Spring Semester 2014
5241 Studies in 18th Century Philosophy-Kant
Instructor: Lisa Shabel
Shabel.1@osu.edu
UH 353 MW 2:20-3:40
Immanuel Kant, an 18th Century German philosopher, is regarded as one of the most influential modern thinkers. His seminal work on the limits of human knowledge, Critique of Pure Reason (1787), represents both a culmination of the Early Modern period and a gateway to 19th and 20th century thought. We will study Kant's epistemology, metaphysics and theory of science by examining as much of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as we can. We will discuss the problem of synthetic a priori knowledge; Kant's theory of pure sensibility; Transcendental Idealism; the Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions of the categories; the System of Principles; and more. Our study will be illuminated by Sebastian Gardner's commentary, entitled Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason, or some similar secondary source.
5260 Studies in 20th Century Philosophy
Instructor: Kevin Scharp
Scharp.1@osu.edu
BO 318 TR 2:20-3:40
We'll read Bertrand Russell's classic, The History of Western Philosophy and discover how one of the founders of analytic philosophy saw the development of Western Philosophy and Western Civilization from the beginning of Greek culture in antiquity to the rise of logical analysis in the early Twentieth Century. Russell is second to none in his appreciation of big picture developments in western thought over the past three thousand years. In 1950, he won the Nobel Prize in literature, in part for The History of Western Philosophy. A goal of the class is to instill in students a sense of how individual philosophers and schools of thought influenced the course of world events, and, conversely, how the historical context of a particular place and time affected its philosophy.
5400 Advanced Political and Social Philosophy: Property
Instructor: Don Hubin
Hubin.1@osu.edu
UH 353 MW 12:45-2:05
This course will focus on the nature and justification of private property. We will begin by examining the nature of ownership and private property. What does it mean to say that a person owns some object? The bulk of the course will be devoted to exploring and critically evaluating various theories purporting to justify (private) ownership (property rights). Some theories of property rights rely on a claim (usually an undefended assumption) of self-ownership. And this is where we will begin our exploration of normative theories of ownership. Is it true, as it is often assumed, that each person owns himself or herself? If so, can this assertion be grounded in some more fundamental moral claim, or is it morally basic? We will then turn to various arguments for private ownership in “external” objects, including natural resources and artifacts. We will also explore the concept and justification of intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks, and patents).
5460 Philosophy in Literature
Instructor: Tim Schroeder
Schroeder.404@osu.edu
UH 353 WF 11:10-12:30
David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, is brilliant, funny, long, difficult, realistic, absurdist, long, full of characters you will love, full of characters you will hate, deeply heartfelt, long, and really, really, epically long. Its themes include the nature of love, the nature of addiction, and how the two are closely related to one another. It is perhaps no coincidence that the philosophical literatures on love and on addiction contain views that make love and addiction more or less the same thing, and other views that make them relatives of a sort. Wallace was on to something.
In this course, we will read Infinite Jest, read the philosophical literature on love, and read philosophical and scientific papers on addiction, and try to make sense of it all.
5750 Advanced Theory of Knowledge
Instructor: Brian Kim
Kim.5062@osu.edu
UH 353 TR 11:10-12:30
Traditionally, philosophical theories of mind, action, and knowledge have focused on the concept of outright belief. Are beliefs individuated by their functional role? Do beliefs and desires cause actions? Is knowledge justified true belief? Each of these questions have focused on an all-or-nothing concept of belief where one either believes that P or does not believe that P. In the 20th century, degrees of belief began to play a more central role in many areas of philosophy. But to this day, there is vigorous debate about how to articulate the relationship between all-or-nothing belief and degrees of belief. For example, we might ask, what is the relationship between being very confident that Reno is west of Los Angeles and outright believing that Reno is west of Los Angeles? The course will cover a variety of issues surrounding this question. We will begin with the Simple Lockean thesis which states that an outright belief is simply a degree of belief that is over some threshold of confidence. Unfortunately, there seem to be some insuperable puzzles and problems with the Lockean thesis. In response, we will survey a variety of alternative proposals and these proposals will raise additional questions about the norms governing these types of beliefs as well as questions about the aims and nature of belief.
5850 Philosophy of Religion
Instructor: Sydney Penner
Penner.13@osu.edu
UH 353 WF 9:35-10:55
This course will survey several issues in philosophy of religion centred around the topic of God and morality. We will focus on contemporary responses, e.g., Robert Merrihew Adams’ Finite and Infinite Goods, to questions such as the following: Does morality depend on God? Would everything be permissible without God? Is God required for human life to be meaningful? Is there moral value to be found in distinctively religious practices? Does morality give us reason to think that God exists? One sometimes gets the impression that there is one way to answer these questions if you are a theist and another way if you are an atheist. In fact, matters are more complicated; there is much disagreement among theists and among atheists. In this course we will begin to think through the various ways in which one might answer such questions. Course requirements will include short reading responses, a presentation to the class, and a final paper in at least two drafts.
8200 Seminar in History
Instructor: Julia Jorati
Jorati.1@osu.edu
UH 353 W 3:55-6:40
Free Will in Early Modern PhilosophyWhat does it take to act freely—does it mean that the action is not completely determined by factors beyond the agent’s control, or are certain kinds of determination compatible with freedom? These and similar questions occupy philosophers today just as they did in the 17th and 18th centuries. The mechanistic worldview popular in that period, similarly to present-day neuroscience, appears to rule out a type of freedom often considered necessary for moral responsibility. Hence, several early modern philosophers felt the need to provide an account of freedom and responsibility that is compatible with a deterministic physics. Interestingly, however, the apparent conflict between moral responsibility and the new science is not the only dimension of the early modern free will debate. There is also, secondly, an important theological dimension: early modern thinkers were worried about the compatibility of human freedom with divine foreknowledge, divine providence, and divine concurrence, and some also held that original sin had corrupted the human soul to the point that its freedom is severely limited. A third dimension is metaphysical: many early modern philosophers have metaphysical commitments—for instance the PSR—that rule out certain types of freedom. In this course, we will investigate these three dimensions of the free will debate by exploring the views of a few prominent early modern philosophers such as (depending on the interests of participants) Hobbes, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.
8300 Seminar in Value Theory
Instructor: Sigrun Svavarsdottir
svavarsdottir.1@osu.edu
UH 353 W 7:00-9:45
Stark, Raving, Mad, Moral Realism: The history of 20th century metaethics is often recounted as a series of responses to Moore’s open question argument for non-reductive moral realism. The ambition of most 20th century non-cognitivists and cognitivists alike was to avoid the alleged metaphysical and epistemological extravagance of non-reductive moral realism. The times have changed. In this century, we have seen some able attempts to defend non-reductive moral or, more broadly, normative realism. This seminar will be devoted to the study of two such attempts: Ralph Wedgwood’s, in The Nature of Normativity (Oxford, 2007) and David Enoch’s, in Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (Oxford, 2011). The seminar will be conducted much like a reading group on these two books. The seminar will be conducted much like a reading group on these two books.
8400 Semantics Seminar & 8600 Philosophy of Language
Instructors: Craig Roberts & Stewart Shapiro
croberts@ling.ohio-state.edu
Shapiro.4@osu.edu
UH 353 T 7:00-9:45
Natural Language Metaphysics
These two graduate seminars, one in philosophy and one in linguistics, will be co-located. It will be run as a single course, team taught by the two of us.
What exactly are we claiming when we put forward our theories about model structures for natural languages? The enterprise looks very close to metaphysics or ontology, describing what some philosophers like to call “the ultimate furniture of the world”. Do things such as properties, kinds, quantities of matter, stages, and so on really exist? I would claim that those are philosophical or scientific questions, not linguistic ones. As a linguist, I feel perfectly justified in sidestepping such questions. Consequently, I like to say that what I am doing here is not metaphysics per se but natural language metaphysics. Some philosophers claim that all metaphysical enterprise is the analysis of language (this was a prominent part of the program of logical positivists like Rudolf Carnap). But here, too, as a linguist I can be – indeed, I think I should be – perfectly neutral. What we are doing is simply seeking linguistic evidence for the nature of the semantic structures that we seem to need to give a good account for the meanings of natural language expressions
Emmon Bach (1989) Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics, State University of New York Press, Albany, pp.98-99.
There are two aspects to natural language metaphysics, and we will delve into both. First, natural languages seem to presuppose that the world is a certain way. In some cases, educated speakers know that the world is not that way. In other cases, the presuppositions are at
least philosophically contentious. We will explore a variety of such cases, noting the ramifications for both metaphysics and for semantics.
Let’s consider a somewhat frivolous example of how philosophical conundrums might be tucked away in our use of language. Suppose I say that the other day, my significant other gave me a kiss. How literally should we take that remark? What are its truth-conditions? Perhaps all this business about giving me something is just a manner of speaking. To say that she ‘gave me a kiss’, on such a view, is simply to say that she kissed me—that a certain moment in the past, she and I stood in the relation of kisser to kissee. But one might also argue that there really was a thing that she gave me, at least in some sense of the term. Now that I’ve been kissed, I am quite literally in possession of something that I will be able to cherish. Or, alternatively, one might think that this entire line of discussion fails to make sense, in which case the interesting challenge is to say why. Are we in for some sort of error theory? Can pragmatics rescue the discourse, even semantics sometimes fails? This admittedly silly example leads quickly into deeper waters. Just now, for instance, in giving a common sense gloss on the truth-conditions, I alluded to a certain moment in the past. What is a moment? Are there really any such things, and if so, what does it mean to say that the past is made out of them? Are we implicitly committed to a theory on which time just is a linear concatenation of moments, solely on the basis of the fact that we use the past, present, and future tenses? And does this commitment persist when undermined by one’s metaphysics or, for that matter, physics? And what are the ramifications of that for semantics and/or pragmatics?
The second aspect of natural language metaphysics concerns the role of linguistic theorizing. Suppose, for example, that there is a bit of theory that seems to be making the right predictions concerning various linguistic data, codifying speakers’ semantic intuitions. To what extent do we have to take the parts of the theory seriously? If, say, the theory invokes possible (or impossible) worlds, then does the success of the theory provide evidence that possible (or impossible) worlds exist, and, if so, do we have some insight into what these worlds are like? This is an instance of a general form of argument for realism in the philosophy of science. Moreover, beyond ontological assumptions, many contemporary linguistic theories posit structures over the domain of models for natural languages, as crucial for explicating logical relations between expressions which denote these entities—e.g. sortal distinctions between natural kinds, the individuals which realize those kinds, and the temporal stages of those individuals; lattices which reflect the count/mass distinction and relations over entities of those sorts; and mereological relations over events or situations. To what extent do these structures over elements of the domain reflect actual structures and relations in the world? There is evidence (Francez & Koontz-Garboden 2013) that across languages there are two kinds of adjectives, which display syntactic differences in how they are predicated, one pertaining to standard qualitative distinctions, the other class taking mass denotations, which are gradable and amenable to comparison. Does this reflect an important distinction between kinds of properties in the world?
The course will begin with some work on the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the notion of open texture, by Quine, Waismann and others. We will then consider relevant work by Davidson, Varzi, Emmon Bach, Kripke, and Pelletier. At each turn, we will fortify ourselves with linguistic work on lexical semantics (and lots of data), including work by Asher, Carlson, Dowty, Francez & Koontz-Garboden, Kay & Maffi, Link, Partee, Pustejovsky, and von Fintel & Iatridou, among others.
Each student will write a series of short essays, a seminar paper to be presented to the class(es), a commentary on someone else’s seminar paper, and a substantial term paper.
8700 The metaphysics of propositions (since 2010)
Instructor: Ben Caplan
Caplan.16@osu.edu
UH 353 T 3:55-6:40
We'll look at recent work on the metaphysics of propositions by Peter Hanks, Jeff King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks. Among other things, we'll work our way through King, Soames, and Speaks's forthcoming New Thinking about Propositions.
8750 Seminar in Theory of Knowledge
Instructor: Brian Kim
Kim.5062@osu.edu
UH 353 F 12:40-3:25
Central to epistemological orthodoxy is the claim that only truth-relevant factors are relevant for distinguishing true belief from knowledge. In recent years, a number of epistemologists have challenged this aspect of orthodoxy arguing that pragmatic factors alone can make the difference between true belief and knowledge. This turn in epistemological theorizing has been described as pragmatic encroachment, and the seminar will be structured around the debates about pragmatic encroachment. We will first consider the various arguments for and against pragmatic encroachment. This will then bring us to more general questions about the relationship between knowledge, deliberation, reasons, and action.