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PHIL 520: Aristotle on Moral Education – Shaw

Aristotle holds that ethical virtue is a mean in acting and feeling, which is produced by habituation.  But what is habituation, and what is its relationship to action and feeling?  We will very likely read: Nicomachean Ethics I.13-II.9, IV.9, X.9; Eudemian Ethics II.1-5; Rhetoric I.11, II.1-11; Politics VIII.  Other likely possibilities include: Nicomachean Ethics III.1-5, VI [= EE V], VII [= EE VI], X.1-5; De Anima III.9-11.

Time permitting, we will also read relevant secondary literature by scholars including Myles Burnyeat, Margaret Hampson, Marta Jimenez, Rachana Kamtekar, Richard Kraut, and Jonathan Lear.

PHIL 528: Phenomenology – Thalos

This course introduces students to phenomenology as a tradition of inquiry into the structures of lived experience, perception, embodiment, temporality, freedom, and intersubjective life. We will take special interest in Edmund Husserl’s foundational analyses of intentionality and how this analysis of first-person experience inflects that of predecessors such as Aristotle and Descartes, engage deeply with Jean-Paul Sartre’s expansion of phenomenology into analysis of the interiority of agency, with its dual emphases on freedom and conflict, compare it with Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenology of embodiment, situation, and social life. We will examine the work of Frantz Fanon, whose reworking of phenomenology in the context of colonialism and racialization provides a decisive point of transition from classical phenomenology to contemporary feminist, critical race, and social phenomenology. Readings may include more contemporary work as well, with attention to how phenomenological methods have been extended to questions of gender, race, oppression, affect, and political life.  The course will emphasize the goals and methodologies of phenomenology, how they compare with those of scientific and conceptual analysis, and engage with the question of the continuing significance of phenomenology for contemporary philosophy.

Student projects may address not only canonical phenomenological topics such as intentionality, embodiment, temporality, and freedom, but also contemporary questions about gender, race, affect, institutions, carcerality, and political life. The course is designed to support projects that place Husserl, Sartre, Beauvoir and Fanon in conversation with recent work by thinkers such as Dan Zahavi, Sara Ahmed, Lisa Guenther, and Alia Al-Saji.

PHIL 540: Ethical Naturalism – Gehrman

This seminar will focus on neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism as developed in the work of Philippa Foot and her students and colleagues.

“Neo-Aristotelian” ethics or “virtue” ethics became a serious mainstream school of thought in 20th century moral philosophy thanks to the work of a fierce group of women philosophers, including Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and their students Rosalind Hursthouse and Julia Annas. These neo-Aristotelian moral philosophers all gave a central place in their ethical writings to distinctively Aristotelian notions of character, moral education, wisdom, and the importance of the emotions in moral life. With the publication of Foot’s late-career monograph Natural Goodness, Aristotelian ethics joined utilitarianism and Kantian ethics as a legitimate theory-type in moral philosophy.

In Natural Goodness, Foot laid out a comprehensive “naturalist” Aristotelian ethical theory, in which she followed Aristotle in claiming that facts about human nature constitute standards for goodness in individual human beings. For example, if humans are (as Aristotle thought) rational, social animals by nature, then individual humans ought to be rational and social simply because they are human; to be otherwise is a human failing. (And so on for all other aspects of human nature.) On this view, morality has a substantial, common human core; something we all share simply in virtue of our shared humanity. And that common core of ordinary facts about human nature provides a secular, factual, universal basis for objective differences between right and wrong that anyone could in principle recognize and be held accountable for responding to.

The prospect of an objective, factually grounded secular ethical theory is appealing. But Aristotle’s ethics is intimately connected with his metaphysics. He saw the world as divinely, hierarchically ordered; as value-laden, and as replete with immutable essences – including an unchanging essence of humankind. And that picture of things is starkly incompatible with a secular, modern-scientific worldview according to which humans are the happenstance, mutable products of evolution and the cosmos is not intelligently designed. Neo-Aristotelian naturalism has to be able to draw on Aristotle’s insights about ethics without covertly or accidentally relying on Aristotle’s metaphysics. We will see this difficulty surface in a range of serious challenges to the view.

PHIL 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 601/624: Justice as Fairness – Garthoff

In this course we examine John Rawls’s conception of justice, “justice as fairness”. We set the context for Rawls’s conception by briefly articulating the views of his (arguably at least) most important precursors in English-language political philosophy: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, James Madison, and John Stuart Mill. We then turn to investigate Rawls’s own work, using his book Justice as Fairness: A Restatement as our principal text. Among the Rawlsian ideas we explicate and criticize are: the basic structure of society, the well-ordered society, the difference principle, the original position, property-owning democracy, public reason, and overlapping consensus. We look at how these ideas can illuminate contemporary large-scale political and economic disputes, including oppositions between capitalism and socialism and conflicting understandings of the role of religion in public life. The significance of Rawls’s distinctive account of societal stability as a frame for these disputes will be an important theme of the course.