Graduate Courses & Seminars

Winter 2025

Philos 207: Seminar: History of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

Instructors: Brian Copenhaver & Calvin Normore
Mondays: 3:00-5:50pm
Location: Dodd 325

Options for Philosophy around 1650: Reform or Revolution?

The 17th century was a period of rapid philosophical  change and that change took place against a background  which had been developing for centuries.  In this seminar we will examine the metaphysics and logics developed by Descartes and by Hobbes against a background distilled in the work of Franco Burgersdijk, Rector Magnificus at  Leiden when Descartes went there to study in 1630 and author of works  which influenced Spinoza, which formed the basis of Locke’s lectures at Oxford,  and which were still standard texts at Oxford  and Cambridge in the next century.  We will focus on three texts: Burgersdijk’s Elements of Logic (largely a treatise on neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics),  Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy Part I and Part I of Hobbes’ Elements of Philosophy. We will begin by situating these works and then turn to study them in context and in detail.

This will be a seminar and each participant will be asked at some point in the course to prepare and present an introduction to and issues raised by a piece of the texts studied and to prepare a final paper for assessment.

The seminar will meet both in-person and online

Philos 254A/B: Seminar: Legal Theory Workshop

Instructor: Mark Greenberg
Thursdays: 1:10-3:30pm
Location: Law

The unusual seminar is structured around the Legal Theory Workshop. The Workshop is modeled on Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel’s long-running workshop at NYU. It brings leading scholars from around the world to discuss their works in progress with graduate students, law students, and faculty. The papers can be diverse, ranging across, for example, legal philosophy, moral philosophy, metaphysics, the relevance of philosophy of language to legal interpretation, and legal theory more generally.

I will be co-teaching the seminar with Larry Sager of the University of Texas who has been a regular distinguished visitor in our law and philosophy program.
The seminar involves biweekly discussions with visiting scholars, with intervening preparatory weeks in which the class discusses the paper to be presented in the following week. In the preparatory weeks, students gain relevant background but we also focus on how to develop a good philosophical question and what makes for a good philosophical conversation. The art of asking good questions is a major focus of the class. The written work for the class involves “question papers,” which include questions for the speaker.

This year’s program includes a distinguished group of scholars, including some prominent moral philosophers. The schedule is available at https://law.ucla.edu/centers/interdisciplinary-studies/law-and-philosophy-program/events/legal-theory-workshop/.
No prior background is necessary. All philosophy students are welcome and have the relevant preparation. Background will be supplied in the weeks in between speaker visits.

The class will meet on Thursdays at 1:10 PM in Law 1314 (in the law building next door to Dodd). It’s a fun and unusual class, and all philosophy graduate students are very welcome. Undergraduates are also welcome, but they need to email me for permission to take the class. Please let me know if you have questions!

Philos M257: Seminar: Philosophy Legal Theory

Instructor: Seana Shiffrin
Wednesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Location: Dodd 325

Philosophy of Public Property

This seminar will focus on the philosophical foundations and significance of public property and in particular public space. The course will survey different conceptions of the (real or material) commons and of the intellectual commons and assess what is at stake in these conceptions with respect to public space. One specific application will concern the rights of the homeless to access to public space and the philosophical dimensions of the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024). The seminar will also discuss conventionalist theories of property and whether they are equally persuasive (or unpersuasive) with respect to public property as they are private property. Other topics may include: the implications of public trust conceptions of the intellectual commons and nonmaterial property as well as free speech issues and principles associated with the structure and regulation of public space.

Philos 270: Seminar: Epistemology of Science

Instructor: Kareem Khalifa
Tuesdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Location: Dodd 325

Permissivism and Underdetermination

Can two people be rational in adopting different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition even when possessing the same evidence? Recent versions of “permissivism” in epistemology answer this affirmatively. However, it harkens back to a much older debate that seems largely to have fizzled out in philosophy of science—whether evidence underdetermines theory. By placing these two discussions in close conversation, we will examine the strengths and weaknesses of both.

Philos 287: Seminar: Philosophy of Language

Instructor: Sam Cumming
Thursdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Location: Dodd 325

Social Meaning

This seminar (designed to be a companion of Josh’s seminar in Fall 2024) will look at interactions between philosophy of language and generative linguistics on the one hand, and the study of the signalling of social categories (and related social signalling) on the other. Social signalling differs notably from regular linguistic communication, so we will also have cause to consider iconic and indexical modes of representation. Moreover, as Alan Fiske points out, it is not limited to the humdrum representation of external fact, but seems to create or reinforce the very relationship it signals, while enacting social scripts that apply a normative grip. If all of this is meaning, then meaning is not exactly what we thought it was.

I hope that, as philosophers of language, we can contribute to a principled way of distinguishing genuine social signals from other evidence of social status. A good understanding of social representation is a useful adjunct to the social sciences, but must enrich the philosophical understanding of meaning too. As semanticists, we may also take an interest in how this category of meaning is integrated with other, especially linguistic, content — a particularly interesting special case of the general theory of multi-modal communication.

I’ll keep a flexible list of possible readings here.

Fall 2024

Philos 220: Seminar: Topics in History of Philosophy

Instructor: Paul Taylor
Thursdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Location: Dodd 325

Thinking with John Dewey

This course will explore some of the core writings by one of the best-known figures in the classical pragmatist tradition. The principal aim will be to develop some familiarity with Dewey’s thought. A secondary aim may involve putting those writings in conversation with contemporary work (most likely in moral psychology, social epistemology, and aesthetics) that covers similar ground using newer theoretical resources.

Philos C236: Science and Values

Instructor: Kareem Khalifa
Mondays & Wednesdays: 9:30-10:45am
Location: TBA

Values and Scientific Inquiry

In this course, we will cover central questions about how both epistemic and non-epistemic values properly influence scientific practice. The seminar will focus on the special role of inquiry—understood as the practice of asking and answering questions—in these debates.​

Interested students should contact Professor Khalifa for more information. Please note: this is a concurrent graduate section for an undergraduate course, PHILOS C123.

Philos 246: Seminar: Ethical Theory

Instructor: Vida Yao
Tuesdays: 11:30am-2:20pm
Location: Dodd 325

Bernard Williams’ Ethical Thought

Though critical and deeply suspicious of systematic ethical or moral theory, Bernard Williams was nonetheless a systematic thinker in the sense that he returned to, reconsidered, and developed several overlapping and consistent philosophical themes throughout his work – several of which have shaped contemporary moral philosophy as we know it. In this class, we will read several of his classic essays, before turning to Shame and Necessity (1993), paired with portions of his earlier and more negative Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). Throughout, I will be returning to Williams’ idea that it is a significant philosophical task – and one with distinctive importance for moral philosophers – to distinguish what we think from what we think we think. What hazards do moral philosophers in particular face when they attempt to mark this distinction, or fail to confront it at all? And what ambitions or qualities of thought encouraged by moral theorizing may lead to that failure in the first place?

Philos M257: Philosophy Legal Theory

Instructor: Mark Greenberg
Mondays: 2:00-4:50pm
Location: TBA

Legal Theory: The Cutting Edge

This course offers a fresh way to approach philosophy of law. The idea is to look at cutting-edge work in philosophy to see whether it helps to solve specific problems in the law. We’ll engage with exciting developments of the past several years, focusing on four or five topics that have recently sparked important and interesting debates.  These will include some of the following: criminal attempts; the famous “blue bus” problem (concerning the use of statistical evidence in the courtroom); statutory and constitutional interpretation (including currently contentious issues about textualism and originalism); foundations of negligence liability; law as a branch of morality. No previous background is required.

The pace of the course will allow us time to explore background material on each topic before approaching the cutting-edge work. For example, in the case of legal interpretation, we’ll begin with well-known theories of legal interpretation, such as textualism and intentionalism.  We’ll then turn to recent work that draws on contemporary ideas in philosophy of language and linguistics.  I have been an active participant in this debate, arguing that, though an understanding of some important linguistic distinctions is valuable, linguistic considerations cannot resolve the central issues concerning legal interpretation.  We will study this and other lively debates in the area.

Similarly, on the use of statistical evidence in the courtroom, we’ll begin with a classic presentation of the blue bus problem. And we will then turn to recent attempts to solve the problem by drawing on contemporary work in epistemology.

This seminar will be given on the normal quarter schedule, so philosophy students are expected to begin attending at the beginning of the fall quarter. In addition, there will be a component of the seminar on the law school semester schedule, which begins at the end of August. Philosophy students are very welcome to attend the meetings of the seminar before the fall quarter begins, but are not required to do so.

Philos 272: Topics in Philosophy of Mind and Language

Instructor: Josh Armstrong
Mondays: 12:30-3:20pm
Location: Dodd 325

Sociality and Meaning

In philosophy and linguistics, there is growing interest in what has come to be called social meaning. In this seminar (and in the companion seminar offered by Sam Cumming in the Winter Quarter), we will explore the nature and conversational import of social meaning. Our focus in the Fall seminar will be on the cognitive-emotional and demographic foundations of social meaning. The first half of the seminar will focus on the process of social bond (or “attachment”) formation, the role of social bonds in mediating novel forms of coordinated social action, and in social category-based forms of social cognition. The second half of the seminar will turn to questions about the nature of communication, the inter-agential expression of social states of mind and, in particular, on the evolution of devices of communication that function to signal socially significant categories that arise within and also between groups of interacting agents. This course will set the stage for the investigation of social meaning as it occurs in human languages and in human conversational interaction more generally.

Philos 283: Seminar: Theory of Knowledge

Instructor: Sherrilyn Roush
Tuesdays: 3:00-5:50pm
Location: Dodd 325

Evidence and Doubt

An eyewitness to the murder is in the witness stand and proclaims himself certain that p, the defendant is the person he saw commit the crime. This witness is compelling, seems of sound mind, doesn’t seem to have any stake in the outcome of the trial, and hasn’t been exposed in the trial as lying or committing fraud in the past. You, a juror, trust the witness and become confident that the defendant is guilty. You then recall reading well-credentialed research that studied a great many subjects engaging in eyewitness tasks, and found them to be, on average, shockingly unreliable, especially when they were highly confident. What the witness said is evidence (possibly weak evidence) about p, i.e., whether the defendant committed the crime. It is first-order evidence. The research you read about gives you evidence (possibly weak), but not about whether the defendant committed the crime, rather about the reliability of the witness who gave the evidence. It is second-order evidence, because it is evidence about your evidence. How should these two different types of evidence affect your degree of belief as to whether p, the defendant committed the crime?

When first-order and higher-order evidence are in tension, often with one kind tending to boost your confidence in p, the other tending to reduce it, is there a rational way to resolve the tension? Are there rules? Are we even obligated to resolve this tension in all cases or can a person let the conflict stand (be epistemically akratic) and still be counted rational? How would letting the conflict stand affect the behavior of an otherwise rational person? What if I get higher-order evidence about myself, as when I read research that says nearly everyone (and “everyone” includes me) has implicit bias on the basis of race, gender, disability, etc., and that anyone who has such a bias is unlikely to be aware of it? More generally, what kinds of reasons to doubt my evidence or myself must be taken seriously, and why? Can it be rational to ignore them? If everyone in the class is okay with it, we will aim to end the term with a week on the epistemology of rape accusations. If not, then we will address some other important real-life, epistemically rich phenomenon.

These are specific topics, but to think about them we will develop a solid understanding of 1) the Bayesian (probabilistic) conception of epistemic rationality and evidential support, 2) Evidentialist, Reliabilist, and Relevant Alternatives conceptions of justified belief, and 3) Internalist and Externalist types of conception of justified belief. These frameworks and the arguments about them are well-developed in the context of first-order evidence; we will bring those resources to questions about second-order evidence, and see how far they can help us. You will also be able to think about the advantages and limitations of, and relations between, formal and informal approaches to epistemology.