Instructor-Specific Course Descriptions for Special Topics, Upper Division, and Graduate Courses
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For a full description of all courses in the catalog, please click the relevant link below:
Fall 2024
PHIL 420 – Hellenistic Philosophy – Shaw
This course will consider the Hellenistic conception of philosophy as therapy, particularly in Epicurean and Stoic traditions, but with some attention given to Pyrrhonism and to antecedents in Plato and Aristotle. We will spend each Tuesday reading primary literature and each Thursday reading a chapter of Martha Nussbaum’s book, The Therapy of Desire. Students will also be encouraged to look at relevantly similar scholarship by Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life) and Foucault (The Hermeneutics of the Subject).
PHIL 420/522 – Hegel – Eldridge
Hegel’s master topic is the construction of free and meaningful joint social life, by human beings as rational animals, within which everyone might find reassurance and recognition. This seminar will trace and evaluate his arguments about the content of this construction and about how it is both possible and rationally well-motivated, as these arguments develop from his Phenomenology of Spirit (1806) to his Philosophy of Right (1820) and on into his aesthetics and philosophy of history.
PHIL 480/574 – Epistemic Dimensions of Agency – Coffman
We’ll explore three important questions at the intersection of Epistemology and Philosophy of Action: What are the cognitive conditions for intentional action? What are the cognitive conditions for morally appraisable action? What’s required for knowing, or having justification to believe, claims about blameworthy behavior? The course divides into five parts. In the course’s first two parts, we’ll acquire epistemological and action-theoretical background required to participate fruitfully in critical discussion of the above questions. The course’s third part will center on what we can call the ‘Problem of Intentional Action’—namely, the fact that the following three claims seem individually plausible but also jointly inconsistent: (1) You perform an action intentionally only if that action is under your control; (2) An action is under your control only if you know you’re performing that action; (3) You can perform an action intentionally without knowing you’re performing that action. In the course’s fourth part, we’ll explore the cognitive side of morally appraisable action. After considering Susan Wolf’s statement and defense of a “sanity requirement” for morally appraisable action, we’ll scrutinize a provocative recent argument for the conclusion that we’re only rarely (if ever) blameworthy for behavior we didn’t deem wrong when it occurred. The course’s fifth part will center on what we can call the ‘Problem of Knowledgeable Culpability’—namely, the fact that the following three claims seem individually plausible but also jointly inconsistent: (I) We can have wholly non-scientific knowledge that we’re blameworthy for some of our actions; (II) We’re blameworthy for some of our actions only if some of our actions aren’t predetermined; (III) If practical blameworthiness requires indeterminism (= II is true), then we can’t have wholly non-scientific knowledge that we’re blameworthy for some of our actions (= I is false).
PHIL 480/574 – Attention and Interpretation – Gardiner
Coming Soon!
PHIL 601/640 – Neo-Aristotelian Ethics – Gehrman
This seminar will focus on 20th and 21st century Aristotelian ethics, broadly construed to include not only “virtue ethics”, but also debates about character, the structure and purpose of practical reason, the fact-value distinction, philosophical methods in value theory, and other areas of normative ethics and value theory influenced by the iconoclastic “neo-Aristotelian” philosophers of the 20th century. We’ll consider not just what the neo-Aristotelians views were, but also the impact and significance of their views in the historical context of 20th-century ethics and metaethics. We’ll consider the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Christine Swanton, Julia Annas, Gavin Lawrence, Warren Quinn, John McDowell, John Doris, and John Hacker-Wright, among others.