This is a theory mastery course. Its aim is to probe deeply into several areas of contemporary interest in Aristotle's ethical theory. Particular emphasis will be given to his theories of the good, voluntariness, virtue, action, practical reason, moral weakness, friendship and love.

The work we will concentrate on is the Nichomachean Ethics translated by W.D. Ross (any edition). One should acquire, if possible, the 2 volume Bollingen edition, The Complete Works of Aristotle, Princeton. Vol. II contains all of Aristotle's ethical writings. A re-reading of the Nichomachean Ethics before the semester begins is strongly recommended.

Each participant will be expected as well to read at least one contemporary theory about Aristotle's ethics. A list of suggestions will be provided at our first meeting. However, if wish to get a head start, call me or email me about suggested readings.

FUFILLS ETHICS AND HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (ANCIENT) REQUIREMENTS

The deliberately provocative periodization of philosophy suggested in the course title is derived from H.O. Wolfson, who first suggested it in his book on Philo. If the theme of medieval philosophy is the calibration of faith and reason, then medieval philosophy begins with Philo's insertion of Plato's forms into the divine logos, ends with Spinoza's equation of Deus with Natura. This course will take seriously the "faith versus reason" problem, providing readings not merely in the "great names" of medieval philosophy, such as Philo, Augustine, Eriugena, Saadia Gaon, Ibn Sina, Anselm, Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Gersonides, Crescas, and Ockham, but also readings in underlying religious currents and eddies, including the standard Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures, and selections from Gnostic, Neoplatonist, Manichaen , and Kabbalistic texts. The knowledge gained here provides pays off in improved understanding of early modern philosophy: Can one understand Descartes' cogito without knowing Augustine's, "si fallor, sum!," comprehend how there can be a "mountain without a valley," without reading Ockham on divine omnipotence, realize how there can be Leibnizian individual concepts without studying Scotus's notion of haecceity? Perhaps—but probably not.

Text: Hyman and Walsh, Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Hackett)

FUFILLS HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (ANCIENT) REQUIREMENTS

Many philosophers believe that for an action to be genuinely moral it must be done because it is moral and not for an "ulterior motive". The roots of such a view about moral motivation lie in Plato and Aristotle. It is clear that Aristotle takes the reason a person does an action as at least partly constitutive of the nature of the action: for an action to be truly virtuous, it has to be (among other things) chosen "for its own sake". Many believe that the same is true of Plato. Kant argues that the motive behind an action is (entirely?) determinative of what the action is; in the words of Barbara Herman, "motives determine what an agent does". This seminar will examine the question of what difference the motive makes to the assessment of action according to Plato and Aristotle, as compared with Kant.

There are no words in ancient Greek (or in classical Latin) that translate as "motive" (as either an adjective or noun), "motivation", or "to motivate"; Plato and Aristotle speak rather of "ends". Of course this does not mean that they do not have such concepts. Is there, however, an important distinction to be drawn between the concept of an end and the concept of a motive or, as they are often treated in ordinary language, are they simply synonymous? Might a distinction between motive and end illuminate our understanding of ancient versus modern ways of thinking about moral motivation? In addition to reading selections from Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, we shall read the work of contemporary philosophers and scholars who discuss moral motivation and who have recently compared ancient and modern accounts of it, such as Julia Annas, Christopher Bobonich, Barbara Herman, and Christine Korsgaard.

Required work will probably include two short take-home essay exams, an in-class presentation of 10-15 minutes, and a term paper of approximately 5000 words. Auditors are welcome, provided they attend regularly.

FUFILLS ETHICS, HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (ANCIENT)

This is a joint Graduate Center/NYU seminar. The seminar will meet alternately at NYU and the Graduate Center. The first meeting will take place at the NYU Philosophy Department on September 2.

We will examine the nature of the distinction between semantic and pragmatic facts, in so far as such facts must be explained by an adequate theory of meaning. Principal aims include (a) drawing a theoretically significant line between the propositions speakers express on given occasions (using sentences) and propositions they merely imply (by expressing whatever it is they express with those sentences), and (b) establishing the extent to which the propositions speakers express are underspecified by traditional compositional semantics, (even when augmented with theories of deixis and anaphora). Case studies will include attitude reports ('John thinks Mary loves him'); speech reports ('John said Mary loves him'); condition reports ('it's raining', 'it's noon', 'it's dark'); definite descriptions ('the mayor'), demonstrative descriptions ('that man', 'this man'); vague predicates ('red', 'bald'). Readings will be from works by Bach, Carston, Fine, Neale, Perry, Récanati, Salmon, Schiffer, Searle, Sperber and Wilson, Soames, and others. Some familiarity with Paul Grice's work on meaning and implicature will be assumed.

FUFILLS PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE REQUIREMENTS

[Web Editor's Note: Note that the course meets from 4:30–6:30 PM, not during the Graduate Center's usual 4:15–6:15 time slot.]

Basically this course is a continuation of the previous semester's course. Topics seem to come up as they are relevant to the interest of the class, and I will continue taking that into account. I do not wish to presuppose acquaintance with anything I did the previous semester, and may even review and extend some of the issues already discussed. I will probably deal with some of the issues that were intended to be discussed last semester but did not get done, such as Field's program, Boolos' ideas, my own Skolem-like approach to set theory, and perhaps some remarks on the neo-Fregean movement. I should probably continue my own model-theoretic approach to the G del theorem, and to other results usually obtained proof theoretically.

FUFILLS PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE REQUIREMENTS

The course will address issues about the psychological reality of language raised in my book, Ignorance of Language (2006), with attention to criticisms, particularly those by Louise Antony, John Collins, Paul Pietroski, Georges Rey, and Barry Smith.

Are the rules or principles of a language psychologically real in a competent speaker? Chomsky's view that linguistics is part of psychology yields a very fast argument that they are, for a grammar is thought to be about 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 open the question of whether the rules or principles are psychologically real.

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/principles of a person's language are likely to be similar to those governing the structure of her thoughts. The linguistic rules/principles would be, to that extent, psychologically real. The course will also raise doubts about whether the rules/principles are psychologically real in any other way. There seems to be no significant evidence that they are represented in the mind and, given what else we know, it is implausible that they are. And they seem the wrong sort of rules/principles to govern language processing.

Other controversial theses will be considered: that speakers' linguistic intuitions do not reflect information supplied by the language faculty and are not the main evidence for grammars; that linguistics should be (and are) concerned with what idiolects share, not with idiolects; that language processing is a fairly brute-causal associationist matter; that the rules of "Universal Grammar" are largely, if not entirely, innate structure rules of thought; indeed, that there is little or nothing to the language faculty.

Requirements

1. A brief weekly email raising questions about, making criticisms of, or developing points concerning, matters discussed in the class and reading for that week. 50% of grade.
2. A class presentation based on a draft for a paper (topic chosen in consultation with me). The draft to be submitted before Tuesday of the week of presentation. 20% of grade.
3. A 2,500 word paper probably arising from the draft in (ii). 30% of grade.

TEXTS

• Chomsky, Noam. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. New York: Praeger Publishers. [ISBN: 0-275-91761-4]
• Devitt, Michael. 2006. Ignorance of Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [ISBN: 978-0-19-925097-4]

RECOMMENDED

• Antony, Louise, and Norbert Hornstein, eds. 2003. Chomsky and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. [0-631-20021-5]
• Barber, Alex, ed. 2003. Epistemology of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ISBN: 0-19-925058-8]
• Block, Ned, ed. 1981. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 2. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. [ISBN: 0-674-74877-8]
• Carruthers, Peter, and Jill Boucher, eds. 1998. Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ISBN: 0 521 637589]
• Chomsky, Noam. 2000. New Horizons in the Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ISBN: 0521658225]
• Fodor, Jerry A. 1983. The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. [ISBN: 0-262-56025-9]
• Gleitman, Lila R, and Mark Liberman, eds. 1995. Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Volume 1. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. [ISBN: 0-262-65044-4]

FUFILLS PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE REQUIRMENTS

A first course in metatheory. Introduction to the tools, methods, and results of metalogic: Mathematical Induction, the Deduction Theorem, Consistency and Completeness of propositional and first-order logic. The texts are Metalogic, G. Hunter and First-Order Logic, R. Smullyan.

FUFILLS PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE REQUIREMENTS

FUFILLS PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE REQUIREMENTS

One glance at the following observations (1)–(5), about concepts could easily lead to the thought that consideration of concepts, both scientific and folk, is just idle talk. There's no point to distinguishing between attributes, predicates, properties, and concepts. Talk of concepts is like talk about ideas of one sort or another, not to be taken seriously.

1. "The exact sciences frequently work with concepts (which are occasionally even their principal concepts) of which they cannot say exactly what they mean; and on the other hand: the traditional methods of philosophy are not of much help here." (R.Carnap, Letter, 1920)
2. "Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expressions of our interests, and direct our interests." (L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953)
3. "When from a content of possible judgment that deals with the objects a and b, we subtract a and b , we obtain a remainder, a relation concept, that is accord-ingly, in need of completion in two ways. If from the sentence "the earth is more massive than the moon" we subtract "the earth," we get the concept "more mas-sive than the moon." If alternatively we subtract "the moon," we get the concept "more massive than the earth."[sic] But if we subtract them both at once, then we are left with a relation concept." (G.Frege, Grundlagen, 1884)
4. "The ontology of modern science, at least as Quine formalizes it, comprises material objects (or alternatively space-time points), sets of material objects, sets of sets of material objects, ..., but no properties, concepts, or forms. Let us thus examine the question: can the principle of individuation for properties ever be made clear?" (H. Putnam, "On Properties", in Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, N. Rescher et. al. (eds.)).
5. "Indeed, the wisest policy, in my opinion, is to resist the impulse to consider "concepts" as well defined entities at all, and instead confine our attention to the shifting manners in which our everyday standards of conceptual evaluation operate over the lifetime of an evolving predicate (I believe that "concept" represents a term like "Napoleon's personality"—it manifests a certain continuity over time but doesn't stay precisely fixed." (M. Wilson, Wandering Significance, 2007.)

The present seminar will consider first the emergence of a modern classical theory of concepts that has an interesting development from Kant to Carnap, and then consider a number of simple but important examples of concepts drawn from elementary physical and mathematical theories (perhaps the definition of some geometrical concepts in Hilbert's Geometry, and maybe the concept of square root in Algebra). From Newtonian physics perhaps the concept of force, and temperature from Thermodynamics. Perhaps as well some concepts used in collision of billiard balls, or the flight of canon balls). In folk physics (weight) in applied science (hardness), in Optics (light beam), in philosophical chemistry (concepts of water and H₂O), and in philosophy (M. Liston's nice example: concept itself). Finally, the aim is to see whether the traditional account of concepts is suitable for characterizing the concepts of science and even those of ordinary non-scientific discourse. The bad news I think is that for the most part, the tradi-tional account is ill suited for an understanding of how concepts figure in scientific theories and inferential practices. The good news is that there is an interesting task ahead: to try to do better.

Texts for the Seminar:

• J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap, To the Vienna Station, Cambridge University Press Paperback, 1993.
• Properties, eds. D.H. Mellor and Alex Oliver, Oxford University Paperback, 1997.
• Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance, Oxford University 2007, Paperback edition May 2008.

FULFILLS PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE REQUIREMENT

This course will explore some perennially interesting issues that are also receiving new attention. The focus will not be on metaphysics and ontology as extensions of the philosophy of language and logic, but we will certainly look at the nature of existence, whether it is a property, perhaps even an object.

The spine of at least the first part of the course will be my paper, "Compatibilism and Special Relativity," in Journal of Philosophy for Sept. 2007. It provides an occasion to discuss most of the issues in free will that have emerged in the past few decades, such as the nature of agency and the self, but others as well. Obvious ones are space and time, and especially time. Here we will look at the classical opposition of absolute to relational theories. We will also look at McTaggart's famous argument, problems of denseness and continuity, and the sense, if any, in which past and future, and past and future objects, can be said to exist (both classically and relativistically). Finally, the relativistic treatment of spacetime may help with other questions, for instance the reality of color (and the nature of causation, raised in any case by free will vs. determinism).

We will also look into the hoary issue of universals and particulars, nominalism vs. Platonism, with an eye to judging whether certain issues disappear if properties are rejected. Can notions of supervenience be reconstituted (in terms of predicates) if there are no properties to supervene or subvene? What becomes of the distinction between primary and secondary properties? Of emergence vs. reduction? Of consciousness vs. matter? If properties are rejected, can sense be made of abstract particulars, like numbers and sets? If so, are there any? These questions, of course, lead to the issue of necessity. Although it is now widely denied, we will look seriously at the idea that the necessity of such statements as "Tallness is transitive" and "George Washington was not made of glass" resides entirely in language, and not at all in extra-linguistic reality.

In a similar spirit we will consider whether objects should be conceived 3- or 4-dimensionally, and whether (or when) they should be viewed as mereological sums. If there is no empirically testable difference between these alternatives, does that mean we have alternative, intertranslatable ways of saying the same thing? Then is the world in itself a Heraclitean flux?

I now expect the authors we will read to include Sider, Carnap, Nozick, Leibniz-Clarke, Jonathan Cohen (2004 Philosophical Review paper), McLarty, Russell, van Inwagen, Frankfurter, Zimmerman, Sidelle, Hirsch and Eklund.

The problem of evil winds through the history of philosophy like a river. This course willsurvey the lower reaches:recent and contemporary versions of the problem. It will be necessary on occasion to travel back towards the headwaters—but only as far back as Darwin, Hume, Leibniz.

Thetopics covered will include:the logical problem of evil, greater-good theodicies, greatest-good theodicies (aka best of all possible world theodicies), rival creator arguments, the free-will defense, divine omnipotence and human freedom, soul-making and Irenaean theodicies, inductive problems of evil, epistemological problems of evil.

Some of the writers we will read: Mackie, Pike, Plantinga, Swinburne, Phillipps, the Adams family, Reichenbach, Hick, Swinburne.

As usual, I will make students do most of the work, making them responsible for presenting material. Also as usual, I will do a lot of the talking.

This course will overlap to a considerable extent with the Evil class that I taught a couple of years ago. There will not be much overlap with the course on the best of all possible worlds that I taught more recently—but there will be some.

Stephen Grover: stephen.grover@gmail.com

FUFILLS EPISTEMOLOGY AND METAPHYSICS REQUIREMENTS

This course will take up the dominant conceptions of moral judgment and moral justification in both their classical and contemporary expressions. The emphasis will be on the relative and distinctive, strengths and weaknesses of such theories.

Students may well already own many of the readings for this course. I will leave it to students to get most of these readings, though some of the hard to get readings, such as the selection of R.M. Hare, will be made available to the class. For the first class, students should have read the following sections from Hume's Treatise: "Of the Influencing Motives of the Will" [2.3.3], "Moral Distinctions Not Derived From Reason" [3.1.1], "Moral Distinctions Derived From Sense" [3.1.2].

In recent years the focus of many debates regarding justice have left the forum of the nation state and moved worldwide. Whether compelled by economic and technological developments of a globalized trade and international communication, or by environmental issues such as global warming, or due to social problems such as ever increasing world poverty and famine, a central question becomes to what extent we are indeed today living in a 'global village' and to what extent we are responsible. Is there an international set of basic human rights and an international social, political and economic "basic structure," for instance? If so, what is their content and foundation? What should the role of international institutions (such as the UN and World Bank, etc.) be and what should be left to local institutions and social movements? Finally, what are the responsibilities of the individual?

Beginning with Rawls's "Law of Peoples" (and a review of basic tenets of 'Justice as Fairness' and his difference principle), the seminar will look at central figures in this burgeoning new field. Philosophers to be discussed will include such cosmopolitans as Beitz and Pogge, nationalists and communitarians such as MacIntyre, Walzer or Miller, utilitarians along the lines of Peter Singer, as well as neo-Kantians exemplified by O'Neill and T. Nagel among possible others.

FUFILLS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY REQUIREMENTS

"Classics in the Philosophy of Art" is a historical survey of the philosophy of art through a close examination of many of its classic texts, including: Plato's Hippias Major, Ion and Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Hutcheson's On the Original of Beauty, Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," Kant's Critique of Judgment, Hegel's Introductory Lectures to Aesthetics, selections from Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, Tolstoy's What is Art? and Bell's Art. Class presentations and a term paper required.

FUFILLS AESTHETICS REQUIREMENT

A critical examination of central topics in the philosophy of religion. We shall read in its entirety my new anthology Exploring Philosophy of Religion (Oxford, 2009). Issues to be explored include the concept of God, the existence of God, religious language, miracles, mysticism, belief without evidence, resurrection and immortality, and religious pluralism. Several short papers will be required.

FUFILLS METAPHYSICS AND EPISTEMOLGY REQUIREMENTS

W. V. Quine is well-known for arguing against the appeal to analyticity and cognate notions in understanding the semantic aspects of language, and for espousing "the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention" (Word and Object, 221). Wilfrid Sellars, in apparent contrast, is known for his view that thoughts, sensations, and other mental states are theoretical entities that have acquired a reporting role that explains our first-person access to them. And Sellars espoused a broadly functionalist view intentional content and the semantic properties of speech.

We'll examine Quine's reasons for rejecting traditional views about intentionality and semantics and ask whether those reasons are well-founded. And we'll examine Sellars' theories about these topics, both to evaluate them and to see how they measure up against Quine's concerns about the groundlessness of traditional views of intentionality and semantics. Do Quine's views about analyticity, indeterminacy of translation, and inscrutability of reference undermine Sellars' theory of intentionality? Does Sellars' theory of meaning square with Quine's concerns? If not, who is right?

We'll also take up various related questions, such as how to regiment ascriptions of intentional states, whether to understand such ascriptions theoretically (Sellars) or as a dramatic idiom (Quine), the interpretation of quantifycation, quantification in connection with the intensional contexts, reference to abstract objects, and the relation between Quine's theses of indeterminacy of translation and inscrutability of reference.

Of special interest will be the relationship of thought to speech, the relationship of our understanding of thought to our understanding speech, and the connection between third-person ascriptions of mental states and our first-person access to those states when they are conscious.

We'll use electronic reserve and portions of these books (on reserve):

An examination of key topics in formal logic which bear on issues in linguistics. This will encompass contrasting classical and non-classical syntactical and semantical approaches to sentence connectives, quantifiers, forms of the copula, modal notions and propositional attitude ascriptions. (I will work individually with those interested in mastering the techniques of first order predicate logic and the rudiments of modal logic used to demonstrate that an argument is valid, a sentence is logically true, a set of sentences is consistent, etc.)

On the philosophical logic side, various approaches to logical form, existentials and existential import (the quantifier vs. the copula tradition*), reference, presupposition, adverbial modification etc. will be discussed. Consideration will be given to looking into topics of special interest to students other than those mentioned.

The course will be organized along the lines of texts such as

• Logic in Linguistics, Allwood, Cambridge Univ. Press
• Meaning and Grammar, Chercia and Ginet, MIT Press.

**Quine and the Fregean tradition: "Existence [being] is what existential quantification expresses"; "To be is to be the value of a variable". Versus: Followers of the Aristotelian tradition in logic such as Kant and others: "Being is obviously not a real predicate—Logically it is merely the copula of judgment."