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.

An introduction to some central issues in moral and political philosophy. The course will focus on issues of objectivity, disagreement, and pluralism in the domain of value. Questions to be addressed include: Are there objective moral standards, or are moral and other values relative? What are some specific moral requirements (relating to killing, sex, and helping people in need)? What is involved in leading a meaningful human life? Can morality contribute to making one’s life good? What makes a society just, and worthy of our allegiance? What are the implications of pluralism for social tolerance? When and why should we tolerate moral and political views that we find abhorrent? Texts will be taken from contemporary sources, and will be made available on the bCourses site for the class.

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

This course will be an introduction to some of the major debates in Philosophy of Mind. Is consciousness a purely physical phenomenon? Is the brain a computer and the mind its software? Are our common-sense ideas about how to explain people’s behavior compatible with contemporary scientific views about the structure of the brain? How can the mind represent the external world? This course will be an introduction to some of the major debates in Philosophy of Mind. Is consciousness a purely physical phenomenon? Is the brain a computer and the mind its software? Are our common-sense ideas about how to explain people’s behavior compatible with contemporary scientific views about the structure of the brain? How can the mind represent the external world?

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

Logical reasoning is essential in most areas of human inquiry. The discipline of Logic treats logical reasoning itself as an object of study. Logic has been one of the main branches of philosophy since Aristotle; it revolutionized the foundations of mathematics in the 20th century; and it has been called “the calculus of computer science,” with applications in many areas. Logic has also played an important role in the investigation of language and the mind, as the basis for formal semantics in linguistics and automated reasoning in artificial intelligence. Today, Logic is an interdisciplinary subject with many applications.

PHILOS 12A is intended as a first course in logic for students with no previous exposure to the subject. The course treats symbolic logic. Students will learn to formalize reasoning in symbolic languages with precisely defined meanings and precisely defined rules of inference. Symbolic logic is by nature a mathematical subject, but the course does not presuppose any prior coursework in mathematics—only an openness to mathematical reasoning.

The Spring 2025 installment of 12A will concentrate on three systems of symbolic logic: propositional logic (also known as sentential logic); syllogistic logic; and predicate logic (also known as first-order logic). Propositional logic formalizes reasoning involving “propositional connectives” such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if…then’, and ‘if and only if’, as these words are used in mathematics. Syllogistic logic formalizes reasoning involving basic patterns of “quantification” such as ‘all whales are mammals’ or ‘some animals are carnivores’. Finally, predicate logic formalizes reasoning involving a greater variety of patterns of quantification, plus the attribution of properties to objects, both of which are on display in a statement such as ’for every number that is prime, there is a larger number that is prime’.

Students from philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics will find important connections between the symbolic logic covered in 12A and their other coursework.

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

Descartes, Elisabeth, Spinoza, Locke, Conway, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. Topics will include the relation of the self to the world, the possibility and extent of one’s knowledge, the nature of bodies and causation, and the relationship of theology to philosophy.

98BC-1  Berkeley Connect. Lane. Tu 5-6, 237 Cory.

98BC-2  Berkeley Connect. Lane. Tu 6-7, 201 Giannini.

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

THIS COURSE IS RESTRICTED TO PHILOSOPHY MAJORS.

It is intended to improve the student’s ability to read and write philosophy. Special emphasis will be placed on developing analytic skills. This semester we will first discuss questions about the ethics of AI and other future technologies, and then examine a number of philosophical texts on the foundations of ethical theory. There will be short written assignments each week, as well as a longer final paper, which will focus on the essays we are reading. In addition to two hours of lecture, students will meet in tutorials with a teaching assistant in order to discuss the reading, their weekly writing assignment, and the preparation for the final paper.

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.

An advanced class in political philosophy. Topics may include political authority, disobedience and protest, democracy, civil rights, and related matters.

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

This course explores, from a philosophical perspective, ethical questions arising from collecting, drawing inferences from, and acting on data, especially when these activities are automated and on a large scale. Topics include: bias, fairness, discrimination, interpretability, privacy, paternalism, freedom of speech, and democracy.

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

This is an upper-division course on the philosophical theory of knowledge. We consider ourselves to know many things: the Sun will rise tomorrow, 1+1=2, the Earth is not flat, Plato wrote The Republic, murder is wrong, etc. But what is knowledge, and how do we acquire it? In this course, we will examine various skeptical arguments—arguments that cast doubt on the possibility of certain kinds of knowledge—and the responses to such arguments.

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

We will be considering a few of the classic questions in the philosophy of science, such as: how are scientific theories supported by evidence? How does scientific explanation work? What is the nature of causation, laws, probability, and time, and how do they relate to one another? Does the success of science suggest that everything can ultimately be explained in physical terms?

As taught this semester, Phil 128, can satisfy group A of the Epistemology/Metaphysics requirement.

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

This course will focus on the philosophy and science of conscious experience. What is consciousness? Can it be explained scientifically, and if so, what would a mature science of it look like? Optimistic philosophers and scientists have proposed theories of consciousness, while pessimists argue that there are fundamental philosophical obstacles to achieving a fully satisfactory theory. We will consider a number of proposed theories, and assess some of the alleged obstacles, including the notorious “hard problem” of consciousness.

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

An examination of some philosophical problems about the intentionality of language and thought. By virtue of what are some things in the world (for example, sentences and thoughts) about others? Is meaning always a matter of interpretation, or do some things have meaning independently of interpretation? Is conceptual thought prior to language? What would it take for a computer to have thoughts? Are the meanings of our words and the contents of our mental states determined by what’s going on inside our brains, or do they depend also on features of our physical and social environments? Could there be facts about meaning we could only discover by looking in someone’s brain? Are there objective facts about meaning at all? In exploring these and related questions, we will read the work of Quine, Davidson, Grice, Putnam, Dennett, Burge, Block, Fodor, Dretske, and others.

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

This course covers the most important metalogical results that are of interest to philosophers. It is divided into three parts. The first two parts are mathematical in style whereas the last part is philosophical. In the first part we will cover the basic notions of computability theory and study in detail the Turing machine approach to computability. The second part of the course will give a detailed presentation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and related results. Finally, we will look at the philosophical relevance of these logical results to various areas of philosophy.

Prerequisite: 12A (or equivalent) or permission from the instructor.

Course requirements: exercise sets approximately every ten days (counting for 60% of final grade) and a philosophical paper due at the end of the semester (40% of final grade).

C158  Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy. Coseru. TuTh 9:30-11, Dwinelle 242.

This is an introduction to Buddhist philosophy, extending from its origins (as preserved in the early sūtra literature), down through its evolution into multiple competing philosophical traditions (Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, Pramāṇavāda, and so on). We will explore Buddhist approaches to issues in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, language, and ethics. One theme running through the course will be radical skepticism; we will explore how Buddhist philosophers questioned not only the existence of an enduring or essential self but also the existence of an external (mind-independent) world, and how their analyses impacted their understandings of meaning in language, their accounts of the nature and function of consciousness. As taught this semester, Phil C158 may satisfy the more inclusive history requirement (which is: 153, 155, 156A, 160-188)

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

This course is an in-depth introduction to the philosophy of Aristotle. We will study selections from each of his major works. The course divides into four units: (1) The Organon; (2) The Philosophy of Nature; (3) Metaphysics; (4) Ethics and Political Philosophy.

Prerequisites: Philosophy 25A or an equivalent lower-level course in ancient Greek philosophy.

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

This course will be a detailed examination of the philosophical writings of the 17th century philosopher G.W. Leibniz, with an emphasis on his metaphysical views in relation to those of Descartes and (especially) Malebranche. Topics will include Leibniz’s theodicy, as well as his views on the relation between mind and body, the nature of space and time, the relation between our representations of the world and the world as it is in itself, the nature of substance and material reality, the relation between God and creation, the nature of inter- and intra-substantial causality, the nature of ideas and intellectual cognition, and the unity of organic entities.

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

In this course we will examine some of the major metaphysical and epistemological themes of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We will be focusing particularly on Kant’s views on the following topics: a priori knowledge and how it is possible, space and time, objectivity and experience, self-knowledge, and transcendental idealism and the contrast between appearances and things in themselves. Several short papers and two longer papers will be required.

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

The focus of the course is Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, often considered one the most important works of twentieth-century philosophy. This work, written in the later part of Wittgenstein’s career, offers a thoroughgoing critique of traditional philosophical approaches to language and mind, and it does so in a way which is itself very untraditional. Rather than putting forward and defending philosophical claims, Wittgenstein offers a kind of scrapbook of observations, scenarios, descriptions of aspects of human behavior, questions, and imagined stretches of dialogue. What he says appears to be intended to make us question the ways in which philosophy is traditionally practiced, but it is not clear what, if anything, he means to put in its place. And while what he writes is usually not difficult to understand at a sentence-by-sentence basis, it is often very difficult to know what his point is in saying the things he says. We will aim in the course to arrive at an understanding of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy through a close reading of central parts of the work, although we will also pay some attention to other late writings by Wittgenstein and to interpretations put forward in the secondary literature. Because much of Wittgenstein’s purpose in the Investigations is to question the ways in philosophy is typically pursued, students are advised not to take this course unless they already have a substantial background in philosophy. It is strongly recommended in particular that students in the course have taken either Philosophy 25A or 25B (or equivalent) and at least one of Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, and Theory of Meaning.

190  Proseminar: Hannah Arendt: Thinking, Acting, Judging. Kaiser. Tu 4-7, Wheeler 124.

This seminar will focus on Hannah Arendt’s later, more philosophical writings. We will analyze her understanding of action, speech, and language, as they relate to her conception of the ‘political’ understood as ‘the common space of appearance’. Only within the dynamic intangible ‘web’ of human relationships can we disclose ourselves as distinct and unique. Moreover, the revelatory quality of action and speech can show itself only in true togetherness as outlined in Arendt’s major work The Human condition

Though initially the emphasis is on action and speech in their revolutionary potential as ‘new beginnings’ within a participatory political context, Arendt also worked out key concepts such as freedom, will, responsibility, and truth within their wider historical and philosophical horizons. Especially the role of thinking and the capacity for judgment moved center stage in her phenomenological analysis of a life increasingly endangered by ‘world and (technological) earth-alienation’, totalitarianism, violence, and last not least ‘the banality’ of evil: Amor mundi (love of the world) needs ‘thinking without banisters’ as much as reflective judgment based upon a sensus communis if despair is not to outrun hope, especially in ‘dark’ or ‘crisis’ stricken times. Thus thinking, willing, and our capacity for judging figure prominently in her later renowned guest lectures, essays, and the (unfinished) posthumously published The Life of the Mind.

Seminar discussions will build on a (selective) close reading of these later works and some of Arendt’s most influential shorter essays. But we will also analyze the impact of other philosophers on Arendt’s thinking, including Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.

As taught this semester, Phil 190 may satisfy the more inclusive history requirement (which is: 153, 155, 156A, 160-188)

Required texts:

– Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, enlarged 2nd edition 2018, University of Chicago Press, (paperback) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58660-1.

– Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1981 (paperback, one volume edition) Harcourt ISBN-13: 978-0-15-651992-2

Recommended:

Hannah Arendt and Ronald Beiner, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (paperback) 1989, University of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0226025957

These texts (and other shorter essays) will also be made available online—if possible—via the UC Berkeley Library or via bCourses.

H196  Senior Seminar: A Collaborative Writing Workshop. Ginsborg. Tu 4-6, Philosophy 302.

A collaborative writing workshop. Students in the honors program will develop their thesis, which they will have started to write in the Fall in Philos H195. Other students will develop a paper from a previous course into a form suitable for a writing sample for applying to graduate school. Students will circulate drafts for discussion, and will also be assigned to comment on other students’ drafts. As time permits, philosophical background for the work in progress may be read and discussed.

Enrollment is by instructor approval only. Students who are not in the honors program, but who are interested in enrolling, should email Hannah Ginsborg (ginsborg@berkeley.edu) by October 25, 2024. Emails should include (1) a list of courses taken or in progress in philosophy, together with grades received (or an unofficial transcript); and (2) a draft, outline, or description of the paper to be developed. Students who are in the honors program should email Hannah Ginsborg (ginsborg@berkeley.edu) for an enrollment code, but do not need to give any additional information about courses or thesis topic.

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

198BC-1  Berkeley Connect. Dolan. 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 the 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 of perceptual consciousness or knowledge. 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, Daniela Dover, Harry Frankfurt, Edward Harcourt, John Haugeland, Sara Heinämaa, Belle Hooks, Hanne de Jaeger, Troy Jollimore, Niko Kolodny, Iris Murdoch, Gabriel Richardson Lear, Jonathan Lear, Simon May, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Plato, and Gillian Rose.

290-5  Graduate Seminar: Political Realism – Classical Roots and Contemporary Issues. Sluga. Th 10-12, Philosophy 234.

Here are some of the topics to be covered:

Why be realists?

Ideals and possibilities (Aristotle, Politics)

The moral and the useful (Machiavelli, The Prince)

The natural and the contractual (Hobbes, Leviathan)

Virtues and laws (Hanfei)

Unity and plurality (S. Hampshire, Innocence and Experience)

Values and fear (B. Williams, In the Beginning was the Deed)

Theory and political practice: (Raymond Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics)

The epistemology of political realism

Experience and politics

Realism and uncertainty

The dialectic of politics

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.

290-8  Graduate Seminar. Cohen. F 12-3, TBA.

290-9  Graduate Seminar: Aristotle’s Physics, Book VIII. Hobbs. Tu 12-2, Philosophy 234.

This seminar will consist in a close reading of Book VIII of Aristotle’s Physics. The culmination of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, Physics VIII argues that, necessarily, the motion of the ordered universe is eternal, and that this eternal motion demands that we posit a first unmoved mover of the ordered universe. In the course of making this argument, Aristotle touches on many issues crucial to his natural philosophy, including: whether and how animals move themselves; why the elements should still be considered to be moved by something external to them, even though they seem to initiate motion spontaneously; why locomotion is explanatorily prior to other kinds of motion; and what are acceptable and what unacceptable stopping points in the search for ultimate explanations of the natural order. In addition to considering these (and other) issues, we will also be interested in considering the relation between Aristotle’s project in Physics VIII and the apparently similar, even partially overlapping, theological project of Metaphysics Λ. We will be reading the text in C.D.C. Reeve’s English translation, alongside relevant secondary literature.