Bard College Catalogue 2009-2010
2009-2010

Philosophy

http://philosophy.bard.edu

Faculty

Overview

The philosophy curriculum is designed to provide every student with the opportunity to obtain a general understanding of the nature and history of philosophical inquiry. Students concentrating in philosophy have extensive access to a more specialized curriculum, which can serve as the foundation for graduate study.

Areas of Study

The core of the program consists of history of philosophy courses and such traditional areas of philosophic study as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, the philosophy of language, and aesthetics. In addition, several seminars are offered each year that are devoted to the work of one philosopher, for example, Hegel, Heidegger, James, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Plato, Sartre, or Wittgenstein.

Requirements

Students moderating in philosophy are expected to have taken three courses in philosophy while in the Lower College. Although no specific courses are required prior to Moderation, students intending to major in philosophy generally take one of the Introduction to Philosophy courses, which provide an orientation to philosophic methodologies, styles of inquiry, and common themes of philosophic concern in texts ranging from Platonic dialogues to 20th-century works. A major in philosophy normally involves taking six to eight courses, of which at least half are in the Upper College. Juniors are required to take the seminar on The Philosophy of Kant (Philosophy 371). Students intending to apply to graduate schools in philosophy are strongly encouraged to take symbolic logic, at least one course in ancient philosophy, at least two courses in modern philosophy (17th through 19th centuries), at least one course in 20th-century philosophy, and at least one course in ethics. The student determines the topic of his or her Senior Project in consultation with an adviser.

Recent Senior Projects in Philosophy:

“Conceptual Disparity and the Growth of Knowledge: Incommensurability, Indeterminacy, and Underdetermination”
“Notion and Object: On the Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit”
“The Advertised Life: Consumer Culture and the Ideology of Need”
“Unpacking and Defending ‘Sapir-Whorf’: An Integrative Exploration of Philosophy and Linguistics”

Courses

Introductory courses are numbered in the 100s. Courses numbered in the 200s, while more specialized in content, also are generally appropriate as first courses in philosophy. Courses numbered in the 300s are more advanced and require previous courses in philosophy and permission of the instructor for admission. Tutorials are also taught: recent subjects include Hegel, Heidegger, Hume, Kant’s second and third critiques, and Quine.

Problems in Philosophy
Philosophy 101
An introduction to the problems, methods, and scope of philosophical inquiry. Among the philosophical questions discussed are those associated with morality, the law, the nature of the mind, and the limits of knowledge. Philosophers read include Plato, Descartes, David Hume, William James, A. J. Ayer, Sartre, C. S. Lewis, and Lon Fuller.

Philosophical Classics
Philosophy 102
An introduction to some of the perennial concerns of philosophy, through a survey of classic texts in the Western philosophical tradition. Some themes include the nature of ethical life, the meaning and possibility of knowledge, the concept of the self, and the nature of philosophical method and style. Readings are from Plato, followed by three contrasting portraits of Socrates by Aristophanes, Kierkegaard, and Merleau-Ponty; additional readings are from Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche.

History of Philosophy
Philosophy 103
cross-listed: classical studies
A critical examination of the work of major figures in philosophy, emphasizing historical continuities and developments. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Nietzsche, and Russell.

History of Ancient Philosophy
Philosophy 103A
cross-listed: classical studies
This course provides close readings of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, along with a number of secondary sources on these and related works. The course considers questions of philosophical method, epistemology, metaphysics, social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of education, philosophy of the arts, and numerous detailed issues in ethics (e.g., responsibility, intention, consequence, character, etc.).

Multicultural Perspectives
Philosophy 104
cross-listed: sre
An introduction to such major themes in the history of philosophy as the nature of reality and our capacity to know it, ethics and justice, and conceptions of how one should live. Readings include selections from diverse traditions, including Buddhist, Chinese, Hindu, African, Latin American, Native American, Western, and feminist.

Reality, Knowledge, and Value
Philosophy 106
An introduction to some key issues in three of the main areas of Western philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Readings are drawn from the classical and modern traditions: for example, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Bertrand Russell. In all cases an attempt is made to show the connections between the traditional problems of philosophy and the concerns of our own lives.

Informal Logic, Critical Reasoning
Philosophy 107
This course is designed to strengthen the ability to reason well. Emphasis is on techniques of inductive reasoning, although certain basic elements of “formal” logic and the use of syllogisms in ordinary reasoning are touched upon. Students learn techniques of diagramming and distilling arguments, methods of detecting common fallacies of reasoning, the central features of inductive reasoning, and the relation between argumentation and explanation, as well as progressively more complex examples of reasoning and argument.

Introduction to Philosophy
Philosophy 108
Western philosophers address questions that most of us find puzzling. Do we have free will? Do we know what the world around us is really like? Does God exist? How should we treat one another? This course critically examines historical and contemporary texts that address these and other central themes of the philosophical tradition.

Introduction to Philosophy: Five Key Questions
Philosophy 111
This course introduces major approaches to five questions: How should we live? Is there a God? How do we know what we know? What sort of beings are we? How should we live together? The emphasis is on the (often conflicting) answers philosophers have given to these questions, but at least one other question about our endeavor is also at issue: Is there a right and a wrong way to answer these questions—and who has the authority to decide?

Introduction to Philosophy of Science
Philosophy 120
cross-listed: sts
This course takes a thematic approach to examine the nature and limits of science and scientific reasoning. Topics broached include the demarcation problem (what distinguishes scientific theories from putatively nonscientific theories such as astrology and creationism?); the riddles of induction (what reason is there to think the future will resemble the past?); and the realism/antirealism debate (does science tell us what the world is really like?).

Personhood and Modern Philosophy
Philosophy 210
Who am I? Am I the sum of my experiences? Or am I something distinct from my experiences, the subject who has them? Am I the same person I was when I was 3 years old? This course considers these and related questions about the nature of persons. It reviews attempts to answer them by philosophers of one of the most fertile periods in the history of Western philosophy, the 17th and 18th centuries. Readings draw from Butler, Descartes, Hume, Locke, and Reid.

Contemporary Political Theory
Philosophy 216
The tension created by the promise of equality and the guarantee of liberty has largely shaped the debate among contemporary political theorists. Most believe it is the function of the liberal state to meld these two goals, but a resolution of the conflict requires, in turn, an examination of more fundamental normative questions—such as, are there moral limits to actions sanctioned by individual or collective consent? Readings include late 20th-century political works by Rawls, Nozick, Walzer, Dworkin, and Nagel.

Philosophy and the Arts
Philosophy 230
This course explores the ways that philosophers (and philosophically engaged critics) have approached issues concerning the nature and value of art. After a discussion of Plato’s influential account of representation and the place of art in society, we turn to questions raised by painting, photography, film, and music. From there, broader topics that cut across various art forms are considered. Readings include Hume and Kant on taste, Stanley Cavell on the moving image, and Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin on mass culture.

Philosophy and Film
Philosophy 235
While much writing about film concerns the evaluation of particular works, the development of motion picture technology raises questions of a general or theoretical nature. This course examines major approaches to such questions from within philosophy, film studies, and criticism. Issues addressed include how film’s characteristic features bear on the range of aesthetic possibilities available to the medium; whether “authorship” can be applied to something as collaboratively complex as a film; and if films can be significant sources of social criticism and philosophical insight.

Symbolic Logic
Philosophy 237
This course reviews several symbolic systems in order to formally test the validity of deductive arguments expressed in ordinary language of various levels of complexity. Beginning with the common notion of a valid argument, the course progresses through such topics as truth tables, Aristotelian logic, Venn diagrams, and general quantification theory, including identity. It ends with a discussion of the extension of such work into higher orders of logic and the foundations of mathematics, and the initial surprise of Gödel’s incompleteness proof.

Relativism
Philosophy 242
cross-listed: human rights
The first half of this course examines epistemic/ cultural relativism and the second half explores moral/cultural relativism. Students are introduced to several fundamental modes of philosophical inquiry (among them, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaethics), but the focus of the class is a detailed exploration of relativism as a philosophical position. Readings include works by Thomas Kuhn, W. V. Quine, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Peter Winch, and others.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Discovery
Philosophy 243
Since Plato, self-knowledge has been thought to be indispensable to the fully human life. Yet a great number of philosophers have been struck by how puzzling a condition it is. This course begins not with philosophy but with Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the King as a way of disclosing that self-discovery is essentially a dramatic process. Thereafter, selections from Spinoza, Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein are discussed.

Epistemology
Philosophy 244
Do you know anything and, if so, what do you know? What does it mean to know something? Is knowing something different from believing it, thinking it, or being sure of it? This course examines these questions, and questions like them, and studies the answers philosophers give to them. Readings are drawn from the works of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Plato, Descartes, Moore, Unger, Gettier, Goldman, Quine, and others.

Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy 247
This course focuses on contemporary readings and such questions as: Is your mind something different from your body and, in particular, something different from your brain? Can you know for sure that the people around you have conscious mental lives? Might it be, in principle, impossible for a computer or robot to have a mind, no matter how fancy its program? Is it possible that you yourself don’t have a mind?

Ethical Theory
Philosophy 251
What is the “moral dimension” of our life, and what constitutes its key elements? Are there such things as “happiness,” “virtue,” and “wisdom”? Do we have “rights” and “duties” and, if so, how do we recognize them? This course critically examines the primary texts of four philosophers whose thoughts on these fundamental questions have had a permanent influence on Western thought: Aristotle, Epictetus, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill.

Medical Ethics
Philosophy 255
cross-listed: human rights, sts
This course examines a range of topics in contemporary debates over medical ethics, among them issues of genetics, reproduction, death and dying, and involuntary psychiatric hospitalization and treatment. Students review competing ethical positions that philosophers have proposed as models for understanding and resolving issues of medical ethics and study basic concepts with which all such theories grapple. Also examined are the ways these concepts apply to actual cases, and the conflict between ethical reasoning and social, religious, and legal concerns.

Environmental Ethics
Philosophy 256
cross-listed: eus, human rights, social policy, sts
An exploration of ethical issues regarding the relation of human beings to their environment. Students review critiques of the anthropocentric character of traditional moral paradigms by deep ecologists, ecofeminists, social ecologists, and others who argue for new accounts of the moral standing of nature and the ethical duties of humans to nonhuman creatures and things. Readings include work by such 19th- and early 20th-century writers as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold.

Religious and Antireligious Philosophers
Philosophy 259
cross-listed: german studies
A comparative examination of philosophical defenses and critiques of religion from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Readings include Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Buber, and Tillich.

Feminist Philosophy
Philosophy 260
cross-listed: gss, human rights, social policy
This course examines a variety of feminist philosophical approaches to issues surrounding our culture’s production of images of sexuality and gender. Readings from de Beauvoir, Delphy, Irigaray, and Leclerc, among others, cover a diverse range of feminist theoretical frameworks. However, the course focuses on “applied” philosophy rather than theory. Many issues are explored, among them the cultural enforcement of both feminine and masculine gender identities, the intersection of feminism and environmentalism, and feminist perspectives of different ethnic groups.

The Philosophy of Nietzsche
Philosophy 275
cross-listed: german studies
Friedrich Nietzsche is the object of very strong opinions, pro and con, as to his merits as a philosopher/thinker. This course examines a significant selection of his works, including Human, All-Too-Human; The Gay Science; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; Toward a Genealogy of Morals; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist; and Ecce Homo. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor and at least sophomore status.

Existentialism
Philosophy 315
Existentialism is a philosophic, literary, artistic, and social movement that emerged during the Second World War in France, but with roots tracing back to Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century. This course provides a close study of selected writings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. It focuses both on themes that are regarded as common existentialist preoccupations —such as rebellion against rationalism and the corresponding emphasis on subjectivity—
and emphasizing important distinctions among these five writers.

Philosophy of Action
Philosophy 320
This seminar explores the nature of actions and agents. What is it for someone to act? Do you act by causing your body to move, or is your role as agent not causal? Should questions about the nature of actions and agents be conceived of as metaphysical or linguistic, or both? Course readings include Anscombe, Chisholm, Frankfurt, and Korsgaard, among others.

Self and Subject
Philosophy 321
cross-listed: cognitive science
Traditionally, the terms “self” or “subject” refer to the locus of a given individual’s experience, consciousness, and/or agency. For some philosophers, these notions are central to an understanding of the human subject as a coherent, autonomous entity; other thinkers have argued either that the self or subject is in some way fragmented or dispersed, or that the “self” is a metaphysical fiction. This course examines classic and contemporary views on both sides of this debate. Readings include Descartes, Locke, Foucalt, and Sorjabi, among others.

Key Texts in Aesthetics
Philosophy 330
In attempting to explain important features of our experience of art and nature, philosophers have proposed the existence of a mental faculty or type of judgment not wholly reducible to either sense perception or conceptual thought. “Aesthetic” is the most common term for this faculty, and the judgments for which it is responsible. This course examines various accounts of the notion of the aesthetic—and closely related issues concerning art, taste, and beauty—through scrutiny of both historically important and contemporary texts.

The Philosophy of Language
Philosophy 352
Since the early 20th century, philosophical inquiry into the nature of language has revolved around the notion of meaning, and questions of how it is that our words can make “contact” with the world, our thoughts, and each other. This course explores two living traditions that attempt to answer these questions: the “semantic” approach, which emphasizes reference and the logical structure of language; and the “pragmatic” approach, which emphasizes communication and our everyday uses of language.

Philosophy of Music
Philosophy 355
Philosophical questions about music include the following: Are definitions and classifications helpful? Is tonality natural or conventional? Other topics explored are music and language, the parallels and differences; and music, politics, and ideology. Students engage these topics through readings, listening to music, seminar presentations, and class discussions. Readings include Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Hanslick, Wittgenstein, and a number of recent and contemporary writers.

Law and Ethics
Philosophy 357
This Upper College seminar combines elements of two disciplines—law and philosophy—to examine the premises that support the ideal of a just society and the reasons utilized in making legal and moral arguments. The course is jointly taught by a faculty member of the Philosophy Program and a constitutional lawyer. Readings include current court decisions involving issues of equality, sexuality, the death penalty, and the right to die, and texts by philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Dworkin, and John Rawls.

Free Will
Philosophy 360
The problem of free will is one of the most familiar, enduring, and difficult issues of Western philosophy. This course begins by studying some classic texts that offer a wide range of answers to the central questions about free will, and goes on to review “state-of the-art” writings about free will from such philosophers and philosophically minded thinkers as Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, Benjamin Libet, Timothy O’Connor, and Daniel Wegner.

The Philosophy of Kant
Philosophy 371
cross-listed: german studies
An introduction to one of the classic texts of Western philosophy, Kant’s magnum opus, The Critique of Pure Reason. Prerequisites: a previous course in philosophy and permission of the instructor.

The Philosophy of Hegel
Philosophy 373
cross-listed: german studies
This course consists of readings from two of the four works Hegel saw to publication, The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and from two of his four posthumously published lecture cycles, Lectures on the Philosophy of History and Lectures on Aesthetics.

The Philosophy of William James
Philosophy 381
William James (1842–1910) wrote and lectured on philosophy for both the emerging “profession” and for laypersons—and he did so with unusual style and clarity. Course readings include selections from James’s major works, and topics include religious experience, the subject matter and nature of psychology, the nature of philosophy, and the pragmatic theory of truth.

The Philosophy of Wittgenstein
Philosophy 385
cross-listed: german studies
A first reading of major works of one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. Readings include Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Blue Book, and Philosophical Investigations. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

Freud and Philosophy
Philosophy 387
cross-listed: cognitive science, german studies
Freud’s writings are examined in light of the questions, challenges, and opportunities they pose for philosophy, and from the perspective of the kinds of criticisms that philosophy has directed against psychoanalytic theory. Readings include The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; The Ego and the Id; Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Civilization and Its Discontents; and critical secondary sources. Prerequisites: a previous course in philosophy and permission of the instructor.

The Philosophy and Literature

of Jean-Paul Sartre
Philosophy 389
cross-listed: french studies, human rights
Readings from a variety of Sartre’s philosophic texts, including Existentialism, Anti-Semite and Jew, Essays in Aesthetics, and Being and Nothingness, and a number of his novels and plays, including Nausea, The Wall, No Exit, The Flies, The Respectful Prostitute, Dirty Hands, and The Devil and the Good Lord. The relation between the two genres of Sartre’s writing is explored, including the extent to which the philosophic and literary productions complement each other.

Kierkegaard
Philosophy 399
An examination of a variety of Søren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic, psychological, and theological texts. The course investigates the portrait of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions of existence; the critique of systematic philosophical discourse; the existentialist psychology of inwardness; and the nature of language and authorship, among other topics. Readings are drawn from the philosopher’s acknowledged and pseudonymous works, and from writers who have engaged Kierkegaard’s authorship in ways central to modern and postmodern thought.