Philosophy 100 is an introduction to the study of philosophy. It is intended to introduce you to philosophical questions, to give you an idea of what some of history’s greatest philosophers have said about them, and to help you learn how to articulate philosophical concerns of your own. The branches of philosophy we’ll study include ethics, aesthetics, and the theory of knowledge.
(Formerly Logic 100)
Critical thinking—also called logic—is the study of how to distinguish good reasoning from bad, correct thinking from incorrect. It’s a little like grammar: we use it all the time, usually without thinking about it. But like grammar, critical thinking involves universal rules that you may not be familiar with. Studying these rules will help you to use them more effectively, and so to become a better thinker. In the first half of the course, we’ll study some of the basic concepts of critical thinking. We’ll pay particular attention to the concept of an argument, and to related notions such as classification and definition. We’ll also study techniques that you can use to assess the strength of an argument and to spot fallacies (errors in reasoning). The second part of the course will be devoted to somewhat more technical topics. We’ll spend several weeks studying classical deductive logic as developed by Aristotle. We’ll also take a look at modern propositional logic, at inductive logic, and at the connections between critical thinking and other important topics.
This course explores the main philosophical ideas and concepts developed by Aristotle and later Greek thinkers, including Epicurus, the Stoics, the Sceptics and Plotinus. We will address a wide variety of issues concerning knowledge, morality, pleasure, beauty, matter and evil. These themes will be approached in their interconnectedness. We will constantly want to see what kind of view about the ultimate nature of reality underlies specific answers given to the more particular questions, and how, a specific view about knowledge, for instance, determines a specific outlook of one’s moral beliefs.
This course is a serious introduction to medieval philosophy. It will consist of a wide-ranging survey of European philosophy from the fall of the Roman empire to the end of the fourteenth century. Particular attention will be paid to the metaphysical and epistemological questions raised during this period, though we’ll look at other areas of philosophy as well. While most of the figures we’ll read belong to various Christian traditions, we’ll also pay some attention to medieval Islamic and Jewish thinkers. The recurring themes of the course will include the relation between reason and religious faith, the problem of universals, the nature of human knowledge, and the philosophical consequences of the doctrine of creation.
LATE MODERN PHILOSOPHY is a critical survey of the development of philosophy in the 19th century. While this development will be primarily concerned with this period, we will also consider the period as providing a background for contemporary philosophy. The historical continuity between then and now will be developed by considering in some depth some of Hegel’s later work and contrasting it with important works in Marxism, Existentialism, Positivism, Pragmatism, and Intuitionalism.
This course is a serious introduction to the philosophical movement known as existentialism. After taking a quick look at the historical background to this movement, we’ll turn to the work of three of the best-known existential philosophers: Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. We’ll pay particular attention to their views on freedom and the nature of consciousness. We’ll also spend some time discussing existentialism’s relevance for ethics, the arts, and our understanding of gender.
This course is dedicated to the study some of the most significant moments in the tradition of metaphysical preoccupations, focusing primarily on four thinkers: Plotinus, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Heidegger. We are going to address issues of a most fundamental nature for philosophy: What is the ultimate nature of reality? Can the ultimate reality be known or is it simply unknowable? What is freedom and how can we know whether we are free? What is the true task and mission of philosophy? Is there a final purpose to the universe as such? Why is there something rather than nothing? By the end of the course everyone will have been persuaded that ours is the best of all possible worlds!
A study of human nature in the history of philosophy, including the ancient and medieval understandings of human nature, early modern and 19th century views, and the human condition described by psychoanalysis, existentialism, and postmodernism. Thinkers studied may include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud, Sartre, and Rorty.
This critical examination in speculative metaphysics aims at discovering what rationally can be said about angels. Our primary concern is with reason and what it can reveal about the nature of angels. In seeking this end, we will investigate arguments for the existence of such beings and try to understand what these arguments imply. Further, we will explore, again by means of arguments, the implications that flow from the very idea of angels not only to help us understand the nature of angels but also what it means to be human.
Feminism is one of the most important voices in the debate in contemporary political theory. Feminist thought draws on the history of political philosophy to formulate and answer two basic questions: what does it mean to be a human being and what are the principles of justice that need to be applied between the sexes based on such an understanding. We will explore these questions by studying important schools of feminist thought and investigating the thinkers that provide them their philosophical foundations.
Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century and one of the most important thinkers of all times. This course is dedicated to a careful study of his major work, Being and Time. We’ll be dealing extensively with themes like the meaning of being, space, time, world, death, conscience, finitude and anxiety. Heidegger’s Being and Time offers probably the best introduction to phenomenology, and an intelligent picture of the relation between traditional metaphysics and contemporary continental approaches to philosophy.
This introduction to the philosophy of Hegel will be developed through a critical textual analysis of one of the truly great philosophical works of the modern era: The Phenomenology of Spirit. In addition to learning how to approach and understand a major philosophical work, a concern of the class will be to give the student some idea of why Hegel has had such an enormous impact on contemporary philosophy.
Socrates is widely regarded as the first political philosopher, the first philosopher not simply to investigate the natural world but to make political questions concerning the best form of rule, justice, virtue, and the good life for human beings central to philosophic inquiry. His political thought, which we know primarily through Plato's Socratic dialogues, takes its bearings from the good, or from the human soul. But what is the basis or justification for such an enterprise? This course explores Plato's Socrates, as well as ancient and modern critiques of Socrates, from Aristophanes' CLOUDS to Socrates' place in the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. We will conclude with Kierkegaard's contrast between Socrates and Christ, and with Nietzsche's contrast between Socrates and Dionysus. Can Socratic philosophizing sustain the powerful attacks made in the name of history, faith and tragedy? And does Socratic philosophizing adequately sustain political life, especially in the face of such attacks? Alternatively, do the positions of these later thinkers offer superior ways to understand and develop political communities.
This class explores Aristotle's NICOMACHEAN ETHICS. It focuses on the questions of moral virtue, intellectual virtue, friendship, and the relationship between ethics and politics and ethics and philosophy. It also considers Aristotle's ethical theory in light of various alternatives, and may include readings from the works of Aquinas, Machiavelli, or Hobbes.
In Philosophy 332, we’ll reflect critically on the study of history. We’ll examine a number of philosophical questions that are raised by the kind of thinking that historians do, and we’ll ask how the study of history might be related to other important philosophical themes. The course will be divided into three parts. The first will focus on the epistemology of history—that is, on whether and to what extent we can acquire knowledge of the past. Among other things, we’ll ask what it might mean to explain an historical event, and whether historians can be objective. The second part of the course will address so-called “speculative” historians—that is, those who attribute a meaning or purpose to history as a whole. As an example, we’ll read Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Finally, in the third part of the course, we’ll examine what might be called “existential” approaches to history. Our main text for this part of the course will be Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.