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

This course is an introduction to some of the problems of philosophy and some of the solutions that have been offered to them. We'll consider answers to questions like:

An introduction to the philosophical achievements of the ancient world, concentrating on Plato and Aristotle. 

An introduction to the philosophical achievements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concentrating on such figures as Descartes, Hume, and Kant. 

Who are we and what makes us who we are? This course explores some of the deepest, most fundamental, and nagging questions about our identity. We will be questioning what it means to have a nature, what it means for that nature to be human, and whether or not nature dictates who we are. To this end, we will be studying the work of philosophers, psychologists, and biologists, and explore ways in which we might give principled answers to questions of self-identity. We will engage with topics from metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of race and gender. Last but not least, we will be left wondering whether Lady Gaga is right when she says “Baby I was born this way”.

Introduction to philosophical issues about the nature of the mind and its relation to body: What is mind? Do people have free will? How does psychology relate to neuroscience? 

An introduction to ethics by way of an examination of a number of contemporary moral problems, including problems of abortion, sexual morality, capital punishment, pornography and hate speech.

This course considers moral problems that are controversial today and the way that different ethical theories recommend that we approach these problems.  We will be discussing:  Balancing Liberty and Well-Being, Cloning and other forms of Genetic Engineering, Human Enhancement, Limits on what can be sold, Mass Incarceration, Immigration and Global Poverty, Artificial Intelligence, Animal Rights, Climate Change, and Killing.

An introduction to ethics by way of an examination of a number of contemporary moral problems, including problems of abortion, sexual morality, capital punishment, pornography and hate speech.

Description: This course is an introduction to philosophy through problems that arise within religion. The course investigates four different attitudes that have been held about the relation of human beings to God. First is an ancient view according to which God's existence is presupposed and all events are interpreted as expressions of God's will. Second is a medieval view according to which the existence of God and his various attributes are suitable subjects for proof and argument. Third is a modern view according to which God exists but little is known about him through reasoning. Fourth is a contemporary view according to which God is assumed not to exist; the questions whether anything has any value and whether human life has a meaning will be asked. Although the course is divided historically, our goal will be to identify what is true or false, rational or not rational about the views expressed in each.

Note: This is not a course in World Religions.

This course is an advanced introduction to philosophical issues concerning the nature of
belief, truth, and knowledge with an emphasis on the latter. Topics to be discussed include,
but are not limited to, the following:
• What is knowledge? For example, what is the difference between knowledge and
mere true belief?
• What are the basic sources of knowledge (i.e., perception, memory, testimony of
others)?
• Why, if at all, should we value the acquisition of knowledge?
• Is it really possible to know anything at all?

This is a course in the basic principles of logic. The student will come out of this course with an understanding of deductive inference and of argument generally, as wells as the notions of logical consequence, validity, soundness, and logical truth. Specifically, we will be looking at sentential logic (which treats the inferential relations among simple sentences) and predicate logic. Predicate logic is distinguished from sentential logic by its use of quantifiers.

This is a course in the basic principles of logic. The student will come out of this course with an understanding of deductive inference and of argument generally, as wells as the notions of logical consequence, validity, soundness, and logical truth. Specifically, we will be looking at sentential logic (which treats the inferential relations among simple sentences) and predicate logic. Predicate logic is distinguished from sentential logic by its use of quantifiers.

In this course, we'll study some technical tools that can help make our thinking clearer, more rational, and more reliable. In particular, we'll learn some mathematical probability theory for this purpose. Our focus will be on how probability can serve as a practical guide to good thinking. Our textbook is online and free. To get a more detailed sense of the content of the course, you can start browsing it here: https://jonathanweisberg.org/vip/

Formulation, analysis, and criticism of philosophical ideas in selected films.

This course will examine the growth and development of science in modern times
through the history of certain crucial debates and breakthroughs that have taken place
since the beginnings of modern science in the 17th century. Topics considered will
include: what is the nature of science? Does it have a distinctive method (or methods)
that distinguish it from other forms of inquiry? What are its criteria of truth? Can science
ever achieve certainty, and if not, does it have any distinctive claims on our belief, and if
so why? What are the mechanisms of scientific progress and change? How does science
relate to, and differ from, other forms of intellectual inquiry?

Description: This course will consider some of the answers given in the Western philosophical tradition to questions about the nature of art and beauty, with some comparison with the aesthetic traditions of other societies. Particular attention will be given to the nature of aesthetic experience from the standpoint of both the artist and the observer, the relationship between art and reality, and the questions contemporary art raises about the purpose of art.

Text:

David Goldblatt, Lee B. Brown, and Stephanie Patridge, Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, 4th ed.

Grading:

Short papers             30% total (beauty, wall text, Landmarks, something toward end)

Exam 1            15%

Exam 2            15%

Final project             20%

Section presentation 10%

Participation 10%

Classic issues in the philosophy of art and beauty, illustrated from the fine arts and contemporary media: literature, drama, music, painting, film, and television. 

Study of basic principles of the moral life, with critical examination of traditional and contemporary theories of the nature of goodness, happiness, duty, and freedom.

What is knowledge? What are the principal types of knowledge, and what does a person's knowing a claim or proposition p amount to? Philosophers have commonly supposed that a person's having justification, or warrant, for
believing that p is a necessary condition of his/her knowing that p. Accordingly, this course will be concerned with theories of justification as well as of knowledge, along with the question of whether there can be knowledge without what is called epistemic justification. Views in ancient, early modern, and contemporary philosophy—also one Eastern view—will be surveyed.

This course examines the development of ethical theory from Aristotle to Philippa Foot.  The philosophers to be focused on are Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Richard Price, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, W. D. Ross, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Philippa Foot.  We begin with Virtue Ethics, and proceed through various versions of Deontological and Consequentialist approaches to ethics, and end, again, with Virtue Ethics. We will be discussing the contrasts and connections between each of these thinkers and their views on normative ethics and moral psychology.

Metaphysics

Instructor: Professor Roy Sorensen roy.sorensen@austin.utexas.edu

Office: Waggener Hall 405      (WAG)                       

Phone: Office 512-471-6755  Office hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 5 to 6 or by appointment          

Course Description: This course with survey the main issues of contemporary metaphysics and also cover the historical development of metaphysical puzzles emanating from nothingness (non-existence, omissions, and more specific absences such as holes, silence, shadows, and darkness). For the modern survey, we will average a chapter a week from Metaphysics: The Fundamentals. The topics will follow the chapter headings.

            The readings for the history of nothingness, will be chapters from the instructor’s manuscript A Brief History of Nothing (which will be made available on Canvas). We will begin in China with Lao Tzu’s interest in omissions (“doing nothing”), pass on to Buddha in India, linger with the Ancient Greeks, and proceed all the way to the present. Chapters of the instructor’s book will be distributed for the historical aspect. The strategy will be to approach standard metaphysical topics through the lens of nothingness.

            The primary focus of the course is metaphysics rather than history. So we will frequently flash forward to contemporary articles. Students are encouraged to recommend articles.

This course is an introduction to many of the central issues in philosophy of mind. Some of the questions we will discuss include the following. Can computers think? Is the mind an immaterial thing? Or is the mind the brain? Or does the mind stand to the brain as a computer program stands to the hardware? How can creatures like ourselves think thoughts that are "about" things? (For example, we can all think that Aristotle is a philosopher, and in that sense think "about" Aristotle, but what is the explanation of this quite remarkable ability?) Can I know whether your experiences and my experiences when we look at raspberries, fire trucks and stop lights are the same? Can consciousness be given a scientific explanation?

Mass disparities exist in the health of humans across the globe. It may seem obvious from a moral point of view that if we can do something to alleviate the global and local disparities in health and access to healthcare, that we should do something about it. Once we scratch the surface of this apparent truism, however, we find a number of assumptions in need of defense. What would ground such an obligation after all? Do humans have a right to health? If so, do they also have a right to healthcare? It may seem that these two concepts are intertwined, but consider an analogy. Someone’s right to life makes it impermissible to kill that person (unless you would be justified in doing so, say, in a case of genuine self-defense). Nevertheless, the right to life plausibly does not entail that you are obligated to protect or preserve the life of everyone who has such a right. Similarly, if humans have a right to health, then it would be impermissible to undermine their health. But it is a different question whether individual’s are obligated to protect and preserve the health of others by, for example, ensuring their access to healthcare. The course will evaluate rights-based arguments, among others, that aim to show the injustice of current disparities in health. Proponents contend that we do have a moral obligation to secure health and access to healthcare across racial, gender, socio-economic, as well as national boundaries.

This course will consider three classic moral theories, those of J. S. Mill, W. D. Ross and I. Kant – otherwise known as Utilitarianism, Intuitionism and Kantianism. We will do this by studying one classic text by each author in detail.

Texts:

1. S. Mill Utilitarianism ed. G Sher (Hackett)
2. D. Ross The Right and the Good ed. P. Stratton-Lake (Oxford: Clarendon Press)
3. Kant Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Ethics tr. M Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Grading:

Written requirements: 2 papers of 1000 words each and a final term paper of 3000 words. This is a Writing Course, and 25% of the grade for each paper will be given for writing quality alone.

These assignments will together generate 70% of the course grade; the remainder will be determined by other criteria e.g. spot quizzes. There will be penalties for absence from class. There will be no final examination.

Issues in ethics and politics that are relevant to the organization of business and industry and the distribution of power in society; topics include the role of industry; concepts of profit, property, and moral responsibility.

The application of ethical theory to medical practice is an important part of modern public
policy. We look at several approaches to ethics and several areas of medicine to gain insights
into medical ethics. This course carries the ethics and leadership flag. Consequently, a
substantial portion of the grade will involve ethical issues and reasoning.

This course is an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy. We’ll focus on three major thinkers: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and we’ll examine their views and arguments on some central questions about human conduct, the natural world, and our knowledge of both. We’ll begin with a brief look at some influential earlier figures known as Presocratics and Sophists, and we’ll end with a brief look at some enduring ideas of Epicurus. The emphasis throughout will be on analyzing both what these thinkers say and their reasons for saying it. The main goal is not to memorize information but to develop a critical understanding of some problems and arguments that remain very much alive today.

This course is an introduction to early modern philosophy. The objectives of the class are to identify and analyze arguments in philosophical texts of the early modern period, and to become familiar with central themes and problems. Topics include causation, substance, and the possibility of knowledge. The relationship of philosophical theories to contemporary science will be an ongoing theme.

The first part of the course focuses on classic views of reference, regarded as the principal link between language and world and the basis of “semantics”. In the forms now discussed, these views go back to Mill and Frege in the nineteenth century, and continue unto the twentieth and the present century with the work of Russell, Strawson, Donnellan, Quine and Kripke. There is an excellent text for this part if the course: Reference, by Barbara Abbott.

In the middle of the last century, Grice drew attention to the importance of speakers’ intentions. In general, they determine what words refer to. But on specific occasions they may contribute something else, including an emotional or evaluative component that may not be counted as part of the meaning of the word. This leads to issues in “pragmatics”, and we’ll discuss the role of context, and the nature of moral language and the kinds if language-use exemplified by slurs. In this part of the course we’ll be looking at published papers available through PCL.

Class discussion is an essential part of the course. This is facilitated by the classroom, which seats everyone round an oval table.

Critical examination of leading theories of the state, including analysis of such concepts as sovreignty, obligation, rights, and freedom. 

This course focuses on some of the most important results in 20th century metalogic: the study of logical systems, their powers and limitations. We will prove the completeness of classical predicate logic, the undecidability of the halting problem, the undecidability of classical predicate logic, the undefinability of truth,  the incompleteness of arithmetic and the unprovability of consistency.

While knowledge of particular mathematical results will not be presupposed the course is technically demanding and the students are well advised to have some familiarity with mathematical proofs.

This course is oriented around the problem of translation (literary, cultural, political, sociolinguistic) as it relates to the cultural production and/or language use arising in Latina/o communities. Depending upon the expertise of the individual instructor, the course might address translation from different angles: issues of linguistic or cultural relativism, complications of literary translations, the mistranslations that ensue when translating cultural texts from one medium to another (the stage to the screen or the page to the stage, for instance).

Examines the history of Christian philosophy through classic Christian thought, concerning what can be known and how people should live.

Topic 1: Philosophy of Biology

Topic 2: The Outer Limits of Reason

Topic 4: The Philosophy of Geometry

“Existentialism” was hardly a philosophical movement in the traditional sense, for few of its major figures would have described themselves as existentialists. And yet the existentialists do represent a movement in the sense that they sharing certain concerns, such as emphasis on how reflective thought relates to our actual lives, skepticism regarding reason, reevaluation of traditional approaches to ethics, and insistence on passionate engagement as essential for a meaningful life. Among the figures we will consider are Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Texts:

Albert Camus, The Stranger

Albert Camus, The Fall

Robert C. Solomon, ed. Existentialism, 2^nd edition

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Martin)

Robert C. Solomon, From Rationalism to Existentialism

Grading:

Exam I                           25%

Exam II                 25%

Exam III                 25%

Participation          25%

Participation includes a daily journal, attendance, engaged participation in sections, directed journal entries, pop quizzes, and possibly other activities.

Topic 1: Philosophy and Feminism

Past topics include major figures and movements in ancient, medieval, early modern, and nineteenth- and twentieth - century philosophy. 

Past topics include major figures and movements in ancient, medieval, early modern, and nineteenth- and twentieth - century philosophy. 

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

The seminar aims to provide an overview of Kant’s theoretical philosophy as it is developed in his masterwork, The Critique of Pure Reason. It presupposes no previous knowledge of Kant or of Early Modern Philosophy. We read the book in its English translation, but I will draw attention to certain important nuances in the German. Where possible attempts will be made to relate the material to issues in contemporary philosophy, but the focus will lie on developing an historically sensitive reading of the text. We will ask after the philosophical motivations for Kant’s views and place them in the context of his reactions to the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy dominant in his day. Secondary readings from (among others): Patricia Kitcher, Michelle Grier, Andrew Chignell, Charles Parsons, Béatrice Longueness, Michael Friedman, Corey Dyck, Anja Jauernig, Karl Ameriks, Katherine Dunlop, Ralf Bader, Eric Watkins, Des Hogan, Lisa Shabel, and Ian Proops.

Obviously, this course does count toward fulfilment of the department’s history requirement.

Grading  Policy

One paper of around 20 pages (12 point, 1.5 spacing) due at the end of term.

Texts

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett (latest edition).

Secondary literature will be made available on Canvas.

This seminar satisfies the History Requirement

The Origin of Metaphysics

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Description:

Since the end of the 20th century, metaphysics as an intellectual enterprise has once again been called into serious question. Fresh doubts have been raised about its ambitions, its methods, its results, and even its cognitive significance. Partly in response to these doubts, some of our contemporaries — such as Kit Fine, Jonathan Schaffer, and Michael Thompson — have tried to recover and revitalize what they take to be the core animating insights of the ancient Greek metaphysical tradition. Our aim in this seminar will be to take a closer look at the roots of this tradition, in the hope of seeing more clearly whether our contemporaries are on the right track. We will focus primarily on the surviving fragments of a poem by Parmenides of Elea — the Greek tradition’s most influential founding father — whose views have become a topic of increasingly intense scholarly controversy over the past few decades. But we will also look carefully at the work of several other crucial figures in the history of early Greek thought, including Hesiod, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus.

Grading:

Term Paper: 70%

Presentation: 20%

Participation: 10%

Texts:

A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia. 2nd Edition. (2011) Edited by Patricia Curd. Translations by Richard D. McKirahan and Patricia Curd. Hackett Publishing.

Secondary readings will be drawn from the work of recent and contemporary historians of ancient philosophy.

Because we will often be discussing issues of translation, some knowledge of ancient Greek will be useful. But it will not be required. English versions of all primary texts will be made available.

This seminar can satisfy the History requirement OR the M&E requirement

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

This course will cover a number of central topics in the philosophy of mind including consciousness, phenomenal intentionality, cognitive phenomenology, the phenomenology of agency, and hybrid views of perception

Grading Policy

One 20-page paper and two short presentations

Texts

We’ll read a number of different philosophers including Adam Pautz, Philip Goff, Angela Mendelovici, Michael Tye, Susanna Schellenberg, Myrto Mylopoulos, Galen Strawson, Peter Strawson, and Tim Bayne

This seminar satisfies the M&E requirement

TITLE:  Topics in Metaphysics: Mind, Self, and Categorial Monism

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

Develop and assess a version of categorial monism; address questions about the mind/self/ person/subject of experience and about panpsychist views both inside and outside categorial monist framework. (Categorial monism is the view that there’s only one fundamental metaphysical/ ontological category; it’s compatible with but doesn’t imply either thing monism (i.e. there is only one thing) or stuff monism (i.e. there is only one kind of fundamental stuff); it’s equally compatible with thing pluralism (e.g. atomism) and stuff pluralism (e.g. Cartesian stuff dualism). Keith Campbell is a categorial monist, also early Moore and Russell, also Whitehead (also arguably David Lewis). John Heil is a categorial dualist. E. J. Lowe is a categorial pluralist (author of The Four-Category Ontology).

Grading Policy

one term paper (up to 20 pages) relating to one of course topics, due by end of semester [90%]

one in-class presentation [10%]

one end-of-semester presentation of draft term paper [0%]

Texts

various, Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism, William Seager ed. 2019

Samuel Alexander,  Space, Time and Deity 1920-4

Keith Campbell, Metaphysics 1976, Abstract Particulars 1990

Sam Coleman,  ‘Panpsychism and Neutral Monism: How to Make up One's Mind’ 2016

Durant Drake, Mind and its Place in Nature 1925

Herbert Feigl, ‘The “mental” and the “physical”’ 1958/1967

Philip Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality 2017, Galileo’s Error 2019

Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays 1935–70 1972

John Heil, The Universe As We Find It 2012, Appearance in Reality 2020

John Heil, The Universe As We Find It 2012, Appearance in Reality 2020

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1.4.6 & Appendix) 1739–40

William James, Principles of Psychology (ch. 10) 1890

Fraser MacBride, “The Particular-Universal Distinction: A Dogma of Metaphysics?” 2005

Alois Riehl, Principles of Critical Philosophy 1887

Luke Roelofs, Combining Minds: How to Think about Composite Subjectivity 2019

Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter 1927, My Philosophical Development 1959

Moritz Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge 1918/1925A. Strong A Theory of Knowledge 1923

G.F. Stout Manual of Psychology 1899

C.C. Williams ‘Naturalism and the Nature of Things’ 1944, ‘Universals and Existents’, 1959

C.D. Broad The Mind and its Place in Nature 1925

This seminar satisfies the M&E requirement

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

Description: a graduate level survey of topics in ethics and epistemology that bear on practical life decisions.

Topics might include: animal rights, the climate crisis, voting vs free-riding, abortion, epistemic injustice, statistics and stereotyping, statistical evidence in the law, artificial intelligence (re the problem of other minds as well as ethical problems), whether it is better to exist, nationalism and special moral relationships (such as family), and special justifications for killing in war.

Grading Policy:

A term paper (graded), maybe a class presentation (probably not graded), and weekly discussion questions on canvas (ungraded)

Texts

Authors might include: Peter Singer, Mark Budolfson, Diane Jeske, William MacAskill, Amia Srinivasan, Nick Bostrom, Michael Huemer, Ned Block, Shamik Dasgupta, Miranda Fricker, Lara Buchak, Sarah Moss, Sam Krauss, Elizabeth Harman, Alex Guerrero, Jeff McMahan, David Benatar. 

This seminar satisfies the Ethics requirement

Katherine Arens

Department of Germanic Studies

arens@austin.utexas.edu

Spring 2020:  WGS 393 (45225)  = CL  382 (34075)

T/TH 12-30-200 CMA 3.108

Identity (and) Politics:

From Class Identity to Positionality and Intersectionality

This course will offer students a laboratory in which they can work through the practical implications of theories of identity and politics from Marx through contemporary work in positionality and intersectionality.  It is a "laboratory"  framed as a work-in-progress seminar, where students start the semester with a project or type of cultural text that they are interested in, and then use that text’s/text type’s cultural site to explore it as reflecting different generations' debates about identity, politics, and power.  By the end of the class, students will be expected to present a well-theorized case study project outline that combines the texts read in the class with further research in theory and on the chosen texts – the kind of document suitable for submission to a conference, journal, or granting agency. 

The theories to be discussed originate in work by Kant, Hegel, and Marx; critically, they add up to a very contemporary call for understanding texts as participant in social and political networks, not only personal psychology, and for understanding the projects of culture not as representational (imposing social norms or authorial insight onto them) but as interventional -- as speaking from nexes of power and social/historical/cultural praxis that create subject positions and mediate agency within groups.  This class, therefore, investigates culture from a post-bourgeois lens, investigating texts rather than art, consumption rather than production of ideology, and the limits and potentials for signification rather than simple reception.

Their goal, and the goal of this class, is to explore generations of texts designed not just to lead/oppose/revolt, but to recenter and pull focus onto interpretations that privilege the multiplicity of subject positions emerging from texts – more than those that signify, testify, and teach rather than preach, but also those inspiring acts of resistant consumption of cultural traditions. The class will introduce (not survey) scholarship in the various subfields in order to open out the map for the various strands of cultural analysis that can be used in students’ individual project-investigations into identity politics as a research field. 

SELECTED READINGS (all readings will be available as pdfs on the class Canvas site):

Marx, selections from the "German Ideology"

Marcuse, "One-Dimensional Man"

Benhabib, "Below the Asphalt"

Horkheimer, "Traditional and Critical Theory"

Patricia Hill Collins, Intersectionality

and essays by Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Deleuze, Lyotard, Kornbluh, Gates, Sandra Harding, bell hooks, and work on intersectionality and postcoloniality

GRADING

20% oral introductions to theories (strictly limited to 5 min;  deductions for overrun)

10% abstract for final project

15% map of analysis and research

15% theory postings

40% 20-pp final paper OR 7-10 page conference paper plus a grant proposal (5-10 pp).

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing

Course Description

We will consider the ethical foundations of law and politics, focusing on the moral virtues.  The questions we consider are of interest to philosophers of politics and jurisprudence, constitutional scholars, political scientists, legislators, and jurists.  The approach is partly historical, partly contemporary.

Most of our ancestors took for granted that it was impossible to organize a decent legal and political order without a certain kind of character on the part of the citizens and the rulers.  Some thought we inevitably get the government we deserve; others thought that certain constitutional devices could ‘stretch’ virtue, so that it might be possible to get a somewhat better government than we deserve (for example, with the help of checks and balances).  Not until Hume did it became common to suppose that a well-designed regime is not particularly reliant on virtue at all.  On this view, arguably, it should have been easier than it has been to promote republican government in countries that are not accustomed to it.

I am primarily an ethical and political theorist, rather than a jurisprude, a historian, or a number cruncher.  However, I invite students who identify with a variety of approaches.

Grading Policy

One third:  Vigorous class participation.

Two-thirds:  Term paper.

Texts

1. A packet, available at the McCombs location of the UT Copy Services (GSB 3.136), including a readings by Alschuler, Anscombe, Pieper, MacIntyre, Langdon, Sherry, Solum, and Duff.

2. Online readings from Aristotle, Cicero, the Bible, Augustine, Hume, Madison, Hamilton, and “Centinal.”

3. J. Budziszewski, Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics (Cambridge, 2017). You may use either a hardcover or an electronic version.

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

Prerequisites

This course is restricted to First Year Philosophy Graduate Students.

Course Description

This course is the required graduate logic seminar. The course will introduce students to a variety of issues in logic that are of importance for work across philosophy. Possible topics include: modal logic and systems of propositional modal logi;  quantified modal logic, de re and de dicto readings, possiblist and actualist quantifiers, and necessitism and contingentism; counterfactual conditionals; multi-valued logic; formal theories of truth including Kripke’s fixed-point construction and revision theories; supervaluationism and the semantics of vagueness; proof theory and Gentzen systems; intuitionistic logic; relevance logic and contradiction-friendly paraconsistent logics; systems of non-monotonic inference; generalized quantifier theory; Bayesianism, probabilistic decision theory, and game theory; social choice theory; and core results of classical first-order metatheory including completeness, compactness, and the Godel incompleteness results.

Grading

Grading will be based on periodic problem sets.

Texts

Readings will be made available as required.

Prerequisites

Graduate Standing and Consent of Graduate Advisor or instructor required.

Course Description

This course will be an advanced survey of contemporary issues in the philosophy of language. We will focus on various philosophical issues concerning language, including, but not limited to, the following: speech act theory, sentence/expression meaning, reference, quantification, propositional attitude ascriptions, and context sensitivity.  An overarching aim of the course is to get clear (or at least clearer) on the relationship between mental content, the content of our speech acts, and the literal context-invariant meanings of the sentences we use in performing such acts. 

Grading

Grades will be determined solely on the basis of a term paper (90%) and one in-class presentation (10%).  

Texts

Readings will include many classics in 20th century analytic philosophy of language, as well as numerous articles from the last decade.  All readings will be posted on our course Canvas site