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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Kant's Political Philosophy Spring 2009. Three credits. Martin Stone Our central focus in this seminar is on Kant's political philosophy and, in particular, on his account of Law as the condition of the realization of external freedom (the freedom of each person in relation to that of another). Kant also offers novel and powerful analyses of the structural features of the rule of law, the nature of legal authority, the separation of powers in a liberal state, the justification of punishment, the morality of international relations, and the prospects for world peace. All of these ideas are treated as expressions of a powerful, underlying view of people as free and equal. Since the ideas of freedom and equality are of enduring political and philosophical interest, Kant's development of them is of first importance and great contemporary interest. Our focus will be mainly on the first part of Kant's late work, The Metaphysics of Morals, which concerns "the doctrine of right". Other readings,drawn from Kant's other works, as well as classic (e.g., Locke, Rousseau) and contemporary authors (e.g., Korsgaard, Hill, Ebbinghaus, Ripstein) will be announced. Time permitting, we will look at glosses on-and criticisms of-Kant's original ideas as they were taken up in the tradition whichdeveloped through Fichte, Hegel, Marx and Pashukanis.
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3.00 Credits
H usserl's Logical Investigations I Fall 2008. Three credits. James Dodd This seminar is the first of a two-semester seminar on Husserl's Logical Investigations. We will pursue a detailed reading and analysis of the Prolegomena and Investigations I-IV. Of particular interest will be situating Husserl's discussion of a wide variety of themes, from psychologism to the philosophy of language and the foundations of mathematics, in the intellectual history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as an attempt to understand in what sense the Logical Investigations represent a "breakthrough" to phenomenology.
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3.00 Credits
Reading Marx Spring 2009. Three credits. Ross Poole The core of this course will be a close reading of Marx's work. The texts selected will be taken in largely chronological order. In the first, and shorter, part of the course we will look at the development of Marx's ideas about history and social change up to 1848, that is, to about the time of The Communist Manifesto. This will cover Marx's early encounters with Hegel, with Feuerbach and Stirner, with 18th and early 19th century political economy, and with Proudhon. In the second, and longer, part of the course, we will begin by looking at his account of the failures of the 1848 revolutions (especially in France) then we will turn to his more theoretical writings. We will read selected extracts from the Grundrisse and from Capital Vol. 1. If we have time, after that we will look briefly at some significant later works, including perhaps his dispute with the Russian anarchist, Bakunin. There will be no attempt to divide the reading into topics. However, we will be concerned to explore certain key themes. These will include: the concept of critique and the related notions of ideology and science; the concepts of alienation and fetishism; Marx's conceptions of history and social change; exploitation; the concept of capital; Marx's conception(s) of freedom and his relationship to liberalism; the tension between his critique of utopianism and the advocacy of communism. The course will focus on Marx. However, it will be concerned to place Marx in the intellectual context of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought (especially but not only German idealism). We will also look at one or two significant 20th responses to/developments of Marx's ideas, including Lukács on reification, Benjamin on history, and perhaps Althusser on contradiction and overdetermination.
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3.00 Credits
Prospectus Seminar Fall 2008-Spring 2009. Not for Credit. Instructor to be announced. The course is designed to take students through the various steps involved in constructing a plan of research in order to write a PhD dissertation. By the completion of the course, all students will be expected to have produced an acceptable dissertation prospectus. This course is required for all PhD students who are completing their course work. The course does not count toward the philosophy department's PhD seminar requirement.
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3.00 Credits
Locke Fall 2008. Three credits. Dmitri Nikulin This seminar is a close reading of books I-IV of Locke's Essay, one of the most influential treatises of modern philosophy. The main thrust of Locke's argument is his polemic against innate principles in favor of the constitution of ideas, such as those of space, duration, number, relation, primary and secondary qualities, and real and nominal essences. We will discuss Locke's foundations of epistemology, in particular, his understanding of knowledge and truth, judgment and reason.
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3.00 Credits
H egel's Philosophy of Right Spring 2009. Three credits. Christoph Menke The book which we will read in this course, bears a complex title: Philosophy of Right or Outline of Natural Law and Theory of the State. Hegel's philosophy of "right" is thus meant to include, even to integrate two different realms:"natural law" as referring to what is right for everybody and "theory of thstate" as referring to the political organization of society. Hegel's philosophyof right is ethics and political theory at the same time. With this, two questions have to be addressed. The first question refers to Hegel's concept of "ethical life" ("Sittlichkeit"), which is meant to provide an account practical normativity that is able to avoid the "paradox of autonomy" inKantian theories. The second question refers to Hegel's concept of the "state,?hich aims at developing a theory of political self-government that is able to contain the destructive power of the capitalist economy. Both questions will be addressed in the course in the context of contemporary appropriations of Hegel's arguments.
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3.00 Credits
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason Fall 2008. Three credits. Yirmiyahu Yovel This course is a text seminar based on Kant's first Critique. We start by reconstructing Kant's meta-philosophy and his stated project (which many overlook today) of creating a valid "metaphysics as science." Against thisbackground, we read the chapters of the Critique of Pure Reason in detail, at least up to the end of the Transcendental Analytic, and try to see what made Kant think that it realized the program. This will take us to the last weeks of the semester, in which the Transcendental Dialectic will be treated in a more generalized way. Central themes along the road will be the various aspects of the Copernican revolution and the relation between rationality and finitude.
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3.00 Credits
Rorty and His Critics Fall 2008. Three credits. Richard J. Bernstein Richard Rorty was one of the most provocative, original, and controversial philosophers of his time. The seminar will follow the twists and turns of his philosophical career-reading selections of his works from the early 1960'sto his final years. We also consider criticism of his works by Anglo-American and European thinkers.
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3.00 Credits
H usserl's Logical Investigations II Spring 2009. Three credits. James Dodd This seminar is the second of a two-semester seminar on Husserl's Logical Investigations. The first semester is recommended, but not required. We will pursue a detailed reading and analysis of Investigations V and VI, as well as consider a number of revisions to Investigations VI that were written in the period after Ideas I ( 1913). The principal concern of this part of the course will be to understand how central, unresolved problems of the Logical Investigations, such as the nature of intentional consciousness, the idea of a descriptive psychology, the primacy of perception, and the phenomenological conception of evidence remained the driving force behind the development Husserl's phenomenological philosophy throughout his career.
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3.00 Credits
Philosophical Anthropology and the Problem of Potentiality Spring 2009. Three credits. Dirk Setton Part of the problem of philosophical anthropology ("What is a human being ") is the problem of the specificity of human faculties, i.e. the question of what it means for a rational being to "have" a potentiality. In contemporaryphilosophy, this question has gained a new and quite controversial actuality. On the one hand, metaphysical approaches in post-analytical philosophy (McDowell, Michael Thompson) maintain a neo-Aristotelian notion of rational faculties that culminates in the idea of virtue. In focusing on the (practical) rationality of the human life form, potentiality appears to this line of reasoning in the form of a unified, unambiguous, and transparent self-consciousness. On the other hand, however, some strands in contemporary ontological theory (Deleuze, Agamben) center on a concept of potentiality that decisively breaks with this Aristotelian framework. By way of highlighting notions of virtuality or impotentiality, they rather focus either on the peculiar human mode of having a potentiality, or on the inner structure of "the virtual" and its specific kind of actualization. The seminar courseaims at both understanding and discussing this constellation by situating it in the philosophical tradition: Readings of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Leibniz'"Monadology," and Heidegger ? Being and Ti me shall therefore make up thbackground for such a discussion.
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