THE FIRST DAY OF THIS COURSE WILL BE TUESDAY FEBRUARY 4, 2003

Kant scholars like the saying, "You can argue for Kant or against Kant but you can't argue without Kant." That seems true at least of his moral philosophy. Kant's attack on some philosophers' "claims of reason" and his defense of others, particularly those of morality or practical reason, are defended perhaps more fervently today (e.g., by a generation of John Rawls' students) than in his own time. The picture of rational autonomous persons acting or "constructing" out of respect for the moral law, without biased, self-interested or ulterior motives, is an inspiring ideal to Kant's followers. But Kant's critics too are legion, particularly among feminist philosophers or those influenced by Nietzsche. This course aims to examine Kant's basic moral theory, to see whether, properly understood and modified as necessary, it can be made plausible. We shall read closely Kant's major contributions to ethics: The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, the Metaphysics of Morals itself, and portions of the Critique of Practical Reason.

A sympathetic reconstruction of core Kantian ideas is compatible with rejecting Kant's ideas on some particular moral issues. Yet it is worth considering those ideas, e.g., his views on punishment in general and capital punishment in particular, his notorious rejection of lying under any circumstances, his conception of marriage and the different civic status of men and women. Those ideas are interesting historically and culturally, and they may be compelling to some people even today. (A number of contemporary philosophers and jurists see merit in Kantian retributivism.) Of course some of Kant's answers to substantive ethical questions prove to be based on empirical misinformation while others are untenable and unwarranted by his more basic theory. Yet even those ideas-Kant's notorious opposition to lying even to save an innocent life is one example, his views of women and non-European races another-can be philosophically instructive. The challenge will be to separate out what is living in his philosophy from what is, or ought to be, dead.

A new edition and translation of Kant's Groundwork, with extensive notes, by Zweig and Hill (Oxford U. Press) should be available by late January. The two parts of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals (the Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Right and Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue) can be read in translations by Mary Gregor or John Ladd. The Critique of Practical Reason is best translated by Lewis White Beck. Alternatively, the Cambridge Edition of Kant contains all these works and more in a single volume called Practical Philosophy, translated by Gregor.

In addition to the works mentioned, certain chapters of Lewis Beck's Commentary on Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, on reserve in the library or available in paperback, are strongly recommended for students wishing to connect Kant's ethics with the problems and arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason. See especially Part I and the chapter on Freedom (chapter 11 of Part II) in Beck's Commentary.

A critical examination of major historical and contemporary works in social and political philosophy. Among the authors to be studied are Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Madison, Marx, Mill, Rawls, Nozick, and Nagel. The text is Classics of Political and Moral Philosophy, ed. Cahn (Oxford University Press, 2002). Grades will be based on an optional mid-term examination and a required final examination.

It is widely believed that Plato's theory of knowledge is an extension of the metaphysical theory of Ideas or Forms, but reading the dialogues concerned with knowledge suggests that, whether this is true or false, the matter is not simple. In this course we will read closely several Platonic dialogues in which knowledge is a central theme and consider the variety of scholarly interpretations of them.

In the Charmides, the longest and most complex of the accounts offered of temperance is that it is "knowledge of knowledge," which some scholars have taken to be the origin of epistemology. In the Meno, on the other hand, Socrates presents an extended example of the theory that knowledge is recollection. The main question of the Theaetetus is, "What is knowledge?" Though no final answer is arrived at, the dialogue contains an elaborate discussion of the claims of sensation to be knowledge and defense of a theory that it is justified true belief. To lay the groundwork for our central reading, of the Theaetetus, Charmides, and Meno, we will begin by looking at the two especially clear presentations of a theory of Forms or Ideas in the first part of the Parmenides and in the central books of the Republic along with an article by Kenneth Sayre, entitled "Why Plato Never Had a Theory of Forms."

A graduate-level introduction to problems and ideas in the philosophy of language. The major topic concerned are meaning, reference, logical form, the analytic-synthetic distinction, propositional attitudes,names, and indexicals. The empahsis will be on current discussions of these topics and their relation to basic issues in the history of philosophy. The text is A. Martinich, Readings in the Philosophy of Language, 4th ed., Oxford University Press. Further information and syllabus will be posted at comet.lehman.cuny.edu/mendel

Course meets T/Th 1/28/03 through 3/13/03

The ethics of care is only a few decades old, but by now offers an alternative to the dominant approaches of Kantian moral theory, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics. It arose in part out of dissatisfaction with dominant moral theories, and has been significantly developed by feminist moral philosophers in recent years. The latter have taken care ethics well beyond its early formulations by, especially, the psychologist Carol Gilligan and the philosopher of education Nel Noddings.

The ethics of care recognizes the moral priority of caring for the particular others for whom we are responsible. Care ethics focuses on responsiveness to need, empathetic understanding, and the interrelatedness of persons, rather than on individual rationality or universal moral rules. It emphasizes relations between persons rather than the preferences or dispositions of individuals; it is caring relations that are thought to have primary value. Caring relations in the contexts of family and friendship provide examples, but issues of taking responsibility for more distant others in one's community and around the world are an important part of the ethics of care.

The course will presuppose some familiarity with dominant moral theories. It will examine major works developing the ethics of care, and will consider difficulties with and objections to this kind of moral theory. It will briefly consider the similarities between care ethics and virtue ethics and Confucian ethics, and will provide ample opportunity for students to concentrate on some aspect or problem of particular interest to them in the care approach.

Students with limited backgrounds in ethics are advised to brush up. Recommended texts would include:

• Stephen Darwall, Philosophical Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998)
• Marcia Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
• William Frankena, Ethics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973)

Readings for the course will include:

• Virginia Held, "The Ethics of Care," in Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (NY: Oxford UP, forthcoming) to be distributed.
• Selections from Noddings, Gilligan, Baier, Card, Tronto, and Jaggar in Justice And Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, ed. V. Held (Boulder, CO: Westview,1995).
• Diemut Bubeck, Care, Gender, and Justice (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) Intro, Parts II, III.
• Margaret Walker, Moral Understandings (NY: Routledge, 1998).
• Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (NY: Oxford UP, 1999) Chap. 2.

During the most productive years of his career, Galileo Galilei insisted on identifying himself as a philosopher and not merely a mathematician or astronomer. This seminar will focus on the central role Galileo's research and writing played in the transformation of cosmological theory and practice from the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian model prevalent in his student days to a heliocentric view grounded in a mathematized physics applicable to both terrestrial and celestial phenomena.

We will consider the principal philosophical influences on his work: thinkers such as Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi of Cherso, Giordano Bruno and Galileo's own mentor, Jacopo Mazzoni. A close reading of a selection of Galileo's own works will be followed by an analysis of their influence on the next generation of philosopher-cosmologists, including Newton, Descartes and Leibniz. A major focus will be to underscore the central role that science played in the emergence of modern philosophy and to validate Galileo's claim to a major place in the history of our discipline.

Philosophers in the field of moral philosophy often deploy concepts that are also used by professional economists-- "equal opportunity," "least advantaged," "maximization," "minimax" "poverty," "rationality," "value," "welfare,"-- in near-complete ignorance of what economics has learned about how these concepts work. This course analyzes moral dimensions of economic theories and economic systems, with particular attention to operating features of the current national and global economy. The goal is to demonstrate that economics without ethics is empty and ethics without economics is blind.

Part I of the course focuses on libertarian claim that the unregulated free market maximizes welfare and maximizes freedom. Classic texts from Hayek, Friedman, and Nozick will be read through, together with classic literature about how and when markets fail, and how market failures can and should be remedied. One sub-section will be devoted to arguments for free trade, with a look at Stiglitz, Singer, and other commentators on problems of economic globalization.

Part II is devoted to the ethics of income distribution. Discussion will begin with Rawls, Nozick, and Dworkin, then proceed to John Roemer's theory of equal opportunity and John Broome's theory of fairness. Some time will be devoted to econometric studies of the causes of poverty.

Part III takes up the question for whether some items, for moral reasons, should be excluded from economic transactions: should there be a free market in blood, body parts, sexual services, recreational drugs, surrogate motherhood? The text for this section is Elizabeth Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics.

Part IV considers ethical problems that arise in the operation of the business system. A survey of the problems will be followed by a survey of textbooks available which consider these problems. When the dust settles, students who take this course can claim to be certified for the teaching of "Business Ethics" in undergraduate schools.

A study of reasoning on the borderlines of cognitive science and epistemology. Topics selected from among:

• AI, the Frame Problem, and Common Sense Reasoning.
• Revision, Perseverance, and All-or-nothing belief.
• Pragmatics, Evolution, and the Rationality Debate.
• Belief Self-Control and First-Person Authority.

For the first class, please read:

1. Daniel Dennett "Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem in AI" in M.Boden, ed. The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford); also in C. Hookway, ed. Minds, Machines, and Evolution (Cambridge).

2. John Pollock "Reasoning about change and persistence: a solution to the frame problem" Nous 31 1997: 143-169. (Basically, this is also 219-229 [and some previous pages for background] of Pollock and Cruz Contemporary Theories of Knowledge 2nd edition.)

CLASS CANCELLED DUE TO UNFORSEEN PERSONAL CIRCUMSTANCES. PROFESSOR DAVIES DEEPLY REGRETS BEING UNABLE TO VISIT THE PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM THIS SEMESTER BUT LOOKS FORWARD TO RETURNING IN SPRING 2004.

Our main goal will be to say what it is for mental states to be conscious, .i.e., in virtue of what do conscious states differ those which are not conscious. In the course of finding an answer, we'll address the following questions: (1) Are all mental states conscious, as Descartes held? Or potentially conscious, as Searle claims? Does a mental state's having sensory quality require that it be conscious? Does its having intentionality? And, if mental states need not be conscious, what does their being mental consist in? (2) What connection is there between a person's being conscious and that person's being in conscious states? Must the two go together? (3) Is a mental state's being conscious a matter of one's being conscious of it? If so, in what way? Do we, e.g., perceive our conscious states? Or is Dretske right that we needn't be conscious of our conscious states? Or Searle, that we cannot be conscious of them? Or Block, that the main ways of a state's being conscious don't require one to be conscious of it? (4) Are sensory states conscious in the same way that intentional states are? Or Block, that a state's being conscious isn't one, but several distinct properties that don't always go together? What connection is there between a state's having sensory quality and its being conscious? Do qualitative properties occasion an explanatory gap? A "hard problem?" What are qualitative mental processes? Does the subjective character of conscious mental phenomena preclude any objective account of their nature, as Nagel urges? (5) Is Dennett right that consciousness results from many interacting processes and is continually revised (his Multiple Drafts Model)? Or that appearance is all there is to the reality of consciousness (his "first-person operationalism")? (6) Can the consciousness of one's own mental states be inaccurate? Do we sometimes confabulate being in mental states we're not actually in? If so, is consciousness merely a matter of self-interpretation? (7) What is the function of consciousness? If mental states need not be conscious, what good is their being conscious when they are? (8) Is there any special tie between consciousness and language? An essential tie, as Descartes held? (9) Is there anything special about how we're conscious of affective states? (10) Are our conscious states unified in any special way? (11) What connection is there between consciousness and metacognitive phenomena, such as feeling-of-knowing experiences? (12) How should we understand the dissociative phenomena revealed in neuropsychological experiments, such as blindsight, anosognosia, prosopagnosia, visual neglect, object agnosia, and hemineglect? Or experimental results on which we seem to decide only after the relevant brain events have occurred?

Most of the readings will be available on the internet:

• web.gc.cuny.edu/cogsci/gc-cn03.htm
• artsci.wustl.edu/drosenth/gc-cn-03.htm

In addition, it will be useful to buy The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, ed. Block, Flanagan, and Guzeldere, MIT, 1996 and Dennett's Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown, 1991

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 course will aim to explore, with reference to contemporary authors, what this is, as well as to achieve as thorough and accurate an understanding as possible of Aristotle's real thinking.

There are many good translations of the Politics available, but in this course I will (for obvious reasons) be using 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 course will introduce students to recent work and modern classics in the theory of knowledge, with the aim of making them conversant with current debates. The topics will include skepticism and possible replies to it; reliabilism and other forms of externalism vs. evidentialism; induction; contextualism vs. absolutism; virtue epistemology; the Gettier problem and its consequences; descriptive vs. normative epistemology; the a priori and necessary truth.

The text is Sven Bernecker and Fred Dretske, eds., KNOWLEDGE: READINGS IN CONTEMPORARY EPISTEMOLOGY. Students are requested to have read selections 22, 23 and 1 for the first meeting. Interested students should contact me, and tell me what background they have in epistemology and their other interests.

Propositional logic, truth assignments, proof theory, soundness and completeness. Predicate logic, models and satisfaction, proof theory, soundness and completeness. Modal logic, models and proof theory. Logics of belief and knowledge. Fuzzy logic, intuitive motivation and semantics. Non-monotonic reasoning. Belief revision.

Students will find the course easier if they have had some elementary logic (or discrete mathematics).

This course will cover the cluster of fundamental logic results grouped under the general heading of incompleteness and undecidability: Gödel's and Rosser's theorems on incompleteness of formal systems of mathematics, Church's theorem on the undecidability of first-order logic, Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of truth, Turing's theorem on the undecidability of the halting problem. Along the way, the basics of computability (recursion) theory will be developed. Some familiarity with first-order logic is needed, along with the ability to follow mathematical arguments. The basic text for the course will be a set of notes, available from my web site, comet.lehman.cuny.edu/fitting; click on "Books & Papers," then on "Unpublished Books," and finally on "Notes on Incompleteness and Undecidability."

The issues to be addessed in this seminar include: (1) the distinction between 'inflationary' and deflationary theories of truth, (2) the relative merits of various deflationary approaches, (3) the value of truth, (4) the space of alternative accounts of meaning, (5) the use theory of meaning, (6) Kripke's meaning-skepticism; (7) vagueness, (8) the normativity of meaning, (9) the relationship between meaning and justification, and (10) the compositionality of meaning.

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.