PHIL 5300: ECOM

Instructor: Dorit Bar-On
Description: We will be comparing animal communication systems with human language (PART I), exploring some issues in language evolution (Part II), and studying Michael Tomasello’s recent book A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard, 2016).

PHIL 5320: History of Philosophy: Early Chinese Thought: Truth, Persons, and Natural Propensities

Instructor: Alexus McLeod
Description: Using the conception of tian li 天理 (Patterns of Nature/Natural Propensities) as a frame, we will investigate the issues of truth, personhood/agency, free will, and conceptualization in Pre-Qin and Han thought, with forays into Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism. We will look at primary source texts including Zhuangzi, Lushi Chunqiu, Huainanzi, Chunqiu Fanlu, and the works of Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming. We will also look at the work of Bo Mou, Brook Ziporyn, Erica Brindley, Roger Ames, Stephen Angle, and others on these issues. We will begin with a background “primer” on key issues in early Chinese philosophy (from the Analects of Confucius through Hanfeizi), and move into the specific issues of debates surrounding the content of nature (天tian), the development of persons, and truth and ideal personhood as constructed through following patterns of nature. We will consider the connection of a variety of theories of truth developed in Pre-Qin and Han texts to the conceptions of personhood advanced in these texts. We will also read key chapters of my manuscript Following the Natural Propensities on these debates in the Pre-Qin and Han periods and their relevance to contemporary work on truth and agency.

PHIL 5330: Truth

Instructor: Michael P. Lynch
Description: Historically, the concept of truth was taken to play a deep role in our understanding of knowledge, meaning and logic. Moreover, it has typically been seen—both in the philosophical and public imaginations—as an important political value. Yet at the turn of the present century, the concept was widely regarded amongst philosophers working on the topic as doing little explanatory work, or even incoherent, subjective, or politically and epistemically irrelevant.
The major issue of this seminar will be whether these charges are justified.
In particular, the seminar will focus on two clusters of questions. The first cluster concerns the character and point of the concept of truth: Is there a single concept or more than one, what is the function of the concept(s) and should the concept be “re-engineered”? The second concerns the value and politics of truth: why does truth matter, and how? Along the way, we will touch on some of the major and developing theories of the concept in the literature.

Required Reading:

• Truth, Burgess and Burgess. Princeton U Press 2012
• Truth, C. Wrenn. Polity, 2014.
• The Nature of Truth, ed. Lynch. MIT Press. 2001.
• Truth as One and Many, Lynch. Oxford University Press. 2009.
• Various papers, Husky CT (Readings by: Beall, Simmons, Ripley, Bar-On, Wright, Tarski, Horwich, Rorty, Sharp, Greenough, Edwards, Pedersen, Field, Quine, Davidson etc.).

PHIL 5331: Philosophy of Mind

Instructor: Dorit Bar-On
Description: The topic is contemporary views of self-knowledge and evaluation of empirical evidence (from cog sci and social psychology) designed to show that we really do not know our own minds.

PHIL 5340: Metaphysics: Identity and Aspects

Instructor: Donald Baxter
Description: The general topic of the seminar will be identity, which will quickly lead us into metaphysical issues about change, becoming, composition, resemblance, universals, instantiation, relative identity, identity in the loose and popular sense, existence, contingency, negative facts, distinctions of reason, infinite divisibility, time, temporal parts, et al., plus issues in the philosophy of language concerning reference, substitution, quantification, and vagueness. We may pay special attention to instantiation–the “non-relational tie” between universals and particulars.

We will begin with a few fundamental problems that will help us understand and keep track of the variety of solutions they have generated. Some readings will be drawn from the history of philosophy with snippets likely from Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Suarez, Leibniz, Locke, Butler, Hume, Reid, Frege. Also we will read essays by the likes of Quine, Geach, Chisholm, Lewis, Armstrong, Evans, van Inwagen, as well as a number of other recent and contemporary published and unpublished essays.

I will present and defend my theories of many-one identity (including composition as identity), of aspects, and of instantiation as partial identity. These views are often cited but rarely (and understandably) given more than a cursory refutation, so knowledge of their details may give our students an advantage in some current debates.
Requirements for the seminar will be a 15-20 page research paper, with a topic proposal and rough draft turned in along the way, as well as a seminar presentation.

PHIL 5344: Logic Seminar

Instructor: Stewart Shapiro
Description: The problem of logical omniscience arises in a number of philosophical contexts.  One source is in epistemic and doxastic logic.  Many accounts knowledge and belief are formulated in terms of possible worlds.  Worlds are usually taken to be closed under logical consequence, so it follows that an agent knows (believes) all of the logical consequences of what she knows (believes).  It also follows that if an agent knows (or believes) p and if q is logically equivalent to p, then the agent knows (or believes) q.

A related area of concern is in the semantics of terms for just about all propositional attitudes.  The standard accounts of these are also formulated in terms of possible worlds and, so far as I know, there are not many well-worked out alternatives.  All such accounts fail to distinguish logically equivalent propositions.

Finally, accounts of ideal rationality, in formalized epistemology and elsewhere, typically assume logical omniscience, usually explicitly.  The problems arise when we try to draw conclusions about rationality for agents, like normal humans, who are limited in their resources.
In this seminar, we will cover most of the basic literature on logical omniscience, looking to see how viable various solutions are for the various issues.

Reading List:

• Required
  • Robert Stalnaker, Inquiry, ISBN: 978-0262691130
  • David K. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, ISBN: 978-0631224266
  • Robert Stalnaker, Ways a World Might Be, ISBN: 978-0199251490
• Recommended
  • Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity, ISBN: 978-0631128014