David Sosa

Intensive examination of selected dissertation topics: attention to research methods, presentation, structure, and argument. Student reports on current research.

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Adviser or instructor required.

Course Description

What we talk about when we talk about about (and ‘about’!). 

A presupposition of much philosophy of mind and language since at least Frege has been what we might call “monosemanticism,” that the phenomenon of intentionality is fundamentally uniform. The proposition is at once the meaning of the declarative sentence and that to which we’re related in any propositional attitude. Propositions constitute the contents, in some important sense, of both thoughts and sentences. And they determine what those thoughts and sentences are about. In virtue of having the contents they do, thoughts and sentences are apt to have truth conditions and, accordingly, truth values.

A still underdeveloped alternative is “polysemanticism”: that the phenomenon of intentionality is rather fundamentally multiplex. No kind of thing is at once the meaning of a sentence of a natural language and that to which a subject is related in thought. What it is to be the object of an attitude is different in kind from what it is to be the meaning of a sentence.

That idea, for what it’s worth, will be the focus of the seminar: there is more than one way for some thing to present another again—to represent it. And language and thought exploit two different such ways. I think such a view provides a new perspective on long-standing obscurities in philosophy of mind and language, several of which will be revisited and reconstrued. But it is not without its own difficulties.

One central challenge is to explain the nature of communication: an attractively simple view is that (in its paradigm, at least) communication is a matter of one subject’s transmitting the content of a thought of theirs by encoding it in a bit of a common language. But if there’s a sense in which no bit of language can simply encode a thought, then a different account is wanted. If there is time, the seminar will also investigate the motivations for the simple view, and contemplate the prospects for an alternative, according to which communication is not dependent on any content of thought.

Work

Enrolled students will be required to write a substantial term paper. In addition, participants will be expected to take part in online course discussions. Near the end of term, there will be final paper workshops.

Possible Texts

(partial list) 
Burge, Davidson, Donnellan, Fodor, Frege, Kripke, Loar, Mates, Putnam, Russell, Salmon

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

Practical reasoning (understood as reasoning to action or intention) has often been understood on the model of theoretical reasoning, which was thought of as itself secure. In this course we will be suggesting that all such approaches (including Aristotle’s notion of the practical syllogism) are hopeless.  We will ask whether this means that the reverse approach is preferable or that practical and theoretical reasoning are simply two distinct species of a single genus (perhaps some notion of judgement). In the process we hope to learn as much about the intended conclusion of theoretical reasoning as about the intended conclusion of the practical.

Grading Policy:

Your grade will be determined entirely by the quality of your paper.

Texts

Among others, we will read at least some of:

Anscombe Intention

Scanlon Being Realistic about Reasons

Dancy Practical Shape

This seminar satisfies the Ethics requirement

This is a course on environmental philosophy with a focus on environmental ethics but also treating epistemological issues. Much of the course will be a survey of major problem areas including intrinsic and instrumental value of environmental features, decision analysis, animal rights, biodiversity, restoration, sustainability, environmental justice, and climate change. The emphasis will be on using locally pertinent case studies to analyze philosophical problems arising from environmental concerns.

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description:

Is there a unified phenomenon of expression that finds, well, expression in speech or in aesthetic production, in performances more generally, and in action perhaps still more generally? If so, what is involved in that phenomenon? What, for example, is the relation between expression and meaning? And how is expression related to manifestation on one hand and to interpretation on the other? What can stand (as the first term, so to speak) in an expression relation: i.e., what can express? And what can stand (as the second term): what can be expressed? Is the expression of something by some thing ultimately a matter of some other relation between those things (or other things)—can expression be reduced? Can something be expressive of something else without expressing it? Is expression an important phenomenon and if so how (morally, aesthetically, in other ways) and why?

Grading Policy:

Students will be expected to write a substantial term paper and to make a seminar presentation.


Texts:

Still indefinite; but likely to include some of these.

Dorit Bar-On, Speaking My Mind: Expression and Self-Knowledge (Oxford, 2004)

Mitchell Green, Self-Expression (Oxford 2007)

Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression (Princeton 1971)

Title:  What do we make when we make an effort? 

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

Wittgenstein—just after he (now, famously) asked, “What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”—added “When I raise my arm I do not usually try to raise it” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, #’s 621–2). Is he right about that? And what turns on whether he is right about that? The philosophical issues behind Wittgenstein’s question/claim pair will be the focus of this seminar. Along the same lines (they are in fact rails invisibly laid to infinity!), Kant, when he describes the will as (“like a jewel”) having its full worth in itself, characterizes it—in an emphatic appositive! (though even there parenthetically)—as “the summoning of all means insofar as they are in our control.” What are those?!

Can one will without trying? Act without trying? Try without acting (so that effort is not itself an action)? Generally: how are the following related?

Deliberating (=reasoning practically?)

Choosing, deciding, or perhaps forming an intention (=practical judgment?)

Intending (whether or not one went into that state through practical judgment)

Setting one’s will (if that’s different from practical judgment)

Willing (if that’s different from intending)

Trying (our nominal focus), and

Acting

Normative status, and freedom and responsibility, will never be too far from our considerations.

Grading Policy:

Students will be expected to write a substantial term paper and to make a seminar presentation.

Texts:

To be determined; but we will likely read some, but not all, of Brian O’Shaughnessy’s two-volume magnum (627 pages!) The Will, Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention, George Wilson’s The Intentionality of Human Action, Jennifer Hornsby’s Action, and Michael Bratman’s Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason.  

Title:    The Lingquistic Turn

Course Description:

Was the Linguistic Turn a wrong turn? The expression (!) was apparently due to Bergmann, though it was popularized with the publication of a book by Rorty. Perhaps a first pass would describe it as acceptance of a methodological presupposition according to which analysis of our language will reveal the structure of reality, or of the conceptual apparatus with which we engage reality (or perhaps the latter because the former—or even, if you have Kantian sympathies, the former because the latter!). Later, but relatedly, settled in the neighborhood to which the Turn leads, Davidson recommends a “method of truth” for metaphysics, Goodman seriously suggests that worlds are “made,” Putnam pushes for “internal” realism, and Quine riddles that “to be is to be the value of a bound variable.” A dramatic and approachable test case for the Turn might be the decision of the International Astronomical Union, in 2006, to define the term “planet” so that Pluto would no longer be one (if that’s how to put it!). We will look at Pluto, and at whales, and at strikes—though there will be no field trips! Is there any “ontological relativity”? Perhaps surprisingly, the status of the truth schema will also concern us.

Grading Policy:

Students will be expected to write a substantial term paper and to make a seminar presentation.

Texts:

To be determined; but we will likely read Quine’s “On What There Is,” Davidson’s “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” some of Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, some of Putnam’s Reason, Truth, and History and his “Why There Isn’t A Ready-Made World.” And we will likely read Plunkett and Sundell’s “Disagreement and the Semantics of Normative and Evaluative Terms.”

Graduate Standing and consent of graduate advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

This will be the inaugural “Sanders Seminar in Philosophy,” funded by the Marc Sanders Foundation. That funding will enable us to bring in three visitors during the course of the term, to present and discuss their work. On each occasion, in the session preceding the corresponding visit, we will read and study the work of that visitor, along with any texts recommended by them. Seminar participants should know that the sessions led by the visitors will be filmed by Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, and then edited and eventually posted on the Sanders Foundation website (as well as the Department’s). For Fall 2014, the visitors will be Susanna Siegel (Harvard)—11 September, Declan Smithies (Ohio State)—2 October, and Geoffrey Lee (UC Berkeley)—16 October. While the general topic for the Sanders Seminar is Mind and Normativity, the more specific topic this time will be the normative significance of phenomenology. For the moment, let me just note how general the issue is by gesturing at what I think are a few related issues: does cognition have a phenomenal character—does it matter too (or instead)? When we have a, for example, mathematical intuition, is there any sort of phenomenal character to that? How does the nature of pain matter in ethics? Is there something normatively amiss with a subject who judges it good (or right) to act in a certain way but feels no desire to act in that way? I mention these questions (and there are many others, of course) because I think the general topic is philosophically broad and significant. Nevertheless, perhaps its most paradigmatic form is about how the character of perceptual experience might be relevant to the justificatory effect of such experiences on belief, and that is indeed the issue that will be central in the seminar.

Grading Policy:

Students will be expected to write a significant seminar paper.

Possible Texts (tentative):

Bengson, J., Grube, E., and Korman, D. “A New Framework for Conceptualism” Gupta, A. Empiricism and Experience (selections)McDowell, J. Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge (selections)“Perceptual Experience: Both Relational and Contentful”McPherson, F. “Colour Inversion Problems for Representationalism” Montague, M. “The Access Problem” Pautz, A. “Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content”Pritchard, D. Epistemological Disjunctivism (selections)Schapiro, T. “The Nature of Inclination” Schellenberg, S. “Experience and Evidence” Shafer, K. “Perception and the Rational Force of Desire” Siewert, C. “Speaking Up for Consciousness”Silins, N. “Seeing through the 'Veil of Perception’” Smithies, D. “The Phenomenal Basis of Epistemic Justification” Speaks, J. “Content and the Explanatory Role of Experience” White, S. “The Transcendental Significance of Phenomenology”Williamson, T. “On Being Justified in One's Head”

NORMATIVITY OF EPISTEMOLOGY

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

Epistemology is plausibly a normative enterprise. When we consider the nature of justification, especially, but also when we're concerned about the value of knowledge or when we think about the demands of reason, the idea that some epistemic conditions are demanded of us, others prohibited—that some ways of being, epistemically, are better than others—is almost inescapable. The goal of this seminar will be to understand better some of the normative dimensions of epistemic phenomena. What would it be for something to be epistemically good? In what could epistemic excellence consist? One form our pursuit of that issue might take investigates the relevance of pragmatic factors to the status of a judgment. But additional possible topics include closure, contextualist and relativist semantics for knowledge attributions, the epistemic basis of disjunctivism, dogmatism, the ethics of belief, fallibilism, luck, transmission of warrant, and the "truth connection."

Grading

Enrolled students will be expected to make an in-class presentation and to write a paper.

Texts

[Preliminary and subject to revision]

Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits

Sellars, Empiricism and the Scientific Image of Man

Fantl and McGrath, Knowledge in an Uncertain World

McDowell, Mind and World

This course satisfies the M&E requirement

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

A number of philosophical problems are alike in arising from relations between epistemic states and linguistic phenomena. For one example, we appear to acquire knowledge from each other, in conversation, through hearing each others’ utterances. How best to account for that circumstance? For another example, what should we do when we discover that someone we consider an epistemic peer disagrees with us? Should we become somehow less committed to our own belief? Finally, for what might be a third case, how shall we understand slurs (and aspersions, epithets, and pejoratives)? What state of mind is expressed by sentences containing them? The course will take up these problems.

Grading

Students will be expected to write a substantial term paper.

Texts

Still to be determined. But among them, at least parts of the following will likely figure:

Coady, Testimony

Burge, “Content Preservation”

Lackey, Learning from Words

Christensen, “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News”

Kelly, “Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence”

Williamson, “Reference, Inference, and the Semantics of Pejoratives”

Richard, When Truth Gives Out

This course satisfies the M&E requirement

POLYSEMANTICISM

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or Instructor required.

Description:

 What we talk about when we talk about ‘about.’ A presupposition of much philosophy of mind and language since at least Frege has been, what we might call “monosemanticism,” that the phenomenon of aboutness is fundamentally uniform. The proposition is at once the meaning of the well-formed declarative sentence and that to which we’re related in any propositional attitude. Propositions univocally constitute the content, in some important sense, of both thoughts and sentences. And they thereby determine what those thoughts and sentences are about. In virtue of having the contents they do, thoughts and sentences alike are apt to have truth conditions and, accordingly, truth values.  

A frustratingly underdeveloped alternative is what I will call “polysemanticism”: that the phenomenon of intentionality is rather fundamentally multiplex. No kind of thing is at once the meaning of a sentence of a natural language and that to which a subject is related in thought. What it is to be the object of an attitude is different in kind from what it is to be the semantic value of a sentence. That idea, for what it’s worth, will be the focus of the seminar: there is more than one way for some thing to present another again—to represent it. And language and thought exploit two different such ways. I think such a view provides a new perspective on long-standing obscurities in philosophy of mind and language, several of which will be reconstrued. But it is not without its own difficulties.  

One central challenge is to explain the nature of communication: an attractively simple view is that (in its paradigm, at least) communication is a matter of one subject’s transmitting the content of a thought of theirs by encoding it in a bit of a common language. But if there’s a sense in which no bit of language can simply encode a thought, then a different account is wanted. One aim of the seminar will be to investigate the motivations for the simple view, and to contemplate the prospects for a radically contrary alternative, according to which linguistic communication is not dependent on any content of thought.  

Grading Policy:

 Students enrolled for credit will be expected to write a paper.  

Texts:

 Selections from Burge, Evans, Frege, Kripke, Loar, Putnam, and Russell, among others.

This course satisfies the M&E requirement.

Past topics include basic issues in metaphysics; particulars and universals; identity and individuation; realism and antirealism; mind-body issues. 

A survey of principal topics and problems in areas such as ethics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of religion. 

Past topics include basic issues in metaphysics; particulars and universals; identity and individuation; realism and antirealism; mind-body issues. 

A survey of principal topics and problems in areas such as ethics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of religion. 

Past topics include basic issues in epistemology; theories of belief and rationality; justification and truth. Three hours a week for one semester.

Past topics include basic issues in epistemology; theories of belief and rationality; justification and truth. Three hours a week for one semester.

Restricted to Philosophy Graduate Students.

Prerequisites

Consent of Graduate Advisor required.

Offered on the credit/no credit basis only. Students may register for this course as many as four times, but only three semester hours of credit in this course may be applied toward a graduate degree

Course Description

This seminar, required for the PhD in philosophy, prepares students to teach and to finish the PhD with a teaching portfolio that includes syllabi for courses at undergraduate and graduate levels.

Grading

The grade will be based on the following items:

Course Syllabi (2 introductory, 2 upper-division, 1 graduate) 50%

A Statement of Teaching Philosophy 10%

Teaching Observation Reports (2) 20%

Participation 20%

Texts

Readings will be made available online.

In-depth examination of philosophical questions and issues in a seminar setting for advanced Philosophy students.

Methods and aims of selected sciences, arts, and philosophy in the attainment of knowledge and in providing the basis for valuation.

Past topics include basic issues in epistemology; theories of belief and rationality; justification and truth. Three hours a week for one semester.

Methods and aims of selected sciences, arts, and philosophy in the attainment of knowledge and in providing the basis for valuation.

Past topics include basic issues in epistemology; theories of belief and rationality; justification and truth. Three hours a week for one semester.

Methods and aims of selected sciences, arts, and philosophy in the attainment of knowledge and in providing the basis for valuation.

Methods and aims of selected sciences, arts, and philosophy in the attainment of knowledge and in providing the basis for valuation.

Past topics include contemporary ethical theory; theories of justice; philosophy of law; social contract theories; political philosophy. 

Past topics include basic issues in metaphysics; particulars and universals; identity and individuation; realism and antirealism; mind-body issues. 

Methods and aims of selected sciences, arts, and philosophy in the attainment of knowledge and in providing the basis for valuation.

A survey of principal topics and problems in areas such as ethics, theory of knowledge, and philosophy of religion. 

Past topics include basic issues in metaphysics; particulars and universals; identity and individuation; realism and antirealism; mind-body issues.