THIS COURSE WLLL BEGIN ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5. 2000

This is the CUNY/Mt. Sinai Medical School preclinical elective seminar in medical ethics for M.D. and Ph.D. candidates. Extended discussions of the theoretical issues involved in the human genome project, issues in genetics, birth defect policy, humane care, life termination policies,transplants, controlled clinical trials, epidemics, incompetence, and justice in health care distribution. Several critical topics in the philosophy of science (scientific explanation, prediction, proof, and scientific revolutions) and ethical theory will be discussed as they relate toindividual cases. Ph.D. students will also have the opportunity to attend Medical Center case conferences. The works to be read are:

1. Contempory Issues in Bio-Ethics, 4th Ed., Beauchamp Waiters, Wadsworth
2. Philosophy of Natural Science. Hempel, Prentice-Hall

Plus handouts.

Prerequisite to consideration for medical ethics fellowship.

Instructors:

• Bernard Baumrin, Ph.D., J.D., Professor of Philosophy (CUNY), (212) 787-5638
• Daniel Mores, M.D., Associate Professor of Neurology (MSMC), (212) 241-8134

A critical examination of central issues in the philosophy of religion, includingarguments for the existence of God, religious experience, the problem of evil, the attributes of God, miracles, immortality, faith and reason and religious pluralism.

The text is Philosophy of Religion: Third Edition. ed. Louis P. Pojman (Wadsworth, 1998). Three short papers are required.

We will concentrate on such topics as scientific explanation, the validation of scientific knowledge, conceptual change, and the ontological import of scientific knowledge. No special scientific knowledge will be presupposed, only elementary (undergraduate) logic and philosophy. We will discuss essays representing the most central contemporary positions and approaches. The selection of readings will be varied enough both to embody relevant dialogue among key authors and to encourage critical discussion.

We will begin with some introductory readings from the collection Science, Reason, and Reality: Issues in the Philosophy of Science, Daniel Rothbart (Ed.), Hartcourt-Brace. The course will focus mainly on The Philosophy of Science seminal papers contained in T, David Papineau. (Ed.),Oxford University Press.

(1) Is a language psychologically real in the minds of its competent speakers? (2) If so, in what way is it so?

The received view of linguistics yields a swift "Yes" in answer to (1), for that view is that linguistics is part of psychology. As Bob Matthews says:

It is a measure of the depth of the conceptual revolution wrought by Noam Chomsky in linguistics that few linguists would quarrel with his notion that theoretical linguistics is a subfield of psychology.

So, if we take the same realistic approach to linguistics that we take to science in general, and if we assume that the linguists' theory of a language - its "grammar" - is more or less true, then of course the rules or principles described by the grammar are psychologically real in the competent speaker; that reality is what the grammar is about. Attempts to answer (2) usually start from the idea that these rules or principles are represented in the speaker's language faculty. The challenge for psycholinguistics is then to build a theory of language acquisition and language use around this idea.

I shall start the course by arguing that the received view is mistaken: a grammar, properly conceived, is concerned with a linguistic reality and is not part of psychology. If this is right, the swift answer is far too swift. It remains an open question whether the rules or principles hypothesized by the grammar are psychologically real: we have not even begun our answer to (1) and (2).

It is surely indubitable that speakers of a language do "know the language": to be competent in the language is to know it. This knowledge/competence is a psychological state and so something to do with the language is certainly psychologically real: and this something produces and understands sentences that are governed by the rules or principles of the language. But this minimal claim on psychological reality does not amount to a clear "Yes" to (1), for it does not entail that the rules or principles themselves are psychologically real. What exactly is the knowledge/competence? What exactly is the something that produces and understands sentences? If it does indeed embody the the rules or principles of the language, does it do so by representing them? The course will examine the evidence on these matters; evidence from the rejection of behaviorism; from folk psychology; from the role of intuitive judgments about language; from psycholinguistics concerning language perception, production, and acquisition. A piece of folk wisdom will be placed center stage: "Language expresses thought."

Expected conclusions: the view that the rules or principles are represented in the mind is unsupported and implausible; beyond that, the evidence leaves it hard to choose between a range of positions on (1) and (2).

The course is based on work in progress for a book, Ignorance of Language.

TEXT

• Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger Publishers. [ISBN: 0-275-91761-4]

RECOMMENDED

• Block, Ned, ed. 1981. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. [ISBN: 0-674-74877-8]
• Chomsky, Noam. 1999. New Horizons in the Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ISBN: 0521658225]
• Cowie, Fiona. 1998. What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press. [ISBN: 0-19-512384-0]
• Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.[ISBN: 0-262-56025-9]

This course will focus on a number of philosophical and metatheoretical issues concerning the nature of social phenomena and social scientific explanation. Topics covered will include issues common to most of the social sciences, such as the debate between so-called "holists" and "individualists"; the possibility of explanatory "laws" in social science; the nature and problems of structural and functional forms of explanation; and the place of social values in social science. We will also devote some time to issues specific to particular social scientific disciplines, such as problems associated with the anthropological understanding of alien cultures, the presumed autonomy of historical explanation. and the role of experimentation in social psychology. Throughout the course, a continuous attempt will be made to provide a general philosophical characterization of social phenomena: to try to explicate what is held to be common (by both lay and professional theorists) to all the varied phenomena we characterize as social in nature, such as social actions, social collectives, social structures and the like, and how such phenomena are conceptually related. It is hoped that the working analysis of social phenomena developed will enable us to get a better conceptual grip on the fundamental philosophical questions of social science. It will also hopefully shed some illumination on the pretensions of new disciplines such as sociobiology, and familiar but puzzling contemporary claims to the effect that our identities and emotions are social in nature, and thus the appropriate objects of social scientific research. Contemporary philosophy of social science is in an exciting state of ftux.since many of its traditional guiding assumptions and contrasts, derived from logical positivist philosophy of science, have been abandoned or qualified in recent years. By returning to the core philosophical questions about social phenomena and social explanation, it is hoped that the course will be able to shed some fresh light upon traditional problems and debates, and to identify some emerging contemporary Issues. Social sciences considered wilt include sociology, anthropology, economics, history, political science, and social psychology. No detailed background in social science is required for the course. although any background would be an undoubted asset and a positive source of course enrichment.

The course text will be Martin, M. & Mclntyre, M. (eds.), (1994), Readings in the philosophy of Social Science, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), supplemented by Xeroxed readings.

The seminar will cover Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, together with the critical reflections on that work to be found in his Philosophical Investigations.

Analytic Philosophy rests on a mistake. The mistake is the equation of intensionalism with Fregean intensionalism. Fregean intensionalism is the view that senses are reference determiners, that analyticity is a species of logical truth, and that semantics is logical semantics. The mistake is made by extensionalists like Russell, Quine, and Davidson as well as intensionalists like Frege, Carnap, and Church. The former rely on it for their conception of the intensionalist position they have to refute. Fregean intensionalism is a form of semantic reductionism which claims that sense is to be explained in the theory of reference. The equation overlooks a non-Fregean form of int ensionalism which rejects semantic reductionism in favor of an autonomous theory of sense, one independent of the theory of reference. This seminar will explore the far-reaching consequences for philosophy of overlooking non-Fregean intensionalism. It will trace the decisive role the equation has played in narrowing the options for solutions to problems in the philosophy of language and other areas of philosophy. We will systematically examine twenty of so prominent problems -- including the problem of names, natural kind terms, Liar Paradox, the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary, the Raven Paradox, etc.--and show, in each case, that a non-Fregean intensionalism provides a more philosophically satisfying solution than those we get from extensionalism and Fregean intensionalism. We will also argue that the principal criticisms of intensionalism in twentieth century philosophy - those of Wittgenstein, Quine, Putnam, and Kripke - work only against Fregean intensionalism.

Students should have at least one course in the philosophy of language (or its equivalent) and a good general knowledge of the concerns of analytic philosophy in the second half of this century.

This seminar lies 50% in the history of philosophy and 50% in aesthetics and the history of art. In the spirit of E. Male's dictum, "to understand the work, find the text," we will study the "cardinal virtues" (prudence, justice, courage, and temperance) in philosophical texts and their corresponding personifications in the history of art. The canonical philosophical texts on this subject are Plato, (especially Meno, Laches, Charmides, Republic), Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), Cicero (De Inventione), Plotinus (Enn. I.2) Macrobius (In somnium Scip.) and Aquinas (Summa Theologiae Il-ll), large sections of which will be assigned. Concurrently, the early development of personification of the virtues-- in literature in Prudentius's Psychomachia and in poetry by Theodulf of Orleans, in painting in illuminations in the Vienna Diascourides, frescoes at Bawit, and various early medieval Psychomachia mss.- will be assayed, with special thought given to the nature and esthetics of personification in visual art. The main aesthetic focus, however,will be the study of several stupendous high medieval and late medieval monuments, to begin, personifications of virtues on archivolts in churches in Poitou and Saintonge, the cycle of virtues and vices in relief in the central portal of Notre Dame de Paris, the grisaille cycle of virtues and vices at eye level in the Giotto's Arena Chapel, and the frescoes called "The Effects of Good and Bad Government" by the Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Publico in Siena We will apply Aristotle and Cicero and Aquinas to the understanding of these great works, and discover what the artists have taken from philosophy and what they have altered, and why. . The fifteenth century brings the revival of Plato, and a recovery of the original doctrine of the cardinal virtues by philosophers and artists of the Renaissnace. We will analyze virtue cycles by Pollaiuolo and Botticelli, Piero della Francesca's virtues on the reverse of the Montefeltro portraits, the fresco of three cardinal virtues by Raphael in the Stanza Della Segnatura, and developments in tapestry and illumination down into the sixteenth century, including several amazing French pictorial maps of the Nichomachean Ethics. The goal of the seminar is to comprehend the virtues doctrine, study its effects on art, and come to a deeper appreciation of the attempts of artists over many centuries to achieve visual representations of abstract ideas.

This course aims to expose students to contemporary discussion of the main questions in theory of knowledge: skepticism, the definition of knowledge, the a priori, induction, Perception and other minds. It also aims to familiarize the student with some current developments, including the internalist/externalist debate, "naturalism" (a buzzword to be avoided), and the bearing on epistemology of the theory of evolution.

The readings mix modern classics with lesser-known works, and same published and unpublished material by the instructor. In some cases several assigned works go over similar ground, on the theory that an idea sinks in more deeply with repeated exposure. The hope is to produce epistemological adepts.

Students will be asked to volunteer to lead class discussion, and will responsible far a term paper to be submitted by June 1.

Students intending to enroll should contact me at Meglev@webspan.net to tell me of their interests and present familiarity with theory of knowledge. This will help me modify the curriculum.

The texts are The Theory of Knowledge, ed. by Louis Pajman, Wadsworth, 2nd ed. and Epistemology: An Anthology, eds. Ernest Sosa and Jaegwon Kim (SK), Blackwell, as well as the indicated readings from other books and journals. Also recommended are Barry Stroud, The Significance ofPhilosophical Scepticism, Richard Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification, Greco and Sosa, eds., The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Roy Sorensen, Blindspots, Wittgenstein, On Certainty and Brian O'Shaughnessy's monumental Consciousness and the World (which I haven't finished, so I don't know if it ends happily.)

Much material has been assigned. Covering it all may prove impossible. Assignment 1 should be read by the first meeting. This syllabus is tentative; other readings will be suggested during the semester.

I. Skepticism: selections 1, 2 and 5 in SK; Levin, 'Demons. Possibility and Evidence," NOUS 2000,

II Definition of Knowledge: 7, 9 in KS; Unger, "An Analysis of Factual Knowledge," J. of Philosophy 1968: 157-170. R. Kirkham "Does the Gettier Problem Rest on a Mistake?", Mind 1982.

III. 36 in SK; Levin, "Virtue Epistemology: No Cure for Gettier's Case." ms

IV Internalism vs. Externalism: Goldman, "A Causal Theory of Knowing" and "What is Justified Belief?"and Lehrer, "A Critique of Externalism," in P, 28, 29 in SK; Haack, Evidence and Inquiry, chapter 7; Levin, "You Can Always Count on Reliabilism," PPR 1997. 34 in SK useful but not reguired.

V. Foundationalism vs.Coherentism: Audi, Bonjour. McGrew, Dancy in P; 11, 12, 20 in SK

VI Contextualism: Annis, Lewis in P; 38, 40 in SK; Schiffer, "Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism," PAS 19963, 17-333.

VII Naturalism: Quine, "Epistemalogy Naturalized," in P; 2A, 25 in SK Optional: Stroud, The Significance ofPhilosophical Skepticism, pp. 209-254.

VLlI 35 in SK; Levin, "Plantings an Functions and the Theory of Evolution," Australasian JP 1997.

IX The A Priori: Ayer, Quine, "Two Dogmas...," Grice & Strawsan. Kripke in P; E Sober, "Mathematics and Indispensability," PR 1993: 35-57.

X Perception: Goldman, "Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge," Locke, Stace, Whitely, and Searle in P; PI Strawson, "Perception and Its Objects," in G. Macdonald, ed., Perception and identity (Cornell UP, 1979): 41-60; Reid selection in Westphal, ed.. Certainty; Stroud, The Quest for Reality (Oxford 2000): 145-168.

XI Induction: Hume, Reichenbach, Strawson and Goodman in P; Levin. "Reliabilism and Induction, Synthese 1993: 305-346.

XII Other Minds: Russell, Malcolm and Levin in P.

XIII The Battle Against Rubbish; Rorty, Margarita Levin in P.

An introduction to Nietzsche's thought and its reception today.

Emphasis on the "historical" or genealogical works, because 1) this approach brings us straight to Nietzsche's encounter with the early Greeks; 2) historical method is the closest thing to a justification Nietzsche offers for his claims; 3) genealogy leads into the tricky but essential question of perspectivism. Thus the historically oriented works are both central to Nietzsche's thought and directly implicated in epistemological issues about his thought.

Topics include the inner self or subject; the reactive form of the will to power; the universalizing tendency in morality.

What problems does a Nietzschean doctrine like the eternal return purport to solve? Does it succeed; and do we want it to succeed?

Is Nietzsche an original thinker? Why does it matter?

We will read more or less the following:

• The Birth of Tragedy
• The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life
• "Homer's Contest"
• On the Genealogy of Morals
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Secondary readings come from Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy Richard Schacht (ed.) Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality; and other sources.

This course will deal with Aristotle's ideas about philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics. We will read the three basic texts in that division of knowledge and philosophy that Aristotle calls "theoretical': On the Soul, Physics, and Metaphysics. In order to lay the groundwork for our central reading we will begin by looking at the basic terminology of argument analysis from the Prior Analytics and Aristotle's conception of what science is as developed in the Posterior Analytics.

Although students will be expected to read all four treatises complete, we will discuss in class selected passages and the problems raised in them. Students will be expected to make a 20-30 minute seminar presentation on a text of their choosing. A short paper may be substituted for the seminar presentation. Students will also be required to submit a substantial research paper on one of the texts or problems dealt with in the course. The paper will be developed and written over the entire semester with individual guidance by the instructor on the process of developing a research project, carrying out the research, and constructing a paper which presents the student's own solution to a problem.

Required Texts:

• Posterior Analytics
• On the Soul
• Physics
• Metaphysics

The current standard edition of Aristotle in English is The Complete works of Aristotle, ed. Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1984). This is the edition I recommend most highly. The earlier Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941) is still usable and probably available used for much less. If you have Greek, I recommend buying the relevant volumes of Oxford Classical Texts or of Loeb Classical Library.

This course will concentrate on the major developments in philosophy from 1350 to 1600. Topics to be investigated will include the rise of Humanism, Renaissance Platonism, varieties of Aristotelianism, the influence of the Protestant Reformation, the new philosophies of nature and the overthrow of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology. Particular attention will be paid to the development of a mathematized physics by Galileo and his contemporaries and the role of Neoplatonism in fostering the growth of Hermeticism and the practice of natural magic. Readings will include selections from Petrarch, Valla, Cusanus, Ficino, Giovanni Pico, Erasmus, More, Montaigne, Pomponazzi, Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno and Galileo.

Texts:

• Cassirer, E., P.O. Kristeller and J.H. Randall, Jr., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago).
• Copenhaver, B.P., Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford).
• Kristeller, P.O., Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford).
• Popkin, R.H., Philosophy of the 16th and I 7th Centuries (Free Press).

We'll focus on a number of interrelated issues about language and mind which figure prominently in the writings of Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. Among these are issues having to do with

(I) Meaning: Meaning in relation to reference; meaning holism; causal role and conceptual role; analytical hypotheses, inscrutability of reference, and indeterminacy of translation,- Sellars' view that meaning is normative and Quine's that indirect discourse attributions are an "essentially dramatic" idiom; whether meaning attributions are relational. (Quine) or not (Sellers); and regimentation, objectual and substitutional quantification, and names.

(II) Intentionality: Brentano's thesis and whether the intentional can be naturalized; referential opacity and the logical form of attribu- tions of intentional states; notional vs. relational attributions; whether meaning must be understood in terms of abstract sentence types or token speech acts; whether meaning must be understood in terms of thinking or thinking in terms of speech; whether thinking or speaking is prior to the other, conceptually or in some other.way; the relevance to intentionality of issues about abstract entities and ontological nominalism; and what conceptual resources are presupposed by our folk- psychological concepts of intentional states.

(III) Thought and sensation: The difference between intentional and sensory states; the connections between our concepts of and knowledge about the two kinds of state; the conceptual resources reguired for our concepts of each; whether either concept depends on the other; whether either phenomenon depends on the other; the divergent conceptual commitments of scientific and commonsense ways of thinking about language, thought, and sensation; Sellars' distinction between the scientific and manifest images; mind-body materialism as applied to intentional and to sensory states; and the place in current and future science of the sensory qualities of perceptual sensations.

Tentatively: Readings will be from Quine's Word and Obiect,*+ Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (revised and enlarged edition),* Ontological Relativity and Other Essays,* The Roots of Reference, Pursuit of Truth (revised edition), * From a Logical Point of View, *+ Methods of Logic, objections and Quine's replies from Words and Objections and The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, and perhaps Theories and Things and From Stimulus to Science; from Sellars' Science. Perception and Reality * (especially "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," usefully republished as a book by Harvard, 1993), Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics and Epistemology, Science and Metaphysics, * Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process (The Carus Lectures), Essays in Philosophy and its History, and possibly The Metaphysics of Epistemology and Naturalism and Ontology and some secondary literature.

(There are two web sites worth consulting: http://www.ditext.com/sellars/ and http://users.aol.com/drquine/wv-quine.html [now at www.wvquine.org].)

Books marked with an asterisk are required (it's assumed that everybody already has books marked with a +).

An exploration of some of the central issues in philosophical aesthetics, largely through modern and contemporary writers. Topics to be taken up include: What is the right account of the concept of intention in art and art criticism? May art be seen, as Goodman and Langer have held, as a "language" and if so, what advantages follow from this picture? How are aesthetic descriptions to be understood - if such descriptions do not appear to follow from naturalistic descriptions, are they then inchoate or mysterious? How are critical justifications to be understood - if, as it certainly seems, there are no laws of aesthetic success, is it the case then that there really are no justifications either? How we are to understand the institutional theory of art and the more subtle historical version of that theory recently developed by Danto?

Philosophical aesthetics faces in two directions. Where relevant, the connections between these theories to more general arguments or positions in philosophy will be taken up. How positions in aesthetics follow from or fit in with various arguments made in philosophy generally will be one of the main concerns of this course. But we will also be concerned with the degree to which these positions do justice to or illuminate our considered experience of art and art criticism.

I have been asked to give this course to the graduate students of Hunter College's studio art and art history program. Hence the location and the two and half hour time slot (do not be alarmed - I am sure we will take a break). The presence of actual artists, a group not known for excessive deference to authority, and art historians, who I assume, will have a wealth of examples to draw upon, should make things very interesting; at the same time, a certain amount of patience with the philosophically young will be expected. Course requirements: a final exam or 15 page course paper.

From Plato to John Locke the sphere of "the state" and that of "civil society" were considered to be equivalent. By the nineteenth century, however, the two concepts come to diverge sharply and recently there has been an explosion of renewed theoretical interest in the sphere of civil society (because of of the demise of the Soviet Union, with the globilization of democracy, with the feminist criticism of the separation of the personal and the political, etc.) What is civil society? Which institutions does it (or should it) comprise and why? What is its relation to the political state, to the economy (capitalism), to the institution of human rights and to democracy in particular? Readings in the first part of the course will include classical works by Karl Marx, Hegel and James Madison on the nature of civil society and the political. In the latter part, the course will turn to contemporary theorists in the liberal, communitarian, socialist and feminist traditions on the relation of civil society to the state. Readings will include analyses by Robert Dahl, G.A. Cohen, Habennas, John Rawls, Virginia Held.

Virtue ethics has become a popular alternative to the traditional consequentialist and deontological approaches within contemporary moral philosophy. But there are some serious questions about what it is and whether or how it works. The first part of this course will cover the following questions in particular: first, what it is about the other approaches that has driven people into looking for something else and specifically into looking for an ethics of virtue; second, what precisely contemporary virtue ethics is (by no means an easy question to answer); third, whether contemporary virtue ethics really does amount to a viable alternative approach within moral philosophy. Since I expect we will come to rather negative conclusions about contemporary virtue ethics, although not about the reasons for being attracted to it, an attempt to do a better of of responding to those reasons and of answering the questions raised by virtue ethics will form the latter part of the course.

The course will focus on a number of articles, mostly contained in a couple of recent anthologies, Virtue Ethics, edited by R. Crisp and M. Slote (Oxford, 1997), and Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, edited by D. Statman (Edinburgh, 1997), but it will prove impossible, as the course advances, to ignore what was said about virtue in the ancient tradition (notably Aristotle and Cicero).