Spring 2025

Undergraduate courses

R1B  Reading and Composition Through Philosophy. Crockett. MW 5-6:30, Dwinelle 263.

2  Individual Morality and Social Justice. Wallace. MWF 10-11, 2040 Valley Life Sciences Building.

3  Nature of Mind. Lee. MWF 1-2, Lewis 100.

12A  Introduction to Logic. Holliday. TuTh 12:30-2, Hearst Mining 390.

25B  Modern Philosophy. Primus. MWF 11-12, Hearst Annex A1.

98BC-1  Berkeley Connect. Dolan. TBA, TBA.

98BC-2  Berkeley Connect. Dolan. TBA, TBA.

100  Philosophical Methods. Dasgupta. W 4-6, Dwinelle 219.

109  Freedom & Responsibility. Wallace. MWF 2-3, Wheeler 222.

The goal of the course is to provide a selective introduction to historical and contemporary debates about the issues of freedom and responsibility. We will look at the following questions (among others): What is freedom of the will? What is it to be a free agent, or to have freedom of thought? What is involved in moral blame and moral accountability? What kind of freedom do we require to be morally responsible or blameworthy for what we do? Are freedom and responsibility possible if our actions are ultimately governed by deterministic laws? Can moral agency be realized in a world of natural causal processes?

Readings will be drawn from both historical and contemporary sources.

As taught this semester, Phil 109 satisfies the ethics requirement for the philosophy major.

115  Political Philosophy. Viehoff. MWF 1-2, Wheeler 102.

121  Moral Questions of Data Science. Kolodny. MWF 9-10, Wheeler 222.

122  Theory of Knowledge. Zhang. TuTh 2-3:30, Wheeler 108.

128  Philosophy of Science. Rubenstein. TuTh 11-12:30, Dwinelle 88.

132  Philosophy of Mind. Campbell. MWF 10-11, Wheeler 204.

135  Theory of Meaning. MacFarlane. TuTh 11-12:30, Wheeler 222.

140B  Intermediate Logic. Mancosu. TuTh 9:30-11, Etcheverry 3109.

161  Aristotle. Staff. TuTh 9:30-11, Social Sciences 56.

173  Leibniz. Crockett. MWF 3-4, Wheeler 222.

178  Kant. Warren. TuTh 2-3:30, Wheeler 300.

186B  Later Wittgenstein. Ginsborg. TuTh 12:30-2, Wheeler 102.

H196  Senior Seminar: A Collaborative Writing Workshop. Ginsborg. TBA, Philosophy 234.

198BC-2  Berkeley Connect. Lane. W 6-7, 201 Giannini.

198BC-1  Berkeley Connect. Lane. W 5-6, 80 Social Sciences.

Graduate seminars

290-1  Graduate Seminar: Causation, Time, and Free Will. Campbell. M 12-2, Philosophy 234.

We’ll review some recent analyses of causation, as found in the current literature, and look at how they apply to mental causation, the ways we ordinarily think about time and our understanding of free will.

Time: Every known human society thinks in terms of a linear time: the time in which one’s own birth and death are located, the time of one’s ancestors, and the time of one’s children and their descendants. Most communities have some story to tell about the origin of their society, and its history. Every known animal species is capable of temporal cognition, often in startlingly complex ways. Animals may have internal stopwatches and be able to compare temporal intervals, as linger or shorter. Animals can estimate and use their temporal locations on circadian and circannual clocks, for example. Yet no other species than humans has clock and calendar time: the linearly organized series of times around which we conceptualize our lives. This raises a puzzle. Since the rest of the animal kingdom manages just fine without linear time, why is it that humans use it? It’s not as if linearly organized times are merely phenomena, like gamma-ray bursts, which humans can recognize even though other species cannot. We put linear time at the center of our moral and practical lives. In many languages, it’s impossible even to report an event without specifying its location in linear time: tense marking is often compulsory. We ask what we are going to do with our lives, and wonder if we are wasting time. But when all other animal species operate without any conception at all of linear time, why is it that we not only use linear time, but give it this central place in our lives? Is there some other difference between humans and other animals, that explains why we think in terms of linear time and they do not?

Free Will: Discussion of free will is usually cast in terms of an ability humans are thought to have to control their actions. The opening sentence of O’Connor and Franklin’s excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on ‘Free Will’ is: ‘The term “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one’s actions’. And it’s usually thought that humans are distinctive among animals in having this kind of control. The more fundamental question, though, is not what kind of control is distinctive of humans, but why humans need to be able to control their actions in a way that other animals do not. The difference between humans and animals, in what kinds of temporal thinking they have a use for, can be traced to this underlying difference in the causal structure of human and animal minds that allows us to think and act freely.

Causation: We’ll look at differences between the causal structure of human psychology and the causal structures of the mental lives of other animals that underpin these differences in free will and temporal thinking. The central questions here have to do with the relationship between generality and causal explanation. Does all causal explanation have to be grounded in generalizations, as most causal theorists have thought? Or is there a special place for the idiosyncratic, the one-off, particularly when we’re giving causal explanations that relate to human psychology?

290-2  Graduate Seminar: The mathematics of the infinitely large: a genealogy.. Mancosu. Th 2-4, Philosophy 234.

Description: Contemporary set theory provides a simple criterion for measuring sizes of infinite collections: Two sets A and B have the same size if and only if A and B can be put into one-to-one correspondence. This criterion, along with a criterion for ordering unequal sizes of infinity, allowed Cantor to develop a theory of transfinite numbers. But the road that led to Cantor was a complex and fascinating one. Historically, several conflicting intuitions concerning the proper way to extend counting from the finite to the infinite were put forward. For instance, many mathematicians and philosophers during the middle ages (and later) defended intuitions (based on frequency or on part-whole relations) that were in conflict with the criterion of one-to-one correspondence. In addition, attempts to develop an arithmetic of infinite numbers were carried out using intuitions and principles that were quite distant from the system of Cantorian cardinalities. Fascinatingly, some of these early intuitions and ideas have recently found a coherent mathematical implementation. In this seminar we will explore the genealogy of the issues related to the problem of assigning sizes to infinite collections and the attempts to develop systems of infinite numbers. We will start from Greek times and then progressively reach the thirteenth century. We will read texts by, among others, Aristotle, Euclid, Proclus, Philoponus, Al-Kindi, Ibn Qurra, Avicenna, Robert Grosseteste, and William of Auvergne. In the second half of the seminar we will go over a book by Prof. Mancosu titled “The wilderness of infinity. Robert Grosseteste, William of Auvergne and mathematical infinity in the thirteenth century” (forthcoming for OUP). While the focus of the seminar is mostly historical and philosophical, we will also give some attention to the contemporary mathematical theories that implement the non-Cantorian intuitions mentioned above.

290-3  Graduate Seminar: The Metaphysics and Psychology of Causation. Gómez Sánchez/Rubenstein. Tu 4-6, Philosophy 234.

We will discuss various metaphysical accounts of causation (e.g. in terms of counterfactuals and probability), the psychological role of causal concepts (e.g. how we infer causal relations), and the nature of high-level causation (e.g. causal exclusion arguments).

290-4  Graduate Seminar: Love and Knowing. Noë. W 2-4, Philosophy 234.

You don’t love someone because of their qualities. If you did, then your love would be fickle and inconstant, since qualities change, and different people may share the same qualities. Might it be that love comes first, that it is the love itself, or the loving attitude, that first puts you in a position to value the other, to perceive their qualities, to appreciate who and what and how they are?

But this would be a paradoxical outcome, since it hostages love and perception each to the other. To perceive the beloved, you must in a way already love them, but you can’t love them without already perceiving them.

One solution would be to allow that the connection between love and perception, or love and knowing, is tighter than we usually think. Something like this thought is suggested by Hanne de Jaegher (2019) who writes that “in their most minimal, stripped down form, loving and knowing are manifestations of the same basic, existential way of relating.”

The purpose of this seminar is to explore nature of love with an eye to the thought that perceiving and knowing might be, at least in some respects, love-like, and that love, for its part, might be, at least in part, the exercise or expression of love. One of the ideas that will guide us: that an account of love is critical to our understanding of what it is enter into any kind of relationship with anything at all.

Among the authors we may read are: Anne Carson, Harry Frankfurt, Edward Harcourt, John Haugeland, Belle Hooks, Hanne de Jaeger, Troy Jollimore, Niko Kolodny, Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Lear, Simon May, Plato and Gillian Rose.

290-5  Graduate Seminar. Sluga. Th 10-12, Philosophy 234.

290-6  Graduate Seminar: Ethics and Time. Frick. W 4-6, Philosophy 234.

What role does time play in our ethical theorizing? This seminar will survey recent work in normative ethics on various aspects of this question.

We will begin by looking at the relationship of moral agents to their own future actions. Consider the debate between actualists and possibilists about moral rightness. Do facts about what I will do affect what I ought to do? Suppose it is Professor Procrastinate’s turn to serve as department chair. Procrastinate, however, can foresee that, if he agrees to become Chair, he will skimp on his duties, with highly detrimental consequences for the department. Is it therefore right for Procrastinate to refuse to become Chair – despite the fact that it is entirely possible for Procrastinate to accept the position and to do a good job?

More generally: Under what conditions is it morally appropriate for an agent to treat her future actions as ‘given’ – to take a purely ‘predictive’ rather than a ‘deliberative’ stance towards her own agency? Could Professor Procrastinate justify his refusal to become Chair to others by appealing to his future laziness? When is treating one’s future behavior as given a problematic form of evasion? Are there situations where it is, by contrast, the responsible thing to do?

What of the future behavior of other agents? Consider the problem of intervening agency: I can foresee that if I perform some action A that would normally be permissible or even morally optimific, another agent will perform some voluntary action B that seriously harms an innocent third party. If, knowing this, I do A, am I morally responsible for the harm that the intervening agent inflicts? How do the consequences of another person’s future actions affect my own reasons for action? Relatedly, to what extent am I required to pick up the slack for other people’s predictable failure to live up to their responsibilities?

We will spend some time thinking about the morality of threats and deterrence. When threats are morally wrong, what makes them wrong? Can it be morally permissible to make threats, in order to deter others from aggression or wrongdoing, that it would be impermissible to carry out?

Next, we will consider a set of questions about a person’s moral power to alter the ways in which he is free to act in the future and the ways in which others may permissibly act towards him. I can seek to constrain my future actions, either morally, by making promises or entering into binding agreements with others, or causally, by closing off certain future options. What are the limits on this power? Are there certain promises that fail to bind my future self? Are there some ways of causally constraining my future actions that ‘wrong’ my future self? Relatedly, I have the moral power to make it permissible for others to treat me in ways that would otherwise have been morally wrong – by signing an advance directive, for instance, or by alienating certain future rights of mine, e.g. through entering into a non-disclosure agreement. Again, what are the limits on this moral power? Are some of my rights inalienable? Are there some ways of treating me that I can consent to contemporaneously, but not in advance or in retrospect?

The second half of this course will focus on changes in our attitudes over time, and their normative significance:

(1) Our pre-theoretical attitudes towards our own wellbeing are often temporally asymmetric. All else equal, we would prefer our pleasures to lie in the future and our sufferings in the past, even at the price of experiencing less pleasure and more suffering over the course of our lifetimes. (Suppose you awake in a hospital bed, groggy and confused. You’re unsure what exactly has happened. What you know is that today is either (i) the day *after *a very painful operation or (ii) the day before a moderately painful operation. Which would you hope is the case, (i) or (ii)? Many answer (i), although this way their life will have contained more pain overall, all else equal). Are such temporal asymmetries of self-concern rationally justified, or are they a rationally indefensible form of time-bias? Does our answer change when we shift from the first-personal to the third-personal case?

(2) In what way do a person’s future attitudes, such as satisfaction or regret, bear on the normative evaluation of her present actions, and vice versa? Is the fact that in the future she will be glad that she did action A always a sound consideration in favor of choosing A? If not, why not? Similarly, is the claim that an agent acted wrongly by doing action B compatible with the claim that, in the future, it will be reasonable for her not to regret, indeed to affirm, having done B?

(3) Can our own agency affect the balance of reasons between two courses of action? Are there ‘voluntarist reasons’, i.e. considerations that become reasons for actions only through an act of will, such that we sometimes make it true, through an act of will, that we have most reason to do one thing rather than another? Are there transformative choices which alter, in some fundamental choice, ‘who we are’? Can such choices be rational?

290-7  Graduate Seminar: The Structure of Wronging. Kolodny. W 12-2, Philosophy 234.

This seminar will probe two of the most central questions in moral philosophy: How do various considerations conspire to make it the case that I wrong you by X-ing, and what special significance, if any, does the fact that I wrong you by X-ing have? Suppose that I would wrong you by failing to aid you, which I can easily do. It might seem straightforward why I would wrong you: because I would set back your interests needlessly. But, for one thing, what then is the significance, if any, of the further fact that it wrongs you, over and above setting back your interests needlessly? For another thing, it seems that this in any event cannot be the whole answer. For if you consent to my not aiding you, my failure to aid you no longer wrongs you, even though it remains the case that it sets back your interests needlessly. For yet another thing, there are cases in which I wrong you even though, or so it seems, my action does not set back any interest of yours. Arthur Ripstein gives the example of harmlessly sleeping in your bed while you are at work. Such cases lead some to a “two-level” view, such as David Hume’s account of the “artificial virtues,” rule utilitarianism, or contractualism, according to which my X-ing wrongs you, roughly, because of the interests that would be set back by a social practice of permitting such actions. Such cases lead others, most notably (the incoming White’s Chair at Oxford) David Owens, to suggest that you have “deontic interests” in its being the case that I wrong you by X-ing. And such cases lead still others, such as Ripstein himself, to deny that the fact that I wrong you by X-ing is to be explained in terms of interests at all.

Authors we read may include, among others, David Hume, John Rawls, Judith Thomson, Frances Kamm, T.M. Scanlon, Jay Wallace, Derek Parfit, Brad Hooker, Arthur Ripstein, and David Owens.