This course is a survey of the main writings of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. We will begin with a close reading of Descartes's Meditations, and follow up with a study of Gassendi's vigorous Objections to them and Descartes's physical theory before turning to Descartes's two successors. Emphasis will be placed on topics such as the following: 1) the 17th century theory of substance and its relation to scientific developments of the period;2) debates concerning the possibility of thinking matter and "mechanical" life; 3) the god of the philosophers vs. the God of the theologians; 4) determinism, motivation, and the status of the will; 6) perception and emotion; 7) the problem of immortality; 8) concepts of proof, certainty, and demonstration. We will be concerned with both the systematic unity of these three metaphysical systems and with their various fissures, as well as with the overall question, what if anything is characteristic of rationalist philosophers, their assumptions, commitments, and mode of argumentation, by contrast with empiricists?

Main Readings:

• Descartes: Meditations, Treatise of the World/Treatise of Man, Objections and Replies
• Spinoza: Ethics
• Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics, On Nature Itself, New Essays (selections), Monadology and Principles of Nature and of Grace.

Cross-listed with Clas sics
Registration Limit: 12

This is a course on Stoic ethics. References to Aristotle and Kant will be supplied, where direct comparison or contrast is useful, but the emphasis will be on Stoic ethics, because that has as much interest and has had as much influence on European thought as the currently better known ethics.

Seminars will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Sep 12 to Oct 26th. A short paper will be due on Oct 6th. A term paper, which can be on a new topic or substantially expanding the old one, will be due on Oct 20th, with a few days extension, for those writing on the last two topics.

Writings (already listed in a fuller course description) will be available on reserve, and relevant ones should be consulted for writing papers. In addition, selected translations restricted to the class will be made available on the web by password before teaching begins. Those translations will be required reading, but are unlikely to reach 100 pages.

• Topic 1. Being true to your individual self in later Stoicism
  Kant versus later Stoics
• Topic 2. Epictetus' inviolable self narrowed down to a rightly directed will
  Aristotle versus Stoics on will (prohairesis)
• Topic 3. Emotions and how to cope with them.
  Aristotle versus Stoics
• Topic 4. Attachment to other humans and of all rational beings to eachother as the basis of universal justice and the unity of mankind.
  Relation of Stoics to Aristotle and Kant
• Topic 5. Hierocles: Stoic attachement theory and views of the self combined.
• Topic 6. Friendship
  Stoics, Kant and Aristotle
• Topic 7. Determinism, responsibility, freedom
  Stoics and Aristotle
• Topic 8. The ancient Greek pursuit of the happy life as a goal contrasted by Kant with the primacy of moral duty.
  Stoics and Aristotle versus Kant
• Topic 9. Owning property versus Communism
  Stoics and Kant
• Topic 10. Practical Ethics
  Later Stoics versus Aristotle and Kant

Interested students may also wish to read the longer description of this course.

A systematic study of the central problems in the philosophy of Space and Time, and the ways in which these problems have shaped and been shaped by problems in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the natural sciences.

Among the topics to be discussed:

1. Time, events, and change.
2. Absolute and Relational concepts of space and time.
3. Selected problems of individuation and causation.
4. The reality (or unreality) of time and space.
5. Empirical challenges to philosophical claims about space and time.

Among the authors to be discussed are Descartes, Newton, Berkeley, Kant, Poincaré, Quine, Goodman, McTaggart, Mellor, Friedman, Sklar, Field, Earman, Dummett, Gödel, Einstein, Stein, Carnap, Russell, Reichenbach, Teller, Broad, Mach, Leibniz, and others.

Readings: The main text for the seminar will be Barry Dainton's Time and Space, Acumen Press, Paperback, 2001 (It is also distributed by McGill-Queen's Press). Additional Xeroxed material will also be made available.

No course description available at this time.

Are the rules (or principles) of a language psychologically real in its competent speakers? Chomsky's view that linguistics is part of psychology yields a very fast argument that the rules are, for a grammar is thought to be about rules in the mind. The course will start by looking skeptically at this view, arguing that the grammar is about a linguistic reality. So, the grammar leaves the question of whether the rules are psychologically real open.

The course will approach this question from a perspective on thought. This leads to the seemingly unChomskian idea that thought is in various respects "prior" to language. It leads also to the view that if "the language-of-thought hypothesis" is correct, then the rules of a person's language are likely to be similar to those governing the structure of her thoughts. The linguistic rules would be, to that extent, psychologically real. The course will also raise doubts about whether the rules are psychologically real in any other way. There seems to be no significant evidence that the rules are represented in the mind and, given what else we know, it is implausible that they are. And they seem the wrong sort of rule to govern language processing.

An investigation of the mathematics behind the logic. Intended for students who have had a previous logic course, but little mathematical background. After considering propositional logic in some detail, we will examine the Tarski definition of model and satisfaction. Soundness and completeness will be proved, and some of the fundamental consequences of model theory arising from these results will be examined. We will look at both axiom systems and tableau systems, but familiarity with these proof methods is not presupposed. To the extent that there is time, we will discuss the ideas behind the incompleteness theorems.

This course will introduce students to some of the main problems concerning the nature of reality. Among the topics to be discussed are:

1. Necessity, Possibility, and Existence: How are we to understand claims about what might or might not have been? How are we to understand the claim that counterfactual situations exist, or, alternatively, that possible worlds exist? Are there things that might have existed but do not?
2. Nominalism, Conceptualism and Realism: Are only particulars real? Or do properties exist as well? What is the status of abstract entities numbers?
3. Identity: A discussion of the two important principles, the Identity of Indescernibles and the Indiscernability of Identicals? Can two distinct objects share all their properties in common?
4. Space and Time: How do space and time enter into the problem of the identity of objects? Could space and time exist without matter, or are statements about space and time reducible to statements about spatial and temporal relations between particulars?
5. Cause and Effect: An examination of the Humean view that causation is just constant conjunction.
6. Freedom of the Will: Does every event have a cause, and if so, how does this square with our notion of an individual’s acting freely, and of our notion of an individual’s being responsible for his or her actions.
7. The Mind/Body Problem: The complex of problems concerning the identification of mental things with bodily things. A discussion of issues about mental content, individualism, and folk psychology.
8. Naturalism and Transcendentalism: Is Reality exhausted by what is revealed to us by our senses (Naturalism), or is there a Reality beyond that which our senses can reach (Transcendentalism)?

Readings from classical and contemporary sources.

While much of the importance of the free will issue derives from its bearing on responsibility and punishment, the issue itself is purely metaphysical. If one can talk of issues of fact in metaphysics, the existence of free will is "factual." The aim of the course is to look at the free will question in this way.

Discussions of free will in the last few decades have been marked by several notable developments. One has the re-emergence of libertarianism, the doctrine that there are actions that are neither causally determined nor purely random. Many but not all libertarians are agency theorists, who maintain that actions are events caused by substances, in particular the self, not prior events. A third development in very recent years has been refurbishment of an argument against free will from the special theory of relativity: since the future already exists, the idea that we have some say in what it will be is illusory.

I intend to spend a good deal of time on these matters, which raise questions about substance, causation—event causation and agent causation—the self, determinism, and space and time. Possibly this material will interact fruitfully with what Prof. Koslow will be discussing in his seminar. Other issues that will come up include counterfactuals, possibility, the nature of dispositions, the ontology of the first-person/third-person asymmetry, supervenience, reduction and mental causation.

Some of the readings will be work of the instructor published or in press. We will also look at work by Michael Lockwood, J. M. Fischer, David Lewis, Robert Kane, John Searle, Harry Frankfurt, Robert Nozick, John Earman and Randolph Clarke, as well as Hume, Broad and Austin.

We'll focus on four problems about the nature of mind: (1) How we know about minds, both our own and those of others; (2) whether mental phenomena are physical; (3) how to characterize the various types of mental phenomena, such as thinking and sensing; and (4) the nature of psychological explanation and its significance for (3).

Because knowing requires mental functioning, nineteenth-century discussions typically followed Kant and Descartes in explaining mind in terms of their role in knowing. But knowing not only involves a highly specialized aspect of mental functioning, but goes beyond the strictly mental. So that strategy ignores mental phenomena that play little or no role in knowing and emphasizes epistemic concerns irrelevant to the nature of mind. Contemporary discussion, by contrast, takes language and action as basic, rather than knowing. And, since many mental phenomena express speech or action, this has led to a theoretical focus on the mental as such.

Still, because of a residual concern with knowing, the new focus on mind originated with the concern about how we know about mental states. Our knowledge about our own mental states often seems unmediated by inference and independent of evidence, whereas we seem not to know about the mental states of others in that way. How, then, do we know about others' mental states? How do we know what others are thinking and feeling, and even that they think or feel anything at all? And, because this concern arises from the way knowing one's own mental states differs from knowing others', how do we know even about our own mental states?

These questions leads to another. We must somehow know about the minds of others by way of connections mental states have to bodily states or to behavior. So we can answer that question only if we can first determine in general terms how mind and body are related. Are mental states a special type of bodily states? Or are they nonphysical states causally related to bodily states?

But we cannot effectively invesigate whether mental phenomena are physical without determining what it is for a phenomenon to be mental in the first place. We'll approach this problem of characterizing mental phenomena by focusing on three groups: inten- tional states such as thinking, doubting, and desiring; sensory states—both bodily sensations such as pains and tickles and the sensations that figure in perceiving; and what it is to be a self or a person and what it is for a mental state to be conscious.

We often determine the nature of something by its role in explaining things. So we may be able to resolve disagreements about how to characterize mental phenomena by appeal to their role in psychological explanation. Psychological explanations are some- times cast in commonsense terms and sometimes in scientific terms. We'll consider both, asking how psychological states explain behavior, what constraints such explanations impose on the nature of mental states, and whether the explanations of scientific psy- chology cast doubt on the applicability of our commonsense psychologycal concepts.

We'll use The Nature of Mind, ed. Rosenthal (available through the Graduate Center bookstore arrangement) and a very few xeroxes on library electronic reserve.

I propose to work through a book-length typescript that I have written on the topic of ‘the self’ addressing five main questions:

• [Q1] What is the nature of the self? (What would something have to be like to count as a self?)
• [Q2] Do selves exist?
• [Q3] What is the nature of ordinary human ‘SELF-experience’, i.e. our experience of there being such a thing as the self?
• [Q4] What is the minimal form of SELF-experience?
• [Q5] What are the grounds of self-consciousness?

On the way I will examine Kant’s views about consciousness, self-consciousness and the subject of experience, and raise the general issue of the necessary conditions of self-consciousness. I will also raise a number of very general issues in metaphysics, e.g. about that objects are, about the metaphysical superficiality of the object/process/property/state/event conceptual cluster. I will follow the thought that there is no better candidate in reality for the title ‘substance’ than a subject of experience, and that this is so however the subject of experience classifies according to other metaphysical schemes (e.g. as a ‘mere’ property or process). If there is time I will move on to ethical issues concerning the putative self.

I begin with the proposal that the best way to approach the metaphysics of the self (Q1 and Q2) is via the phenomenology of the self, ie a phenomenological investigation of the essentially conceptually informed experience of there being such a thing as the self, which I call SELF-experience (the small capitals are in effect used to denote concepts, or what I’ll call ‘non-sensory experience-structuring elements’ or ‘thought-elements’: thus SELF-experience is experience that is essentially structured by a certain conception, that of the self). ‘SELF-experience’ is a strictly phenomenological term that does not imply that there actually are such things as selves (compare ‘PINK-ELEPHANT experience’). SELF-experience certainly exists, whether or not selves do.

I first consider ordinary human SELF-experience (Q3), and then try to work out the minimal case of genuine SELF-experience (Q4). The crucial claim is twofold: anything that is to count as a self must have the properties specified in some valid description of SELF-experience and (the converse) anything that has the properties specified in some valid description of SELF-experience counts as a self. This seemingly anti-Kantian project requires defence (Why couldn’t the self be ineffable, or quite unlike our conception of it?) And why couldn’t it have essential properties that are not in any way represented in SELF-experience?). It also needs to be shown that the phenomenological project can be run without covert metaphysical presuppositions about the self (otherwise circularity threatens).

I argue that this can be done and that the phenomenological project confers a valuable determinacy on the metaphysical enquiry. Once we have answered the phenomenological questions about SELF-experience we are in a position to answer the metaphysical question whether selves exist. (If we cannot find anything possessing the properties attributed to the self in ordinary human SELF-experience then we may at least find something possessing the properties attributed to the self in the minimal case of SELF-experience.) One does not however have to accept this claim about the relation between metaphysics and phenomenology in order to engage with the issues about the self that I aim to raise within the framework that it generates. That said, I also claim that Kant, who so famously blamed the ‘rational psychologists’ for going from phenomenology to metaphysics, would not have any quarrel with the project as I present it.

Brief summary

1 (‘Phenomenology: the local question’) is phenomenological and addresses Q3. Section by section it considers the proposal that ordinary human SELF-experience involves at least the following thought-elements. The self is figured as:

1. SUBJECT (=subject of experience)
2. SINGLE
3. MENTAL (=mentally propertied)
4. THING (where the general notion of being a thing stands opposed to being a mere property of a thing)
5. AGENT
6. PERSONALITY
7. PERSISTING (=something that persists over a relatively long-period of time, arguably for life)
8. DISTINCT (=not identical with the organism, in this case the human being, considered as a whole).

The claim is not that all (non-pathological) human SELF-experience must be like this (I raise doubts about the necessity of [6] and [7]), but that these eight elements are nonetheless fundamental in a way that overrides all intercultural variation. The list contains redundancy ([1] arguably entails [2]-[4]) in the interests of maximum articulation.

2 (‘Metaphysics: The Grounds of Self-Consciousness’) is metaphysical. It enquires into the necessary grounds of SELF-experience (Q5). It defines a notion of full or explicit self-consciousness, argues that SELF-experience of the sort that is in question requires such self-consciousness, and asks what its necessary grounds might be. It contests the Kantian and neo-Kantian view that self-consciousness requires experience that has the character of being experience of other subjects, or of body, or of an ordered external world of any sort. In all it considers thirty proposed necessary conditions of self-consciousness and rejects twenty-four of them, developing and expanding some previously published work.

3 (‘Phenomenology: the general question’) is phenomenological. It seeks to give an account of the minimal case of genuine SELF-experience. It argues section by section that all genuine SELF-experience must involve figuring the putative self as a [1] subject of experience, and (hence) as [2] single or unified in a way to be explained, as [3] mentally propertied, and as [4] an entity that is a thing at least in the sense that it is not a mere property of a thing. [4] is discussed at length, and the evident connections with Kant’s Paralogisms are made explicit. It is then argued that minimal SELF-experience need not involve any sense of the self as having [7] long-term persistence, or [6] character or personality, or even as [5] being an agent. It need not even positively figure the self as [8] something non-identical with some larger containing organism.

The four indispensable and presumably uncontroversial elements [1]-[4] do not, however, come separate (after all, taken separately, they allow whole human beings to qualify as selves). They combine into further indispensable complex elements, e.g. SINGLE-as-MENTAL (= single specifically so far as its mental being is concerned whether or not also single in its non-mental being, i.e. qua brain or organism) and THING-as-SUBJECT (= thing specifically so far as it is a subject of experience even if it is also a thing qua brain or organism). Plainly these elements need not be consciously articulated in any genuine SELF-experience, but I argue that they are none the less an essential part of what structures it. Each can be argued for separately, and I argue that in the final analysis they fuse into the super-element SUBJECT-as-SINGLE-MENTAL-THING, or ‘SESMET’ for short. The claim, then, is that genuine SELF-experience must be SESMET-experience, i.e., roughly, experience of there being an entity that is correctly said to be a single thing when considered specifically as a subject of experience that is itself being considered specifically in its mental being.

Given the framework according to which answering the phenomenological question determines the metaphysical question, we can proceed to metaphysics. For answering Q4 via Q3 delivers determinate content to Q1, which in turn delivers determinate content to Q2, which is now: Do things that have the property specified by SESMET exist? Do ‘sesmets’ exist?

4 (‘Metaphysics: Preliminaries’) and 5 (‘Phenomenology and Metaphysics: Time’) are preparatory, furnishing basic materials for the answer to Q2. Section by section they examine the following notions (among others): materialism; the subject of experience; concrete unity; thing or object as opposed to property or event or process; the object/property relation; the temporal character of the process of consciousness and our experience of it, the ‘stream of consciousness’ and the ‘specious present’.

6 (Metaphysics: The Question of Fact) takes on the metaphysics of the self directly. It starts from the previously established conclusion that anything that is to count as a self must be a sesmet, and asks whether there actually are such things. I offer two ways of answering Yes, one relatively easy, the other hard and I think more interesting. According to the first, a self is a persisting, complex distributed structure in the brain. It is not a single thing considered non-mentally but can nonetheless be said to constitute a single thing considered specifically in so far as it is something mentally propertied. According to the second, a self is strictly speaking something that lasts only as long as an experientially unbroken period of experience of which it is the subject; it is something essentially live. It is a subject of experience in the sense in which a subject of experience cannot properly be said to exist unless experience exists for it to be the subject of.

Descartes and Hume conceive of selves or subjects in this second way (Hume’s are short-lived, Descartes’s are not). So do Fichte and James and perhaps Nozick.

A review of the principal issues and authors in moral philosophy from its Athenian roots to contemporary thought. The purpose of the course is to gain familiarity with the key concepts, distinctions, issues, and stances that form the present context of discussion in ethical theory, moral epistemology, moral psychology, and metaethics. The topics considered will include:

• Classical Content (Plato and Aristotle);
• Ethics within the bounds of Christianity (Augustine, Aquinas);
• The English Enlightenment (Hobbes, Butler, Hume, Bentham, Mill);
• Continental Moralists (Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche);
• The Autonomy of Ethics (Sidgwick, Moore, Prichard, Ross);
• Contemporary non-cognitivism, relativism, and antirealism.

Required texts include the main ethical works of the moralists as listed below, and William Frankena's Ethics, 2nd Edition.

• Plato includes the Euthyphro, Crito, and the Republic;
• Aristole - Nicomachean Ethics;
• Hobbes - Leviathan, Parts I and II;
• Butler - 15 Sermons - Esp. 1-3, 11, 12;
• Hume - Treatise Bk III;
• Benthan - Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation - Chs. 1-7;
• Mill, J.S. - Utilitarianism, On Liberty;
• Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract;
• Kant - Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals;
• Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil or The Geneology of Morals;
• Sidgwick - Methods of Ethics, Ch. 1;
• Moore - Principia Ethica;
• Prichard - Moral Obligation;
• Ross - The Right and The Good;
• Rawls - Essays

One should, if possible, obtain individual editions of these texts. A useful alternative is Ethics, ed. by Steven Cahn and Peter Markie, Oxford 1998. This volume also contains other essays which will be assigned periodically. Please use the 2nd edition of this book.

The first three classes will be devoted to Plato and Aristotle.

This material should be given a fresh reading before the first class on September 5, 2006.

This course is intended to provide a forum for discussion and examination of some basic theories, concepts, foundations and functions of law using the US legal system as a model. We will examine history, presuppositions, purposes and implications of this model with a view to better understanding law as a functioning system and social institution. Special emphasis will be placed on the concepts of law and rights. The grade will be based on one class presentation and one term paper. The text for the course will be Smith, The Nature and Process of Law as well as some other related materials as needed.

Environmental philosophy is a large subject that involves discussions in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy, as well as in ethics, aesthetics, economics, and political philosophy. This seminar seeks primarily to provide a systematic introduction to normative ethical issues underlying environmental and ecological controversies, as well as a chance to explore certain environmental issues in greater depth. It begins by reviewing classical philosophical positions on the nature of ethics and value in general, and on the status of the human being's relation to land, wilderness, the oceans, other humans, animal species and flora in particular. Topics will include such pressing contemporary concerns as bio-diversity loss, pollution, and nuclear power, as well as issues in international justice such as overpopulation, over-consumption, global poverty and their effects on the earth's environment and its creatures. Non-western views, as well as those of the more recent Deep Ecology, Ecological Feminism, the Environmental Justice and Social Ecology movements will be considered, with readings from among such diverse authors as Rachel Carson, Herman Daly, Garrett Hardin, Christine Korsgaard, Aldo Leopold, Mark Sagoff, Arnold Naess, Dale Jamieson, Tom Regan, Vandana Shiva, Peter Singer, and others.

A critical examination of central issues in the philosophy of religion. Authors to be studied include Plato, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Hume, Kierkegaard, James, and various contemporary philosophers of religion, including Alston, Hick, Plantinga, Rowe, Swinburne, and Wolterstorff. The readings will be drawn from Ten Essential Texts in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Cahn (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Questions about God, eds. Cahn and Shatz (Oxford University Press, 2002). We shall also discuss my recent book God, Reason, and Religion (Wadsworth, 2006). Several short papers will be required.

For purposes of satisfying the comprehensive examination requirement of two advanced courses in an area, this course is considered an advanced course in the area of metaphysics or epistemology.

aorensteinny@earthlink.net

Quine is the foremost representative of naturalism, supporter of the theory of reference, and detractor of the theory of meaning in the 20th century. This class will serve as an introduction to and exploration of these themes. Attention will be paid both to how these themes relate to various figures earlier in the century e.g. Russell, Carnap, Church, Barcan-Marcus as well as current work. The course will cover Quine's work in the theory of reference and ontology , his naturalism, and his holistic empiricist criticisms of themes from the theory of meaning.

1. The Theory of Reference - Ontological commitment and how to avoid it.
   Indeterminacy/Inscrutablity of Reference, Logical truth: defining it and expressing it.
2. The Theory of Meaning - Analytic - Synthetic, Modal Muddles, The status of the Indeterminacy of meaning claims
3. Quinian Naturalism - Epistemology naturalized, Duhemian empiricism, the dogma of a priori knowledge.

Some Suggested Texts available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and the virtual bookstore.

1. Quine:
   • Word and Object
   • Ways of Paradox
   • Pursuit of Truth
   • Theories and Things
   • From a Logical Point of View
2. Orenstein: W.V. Quine, Princeton Univ. Press (Go on line and get a used copy. Barnes and Noble stores seem to keep a single copy at each store. If you buy the book that way, please ask them to order additional copies.)
3. Any of Roger Gibson's books on Quine.
4. For a survey see the Quine entry in the Routledge encyclopedia. A copy is available for loan and xeroxing in my Logic class folder.

The subjects of this course are how scholarly publishing works and how one successfully writes for publication. We will study the mechanics, economics, ethics, and politics of scholarly publishing and both the logic and the rhetoric of scholarly writing. There will be some hands-on exercises to learn about publishing in the student’s particular area of interest. Throughout the semester part of each class meeting will be a workshop for practice and group critique of editing, revision, and preparing a manuscript for submission. Students should bring to the course a paper already written to serve as their workshop project.

Required Book: Richard A. Watson, Writing Philosophy: A Guide to Professional Writing and Publishing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992). ISBN: 0809318105

Required Work: brief written exercises in discovery of journals, author guidelines, and book proposal guidelines in each student's field. Abstracts of journal articles and/or monographs in each student's field. Semester-long preparation of an article or review for publication submission.

This course is is in Classics department. Please see the Classics department web site for up-to-date information.

Aristotle's Politics has in recent years become almost as popular and influential as his Ethics (of which it is anyway the express continuation). A variety of contemporary thinkers (notably but not only communitarians) have expressly resorted to the Politics to develop their own ideas, both political and epistemological. Of course no contemporary thinker is a thoroughgoing follower of Aristotle (his views on natural slavery, if nothing else, tend to embarrass people). But there is clearly something about the Politics that is proving irresistible. The Politics is anyway a classic instance of Aristotelity, both in its Greek style and in its content, and contains, besides much to satisfy the curiosity of philosophers, much to pique the interest of ancient historians too. Together with his Constitution of the Athenians (rediscovered only in the nineteenth century), Aristotle’s Politics is a mine of historical data as well as philosophical speculation. The course will aim to explore all these elements as much as time permits.

The text will, of course, be read in Greek (probably the Oxford Classical Text is the most readily accessible), but among translations I should at least mention my own: The Politics of Aristotle, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Students are also referred to my companion commentary: A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle, published by the same press in 1998. Both books are available in paperback (the latter currently on sale with Labyrinth Books). Finally, should there be sufficient demand, I will also make available the Greek text of Aristotle's Constitution of the Americans (the likely story of whose recent discovery makes for enjoyable after-dinner conversation).

Note: This course will study Aristotle's texts in the original Greek and therefore requires some knowledge of the language. Students in the philosophy program, or other programs, who may be interested in this course but are unsure about their language competence should contact me beforehand: psimpson@gc.cuny.edu