Graduate Courses & Seminars
Fall 2024
Philos 220: Seminar: Topics in History of Philosophy
Instructor: Paul Taylor
Thursdays: 2:00-4:50pm
Location: TBA
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: TBA
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
TBA
Philos 272: Topics in Philosophy of Mind and Language
Instructor: Josh Armstrong
Mondays: 12:30-3:20pm
Location: TBA
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
Day/Time: TBA
Location: TBA
TBA