A survey of some of the major problems which occupied Western philosophers from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, focusing upon the transmission and adaptation of the ancient philosophical traditions within the Latin, Jewish and Arabic cultures. Readings will include selected passages from the works of such thinkers as Augustine, Anselm, Abelard, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Problems examined will include the relation of faith to reason, the sources and limits of knowledge, human freedom and immortality.

In 1950, Quine woke up the analytic establishment with an argument that no individual statement can be confirmed or refuted by experience. In 1953, Wittgenstein warned us from the grave against the error of attempting to define concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. In 1956, Sellars repudiated the "myth of the given," a basic presumption of empiricism. In the late 1950's, Michael Dummett wrote a series of penetrating essays that related the semantical interpretation of the law of excluded middle to one version of metaphysical realism. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn wrote a best-selling book which argued that science proceeds through a series of revolutionary paradigm shifts that alter the meanings of concepts embedded in theories. During the 1960s, Toulmin, Hanson, Feyerabend, and Wartofsky changed the sub-discipline of philosophy of science by persuading many that science cannot be considered independently of its history. In 1973 Nelson Goodman changed the direction of aesthetics with arguments that works of art are symbols that carry cognitive content qua works of art. In the 1980's Hilary Putnam abandoned the metaphysical realism he had defended for decades, Gilbert Harman argued that ethical claims have no truth independently of the cultural systems in which they are embedded, and Michael Sandel and other communitarians claimed that contractarians and Kantians err by presuming that moral agents exist outside space and time and a particular culture.

Question. What do all these hard wrought theses produced by eminent contemporary philosophers have in common?

Answer. They are all clearly maintained and defended in works of Hegel written between 1806 and 1830./p>

As the French philosopher Andre Lecrivain wrote in a recent issue of The Philosophical Forum, "We strive to develop new ideas in philosophy that lead us down strange and unexplored paths. We come to the end of the path, and there always is Hegel, waiting for us." This course is an introduction to Hegel's basic ideas-in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of culture and religion, for students whose background is primarily in non-Continental philosophy. Every attempt will be made to explain Hegel's ideas in intelligible language, even at some risk of simplifying the subject. Texts: Phenomenology of Spirit; Encyclopedia.

This is one of the few great books on moral philosophy. It is, of course, written against a very different background from more recent treatises on ethics - no concept of duty but a theory based on virtue; a psychology very different from ours; nothing quite like our problem of the freedom of the will, etc. But because his standpoint is different, his writings throw light from a new angle on the problems that he does share with later moral philosophers. The seminar will deal with the following topics: the nature of happiness, the theory of responsibility, the theory of the mean, the explanation of deviations from virtue - wickedness and lack of self-control - and the nature of pleasure.

• Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, tr. W. D. Ross; Oxford 1998, in Oxford World Classics Series. Paperback
• W.F.R. Hardie: Aristotle's Ethical Theory, Oxford, 1968. Paperback
• Sarah Broadie: Ethics with Aristotle, Oxford 1991. Paperback

A systematic study of the central problems in the philosophy of Space and Time, and the way 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 empirical challenges to philosophical claim 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, Nehrlich, Broad, Mach, Leibniz, and others.

Readings: The main readings will be from

1. Space From Zeno to Einstein, Classic Readings with a Contemporary Commentary, ed. Nick Huggett, MIT Press (paperback), 1999
2. Selections from Real Time II, H. Mellor, Routledge paperback, 1998.
3. Additional Xeroxed readings.

WHAT IS SCIENTIFIC REALISM?

Scientific realism has an existence dimension and an independence dimension. The existence dimension is that, for the most part, the unobservables that science appears to be committed to - atoms, viruses, photons, and the like - really do exist and have the properties specified by science. This is opposed by those - most notably van Fraassen - who are skeptical that science is giving us an accurate picture of reality. The independence dimension is that scientific entities do not depend for their existence and nature on the cognitive activities and capacities of our minds. This is opposed by those - most notably, Kuhn and Feyerabend - who hold that these entities are somehow "constructed" by the theories we have of them.

The course will start by clarifying this metaphysical "definition" of scientific realism and comparing it with the bewildering variety of definitions to be found in the literature. These include epistemic, apparently semantic, and really semantic definitions.

SCIENTIFIC REALISM VS CONSTRUCTIVISM

Constructivism about science arises in the context of the alleged incommensurability of rival paradigms like the Ptolemaic and Copernican. Arguments will be mounted against constructivism, incommensurability, and the methodology that leads to them.

SCIENTIFIC REALISM VS SKEPTICISM

1. Arguments for scientific realism will be examined. The most famous is the argument from success. Why do the observational predictions of theories tend to come out true? The best explanation, the realist claims, is that the theories are (approximately) true. Indeed, if they weren't, this success would be "a miracle." Laudan and Fine have mounted a sustained attack against this argument. Other abductive defenses of realism will be considered along with arguments from scientific practice.
2. Perhaps the most influential argument against realism is the argument from the underdetermination of theories by the evidence. Any theory is alleged to face many empirically equivalent rivals, rivals equally compatible with all possible evidence. This argument will be criticized by appealing to the Duhem-Quine thesis and to the lack of any known limit to our capacity to create evidence.
3. The pessimistic "meta-induction" is another influential argument: past theories have been mostly wrong; so probably present theories are too. Realist defenses against this powerful argument will be explored.
4. Van Fraassen's argument against realism will be criticized for selective skepticism: the antirealist cannot insist on more demanding standards for knowledge of unobservables that she employs for knowledge of observables.

The course will finish with some critical remarks about van Fraassen's antirealism.

TEXTS

• Kukla, Andre. 1998. Studies in Scientific Realism. New York: Oxford University Press. [0-19-511865-0]
• Psillos, Stathis. 1999. Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth. New York: Routledge. [0-415-20819-X]

RECOMMENDED

• Churchland, Paul M. and Clifford A. Hooker. 1985. Images of Science: Essays on Realism and Empiricism, with a Reply form Bas C. van Fraassen. Chicago: University of Chicago. [0-226-10654-3]
• Devitt, Michael. 1997. Realism and Truth. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [0-691-01187-7]
• Fine, Arthur. 1986a. The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [0-226-24946-8]
• Laudan, Larry. 1996, Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method and Evidence. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. [0-8133-2469-6]
• Leplin, Jarrett. 1997. A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism New York: Oxford University Press. [0-19-511363-2]
• Kukla, Andre. 2000. Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Science New York: Routledge. [0-415-23419-0]

The course will trace the development of several programs for answering the question "Under what conditions is an hypothesis confirmed or corroborated by observational data?" Roughly speaking, the answer of the probabilist program is "When the probability of the hypothesis in light of the observations is greater than the probability of the hypothesis prior to the observations." However, there are several schools of thought on how to fill in the details of this account. The classical and neo-classical schools of probability hold that an objective, epistemological notion of probability is required. Classicism in one form or another has been in business for almost three hundred years. Its achievements and problematic features will be sketched. The version of probabilism that has most currency is personalist Bayesianism. It holds that prior probabilities of hypotheses represent personal opinions, hence judgments of confirmation and the weight of evidence are an amalgam of both subjective and objective judgment. Some personalists try to minimize the extent of subjectivity in the their treatment of confirmation. For example, Carnap's work on inductive probability is a hybrid of classical and personalist ideas. A critical survey of several personalist treatments of confirmation will be sketched.

We will review theories of confirmation that reject the basic tenets of probabilism. One school of thought holds that confirmation should be explained in terms of the concept of agreement with data. Another approach defines it in terms of failed attempts at falsification. A blend both of both approaches treats an hypothesis as confirmed when it passes a well designed test of it against its rivals. We will review presentations of these ideas by both philosophers and working scientists.

Texts: A variety of articles and selections from monographs. The list of thinkers studied covers a number of major philosophers as well as statisticians and scientists. It will include among others, Laplace, Boole, DeMorgan, Mill, Broad, Carnap, Hempel and Goodman. Photocopies of the most important readings will be handed out. Others will be on reserve in the Library.

Prerequisites: Modest facility in ninth grade algebra and elementary logic. The emphasis is primarily on concepts and not on technical details. Mathematics will be kept to the bare minimum needed to grasp important concepts.

We will review and update the classic arguments for innate knowledge of language: species specificity, neurological and genetic bases, language universals, poverty of the stimulus for acquisition. On this we will read Bickerton, Chomsky, Crain, Marcus, Pinker and others. We will also examine the recent arguments against innateness of language, in work byCowie, Elman et al., Pullum, Sampson, and others. This is an interdisciplinary course. Students from all relevant programs (linguistics, philosophy, psychology, speech and hearing, computer science) are welcome.

Modal logic, Kripke structures, characterization of logical properties. Belief and knowledge as modalities. Common knowledge and the problem of logical omniscience. Possible worlds and the Lewis-Stalnaker theory of conditionals. Bayes' law, full belief, probabilities and Popper functions. Games in strategic and extensive form. The centipede game and backward induction. Prisoner's dilemma. First order logic and Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games. Henkin quantifiers and Hintikka-Sandu's IF logic. More topics may be added as time permits. All topics except the last will only require familiarity with propositional logic. The last topic will obviously require also that one is comfortable with the language of first order logic (quantification theory). However, it will not be necessary to know the Goedel completeness and 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 situation 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 like numbers?
3. Identit: A discussion of the two important principles, the Identity of Indiscernibles and the indiscernibility 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 Effec: 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.

This seminar will examine the classic question of the freedom of the will, coming at the question from as many directions as it takes. Questions of metaphysics, epistemology and ethics will be raised, although the focus will be on the first two.

The main players are the compatibilists, the incompatibilists--an uneasy alliance of hard determinists and libertarians--and lately the impossibilists, who reject the notions of free will and responsibility as incoherent. Each will be examined in some detail. Libertarianism has made a considerable comeback in the last two decades, along with doctrines of self-.and .agent-, as against more standard event-, causation. We will discuss and attempt to characterize determinism, causality, inevitability, autonomy, action, volition, compulsion, predictability and other notions salient in the dispute.

The instructor is a professed compatibilist who will make no pretense of neutrality.

Since the literature on the free will question is oceanic, -historical completeness is impossible. However, we will look at some of the most relevant sources, including Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume and Reid, Among the modern authors we win concentrate on are Frankfurt, Fischer, Strawson pere et fils, Nozick, Clarke and O'Connor.

Fortunately, two excellent (and cheap) anthologies have recently appeared that include many of the central papers: Pereboom's Free Will (Hackett, 1997) and O'Connor's Agents, Causes and Events (Oxford, 1995). The student should acquire both. There is also Watson's older but still useful Free Will (Oxford, 1982). Fischer and Ravizza's Responsibility and Control is an important new study, but Fischer is well-represented enough in the anthologies that R&C will be suggested rather than required. We will also look at some critical commentary. Other books that will probably figure in the course is Dennett's highly enjoyable Elbow Room, Berofsky's Freedom from Necessity and O'Shaugnessy's The Will.

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, 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, and 11 and 12;
• Hume - Treatise Bk III or the Enquiry;
• Benthan - Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation - Chs. 1-7;
• Mill, J.S. - Utilitarianism;
• 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.

The books for this course may be purchased at Labyrinth Book Store.

This class will consider social contract, utilitarian, socialist, liberal and feminist positions on the well-ordered society. Particular attention will be given to conceptions of individual freedom, property, personality, justice and the ideals of citizen and democratic community. The focus of issues will be quite narrow in the hope of gaining some depth of understanding. Readings will include selections from Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Marx and contemporary thinkers such as Rawls.

In recent years, philosophy of law has become enormously more fertile and more interesting. In part, this is a function of the degree to which some of our more centrally contested social questions, such as affirmative action, hate speech issues, and questions surrounding abortion and sexual privacy, have been taken up and vigorously litigated within the courtroom. But in part this is a function of the impressive development of philosophical theory brought to law and legal issues over the past decades, the theories of Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner being but two of the better known examples. This course will offer an survey-like examination of some of the central issues that arise with respect to philosophy of law; among the topics to be taken up will be:

• the distinctive nature of legal justification, and the role, if any, of free standing political principles in such justification stories, the debate between Dworkin and his critics;
• the place of economic and other efficiency concerns in structuring legal relations, particularly those of tort liability, and whether a purely economic approach can be satisfactory;
• the distinctive structure of affirmative action debates when within Constitutional law;
• the nature of criminal responsibility, giving particular attention to what lies behind the insanity defense; and
• certain problems concerning privacy generally and those that arise with respect to sexuality in particular.

There are other issues that we may take up if there is sufficient interest and if time permits. For example, I would also like to take up the issue of "offense," whether offense may legitimately be regulated, and if so, on what grounds, with particular attention to some of the doctrines and case law on obscenity and hate speech. And in general, students who have some interest in some particular issue in philosophy of law that is not mentioned here will be encouraged to pursue this interest independently under my supervision, or perhaps, to give a presentation. We will see how large a group we are and where these additional interests lie. This course should be of interest to anyone with an interest in law and social theory.

Steven Ross is a professor of philosophy and an attorney.

A critical examination of the role of education within a democratic society. Among the reading's are Plato's Republic, John Dewey's Democracy and Education, and Amy Gutman's Democratic Education.

Two short papers are required.

The course will focus on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, but will also address his On Certainty and Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. We will be exploring the central role of Wittgentein's metaphilosophy in his treatments of philosophical problems concerning rule-following, language, experience, knowledge, religion, and aesthetic judgment.

We'll focus on two mental phenomena: the sensory qualities of bodily and perceptual sensation, and the self. It may seem that sensory qualities and the self have little in common. The self is a relatively sophisticated mental occurrence and involves some special kind of unity, whereas sensory qualities are a relatively primitive mental phenomenon that occurs independently of any such mental unity. Nonetheless, the two are widely regarded as more recalcitrant than other mental phenomena to informative explanation, and so most resistant to materialist treatment.

More important, discussions both of both sensory qualities and the self tend to rely heavily on our distinctively first-person consciousness of them; the nature of sensory qualities and the self is thought to be revealed by the way we are conscious of them. We will therefore discuss how we are conscious both of our sensory qualities and of ourselves, but also investi- gate whether considerations other than such consciousness can help us understand the nature of qualities and of the self. And we will ask whether emphasis on the way we are conscious of these mental phenomena leads to erroneous views about them.

Among the topics we will address are how to characterize sensory qualities; the relation between how we are conscious of those qualities and their perceptual roles; how states with sensory qualities differ from intentional states, such as beliefs and desire; whether we must understand one of those two types of mental state by reference to the other; whether states with sensor quality can occur without being conscious; whether quality inversion (across subjects or within one subject) is possible; whether sensory qualities occur in sensory fields distinctive of the various modalities, or are unified in a single sensory field; if they occur in distinct fields, why those fields appear unified; sensory quality and nonconceptual content; what the unity of the self consists in; the relation of that unity to the unity of sensory fields and the unity of consciousness; the indirect reflexive and first-person reference in thought; self-knowledge and consciousness of the self; whether the distinctive unity we ascribe to selves is illusory; whether it pertains especially to any particular kind of mental state or process, such as memory or rational thinking; the alleged immunity of first-person remarks to error through misidentification of the self; Dennett's "center of narrative gravity" model; first- person access and first-person authority; the self and free action; failures of unity of the self; the unity of nonconscious mental functioning; self-location and spatial perception; and points of view, sensory qualities, and the self.

Readings will be from authors such as Roderick Chisholm, Wilfrid Sellars, Sydney Shoemaker, Ned Block, Gilbert Harman, Frank Jackson, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Peacocke, Brian Loar, David Lewis, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. F. Strawson, Jose Bermudez, Cassim Qassam, and William Brewer, and occasional work of cognitive psychologists and neuropsychologists.

This is a first course of logic for graduate students in philosophy. Wherever possible, we will explore the relevance of the study of logic to philosophy.

Topics to be covered include the Following:

1. An introduction to elementary logic (sentence logic and predicate logic with identity).
2. A survey of topics in metalogic e.g., basic syntactic and semantic concepts, consistency, and completeness.
3. A survey of some philosophically interesting systems, e.g., modal logic, many valued logic, intuitionistic logic, free logic and classic Aristotelian logic.

Textbook:

• The Logic Book by Bergman, Moore and Nelson

N.B. Students are advised to prepare for the course by reviewing sentence logic and truth tables.

This course will examine the epistemological and metaphysical views of the three most prominent British Empiricists. We will focus on the relationship between philosophy and science during the period 1632 to 1776, years that exactly spanned the lives of these three men. In the year Locke was born (1632) Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was published. The year of Locke's death (1704) saw his friend Isaac Newton publish his Optiks. Berkeley was two when Newton's 'Principia' was published, and the year before Berkeley died (1751) Benjamin Franklin published his Experiments and observations on electricity. Hume was two when Newton published the second edition of 'Principia,' and in 1759, when Hume was 48 years of age, he observed the reappearance of Halley's comet exactly as predicted by Newton's gravitational theory. In the year of Hume's death (1776), Laplace stated the classical form of determinism, that if all the forces acting on all objects at any one time were known, then all the future states of those objects could be completely predicted. The lives of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume spanned a critical period of the development of the new science. All three of them reflected on issues regarding the nature of knowledge in general, but focused on scientific knowledge in particular. Similarly their metaphysical concerns reflected their views on the proper subject matter of the sciences. Locke put it most interestingly when he wrote in his "Epistle to the Reader," of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,

The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge; - which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences ... Vague and insignificant forms of speech . . . have so long passed for mysteries of science . . . that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge.

Although Locke here speaks for himself, we shall see that Berkeley and Hume were to become fellow "under-labourers."

Locke 1632-1704, Berkeley 1685-1752, Hume 1711-1776