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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TEXT

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

RECOMMENDED

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

Philosophies of Ancient Iran (Zarathustrian), India (Hinduism, Buddhism), China (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism), and Japan (Buddhism) will be considered historically as well as analytically. Since these philosophic conceptions emerged from religious traditions, the transformation form mythic to rationalist thought will be examined as either providing a philosophic elaboration or a replacement of the theology. The philosophies will ultimately be discussed with a view to extracting their enduring insights, whether metaphysical, moral, or social.

List of Books

• Buddhism by C. H. Hamilton (Bobs-Merrill Co.)
• The Sayings of Confucius Tr. James R. Ware (Mentor Classic)
• The Buddhist Religion by R. H. Robinson and W. L. Johnson (Wadsworth Pub. Co.)
• The Chinese Way in Religion by L. G. Thompson (Wadsworth Pub. Co.)
• The Hindu Religious Tradition by T. J. Hopkins (Wadsworth Pub. Co.)
• The Upanishads Tr. Prabhavananda and Manchester (Mentor Classic)
• The Bhagavad Gita

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. Identity: 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 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)?

This course is intended to enhance each student's skills in teaching philosophy. Among the matters to be discussed and practiced in class are motivating students, choosing texts, organizing courses, making presentations, constructing examinations, and providing grades.

We shall review all the steps in teaching an introductory philosophy course, using as our introductory anthology Exploring Philosophy, ed. Cahn (Oxford University Press paperback).

Grades in the course will be based on the performance of numerous pedagogical assignments. The course is not open to auditors.

Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) was a brilliant philosopher who was influenced by and in turn influenced his Cambridge colleagues, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Keynes. In addition, there is now an interesting body of contemporary philosophical work that has been deeply influenced by Ramsey. The course intends to cover his philosophical work in the following areas (excluding his contributions to Economics): (1) Belief, (2) Truth, (3) Laws and Causation, (4) Probability and Knowledge, (5) Theories, (6)The lack of a logical distinction between Universals (Properties) and Particulars, (7) Conditionals, and (8) The distinction between logical and semantic paradoxes (Russell; The Liar).

The contemporary influence (Externalism and Reliability theories of knowledge; that belief comes in degrees which satisfy the axioms of probability; two theories of truth, a deflationist one, and a dialetheic one (some contradictions are true); the development of a subjective theory of probability,; two accounts of laws -one modified and adopted by D.Lewis, the other closer to views of N. Goodman and R. Braithwaite; an account of theories [Ramsey Sentences] now explicitly applied to functionalist theories of mind; the distinction between logical and semantic paradoxes, etc.,

Main Text: F.P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, Ed. D.H.Mellor, , Cambridge University Press, 1990 (Paperback).

The contemporary papers of interest are located in various journals and books that are not readily accessible, and they will be available in Xerox at the Philosophy Office.

THE COURSE START DATE IS SEPTEMBER 3, 2003
THE COURSE END DATE IS OCTOBER 29, 2003

COURSE CANCELLED

THE COURSE START DATE IS SEPTEMBER 4, 2003
THE COURSE END DATE IS OCTOBER 21, 2003

This seminar will focus on issues surrounding deflationism, relativism, truth, meaning, realism, and fictionalism -- especially as they bear on normative domians.

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.

This material should be given a fresh reading before the first class on 9/8/03.

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 mental phenomena, such as thinking and sensing; and (4) the nature of psychological explanation and its significance for getting an answer to (3).

Because knowing requires mental functioning, nineteenth-century discussions typically follow Kant and Descartes in explaining mind in terms of role in knowing. But, because knowing involves a highly specialized aspect of mental functioning, that strategy ignores mental phenomena that play little or no role in knowing and emphasizes epistemic concerns irrelevant to the nature of mind. Most 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 salutary 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 that way about the mental states of others. An initial question, then, is how we do know about others' mental states. How do we know what others are thinking and feeling and, indeed, 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', it's crucial to be clear about how we know our own.

This cluster of question inevitably leads to another. We know about the minds of others only by way of connections mental states have to bodily states or to behavior. So we can deal with that question only if we 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 investigate 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: intentional 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 sometimes 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 psychology cast doubt on the applicability of our commonsense psychological concepts.

We'll use The Nature of Mind, ed. Rosenthal and some xeroxes on library reserve.

This course studies the relationship between political liberalism and policies of political, religious and social toleration. We will examine the various justifications offered for both requiring tolerance and for setting limits to it and we shall address the following questions:

1. Why is tolerance viewed as a distinctly liberal virtue?

2. Under what understanding of liberalism may we say not only that certain defenses of toleration and certain attacks on it depend on liberal assumptions but also that the very notion of a liberal state depends on the kind of practices that are tolerated within it?

There will be two short papers (3-5 pages) during the course of the term and one final examination.

Readings will include selections from the following:

• John Locke A Letter Concerning Toleration
• B. Spinoza, "Freedom of Thought and Speech" (Theological and Political Treatise)
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (ch.2,3 and 4)
• Igor Primoratz, "On Tolerance in Morals", Philosophical Studies, 1987
• Lord Devlin, selection from The Enforcement of Morals
• Wolff, Moore, Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance
• Ronald Dworkin, "Lord Devlin and the Enforcement of Morals"
• Brenda Cohen, "An Ethical Paradox", Mind, April 1967
• Trudy Govier, "Tolerance and Dogmatism in Morals", Mind, 1982
• C.D. Broad, "Conscience and Conscientious Action", in Ethics & the History of Philosophy (London:Routledge '52)
• Jonathan Harrison, "Utilitarianism and Toleration", Philosophy 87, 1962- 421-432.
• W.K. Frankena, "Is Morality a Purely Personal Matter? Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3, (1978)
• David Richards, "Toleration and Free Speech", Philosophy and Public Affairs 17, Fall '88
• Konstantin Kolenda, "Freedom and Tolerance", Humanist Mr-Ap- '88
• Rod Sykes, "The Right to Believe and Believing the Right Thing," Religious Studies 18 (December '82)

Other readings (which may or may not substitute for some of the above) will accommodate student interest.

This course will investigate the relation between social change and legal change. It has been said, for example, that modern tort law was created by (and/or because of) the industrial revolution. On the other hand, most historians agree that the development of particular legal institutions made the industrial revolution possible in some places and not possible in others. Law responds, positively or negatively, to social change, and social change is facilitated, retarded, or blocked by law. The 20th century has seen revolutionary changes on several fronts. This course will trace the changes in certain areas of law, as well as consider the causes, effects, implications, and possible justifications for such change, either legislatively or judicially. Volatile areas of law such as the following will be discussed: drug law, welfare law, law of discrimination, censorship, marriage and family, sexual harassment, domestic violence, abortion, morals offenses, civil rights, or privacy law. Texts will be contemporary books or essays on these areas of law, such as: Feinberg, Harmless Immoralities; Gruen & Panichis, Morality, Sex and the Law; J. Williams on family law; J. de Cew on privacy law, D. Husak on drug law; or selections from P. Smith, The Nature and Process of Law. Grade will be based on a term paper.

This course will entail an in depth study of the philosophy of John Rawls, arguably the greatest political theorist of the 20th century, as well as of central criticisms of his work from diverse directions. In the first part of the semester we will familiarize students with the basic concepts and themes of A Theory of Justice (1971) with close attention being paid to Rawls's more recent Political Liberalism (1996) viewed as commentary on the main argument (noting developments, conflicts, etc. between the two works). In the second third of the semester we will turn to representative criticisms from the libertarian camp (e.g. Nozick), from communitarians (Sandel, Taylor), as well as from Marxist (G.A. Cohen, Habermas) and feminist perspectives (Okin, Young, and others). The seminar will end with Rawls's more recent The Law of Peoples (1999) and the extension of his view into the international domain, again, inclusive of criticism (e.g. Beitz, Pogge).

In all cases we will seek the best possible interpretation of Rawls's liberal position, and then ask whether it survives the above criticisms or whether (and how far) Rawls's theory must be revised or even discarded altogether in the face of them.

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.

Textbooks:

1. J. Bessie and S. Glennon, Elements of Deductive Inference (Wadsworth)
2. Nagel and Newman, Godel's Proof

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

N.N.B. Before the semester begins go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble etc. to purchase less expensive used copies of the text books.

Natural science has the potential to challenge our most treasured beliefs about the world, ourselves and the way we live. Challenging tradition, Darwin argued that life is not eternal and immutable; life evolves. He also introduced an idea of how this evolution took place through a mindless, mechanical process he called "natural selection". Biology has grown and developed a great deal since then; now it seems to tell us how we came to be, how we relate to the rest of the natural world, and even what we are. As biological ideas get closer to our own condition tempers run higher, and the rhetoric tends to swamp the analysis. Scientific claims with seemingly novel philosophical implications tend to be extremely controversial -they certainly do not follow from the facts alone. Still, even if philosophical claims cannot be simply inferred from factual scientific statements, the natural sciences can at the very least discover philosophically relevant facts.

In this course we will concentrate on the rise of evolutionary biology and look at its relevance to contemporary philosophical work. Our areas of discussion will include: naturalist conceptions of possibility and actuality, the current understanding of species and higher taxa, the origin of complex systems, ontological levels, the rise of language and intelligence, cultural evolution, and the question of morality and human nature.

No special scientific knowledge is presupposed.