Philosophy 121 / Ethical Theory / Erin Kelly / D+TR
TA: Andrew Kukorowski
This course will examine a range of philosophical views about the nature and content of morality. The main theoretical approaches we will study are consequentialism, Kantianism, virtue ethics and constructivism. We will explore in detail such questions as: Can the rightness of actions be settled by looking to the goodness of their consequences? Or do such notions as rights, the importance of reaching agreement, or the moral respect we owe to others figure more fundamentally into our moral thinking? Does morality depend on social conventions or are certain values universal? Why be moral?
Further topics to be explored may include the relationship between morality and self-interest and between morality and values with which it may conflict (e.g.,friendship, integrity). Course readings will be drawn from Mill, Kant, Williams, Rawls and others.
Prerequisites: One course in philosophy or junior standing or consent.
Philosophy 122 / Indian Philosophies / Joseph Walser (Comparative Religion) / 2 block
This seminar will examine in detail the doctrines and the arguments of the major Indian schools of philosophy. We will examine the way that these schools attempt to ground their religious systems in sound argumentation. Specifically, we will cover the range of arguments concerning the human soul, God, Release and the path leading to Release. To this end we will cover the Sàükhya, Buddhist, Vedànta, Nyàya-Vai÷eùika and Navya-nyàya schools of Indian Philosophy.
Philosophy 131 / Epistemology / Stephen White / M+MW
It seems plausible to suppose that all of our substantive information about the external world comes from the senses. But the connection between events in the external world and our perceptual experiences is causal and contingent. Thus we could have exactly the same perceptual experience even if the world were radically different -- even if, for example, we were brains in vats or were dreaming. Indeed, we could have the same perceptual experience even if the external world did not exist. Furthermore, it seems that any principle that could take us from what we are given in perception to the nature of the external world would simply beg the question against the skeptic, since it would seem to presuppose that we already know something about the world beyond our perceptual experience.
Many contemporary philosophers (the so-called new Humeans -- e.g., Stroud, Nagel, and Strawson) find this kind of argument impossible to answer. Moreover, they hold that in considering skeptical possibilities we are doing nothing different from what we do in our ordinary epistemic assessments. Such philosophers claim, however, that skepticism has no practical implications. But how could these three claims all be true? Certainly our ordinary assessments about what we know and what we are justified in believing are directly relevant to what we do and what we take ourselves to be justified in doing. How, then, can our philosophical reflections fail to have such consequences if we are doing what we ordinarily do and not arbitrarily raising the standards for what we consider knowledge or justification?
Now consider a radically different form of skepticism. Imagine someone who (perhaps after suffering some extreme trauma) suddenly finds the concept of action unintelligible. Such a person might agree with us about all the objective facts about the world -- what has happened, is happening, will happen -- but utterly fail to make sense of the idea of anyone doing anything. This form of skepticism, which we might call agential skepticism, is extremely practical in its implications. We can in fact imagine the person in question paralyzed not by nerve or tissue damage, but by his or her sheer incapacity to comprehend the idea of intervening to change the course of events (as opposed merely to being a passive part of the mechanism through which the causal forces of the universe flow).
Finally, imagine a third form of skepticism according to which nothing is really valuable. On this view there are no genuinely valuable objects or events in the world, merely our desires, projections, illusions of value, and so forth. (This may seem to some like obvious common sense rather than skepticism.) In this case the practical implications of skepticism are not clear. Would it make a difference if we believed that some things were not merely desired but were desirable (i.e., were such as to justify desire)?
In this course we will examine a range of standard epistemological topics from the perspective of the new Humean response to skepticism, as well as some skeptical issues normally treated outside the epistemological context. Topics will include our knowledge of the external world, of the past and the future, of meaning, and of other minds. We will also consider the issues of foundationalism and coherentism, internalism and externalism, self-knowledge, and the special role of testimony in epistemology.
Philosophy 191-01 / Seminar: Metaethics / Stephen White / I+MW
Metaethics concerns the meanings of our moral and evaluative terms and the character of our evaluative discourse, and moral psychology involves the character of our moral and evaluative experience. For example, we have a coherent discourse of evaluation, where the values purport to be objective. That is, we talk as though things were valuable not just in the sense of being desired, but of being desirable -- being such as to justify the desire of any rational subject. (We say, for example, not just that we desire compassion in ourselves and others, but that it is desirable and valuable).
Whether or not such claims that some things are objectively valuable are accurate, they seem coherent -- we can advance or reject arguments for such claims, recognize better and worse reason for them, and so forth. Moreover, we experience a world in which things are objectively valuable (think of our human relationships), even if there are no such things (even if the experiences are nonveridical).
Such claims about our value discourse and our value experience are generally acknowledged even by value skeptics. Such skeptics (for example J. L. Mackie) go on to deny that anything objectively valuable exists. They hold, often following Hume, an error theory of value according to which our beliefs that things are genuinely valuable are false and our experiences that purport to give us a world of things that are genuinely valuable are illusory.
But such a theory raises the following question: What would the world be like if our value beliefs were true and our value experiences were veridical? Error theorists such as Mackie have no answer, because on their views the notion of an objective value is incoherent. It seems, then, that they cannot explain the coherence of our value discourse or the nature of our value experience.
Compare this problem in value theory to the problem of agency. Just as it seems that there is no room in the objective world for values -- that there could not be nothing that could both motivate us to pursue it and to do so merely in virtue of our rational capacities (and so rationally justify our being so motivated) -- it seems that there is no room in the objective world for actions. If our actions are determined it seems that we cannot be genuine agents, and no amount of randomness in the genesis of our actions seems to help. Again the conclusion is that our discourse regarding agency is false and our experience of ourselves as agents is illusory. Again we can ask what the world would be like if the discourse were accurate and the experience veridical, and again the skeptic has no answer.
In this course we will take up the (metaethical) question of how our value discourse could be coherent given the powerful arguments to the contrary and the analogous question for our talk regarding agency. The recurring comparison between the two domains will be useful in part because no one would deny that we have an apparently coherent discourse regarding agency and a powerful experience of ourselves as active subjects.
Although traditionally metaethics has focused on language, our emphasis will be on experience. We will be particularly concerned with questions about the limits to what we can be given in perception. (Can we, for example, actually perceive things as valuable?) We will draw on evidence from the philosophy of language and perception, including phenomenology, philosophy of science (particularly as it regards theory laden perception and incommensurability), experimental and clinical psychology, decision theory and game theory, and the literary and artistic treatments of our agential and value experience.
Philosophy 191-02 / Seminar: Causation / George E. Smith / 11 block
Causation is among the most ubiquitous concepts in everyday life. It is also at the heart of much of law, especially legal questions about responsibility for such unfortunate outcomes as the collapse of the Hartford Civic Center roof; and of course it is central to such activities as engineering and medicine in which the whole idea is to take actions that make some desired ends happen. Some philosophers, like Bertrand Russell, have argued that the functional relationships that have dominated modern exact science have elimi¬nated causation from them. These relationships nevertheless support such counterfactual claims as, “If the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn were concentric circles, these two planets would not disturb one another's motion nearly as much as they now do,” and these claims bring causation in through their singling out details of the world that make a difference and the differences they make. With causation so ubiquitous, the surprise is that few concepts have produced more yet-to-be-resolved disagreement in philosophy from David Hume and Immanuel Kant forward and still continuing. In philosophy, though not so obviously outside of philosophy, causation has long been a perplexing problem.
Is the concept as we employ it all the time really so ill-founded and wrought with confusion? This seminar will address this question by focusing on two books on the topic, both in paperback: Causation in the Law by H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré, a true classic (2nd ed., 1985); and the most recent book-length study of causation, Making Things Happen by James Woodward. The choice of the first of these two was prompted not only by the fact that it is a great book, but also in the hope that it will help us to become clear about distinctions entering into causation, for nowhere do crucial distinc¬tions indispensable to everyday concepts become clearer than through decades of struggling to sharpen them in litigation. The second was chosen because it is so recent (2003, paperback 2005) and thus gives some perspective on where things now stand in philosophy with disputes about the concept. The seminar will require two papers, one short near mid-term and a final term paper on a topic of the student's choice.
Philosophy 191-03 / Ethics, Law and Society / Erin Kelly / L+TR and N+TR
This course forms the core of a new certificate program in Ethics, Law and Society, administered through the philosophy department. The goal of the program is to use philosophy to prepare students to be active citizens in leadership positions in government, NGOs and the private sector. Students will learn about how moral and political philosophy relate to questions of public importance.
The seminar will study a range of practical ethical questions concerning three basic themes: (1) morality across boundaries; (2) criminal justice, moral responsibility, and the aims of punishment; (3) terrorism and just war; (4) multiculturalism and religious toleration.
We will approach these questions by considering case studies and by evaluating moral principles for resolving ethical dilemmas. We will be especially concerned with the challenges to ethical thought posed by ethnic, religious, and political diversity.
Requirements for the course include several short papers and an individual research project.
Prerequisites: one course in philosophy or consent of the instructor.
Information about the requirements for the certificate is available through the philosophy department.
Xlist 197.
Philosophy 195-01 / Philosophy of Biology / Patrick Forber / L+TR
We will examine the conceptual foundations of evolutionary biology and outstanding problems in the philosophy of biology. The course begins with Darwin, and his original presentation of natural selection in the Origin of Species. Then we will look at two very different “big picture” views on the nature of evolution and the importance of natural selection. The first, defended by Richard Dawkins, emphasizes the primacy of natural selection and the demand that evolutionary theory must explain the striking adaptive designs we see all around us. The second, defended by Richard Lewontin, emphasizes the complexity of the evolutionary process and the need to appeal to non-selective forces to explain it. The course continues by discussing specific philosophical and theoretical controversies, including the units of selection, the nature of evolutionary fitness, biological function and macroevolution.
Xlist 118.
Philosophy 195-02 (may change to 195-01) / Linguistics / Ray Jackendoff / E (MWF)
See Philosophy 015.
Co-listed as CD 143-07.
Philosophy 197 / Ethics, Law and Society / Erin Kelly / L+TR and N+TR
This course forms the core of a new certificate program in Ethics, Law and Society, administered through the philosophy department. The goal of the program is to use philosophy to prepare students to be active citizens in leadership positions in government, NGOs and the private sector. Students will learn about how moral and political philosophy relate to questions of public importance.
The seminar will study a range of practical ethical questions concerning three basic themes: (1) morality across boundaries; (2) criminal justice, moral responsibility, and the aims of punishment; (3) terrorism and just war; (4) multiculturalism and religious toleration.
We will approach these questions by considering case studies and by evaluating moral principles for resolving ethical dilemmas. We will be especially concerned with the challenges to ethical thought posed by ethnic, religious, and political diversity.
Requirements for the course include several short papers and an individual research project.
Prerequisites: one course in philosophy or consent of the instructor.
Information about the requirements for the certificate is available through the philosophy department.
Xlist 191-03.