Grad Seminars 2016-17 Department of Philosophy Western University
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Grad Seminars 2016-17 Department of Philosophy Western University This is a tentative list of the courses we will be offering next year, as of March 8, 2016. Details will be filled in over the next few days and weeks. Some seminars may be added, and the content of some may be adjusted. FALL TERM Phil 9xxxA: Proseminar (Stainton) Phil 9xxxA: Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Thorp) This seminar is intended to introduce students to some main issues, and some main texts, of Aristotle’s metaphysical enquiry. The issues will include the quest for substance, the meaning of ‘essence’, the idea of ‘being qua being’, form and matter, the nature of soul, the system of categories, the status of mathematics, Aristotelian theology, and the enterprise of metaphysics itself. The texts under discussion will be drawn almost entirely from the Categories and the Metaphysics. Throughout these discussions a watchful eye will be kept on the ways in which Aristotle's work shaped much subsequent thinking. Phil 9xxxA: Thinking Matter in the 17th Century: Descartes to Locke (Hill) The metaphysics of minds and persons in the seventeenth century is a hot topic right now. It intersects many interesting topics concerning the nature of thought, embodiment, morality, freedom, the nature of body, and life after death. This seminar-style course will engage with canonical and non- canonical primary literature as well as the recent secondary literature on this topic. The focus will be on how the problem(s) of thinking matter intersect with positions in the philosophy of mind and representation, morality, action theory, natural immortality and resurrection, and ontology, and vice versa. Special attention will be paid to the following issues: Representation and the Achilles argument against materialism; The unity of distributed cognitive powers; animal cognition; Moral vs Metaphysical arguments for Immortality; the requirements for the conceptual possibilities of immortality and resurrection; the degree and nature of our freedom; the metaphysical requirements for freedom, responsibility, and moral accountability; and voluntarist and rationalist conceptions of metaphysical possibility and necessity. Figures studied will include: Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, More, Suarez, Cavendish, Cordemoy, La Forge, Charleton, Bayle, Overton, and (possibly) Malebranche. (Leibniz and Anne Conway will not be considered in this course.) Phil 9xxxA/Pol 9xxxA: Distributive Justice (Jones) This course examines the debates on distributive justice, the question of giving people what is due to them. The term is divided into three parts. First, we survey the range of positions taken, including those grounded in utility, desert, entitlement, and fairness, along with socialist, communitarian, and feminist critiques. Second, we investigate a recent innovative attempt to defend a compromise between classical and welfare liberal views of justice in John Tomasi’s Free Market Fairness. Finally, we consider Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, in which he criticizes theories of the ideally just society and defends a comparative approach aimed at making our world less unjust. Phil 9xxxA: Rationality (Hoffmaster) Philosophy is grounded in rationality. That rationality is reasoning, the formal reasoning of deduction and the informal reasoning of methods such as argument by analogy. When rationality is restricted to reasoning, however, much of our lives cannot be rational. In particular, the judgments we make all the time cannot be rational. This course will examine a more expansive, process-based conception of rationality that can account for the rationality of judgment. Phil 9xxxA: Survey of Philosophy of Mind (Viger) This survey course in the philosophy of mind is divided into two sections. The first section focuses on concepts and content. We will consider several theories about what concepts are, what it is to have a concept, and problems that each view faces; we will also look at theories of mental content that attempt to explain how our thoughts are about things in the world. Topics will include concepts as definitions, prototypes, symbols in a language of thought, and mere ascriptions made to predict intentional systems. Theories of content we will study include causal/informational theories, naturalistic teleological theories, and phenomenal intentionality theory. The second section of the course investigates ways in which cognitive science is being used to address traditional philosophical questions such as the nature of free will, consciousness, and responsibility. As we better understand the mechanisms that produce our behaviour what is left of our traditional notions of ourselves? Phil 9xxxA: Contemporary Philosophy of Science in Perspective (DiSalle) This is a survey of the central issues in modern philosophy of science, both in contemporary debates, and in historical perspective, as they have evolved through the interaction between philosophy and the sciences over the last few centuries. Topics to be discussed will include realism, scientific representation, conceptual change, the nature of evidence, criteria of meaning, and the structure of scientific theories; readings will be drawn from contemporary literature, and from historical figures such as Newton, Kant, Darwin, Mach, Poincaré, Einstein, Carnap, and Quine. Phil 9xxxA: Cosmology (Smeenk) This course will survey three different topics that have been the focus of active debates among cosmologists and philosophers. The first regards the assessment of theories of the early universe and the origin of the universe. Cosmologists have had remarkably open methodological debates regarding whether these ideas go beyond the “limits of science,” or require a new methodology; we will discuss the philosophy of science literature relevant to these debates, which the cosmologists have (for the most part) ignored. Second, we will consider how to treat probabilities and selection effects due to our presence as observers in relation to the assessment of cosmological theories. Finally, we will consider recent proposals regarding the “emergence” of spacetime in cosmology, from a description of an “initial” state of the universe that does not employ the spacetime concepts of general relativity. For each topic, we will read a combination of recent survey articles (where available) and research articles, primarily from philosophy. Phil 9xxxA: Intensive (3 week) course in philosophy of science; topic TBA (Psillos) WINTER TERM Phil 9xxxA: Survey of Ancient Ethics (Henry) Phil 9xxxB: Grotius and Hobbes (Klimchuk) It is often said that modern political philosophy begins with Hobbes, but in fact it begins with Grotius. And so will we, spending the first half of this course on his Rights of War and Peace (1625) and the second half on Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). We will focus on the points at which they most directly engage one another and on which their shared influence most clearly continues to be felt, on questions on the nature of sovereignty and of law. Among our themes will be the rule of law and a central distinction on which that ideal relies, that between an office and its holder. Other topics will include natural law, the social contract, property, equity, and punishment. Phil 9xxxB/Pol 9xxxB: Theories of Global Justice (Vernon) Until quite recently political theory has focused almost entirely on relations among citizens within states. Now, however, close attention is paid to questions of justice in the relations among, and inequality between, different states. This seminar examines some of the leading recent theories of, and topics in, global justice. The main focus is on issues of distributive justice: the ideas of cosmopolitanism and nationalism are discussed, as well as theorists such as John Rawls and Peter Singer and their critics. Specific topics for examination will include the ethics of immigration and the idea of exploitation. In the final third of the course, we will discuss selected issues of global retributive justice (collective punishment, crimes against humanity) and restitutive justice (reparations, the idea of climate debt). Phil 9xxxB/Pol 9xxxB: Toleration This seminar will begin by closely examining John Locke’s defence of the idea of toleration as it evolved in response to criticism in the last years of the 17th century. Rival interpretations of what was at stake in this debate will be evaluated. We will then move on to discuss possible meanings of “toleration” and objections to it, as well as to various later attempts to ground it in ideas such as “moral pluralism”, “essential contestability”, and “reasonable disagreement”. In the final part of the course, the idea of toleration will be evaluated in relation to other attempts to accommodate diversity, such as multiculturalism and the politics of “recognition”. Phil 9xxxB: Philosophy of Experimentation (Sullivan) Science advances our understanding of the world and ourselves primarily by means of experimentation. Yet, what is an experiment? How do experiments differ across different areas of science? How do experiments produce knowledge? Are experiments always knowledge-generating? What differentiates a successful experiment from an unsuccessful experiment? Answering these questions by exploring historical, philosophical and theoretical analyses of experimentation in the physical, biological and mind-brain sciences will be the primary aims of this course. Phil 9xxxB/Bio 9xxxB: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Philosophy of Biology (Barker) This seminar will bring graduate students from philosophy