Fall 2005 Course Descriptions

Stoicism and Pragmatism
330.03
John Stuhr and John Lachs

This seminar will explore similarities, differences, and systematic resources in stoic and pragmatic philosophical traditions. Its working hypothesis is that these two traditions have multiple and important points of contact and shared insights, and also that each serves as a corrective to over-emphases and problems in the other. The course will be organized primarily along systematic, comparative, and issue-focused lines. Accordingly, the first third of the course will be devoted to metaphysical issues concerning being, nature, and human nature; the second part of the course will deal with ethical issues of control, habit, character, conduct, and conceptions of the good life; and the final part of the course will address social and political issues of education, community, cosmopolitanism, and transcendence.

Readings will be drawn from primary texts by central authors in both traditions. We will read works by Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, along with selections from Thoreau, Emerson, James, Royce, Dewey, Mead, and Santayana. The course will be jointly taught by Professors Lachs and Stuhr; both will participate fully in all class sessions. Course requirements include class participation and a final seminar paper. Students need not have any prior background in either stoic or pragmatic philosophy.

Philosophy of Law
(245.01, TR 9:35-10:50)
Kevin Davis

This course will address central problems in the contemporary philosophy of law, including the nature of law, law's relation to morality, how we should interpret rules, and the conditions for holding people responsible under the law. We will consider debates over whether law must be justified by moral theory, how society should respond to violations of law, and the nature of reasoning used by judges when interpreting laws and deciding legal disputes.

We will also look at some particular issues in American law that reflect conflicts in beliefs about the purposes of law, including the appropriate scope of the freedom of expression, the nature of legal due process, and the meaning of equal protection under law.

The course format will be primarily discussion; we will use a variety of activities and settings to talk about the readings including some in-class presentations and debates. Course requirements include 4 short papers.

Philosophy of Religion
(242.01, MWF 9:10-10:00)
Jeffrey Tlumak

We will explore major issues arising from a philosophical examination of religion, with much heavier but not exclusive focus on theistic religions. Topics include the nature and significance of religious and mystical experience; the nature of and relation between faith and reason; the attributes traditionally associated with a monotheistic God and the force of some non-traditional conceptions; the classic arguments for the existence of God; the most serious rational objections to belief in God, especially the problem of evil; the most serious deflationary accounts of the phenomenon of religion, such as the Freudian treatment of religion as illusion; the problem of applying human words meaningfully to God; the possibility and identifiability of miracles; the varying concepts of and arguments for and against life after death; the relation between religion and science; the question whether such seemingly divergent religions can all be said to be true (or point to the same truth); the connection between religion and ethics (whether ethical norms can or must originate in God), and whether religion offers a distinctive vision of human moral fulfillment. Our central goals will be to understand the issues, appreciate what's at stake, clarify our main options, argue their merits and demerits, and develop the ability to continue to think about them in meaningful and helpful ways. Our sole text is Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, ed. Louis P. Pojman (Wadsworth, 2003). Typical format: Mini-lectures to set up issue, then progress through discussion. Total reading: Approximately 400 double-column pages. Writing requirements: Three (average 6-8 page) papers.

Metaphysics
(217.01, MWF 11:10-12:00)
Jeffrey Tlumak

Metaphysical questions arise in pursuit of virtually every branch of philosophical inquiry and reflective living. We will explore some powerful, alternative metaphysical visions of ourselves and our relations to our natural and social environments, and to realms beyond familiar experience. We will study three books and three essays. John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind argues that dominant accounts of what we are - in both dualistic and materialistic traditions - are radically wrongheaded, and aims to replace them with his own account of mind, of its main feature consciousness, of its various capacities such as intentionality (other-directedness) and mental causation, and of which features of the world are intrinsic and which observer-relative. Robert Kane's The Significance of Free Will beautifully traces rival conceptions of the nature, possibility, and significance of free will, argues against the full range of popular, influential, less robust conceptions of freedom, and develops and defends a strong account of his own. E.D. Klemke's The Meaning of Life collects many of the most important essays written on the topic from theistic, humanistic, and skeptical perspectives, including those by Tolstoy, Camus, Nagel, Baier, and Russell, and allows us to see the implications of metaphysics for our most fundamental human concerns. Thomas Nagel's 'Subjective and Objective' diagnoses the source of metaphysical (and more broadly, philosophical) challenges in terms of our inability to reconcile subjective and objective points of view. It will help us organize the debates in our three books. John Mackie's 'The Subjectivity of Values' lays out many of the critical issues for deciding the status of morality. And John Hick's chapter on 'Evil and Soul-Making' from Evil and the God of Love is a rich and engaging launching pad for broaching questions about our relation to God. Class format will most typically be a combination of short lecture and topical development through discussion. Total readings: Approximately 700 standard-formatted pages. Writing requirements: Three (average 6-8 page) papers.

Gregg M. Horowitz
243.01
Philosophy of Film

The medium of film raises unique problems for interpretation and aesthetic theory. As a young medium, just more than one hundred years old, film stands in anxious and uncertain relation to more traditional art forms and functions as a kind of laboratory for the invention and development of new artistic norms. As a medium that enables the use of space and time, sound and image, word and narrative, film jumbles together the capacities specific to the other arts; it thereby risks representational and artistic incoherence, but at the same time opens up unanticipated possibilities for representation and art. And as a medium that has given rise to ever-expanding industries of entertainment and documentation, film blurs the line between art and mass culture. In this course, we will investigate these problems of film theory and practice by watching a mix of films from different periods, countries, and genres, and analyzing them with the help of readings drawn from philosophy, film theory, film criticism, and film history. We will pay special attention to the question of how particular films invent new possibilities for the medium by taking up for themselves the problems of film's specificity and uniqueness as a medium.

Robert Talisse
PHIL 202
Formal Logic and Applications

A standard course in the concepts and techniques of formal logic, from symbolization and truth tables to deduction, quantification, and identity. Along the way, we shall have occasion to consider a range of philosophical issues relating to logic, including the nature of logical necessity, the epistemic status of logical truths, and the supposed implications of logic for other areas of philosophy.

Robert Talisse and Henry Teloh
PHIL 294
Multiculturalism

A critical engagement of the central issues, arguments, figures, and texts of multiculturalism, focusing on the controversies stirred by Brian Barry's recent book, Culture and Equality. In addition to Barry's book, we shall examine the relevant work of Iris Marion Young, Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, Susan Mendus, Bhiku Parekh, and Chandran Kukathas. This course will be team-taught by Professors Talisse and Teloh, who disagree sharply about the issues to be examined.

José Medina
PHIL 115F.04.
FYS: Understanding Other Cultures

What are the problems and obstacles that we face in understanding other cultures? In our multicultural society and in the globalized world of the 21st century it has become crucial to determine how different cultures can understand each other and engage in a dialogue that makes possible not only their peaceful coexistence, but also their rich life in common. In this seminar we will study the conditions of possibility of the dialogue between cultures, and we will examine how to identify and repair possible distortions in the understanding of one culture from the perspective of another. We will read philosophers and social scientists with conflicting views about the best way to achieve mutual understanding between cultures.

José Medina
PHIL 330.04
Philosophy Of Language

This course will focus on core issues in semantics and pragmatics: communication, meaning, reference, truth, interpretation, performativity, and the formation of identities and communities through language. Especial attention will be given to Speech Act Theories both in the analytic and in the Continental tradition. We will study some of the most important authors in contemporary Philosophy of Language: Wittgenstein, Austin, Derrida, Davidson, Habermas, Bourdieu, and Butler, among others.

Michael Hodges
Philosophy 234.01
Philosophy of Education

The philosophy of education is really a branch of ethics and social and political philosophy. Since whatever happens to one changes one and since all such change can be called education, it becomes essential to an understanding of a critical theory of education to offer some account how we ought to be both individually (ethics) and socially (political philosophy). No one knew this better than Plato and so we start there. We will examine the Republic, sections of Aristotle's ethics, Medieval texts on education and various modern essays from Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Then we will undertake a careful reading of Dewey's Democracy and Education. Finally we will look at the university that we all inhabit by way of Wilshire's The Moral Collapse of the University.

Professor Kelly Oliver
Phil 115F.02
Freshman Seminar: Limits of the Human in Philosophy and Film

We will examine the limits of what counts as human in relation to both animals and machines in philosophy and film. Within the history of philosophy, we will take up the following questions: How did animals acquire language to become human? What is the relation of human beings to other animals? What are our ethical obligations to them? What does the study of animals tell us about ourselves? Can we imagine a machine, computer or robot that could be considered a person? What criteria would such a machine have to meet? Could we have ethical obligations to robots or androids?

The use of film will make vivid these philosophical questions. In films such as The Island of Doctor Moreau and Planet of the Apes we see speculations on the origins of human society. In films such as Cat People and The Wolfman we see images of the human turned back into animal. And, films such as Bladerunner and I Robot address issues about our relation to thinking, feeling machines. These films raise questions about what it means to be human and the limits of the human.

The readings are essays or chapter length. The films will be on reserve at the library to view outside of class. Class sessions will combine lecture, discussion, and student presentations.

Kelly Oliver
Women's Studies: 301.01/Philosophy 330.05
FEMINISM AND FILM

We will study representations of gender, women, masculinity, femininity, sexuality, race and class in Hollywood film. Our investigations will take us from early Hollywood film to the present. Our discussions will be informed by readings in film theory, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, race theory, and queer theory. Genres of film that we will examine include film noir, passing films, and B-horror films.

L. E. Goodman
Philosophy 332
Aristotle

Detailed study of the principal works of Aristotle, including the Nicomachaean Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, De Anima, Organon, Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics. Attention is paid to recent secondary literature, but the chief goal of the course is to attain a grasp of Aristotle's central theses and arguments and to situate ourselves philosophically, critically and creatively, in relation to his ideas. Thus, the seminar paper will contain not only descriptive but interpretive, analytical, and critical elements and will argue a thesis of the writer's own about how one ought to address one of the problems raised in Aristotle's wide ranging philosophical corpus.

Secondary literature featured for the Fall of 2005:

Jonathan Jacobs, Aristotle's Virtues (Lang, 2004)
David Charles, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (O.U.P., 2003)
Charlotte Witt, Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics (Cornell U. P., 2003)
Deborah Achtenberg, Cognition of Value in Aristotle's Ethics (SUNY Press, 2002)
William Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion (Duckworth, 2002).