions related to agency, action, and practical reasoning.  Topics may include action explanation, the ontology of action, practical knowledge, weakness of will, and theories of intention and planning.

This course examines the question of whether AI can be sentient or sapient through the lense of the conflict between computational and biological approaches to the mind. The first half of the course will focus on sapience, i.e. machine intelligence and thought, and the second half will be on sentience, i.e. what it is like to perceive and think. The approach to sapience will start with classic issues in the philosophy of AI, the Turing Test, the blockhead, Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and functional role semantics as the answer to Searle. The functional role semantics point of view will be applied to various large language models. The second half of the course on sentience will consider the inverted spectrum hypothesis, whether there is more informational capacity in consciousness than in cognition, higher order theories of consciousness and phenomenal consciousness vs access consciousness. We will ask whether computational and biological approaches are complementary or whether they conflict; that is, whether the mind is fundamentally computational or whether it is fundamentally neural or whether it can be fundamentally both

In a typical session of this course, the members of the seminar receive, a week in advance, copies of work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading the week?sIn a typical session of this course, the members of the seminar receive, a week in advance, copies of work in progress from a thinker at another university. After reading the week?s work, the students discuss it with one of the instructors on the day before the colloquium. Then at the colloquium the next day, the instructors give critiques of the work, and the author responds to the critiques and also to questions from others in the audience.

This course will explore topics in the philosophy of language. Topics may include various parts of semantics, pragmatics, meta-semantics, and related topics in philosophical logic. 

Over the last few decades there has been a large and growing interest in vagueness. This seminar will cover some of the developments in the area and their applications to other topics. Possible theories of vagueness to be considered include: supervaluationism; epistemicism; many-valued approaches; and globalism. Possible applications include: the sorites; the connection with the semantic paradoxes; luminosity; and vagueness in the world.

Hegelian and Marxist conceptions of society and history. Topics may include: ideology; the "cunning of reason" and law of unintended consequences; the left-Hegelian critique of religion as a form of alienation; the Marxist idea of alienated labor; differences between “modern” and traditional forms of life; methodological individualism versus social holism; idealist versus materialist accounts of social revolution and historical change; capitalism, the market, and exploitation; notions of historical progress or regress; and the critique of social contract theory, the natural law tradition and atomistic conceptions of society.

Deals with different periods or figures from the history of philosophy not covered in the other historical courses regularly offered by the department. The content varies, depending on student and faculty interests.

Selected topics in philosophical logic.

Selected topics in epistemology.

Selected topics in metaphysics.

Selected topics in ethics.

Selected topics in the philosophy of science.

Additional topics in philosophy of mind.

Selected topics in philosophy of physics.

Specialized individual research.

Specialized individual research.

For Ph.D. students who have completed core requirements.

Required writing course for Ph.D. students.

In the Third Year Review preparation course, students work with a faculty member to develop and refine an already existing paper or project. (Such a paper is often, but not always, a paper written for a previous graduate seminar.) During the semester, the student submits drafts of the developing paper, discussing each draft with the instructor before moving on to the next draft. The aim is for students to receive individual mentoring in the craft of writing a professionallevel philosophy paper; to have a chance to develop a paper more deeply and thoroughly than is typically possible in the more rushed context of a onesemester seminar; and to be provided with a formally structured opportunity to prepare a paper for the third-year review. It is expected that the student and faculty member will meet roughly every two weeks during the semester. Students need not have prior acquaintance with a faculty member to ask him or her to supervise the Third Year Review preparation course. Under no circumstances may a student submit one and the same paper for credit in both a graduate seminar and the Third Year Review preparation course. If a Third Year Review preparation course paper develops out of an existing seminar paper, as will often be the case, the expectation is that it will constitute a substantial development of that paper. Except in special circumstances, it is expected that the Third Year Review preparation course paper will serve as the student’s Third Year Review submission.

The Work in Progress seminar is devoted to the discussion of work-in-progress by advanced students under the supervision of a faculty member. The work-in-progress is typically taken from the dissertation but may also consist in independent paper projects or conference presentations. All students in their third year or later in the program are strongly encouraged to attend the Work-in-Progress Seminar. Enrollment and active participation in the Work-in-Progress Seminar is required for at least one semester, with the obligation usually to be fulfilled by the end of the student’s fourth year.