Spring 2004 Course Descriptions
Diane WillaimsonTHE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
PHIL 294B.01 (MCGILL SEMINAR)
TR 6:10-7:25
The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 as the first Marxist Institute in Germany. This course will trace the development of the Frankfurt School and of those connected with it. Understanding its foundation and first generation will take us into historical considerations of the Bolshevik revolution and the political climate of the Weimar Republic. We will cover key philosophical concepts in Marx and Marxist theory (such as that developed by Georg Lukacs). The second generation, marked by the directorship of Max Horkheimer, and the years of exile marked by the Nazi confiscation of the institute in 1932, will lead us into an exploration of critical social theory, which will require a consideration of psychoanalysis and sociology. We will focus on the writings of Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno that criticize capitalism, enlightenment values, anti-Semitism and other homogenizing tendencies of popular culture, exploring possibilities for emancipation given the totalitarian nature of rationality. We will also consider that work Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin. Students will be encouraged to discuss the relevance of critical theory to contemporary culture. Adorno's work will also facilitate considerations of aesthetics and art history. The third generation, marked by a return to Frankfurt and the directorship of Jurgen Habermas, will provide an opportunity for critical reflection on critical theory as well as a final analysis of the value of the Enlightenment project.
Mark J Bliton
ETHICS & MEDICINE
PHIL 270.01
TR. 11 to 12:15
The course is designed to help students understand the many ways in which moral issues arise within clinical situations. The course will address the variety of influences that contribute to the complexity of ethical issues raised among the intersections clinical practice, medical theories, biomedical research, and genetic technology. Focusing on the network of relationships among health care providers and patient/families depicted in clinical situations, specific circumstances will be discussed as both occasions for examining clinical ethics and for philosophical reflection.
In addition, the course will examine issues evoked by genetic technologies and manipulations. Selected cases will be discussed, for example, the issues and positions in the current public controversy regarding Terri Schiavo.
The aim for our conversations is to examine and identify what we recognize as the focal points that make a difference for the ways that we understand ourselves and others in relation to particular moral circumstances and questions.
Larry R. Churchill, Ph.D.
Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics; Professor of Philosophy
BIOETHICS: CONFLICTING VOICES IN MEDICINE AND THE LIFE SCIENCES
PHIL 115W
TR 11-12:15
This course is designed to introduce and critically examine moral issues in medicine and the life sciences. Emphasis will be placed on discovering the various moral habits and traditions each of us brings to these issues, and on learning new tools of moral reasoning in order to resolve them. The focus will be on problems and issues most likely to be encountered as personal issues, or as matters of public policy, such as genetic testing and diagnosis, the ethics of managed care, social justice and the distribution of scarce medical resources, and care at the end of life.
L. E. Goodman
JEWISH PHILOSOPHY
PHIL 261.01
TR 9:35-10:50
We will study a handful of the great figures of Jewish philosophy from antiquity to the present: Philo, Saadiah, Halevi, Bahya, Maimonides, and Levinas. Emphasis will be on the nexus between ethical and religious ideas, and we'll be paying special attention to Maimonides, since 2004 marks the 800th anniversary of his death and commemorations of his life and achievements in many academic centers, including a conference on Maimonides and his milieu planned here at Vanderbilt in November, 2004. The method of the course is comparative and students are encouraged to engage with the large issues raised by these philosophers and develop their own philosophical thinking in dialogue with the classic texts.
L. E. Goodman
HUMANITY, EVOLUTION AND GOD
PHIL 245.01
TR 2:35-3:50
This course explores the impact of the idea of evolution on our conceptions of human dignity and freedom. Readings include Darwin's Descent of Man, Daniel Dennett's polemical Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, and selections from Professor Goodman's manuscript in progress, God and Evolution. The aim is to allow students to situate themselves philosophically and critically vis a vis the important issues raised by evolution in conceptualizing humanity itself and our place in the cosmos.
José Medina
PHILOSOPHY AND THE NATURAL SCIENCES
PHIL 244.01
TR 9:35-10:50
In this course we will examine what defines scientific knowledge and scientific methodology from a variety of perspectives. Among the central issues we will study are the following: What is the distinction between science and pseudoscience? What are the proper standards of scientific objectivity? How should we interpret science, as a true picture of reality or as a useful instrument for prediction and control? We will consider how the history and the sociology of science can shed light on these issues.
José Medina
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
PHIL 256.01 / PSY 256.01
TR 1:10-2:25
The central problems that this course will cover include: the relationship between mind and body, the nature of consciousness, the problem of other minds, and the possibility of artificial intelligence. Especial attention will be given to the complex relationship between personal identity, consciousness, and the unconscious. We will also consider philosophical assessments of psychological research on mental illness and personality disorder.
Professor John J. Stuhr
POST-METAPHYSICS, POLITICS, AND POETRY
PHIL 330.01
W 7:10-9:30
This seminar will focus on three central issues:
1)What is the relation between metaphysics, or a post-metaphysics, and criticism? Is, or can, or should metaphysics be simply descriptive or thoroughly value-neutral? What conception of philosophy would support such a view of metaphysics, and how could this support avoid begging the question? Or, is metaphysics inherently critical, such that metaphysics itself is a sub-field of politics? Again, what conception of philosophy (and what conception of criticism) would support a view of metaphysics as criticism?
2)What is the relation between metaphysics, or a post-metaphysical conception of philosophy as criticism, and politics? For example, does the adoption of a particular metaphysical theory, a particular view of the nature of reality, entail, carry with it, or rule out particular political commitments? Does metaphysics have any practical, political consequences at all? Or, are all metaphysical theories politically underdetermined, such that any particular view of the world is consistent with any number of political orientations and agendas? From the standpoint of metaphysics, are political commitments thoroughly contingent?
3)To the extent that metaphysics, or post-metaphysics, is critical, what difference, if any, is there between metaphysics and novels, or metaphysics and poetry, or metaphysics and other forms of literature? Is philosophy a form of fiction? From both the standpoints of philosophy and politics, what difference, if any, does it make how this question is answered?
These large issues will be approached by means of one particular there could be many others--extended case-study in metaphysics, post-metaphysics and politics: pragmatism's radically experiential metaphysics and its radically democratic politics. In the first third of the semester, the seminar will consider the above three issues in the philosophy of John Dewey (and also Emerson and James), drawing particularly on Experience and Nature, and several works in political philosophy. The focus will be on Dewey's tight linking of his pragmatic metaphysics, his radical empiricism, and his democratic politics, his understanding (and definition) of metaphysics as a sub-field of criticism, and his efforts to distinguish philosophy from literature. In the second third of the semester, the seminar will turn to more recent work in the pragmatic tradition, focusing on Richard Rorty's uncoupling of metaphysics from democracy and humanism, his arguments for the radical contingency of politics, and his account of the priority of both politics and poetry to philosophy (in, for example, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Philosophy and Social Hope, and Achieving Our Country). This section of the course will also include writings of other major contemporary authors concerned with metaphysics and politics, including philosophers, legal scholars, and historians. In addition to those working explicitly in or against a pragmatic tradition, this section will include attention to the writings of Gilles Deleuze on the nature of philosophy, the relation of philosophy to criticism and, and his own version of radical empiricism (in, for example, What is Philosophy [with Felix Guattari; Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?], Essays Critical and Clinical [Critique et Clinique], and Pure Immanence ["L'Immanence: Une Vie"]. In the final section of the course, the relation of metaphysics, politics, and criticism to poetry and literature will be central, and the main text will be Richard Poirier's Poetry and Pragmatism, a book that links the philosophy of Emerson and James and Dewey to the poetry of Frost, Stein, an Stevens, and concludes by examining pedagogical implications of this rethinking metaphysics. Here too, intersections and point of difference with the work of Deleuze will be highlighted.
Dr. Robert Talisse
POLITICAL THEORY AFTER RAWLS
PHIL 330.01 / LAW 705.01
M 5:00-7:00
This is an interdisciplinary seminar focusing on the influence of John Rawls's philosophy on subsequent political theorizing. Faculty from Law, Political Science, and Economics will participate. Additionally, the seminar will be lead regularly by distinguished visitors such as Ronald Dworkin, Susan Okin, Michael Sandel, and Chantal Mouffe. Students will read the current work of these influential post-Rawlsian theorists, and engage with them directly in a seminar setting. Only students who have taken either Dr. Talisse's Spring 2003 seminar (Rawls and His Critics) or Dr. Ackerly's Fall 2003 seminar (Reading Rawls) may register for this course. No auditors will be permitted. Please contact Dr. Talisse for further information.
Jeffrey Tlumak
MODERN PHILOSOPHY
PHIL 212.01
MWF 10:10-11:00
Modern Philosophy is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy. This spring we will examine the methodological innovations and central positions and arguments of three brilliant figures of the period Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume tracing their interconnections and impact on subsequent thought on issues such as how to do philosophy and how to achieve genuine knowledge of the nature of and relations between what we call "mind" (and its special features such as consciousness and freedom), "body," and "God." We will read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (with some objections and replies), Spinoza's The Ethics (with some supplementation from Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and selected letters), and Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (with some supplementation by the Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature and the essays 'Of the Immortality of the Soul' and 'Of Suicide.' Typical format: Lecture in stages, with ongoing invitation to and prompting of discussion. Total reading: Approximately 500 pages. Writing requirements: A (average 6-8 page) paper on each of the three philosophers studied.
Jeffrey Tlumak
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
PHIL 242.01
MWF 12:10-1:00
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 and a straightforward final exam.
David Wood
HEIDEGGER AFTER BEING AND TIME
Phil 327.01
M 6:10-8.00
This seminar will focus on one book: Heidegger's recently translated Contributions to Philosophy (1936/7). This has been described as Heidegger's second magnum opus (after Being and Time). It is an extraordinary, experimental work, in which Heidegger tries to find a way forward for philosophy in a time of its historical crisis. I do not presuppose that students will have already read Being and Time; I will handouts when I refer to other texts by Heidegger. Mostly we will be trying to find our way around this book - trying to imagine what it means for our philosophical situation today.
