Honours Seminars in the Department of Philosophy

Rights & Norms
Dr Justine McGill
Wed 11-1
Quadrangle Building Room S227
If rights are universal and norms particular, then how should we understand the relation between them? Do social, cultural and political norms shape our understanding of rights? Should rights always be understood as universal and norms particular? This unit will explore recent work on the justification of rights as well as criticisms of them. It will also examine case studies to do with Aboriginal rights and women's rights as well as explore the link between rights, cosmopolitanism and ideas of freedom.

Cosmopolitanism and Community
Dr Thomas Besch
Tues 2-4
Quadrangle Building Room S227
Should we think of our moral and political obligations as limited by our membership in particular communities? Should we define our conceptions of moral and political community according to particular cultural or national characteristics, or in terms of of a shared common humanity? Do we have special obligations to our compatriots or general obligations to humanity as a whole? What is the relation between universal principles and local practices, and what are the consequences for our conceptions of practical reason? We shall explore these questions, and others, through an engagement with the arguments of leading contemporary moral and political philosophers.

Self-Knowledge
Dr David Macarthur
Fri 3-5
Quadrangle Building Room S422
To discover what someone else believes, hopes, intends etc., we appeal to what they say and do. But to discover these same attitudes in one’s own case, one need not rely on any evidence or observation of oneself. How is this possible? And how is this lack of evidence compatible with 1st-person authority? In this course we shall consider these and other issues concerning self-knowledge such as self-constitution, Moore’s Paradox, and self-deception. Our larger aim will be to explore asymmetries between relations to oneself and relations to others.

Public Reason
Dr Thomas Besch
Thurs 2-4
Thurs 2-4 Badham 145 Tutorial Room 2
While the idea that there is, or can be, a genuinely "public" dimension to reasoning and argument has been around for a rather long time, over the last 20 years it has been revived, developed and applied to a wide range of moral, political and other issues. The seminar 'Public Reason' provides a context to read and discuss several exemplary and in some cases highly influential texts on the topic. And while many of the texts that we will be examining are sympathetic to the idea that people should, in one way or other, reason publicly, one of the aims of the seminar is to introduce you to some of the problems that conceptions of public reason often face.

Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
Professor Warren Goldfarb
Dept. of Philosophy, Harvard University
Fri 4th April to Mon 28th April inclusive, meeting twice a week
Mon 3-5 and Fri 12-2 (Quad Refectory)
This seminar will be offered intensively in April, 2008. For further information contact

Lectures
In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein claims to be giving a radical critique of philosophy. The nature of this critique, and the nature of the activity that Wittgenstein would like to see replace philosophy as previously done, are not well understood, particularly because they are not based on any general view that underwrites the criticism ('verificationism', 'behaviorism', etc.). In this series of seminars I want to provide a unified reading of the work that focuses on
five major topics: reference to objects (ontology), linguistic meaning, understanding and other cognitive notions, rule-following, and the private mental realm. A major aim is to exhibit an idea of 'Wittgensteinian scrutiny' and to point a way to apply it to contemporary questions in philosophy.

Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling
Dr P. Diego Bubbio
Wed 10-12
Quadrangle Building Room S422
Kierkegaard's reflection on Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac presents a challenge both to ethics and religion. Is it possible that Abraham was right in killing Isaac, and that can there be a religious "suspension" of ethics? By a close reading of Kierkegaard's classic Fear and Trembling, this unit provides the student with an understanding both of the basic components of Kierkegaard's philosophy and of the issue of the relation to ethics to which he is responding.

Concepts & Conceptual Change
Ass. Prof. David Braddon-Mitchell
Wed 10-12
Quadrangle Building Room S227
This is a unit in which we'll attempt to answer two questions. The first is: 'what on earth is a concept?' The second is: 'How can concepts change significantly, whilst still being the very same concept'. Think about a debate you might have about, for example, justice. Two people might disagree about almost everything about justice. Their theories of justice could differ in just about every detail.
On the most promising and widely accepted accounts of the concept JUSTICE this would mean that they possess different concepts. In which case it seems like they aren't disagreeing about one thing - justice - rather they are talking about two different things, and thus talking past each other.

A good theory of concepts should help us settle which of these is the case – whether they are disagreeing about the one subject matter, or talking past each other. Of course this is famously important in the history and philosophy of science. Do we have a new and improved understanding of the atom now, or have we just changed the subject?

The unit will start by looking at the classical theory of concepts, and some of the successors in the cognitive science of concepts.

We'll then move on to discuss the so-called 'two dimensional' approach to concepts, and develop a version of it which (I hope) solves many of these problems. We'll finish by looking at one of the most intriguing problems in philosophy – the problem of hyperintentionality. But you'll need to do the course to even know what that problem is!

Ayer & Quine
Ass. Prof. Michael McDermott
Wed 12-2
Quadrangle Building Room S212
Analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by "Logical Positivism". Its main doctrine was the "Verification Principle", which (roughly speaking) identified the meaning of a statement with its consequences for experience. Analytic philosophy in the second half of the century was dominated by Quine. This course examines Quine's philosophy, especially his attack on the concept of meaning presupposed by the Positivists.

Themes from Cavell
Dr David Macarthur
Fri 11-1
Woolley Tutorial Room N384
Stanley Cavell is a philosopher who is indispensable for anyone wishing to think fruitfully about the connections between analytic and continental traditions of philosophy, or between philosophy and the arts (including film, literature, and music). In this course we shall explore Cavell's diverse body of writings by way of the theme of "reading": from his reading of Wittgenstein's Investigations to his readings of Hollywood cinema. A central concern will be to understand the nature of a perfectionist relationship to a text.

Metaphilosophy
Dr Adrian Heathcote
Tues 2-4
Education Seminar Room 434
The purpose of this course is to examine certain logical problems that permeate philosophy, but examine them at a higher level than is usually done. So this year I will be looking at use-mention problems that affect the theory of truth, identity and modal logic. A set of readings will be provided, starting with Quine's discussion of use-mention in his Mathematical Logic. Another important paper that students may wish to look at before the course begins is Quine's "The Problem of Interpreting Modal Logic" in the Journal of Symbolic Logic, 1947, pp. 43-8.

Plato's Aesthetics
Ass. Prof. Rick Benitez
Thurs 2-4
Watt Tutorial Room 106
A survey of Plato's views on aesthetics from the Alcibiades I to the Laws. This class will explore Plato's Aesthetics through original texts and the latest scholarship. Dialogues to be examined include: Alcibiades I, Ion, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Philebus, Laws. Papers on each of these dialogues, planned for the volume Plato on Art and Beauty (ed. R. Benitez) will be part of course reading and review. Authors include: Fiona Leigh (King's College London), Emmanuell Jouet-Pastré (Toulouse), Martin Black (Boston University), Franco Trivigno (Marquette), Jacques Duvoisin (St. John's, Santa Fe), Christopher Raymond (University of Texas at Austin), and others.

Conceiving Responsibility
Dr Justine McGill
Wed 1-3
Mackie Seminar Room 114
How should we conceptualize moral responsibilities that individuals and institutions bear in relation to structural social and political problems to which they contribute by their actions, but which cannot be causally traced directly to these actions? We will investigate this question by comparing and contrasting several theories and concepts of moral and legal responsibility: philosophical theories of personal and collective responsibility, concepts of responsibility in tort and criminal law, and theories of shared, organizational and institutional responsibility.

Vagueness
Dr Nick Smith
Friday, 2-4pm
Venue TBA
A word or object is said to be vague if it is not clearly or sharply defined. So a mountain is a vague object, because if you were to walk down it, there would be no precise point at which you would step off the mountain and onto the surrounding plain; and the word 'tall' is vague, because there is no sharp division between the people to whom it applies and the rest. When we start to think about it, it seems that many words and objects are vague. So vagueness is everywhere—and yet it is deeply puzzling: it gives rise to perplexing problems in philosophy of language, metaphysics and logic. In this course we shall explore three main issues:

1. We shall try to get a clear understanding of what vagueness is.
2. We shall examine theories of vagueness (epistemicism, supervaluations, fuzzy logic, etc.), and try to determine which gives the best account of the phenomena.
3. We shall explore the question of whether vagueness is a purely semantic phenomenon (i.e. one having to do solely with language and its relationship to the world) or whether it is also a metaphysical phenomenon (i.e. whether objects, and other constituents of the world, are inherently vague).

Sample reading list:

• Nicholas Smith, Vagueness and Degrees of Truth, Oxford forthcoming.
• Tim Williamson, Vagueness, Routledge 1994.
• Rosanna Keefe, Theories of Vagueness, Cambridge 2000.
• A selection of papers, many of which are in Rosanna Keefe and Peter
  Smith ed., Vagueness: A Reader, MIT 1997.

Venue details for all of these units will be posted on the philosophy notice board, outside the Philosophy Common Room S413, Main Quad A14, at the beginning of semester.