Much of who we are has been decided for us historically.  Often practical life simply demands of us that we accept these past decisions and work on the basis they provide.  But practical life also demands creativity, innovation, and leadership, without which we will not be prepared for change and ready to adapt in a way that is consistent with our aims and identity.  Into this slot, between the authority of the past and the demands of change, steps philosophy.  Philosophy is the study of those aspects of ourselves that are so habitual and basic as to be dormant.  Philosophical study wakes the slumbering self to restore to us the spirit of new ideas and the courage of risk-taking in which we thrive.  Make no mistake, philosophy is a difficult subject, and this is a difficult class.  But by familiarizing yourself with the way people before you have seen fit to question and define justice and power, God, property, human rights, objectivity, and a handful of other basic terms by which our experience if framed, you are preparing yourself for a long and fruitful career as an innovator and creator.

 

PHI 270-001 History of Philosophy II: From the Renaissance to the Present Era –Staff            

This course will explore the development of western philosophy from the early 17^th century until the end of the 19^th century.  We will be concerned with the main issue: How can I have knowledge of reality? That is, we will study issues of metaphysics (What is real?) and epistemology (What can I know?). We will focus on a small number of central figures:  the rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz), the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), and end with Kant’s synthesis of rationalism and empiricism.

 

This course philosophically examines the contemporary problem of the pornographic culture of late modernity. The harms of pornography, especially to women and children, tend to be obscured by the traditional view that casts pornography as merely reflecting the naturally different ways that men and women experience freedom or sexual liberation: Men through treating women in abusive ways and women through enjoying such treatment. Through a close examination of the lived reality of pornography and its myriad ties to sexual abuse, we elicit a new understanding that questions these governing assumptions. Here, we read writings by feminist authors Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, Gail Dines, and others.

 

We also situate this problem within a larger historical-philosophical context. We explore its connections to a tradition in political philosophy (a traditional ontology) that obscures systematic harms by sorting humanity into two natural kinds and to the philosophical attempts to dismantle that ontology. To this end, we read Aristotle and Enlightenment debates surrounding political liberty and freedom. We thereby partake in a classic idea of philosophy in which it responds to a contemporary crisis that it situates that in a constructively critical dialogue with philosophy’s past; that is, we make the past living and relevant to the present-day.

 

 

This course is an upper-level introduction to the philosophy of sport.  The topics we will consider involve metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic issues of sport.  Among the questions we will consider are:

·         What is a sport?  What, if anything, distinguishes a sport from a game or recreation?

·         What is the nature of sportsmanship?

·         What does knowing a technique entail?  Does playing, or succeeding at, a sport involve a special kind of knowledge?

·         Is cheating ever morally permissible?  Does using performance-enhancing drugs count as cheating?

·         Are sports beautiful?

Along the way we will consider both classic and contemporary readings.  In doing so, we will consider not only the specific issues at hand but also why those issues count as distinctly ‘philosophical’.

 

 

Traditionally, philosophers have argued over the meaning of life by studying canonical texts, while biologists have tried to uncover the mechanical conditions of life by running controlled experiments. Philosophers think in their armchairs, while biologists gather in their fields. This course introduces students to the vibrant trading zone in which philosophers and biologists share intellectual resources. According to philosophers of biology, philosophy is empty without the very latest empirical content, while biology is blind without reflective pause.

 

In particular, we will investigate the important philosophical consequences of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. We will start by tracing the emergence of Darwin’s theory throughout several rarely taught background materials, beginning with an early field biologist, Aristotle, for whom nature is organized with purpose and design; continuing on to William Paley, who offers an especially clear and developed version of the argument for intelligent design; and then turning to Darwin’s immediate precursors, Malthus, Lamarck, and Lyell. Finally, we will read much of Darwin’s classic work The Origin of Species, which disenchants nature and initiates the West’s most disorienting conceptual revolution.

 

Once we have established this deep understanding of the theory, we will move on to contemporary issues in the philosophy of biology, many of which ask about the limits of Darwin’s theory. We will critically analyze the debates over the units of selection, adaptationism, epigenetics and evo-devo, evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution, evolutionary ethics, function, reduction, sexual orientation, the concept of human nature, and feminist philosophy of science. Our contemporary authors will include a mix of well known philosophers and biologists such as:  Richard Dawkins, Evelyn Fox Keller, Stephen Jay Gould, David Hull, Phillip Kitcher, Paul Griffiths, Elizabeth Lloyd, Richard Lewontin, Michael Ruse, John Maynard Smith, and Elliott Sober.

 

Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this course typically enrolls students from different concentrations. All are welcome, as there is no evolution without variety! Philosophers will leave the course with a more informed sense of post-modernity, while biologists will leave the course with the ability to ask broader and more creative questions about their research. Please note only that, to succeed in this course, students should be competent writers and should have some basic understanding of the theory of natural selection.

 

 

 

A consideration of the ethical issues and difficult choices generated or made acute by advances in biology, technology and medicine.  Typical issues include:  informed consent, healer-patient relationships, truth telling, confidentiality, problem of birth defects, abortion, placebos and health, allocation of scarce medical resources, genetic research and experimentation, cost containment in health care, accountability of health care professionals, care of the dying and death.

 

 

In this course, students will study a number of ethical issues commonly faced by people working in health care, including related areas of research.  The course will cover a number of professional issues, such as informed consent, decision-making for incompetent patients, fair access to health care, and an extended treatment of end-of-life issues.  The course will also include a strong emphasis on techniques for carrying on discussions about ethics, both in person and in writing.

 

 

 

A course introducing philosophy at the upper division level which studies various issues involved in analyzing what it means to be human, in the interest of developing a coherent conception of man.  Answers will be sought to questions like these: Is there a human nature?  What would differentiate the properly human from the nonhuman?  What kind of relations tie a human being to environment, society, and history?

 

 

This course explores the range of ideas that philosophers have proposed about what a human being is.   We will read selections from the writings of major thinkers from both Asian and Western cultures, from Ancient, Medieval and Modern times. 

 

 

This course will be an introduction to science fiction and philosophy. We will look at science fiction in several different forms--short stories, books, movies, TV shows, and video games--and use these as a springboard for philosophical topics such as time travel, knowledge and skepticism, language and meaning, free will and determinism, modality and possible worlds. We will supplement the science fiction with articles from various philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, and contemporary philosophers such as Frege, Kripke, Lewis, Dennett.
 

 

This course provides a systematic study of sentential logic, elementary quantification, and the logic of identity.  The student will acquire the specific skills in symbolic methods of analysis which are necessary for further study in logic as well as useful in addressing complex issues in philosophy and other areas.

 

 

This course will examine three directions modern ethical theory has taken. We will first examine utilitarianism in its classical form in Bentham and Mill and in its contemporary form. We will then turn to liberal critiques of utilitarianism and explore some of the basic ideas behind this doctrine. Here we will look at writers like Kant and Rawls. Finally we will turn to contemporary, post-liberal theory, the so-called ethical turn in which the concrete ethical situation is once again emphasized. Writers in this line include Foucault, Derrida and Judith Butler.

 

                     

An introduction to moral problems that arise in contemporary business practice and the ethical frameworks proposed to resolve them.  Topics will include areas such as truth-telling and integrity; social responsibility; property rights and their limitations; and justice in personnel and labor practices.

 

 

This course provides an examination of several incompatible views concerning the relation between the individual and society, including radical individualism and collectivism, as well as more moderate theories.  Attention will be given to contemporary as well as classical spokesmen for these views and emphasis will be placed upon relating these theories to contemporary social, cultural, and political issues.

 

 

The goal of this course is to help students understand the ideas behind several major strands of United States politics.  To that end, we will study the moral justifications for a number of approaches to politics.  In particular, we will consider the issues and ideas that lead people to become liberals, libertarians, conservatives, multiculturalists, feminists, and communitarians.  We will also examine how these different perspectives apply to controversies such as taxation, school funding, and health care.

 

 

A number of questions define the focus of this class. What is our place, individually, culturally and as a species, in the community of life? Indeed, are we connected to non-human living systems in any moral sense? How can we construct our economy so as to sustain the environment for future generations? For that matter, what does sustainability mean? Conversely, are all values defined solely by reference to human needs or interests? Should we consider animals, plants, or even ecosystems subjects of moral worth? If so, how far does the line of moral considerability extend, and on what basis do we draw this line? And lastly, does wild nature, have value in and of itself? If so, what do we mean by wild nature? As we examine these issues, I will also ask you to keep a journal (blog) in which you reflect on your place here in Lexington as members of a local economy and a biotic community.

 

 

This course will offer an overview of the development of legal theory. We will cover the history of legal philosophy, paying attention both to the natural law tradition starting with Aquinas and to the positivist tradition which began with Bentham. We will examine how these came together in Kant. We will then cover central debates between these two main positions in the 20^th Century, focusing on H. L. A. Hart’s debates with Lon Fuller and Ronald Dworkin. We will end with a series of essays on international law, which employ both positivist and natural law theory.

 

 

This course examines the principal philosophical ideas, values and social practices that have evolved in India, China, Japan and greater S.E. Asia from the 4^th millennium B.C.E. to the present.  We will study primary texts from the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist traditions in their cultural contexts as presented in a secondary text like Religions of Asia that is written from a modern social science perspective.  Films, lectures as well as class discussion will help the student gain perspective on the background and development of those traditions. 

 

 

This course will be an examination of fundamental issues in metaphysics and epistemology, such as causation, the nature of space and time, personal identity, free will, the existence of God, the nature and types of knowledge, the character of human existence, skepticism, and rationality.

 

 

Understanding death is a profound philosophical problem; and this class is devoted to examining this problem. In these modern times, it is not a simple matter to determine when death arrives. Indeed, today it is possible to keep the body alive in the barest mechanical sense in order to allow the harvesting of valuable organs and tissues. But this biological criterion of death only accentuates the problematic distinction between our biological and personal existence. In this class we examine both the definition and criterion of death and idea of the human person the biological criterion suggests.

 

 

 A philosophical and interdisciplinary investigation of a cluster of prominent issues about the meaning of life and death, caring for dying persons, and the quality of life of the terminally ill.  Among topics included are: death definitions and criteria; allowing to die versus killing; euthanasia and suicide; life prolongation; ethics of care of the terminally ill; and rights of the dying.

 

 

Pedagogically, the objective is to introduce students outside of philosophy to part of the history of philosophy which more familiar figures like Foucault and Derrida draw on. For philosophy students, this course is an attempt to reconstruct the influence utilitarian thinking has on the tradition starting with Rawls which is so important in contemporary meta-ethics. The course also seeks to position thinkers in the continental tradition with regard to utilitarianism and liberalism in a way that is usually not done.

The thesis of this course is that the philosophical movements of utilitarianism, liberalism and the recent ‘turn to the ethical’ in continental philosophy should be read as responses to social and material pressures. In broad strokes then, we read utilitarianism as a form of rebellion against the ancien regime. Utilitarianism sought to authorize individuals to make judgments on their own behalf, using the empiricist model of pain and pleasure.

 

This model was criticized by liberals as not paying enough attention to the (perhaps ineffable) idea of freedom which they championed as personal responsibility. Liberalism takes it to be axiomatic that we cannot actually agree on the content of the good life (as some versions of utilitarianism assume) so it is necessary to develop a form of political organization which safeguards but does not judge freedom. The result is a politically fragile truce in which people agree not to disagree.

 

Finally, we read the ‘return to the ethical’ in recent continental thought as a return to the idea of an ethically contentful conception of the self which develops in response to the relativist and economic backdrop with which liberalism has allied itself in its pursuit of a stable society based on consumption.

 

Authors we will be considering range from Bentham and Peter Singer through Kant, Rawls, and Rorty to Hegel, Foucault and Judith Bulter.

 

*This course fulfills the 20th century VT requirement for graduate students.

 

The emergence of the school of Plotinus in the 3rd century ce came well before the Medieval Period in European intellectual history, but the subsequent power of its philosophic vision was one of the major influences in Medieval philosophy, above all in its service to theology. This imprint upon Medieval thought, however, continued well beyond the medieval period to exercise its influence through the Renaissance into both the Modern period and contemporary thinking, often without a thinker’s being aware of the elements of this potent intellectual stream.

 

This course will begin with a comprehensive study of Plotinus’ own doctrine, then follow it in the form in which it was represented by and taken up in the Middle Ages—with Pseudo-Dionysius and Thomas Aquinas among others. From there this reworked and sometimes transmogrified Neoplatonism continued in anti-traditionalists such as perhaps the most radical of all (in Neoplatonic terms) Giordano Bruno, in his finding Nature to be both the purely material principle and the purely spiritual. Finally, the course will touch upon various Neoplatonic strata—often intermixed with other marginal movements in what is called the hermetic stream—in more recent figures, for example, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Schelling, to finish with its seeming vestige in a “meontic” factor in 20th century transcendental phenomenology.

 

There will be considerable reading, periodic written retrospectives, and a final term paper.

 

PHI 509-001 Topics in Modern Philosophy: Kant’s 1^st Critique - Breazeale   TR   2:00-3:15pm

 

In this class we will read and discuss, thoroughly and in its entirety,. a work that has been described as "the Doomsday Book of German philosophy," Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (in a conflated edition, combining the complete texts of the first, 1781, and second, 1787, editions).   Each student will be required to prepare and submit in weekly installments a running précis of and commentary on the text.  In addition, there will be a few short (5-10 page) papers required over the course of the semester.  Graduate students enrolled in this class will also be required to submit a term paper, which will be optional for undergraduates.

 

Text: Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Unified Edition, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett).  Students may use the Geyer/Wood translation (Cambridge University Press) if they prefer, but the Pluhar translation is the one to which reference will be made in class.

 

                                                                                     

An intermediate to advanced course in logic. We will review sentential logic, review and develop predicate logic, and investigate meta-logical issues such as consistency, soundness and completeness. Time permitting, we will explore modal logic or non-classical logics such as paraconsistent logic, which rejects the law of non-contradiction. Prerequisite: PHI 320.

 

 

At least as far back as Hegel, there is a tradition in philosophy that considers ethics an historical enterprise. This means, among other things, that our understanding of major ethical challenges emanates from grappling with their lived reality. For Hegel, this task centered on better understanding slave-like oppression and liberation from it, which was his way of responding to the monumental ethical challenges in his time surrounding events of the French Revolution. However, his historical ethics was still wedded to metaphysics in the sense that such understanding was assumed to yield or to conform to timeless definitive truths.

 

In this course, we examine Hannah Arendt’s responses to ethical crisis in her time, specifically totalitarianism and the Holocaust, as being, in many ways, a continuation of this tradition but, crucially, without the absolutism of metaphysics. We explore sources of this move in Arendt’s having “passed through” Heidegger’s phenomenological “dismantling” of modern metaphysics. By placing her in conversation with Heidegger, we consider what it is to do ethics in ways decisively affected by this shift. Here, ethics might be considered more fundamentally historical or open to the world (though guided by objectivity as a regulative ideal) than Hegel considers it and as such also a matter of what Heidegger calls “the question of Being” or of meaningful human existence. Our readings may include, among others, selections from Heidegger’s Being and Time, “The Letter on Humanism,” “What is Called Thinking?”, Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and selections from The Life of the Mind.

 

 

 

In this course we will examine the origin, development, and history of the Frankfurt School and its form of critical theory.  Attention will be paid to the Marxian/Freudian origins of the Frankfurt School as well as the social/political environment to which it was a response.  We will examine the relationship between the Frankfurt School and western philosophers such as Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, Kant and others. 

We will begin by reading works by early Frankfurt School members such as Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm, Benjamin, and Marcuse.  We will then examine the transition from the early model of critical theory to Habermasian discourse ethics with its fusion of Hegel, Kant, Piaget, Kohlberg, and language philosophy.  After our study of Habermas we will then turn to the third generation model of critical theory represented by Axel Honneth and his theory of recognition.  Here, we will also take a look at the debate between Honneth and Nancy Fraser on recognition and redistribution. 

This course will expose students to a very unique and exciting body of work in social political philosophy.  Our goal is to grasp the relevance of the many versions of critical theory for contemporary social/political problems.  We will want to pay attention to the relationship between critical theory and traditional liberalism, as well as to the contribution that critical theory can make to the struggle for democracy, debates about multiculturalism, and identity politics. 

 

 

This course will be a survey of central topics in the philosophy of religion, including faith and reason, religious experience, the existence of God, miracles, the problem of evil, survival after death, and religious diversity.  Readings will be drawn primarily from contemporary authors and will focus on western theism, although there will also be some attention to eastern religions.  After reading a variety of articles on the aforementioned topics, we will conclude with a recent monograph dealing with arguments for the existence of God, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God by C. Stephen Evans.

 

 

 

 

This course will investigate the nature of science and scientific discovery, and the philosophical issues that develop out of scientific methods and theorizing in general. We will be exploring such questions as: What is it exactly that scientists are doing when they are developing and testing scientific theories? Are they discovering real facts about the world? Or are they merely composing a fiction that is just one of many ways to 'describe' realty. Or are they just making it up as they go along? Do scientists actually explain anything or are they merely describing observable facts, with no hope to truly understand why the world is the way it is? Why should we think that there are objective scientific facts anyway? What is our basis for choosing one scientific theory over another? Very often scientific theories are chosen on the basis of simplicity, parsimony, explanatory power, ability to account for the data, and non-as-hoc-ness. But why should we think that these are theoretical virtues instead of vices? In particular, simplicity and parsimony are aesthetic criteria. But why should we think that our best scientific theories should adhere to aesthetic criteria? Why should we think that the universe is elegant, e.g.? We will also be looking at the problem of induction and the epistemology of future expectations. Do we have any legitimate grounds on which make predictions? Or is all of our seemingly calculated predictions about the future no better than consulting a crystal ball? Throughout the course, we will be looking at the division and differences between science and philosophy and how and why each influences or informs (or should influence or inform) the other. 

 

 

 

What is the normative basis of moral obligation, and precisely how are such obligations related to human freedom and to natural desires and dispositions?  What is the relationship between individual autonomy and intersubjective "recognition" of the same?  How is a formal principle, such as the Categorical Imperative related to concrete practical duties and concrete social and institutional norms?

 

These are some of the questions that occupied the attention of philosophers in the immediate wake of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Critique of Practical Reason, and Metaphysics of Morals. This seminar will begin with a quick review of these Kantian texts and will then turn to a consideration of how the preceding questions were raised and answered by K.L. Reinhold, J.G. Fichte, and G.W.F. Hegel. 

 

Grades will be based upon one short paper early in the semester, regular seminar presentations by each participant, contribution to seminar discussions, and a full-length final essay on a topic to be individually negotiated with the instructor.  
 

Required Texts (all paperback editions)

Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor  (Cambridge)  ISBN: 0-

521-65408-4

K.L. Reinhold, Excerpts from Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, Vol. 2 (typescript translation),

 plus a few secondary articles (in English) regarding Reinhold's new account of human

 freedom in these Letters..
J. G. Fichte, System of Ethics, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge)

 ISBN: 0-521-57767-5

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood

            (Cambridge) ISBN: 0-521-34888-0

 

This course will consist mainly of a rigorous and precise reading of Plato’s Parmenides, which is not only one of the most difficult texts in the Platonic corpus and in the history of philosophy but arguably also one of the most pivotal.  We will approach this text from a fundamentally sympathetic perspective.  By seeking to identify and put to the test the basic assumptions that inform our average everyday attitude toward things, we are laying bare millennia of sedimented human involvement with the practical world.  The aim of the course is to understand with rigor what stands behind our familiar ways of seeing and speaking about objects, and in particular we want to understand the sense in which there is no “object” there (and no  “there” there) except on the basis of our relation to forms.  If we are successful, philosophers working on a number of different subjects in the history of philosophy can expect to come away from the course with a set of tools for carefully testing and discussing metaphysical, epistemological, as well as ethical and political positions.  As a preface to our study of the Parmenides, which will be long and complete, we will examine Plato’s Phaedo.  Seminar discussion will be based on prepared and deliberate questioning of one pre-assigned student, who is responsible for explaining the reading, by other students, also assigned in advance, who are responsible for getting all of the relevant questions asked.  Each student (not including the student(s)  subject to questioning) will also be responsible at each of our meetings for one secondary source reading.

 

 

The project of meta-ethics, and of meta-normative theory more generally, is deeply bound up in questions about language. What do our normative and evaluative terms mean? Do they describe the world as being a certain way, or do they merely express our attitudes? If there is something linguistically or conceptually distinctive in our normative and evaluative thought and talk, how are we to make sense of its role in our reasoning more generally? We will begin with a historical overview of various answers to these questions and work forward through contemporary defenders and critics of expressivism about normative and evaluative thought and talk, including Allan Gibbard, Simon Blackburn, and Mark Schroeder.