Please see Banner/Timetable for further information about sections, times, locations, and instructors. For a description of all courses in the catalog, please click the link below:

PHIL 522-01: Pessimism – Stratmann

Pessimism typically denotes some commitment to things being worse than they are ordinarily taken to be. We will primarily focus on the pessimistic tradition that has developed in Western philosophy over the last few hundred years. Figures that we will investigate include Pierre Bayle, Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Olga Plümacher, Philipp Mainländer, Julius Bahnsen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Zapffe, David Benatar, and Mara van der Lugt. We will also look at some potential practical implications of pessimism, such as anti-natalism.
*NOTE: if you want to take both 420-01 and 420-02, please contact the department for an override.

PHIL 522-02: Wittgenstein – Eldridge

Wittgenstein’s writings on representation, meaning, logic, language, and the nature of philosophy both transformed approaches to standard topics (knowledge, truth, and value) and developed a powerful new picture of human being-in-the-world. Exactly what that picture is, however, remains controversial. Is conceptual analysis a discipline that is autonomous and toto genere distinct from empirical inquiries, in being the tribunal of sense (as Peter Hacker puts it)? Or does (modern) human being-in-the-world involve an endless, historically inflected struggle for reconciliation with others and for self-transparency in one’s commitments, or what Stanley Cavell (with a kind of existentialist twist) calls the truth of skepticism? What are the arguments or considerations in Wittgenstein’s texts that support either reading, and are those arguments or considerations compelling? What would it be fully to receive Wittgenstein’s writings?
*NOTE: if you want to take both 420-01 and 420-02, please contact the department for an override.

PHIL 540: Modern Ethical Theory – Cureton

This course is a seminar in the history of modern moral philosophy. Through close engagement with Hobbes, Hume, Butler, Kant, and Mill, we will explore basic moral questions, such as: What ought we to do? What is valuable in life? How should we treat others and ourselves? What counts as a happy or fulfilled life? Although we rarely ask these questions explicitly in our everyday lives, we very often act as though there are correct answers to them – some of us follow the wishes of our parents or religious leaders because we think doing so is the right thing to do; we regard certain activities, relationships, and commitments as valuable in themselves and treat them accordingly; we try to be respectful of others, and so on. Beyond academic interest, finding a way to answer some of these questions can be useful to many of us. Specifying a suitable moral perspective to assess what we ought to do can be useful in evaluating certain real-world ethical situations. Policymakers, law enforcement officials, and military personnel, for example, are sometimes called on to make difficult moral decisions, and their deliberations about what to do could be improved by taking advantage of a suitable moral framework. Those of us who are unlikely to face terrible life-or-death cases can also employ a standpoint of this sort to assess the actions of our government officials and the laws they adopt, determine what moral rules to teach our children and socially enforce in others, and resolve more familiar questions about when we are allowed to break our promises or tell lies. This course aims to help us to think about morality and its relation to our own lives by drawing on the moral wisdom of the past.

PHIL 585: Mechanisms and Scientific Explanation – Carlisle

In this course, we will explore the mechanistic conception of scientific explanation and its critics. We will begin by reading Wesley Salmon’s Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, which traces the development of philosophical accounts of scientific explanation. We will then turn to Carl Craver’s Explaining the Brain for a detailed examination of the mechanistic approach. We will finish the semester by considering objections to mechanistic explanation, as well as alternative frameworks for understanding scientific explanation. Throughout this final section, we will consider whether these alternatives pose genuine challenges to the mechanistic framework or whether they might instead complement it.