2007–2008 Philosophy Courses
Philosophical Therapy: From Socrates to Derrida
Level: Open,Intermediate
Semester: Year
If “therapy” is understood to mean increased understanding, self-awareness, and a striving toward the “good life,” then the theme of therapy is as old as philosophy itself. Ever since its inception, philosophy was more than an abstract search for truth or a body of knowledge; rather it was a way of perfecting one’s understanding and sensitivities by means of discussion, dialogues, and personal, poetic, or dramatic accounts. Philosophers such as Socrates, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Derrida, different in almost any other respect, all share a common way of practicing philosophy, not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art. The philosophical arguments we will discuss in this seminar are wide ranging: from ethics and aesthetics to the philosophy of language. But apart from their theoretical dimension, which is concerned with objective validity or truth, we will concentrate on the practical value of these arguments and on their ability to affect or shape a certain way of life.
Philosophical Approaches to the Problem of Evil
Level: Open
Semester: Year
Why is there evil? Why do the innocent suffer? In Greek literature, the problem is posed as far back as Homer. It is more acute, however, for Jews and Christians, who believe that the world is created by a single, just Creator. In the fall semester, we will begin by reading Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and some brief selections from Herodotus. We will then pass on to the books of Genesis, Amos, Jonah, and Job from the Hebrew Bible. We will then read Plato’s Timaeus and Critias, selections from the Republic, and Book Ten of the Laws. We will study Aristotle’s principle that nothing happens without a reason. Then we will read Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, which denies that the gods care about human beings, and some discussions of divine Providence from Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. In the second semester, we will read selections from the New Testament, and in particular Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in order to investigate the Christian hope of overcoming the Fall from Eden. After some readings on Manichaeism and selections from Dante’s treatment of hell and purgatory, we will consider Bacon’s promise of redemption through science, Descartes’s revision of Christian solutions to the problem of evil, and some responses to it by Bayle, Leibniz, Voltaire, and Rousseau. We will conclude with Shaftesbury’s “Moralists,” the founding text of Romanticism.
The Roots and Meaning of Modern Science
Level: Open
Semester: Year
What do we mean by “science”? Is modern science the same kind of thing as ancient science? What is its relation to contemplation of the cosmos, to magic, and to religious authority? What are its political presuppositions and consequences? We will begin by reading some samples of ancient science from Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Archimedes. We will pass on to the beginnings of modern science in Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. We will then investigate the first major philosophical treatments of modern science by Bacon and Descartes. In the second semester, we will consider two works in philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, and ask whether they adequately characterize the facts about science we have considered in the first semester. We will then study the problem of the relation between modern science and the perspective of common life. We will investigate it by studying the criticisms of Cartesian science by Newton and Leibniz and some writings of Hume on attitudes to causation, including discussions of miracles and what is nowadays called “intelligent design.” We will conclude with selections from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Teleological Judgment.
Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics
Level: Open
Semester: Year
In this course, we will explore and interpret different philosophical approaches to art and aesthetic experience in relation to the wider context of culture, society, and politics. Some of the questions that will interest us concern the rivalry between philosophy and the arts, the autonomy of art, aesthetic reflectivity and the formation of modern subjectivity, aesthetic ideology and its political ramifications, and aesthetic fragmentation and estrangement as it figures in pop culture and the mass media. Since our aim is to reach an understanding of aesthetic experience not only in theory but also in practice, the course will make use of art works (mostly plastic art and films) as means to integrate abstract, conceptual analysis of ideas with a concrete, experience-based understanding of them. Philosophers that will be discussed include, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, and Derrida.
Knowledge and Power: Plato, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Foucault
Level: Open
Semester: Year
The relationship between knowledge and power has been a central preoccupation throughout the Western philosophical tradition. In this seminar, we will study four key philosophers, focusing on a central text from each. While aiming to grasp each text as a whole, we will pay special attention to its doctrines on the nature of reality and knowledge as well as its conception of how life in society should be organized. In this way, fundamental branches of philosophical enquiry—metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy—will be illuminated by way of their history. Plato (ancient philosophy) and Hobbes (early modern philosophy) both thought that knowledge and power must be fused in a society, although Plato privileged knowledge and Hobbes, power. Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and Foucault in the twentieth undertook a radical subversion of the tradition, essentially claiming that knowledge is power in a different guise. We are still living out the complex consequences, both intellectual and political, of this subversive project. As the course unfolds, the extraordinary breadth of the philosophers’ questioning and the diversity of their responses will reveal to us the structure of philosophical thinking and its continuing importance in shaping the culture and politics of our present.
“The Other” in Post-Hegelian Thought: Hegel, Nietzsche, Zilberman
Level: Open
Semester: Year
The question of “the other” and issues of diversity are central preoccupations of our age. One important reason to study Hegel’s thought is its continuing and pervasive influence on the horizon of contemporary debates, insofar as these debates have been lastingly defined by Hegel’s early critics. The most significant “others” in Hegel’s philosophy are other philosophers. This is because the diversity of seemingly incompatible philosophical positions threatens to turn Hegel’s own position into simply one among many, thus posing the greatest challenge to his claim to “Absolute Knowing.” We will begin by reading from Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, his most direct and well-developed attempt to meet this challenge. We will examine Hegel’s claim to have completed the history of philosophy in a comprehensive presentation of truth that preserves and transcends all the contradictory philosophies of the past and also makes future ones inconceivable. This response to the problem of intellectual plurality provokes later thinkers to accuse Hegel of misconstruing the genuine diversity of others. Nietzsche, our representative of influential early critiques of Hegel, argues in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to the Philosophy of the Future that Hegel’s method involves a misunderstanding of the nature and limits of knowledge, including philosophical knowledge. We will reconstruct Nietz-sche’s argument that the price of retaining genuine diversity is to recognize oneself as part of that diversity and hence to abandon claims to an absolute position of knowing. We will then go on to consider the paradoxes of perspectivism as symptomatic of Nietzsche’s ultimate inability to construct a methodology of pluralistic understanding. Finally, we will turn to a novel and promising treatment of intellectual plurality in Zilberman’s The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought. Here we will be guided by the question of how the nature of thought must be understood if we are to appreciate both its capacity to issue in incompatible constructions and its capacity to deliver genuine knowledge of such constructions. This will allow us to consider whether it is possible to retain both Hegel’s commitment to knowledge and Nietzsche’s commitment to irreducible diversity, and how both need to be reconfigured if we do.
Ancient Philosophy: Plato
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Fall
This course will be devoted to a careful reading of a small number of texts from a major figure in ancient philosophy. The goal of the course is twofold. It is first designed to acquaint students with one of the seminal figures of our tradition in more than a superficial way. In doing that, it will force us to slow our usual pace of reading, to read almost painfully carefully, with a view to understanding the thinker as he wrote and as he understood himself and not as a stage in a historical development. The second part of the goal of the course is to introduce and encourage this kind of careful reading. (The text for fall 2007 will be Plato’s Laches.)
Ancient Philosophy: Aristotle
Level: Intermediate
Semester: Spring
This course will be devoted to a careful reading of a small number of texts from a major figure in ancient philosophy. The goal of the course is twofold. It is first designed to acquaint students with one of the seminal figures of our tradition in more than a superficial way. In doing that, it will force us to slow our usual pace of reading, to read almost painfully carefully, with a view to understanding the thinker as he wrote and as he understood himself and not as a stage in a historical development. The second part of the goal of the course is to introduce and encourage this kind of careful reading. (The text for spring 2008 will be Aristotle’s On the Soul.)
Language and Religious Experience
Level: Open
Semester: Fall
In this one-semester course, we will look at what is meant by “religious experience” and why its relation to language has been considered problematic. We will concentrate on the concept of “God,” some forms of mystical experience, and the linguistic phenomenon of “performative apophasis,” or the saying of what cannot be said. Readings will be from Martin Buber, Ibn’Arabi, Michael Sells, Wittgenstein, and Bernadette Roberts.
Open to sophomores and above.
Knowledge and Skepticism
Level: Advanced
Semester: Year
Skepticism about the possibility of our knowing anything is one of the central problems of philosophy. Traditionally, skeptical arguments and the attempts to respond to them have been concerned with the relationship of our perceptions to the external world. Both sides of the debate have presupposed a certain model of mind, which has been seriously called into question in the 20th century. The modern version of this debate is framed not in perceptual terms, but in terms of language or conceptual frameworks and their relation to the world. Instead of wondering whether the external world is what it appears to be or whether it exists at all, modern philosophers have wondered whether our language or conceptual frameworks truly represent reality and whether objectivity, or even truth, is possible at all. In this course, we will look closely at a variety of skeptical arguments and some well-known attempts to respond to them, as well as the relationship of these arguments to current debates about truth, objectivity, and relativism. Readings will be from Descartes, Russell, Kuhn, Moore, and Wittgenstein.This one-semester course will be an introduction to Ordinary Language Philosophy, a mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophical movement that originated at Oxford. More a method or style of doing philosophy than a particular view of reality, it has as its main concern the correction of philosophical error resulting from inattentiveness to “ordinary language,” namely, to how words are actually used. We will concentrate on the work of John Austin and O. K. Bouwsma and their often witty critiques of certain problems about knowledge and skepticism first articulated by Descartes in his Meditations on First Philosophy. We will also consider what light this movement sheds on the nature of philosophy. In addition to Austin, Bouwsma, and Descartes, there will be readings from A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell.