Temple University, Department of Philosophy
Course Descriptions Fall 2008
3000/4000 courses
3210 Special Topics: Philosophy of Film Smuts
Often, when one hears "philosophy of film," one imagines something that would be better called philosophy in (or through) film. On this model, one picks a handful of philosophical films and then discusses whatever philosophical issues happen to be relevant. Although this may improve one's understanding of those particular films, such courses are typically too diffuse and do little to increase our understanding of philosophy. As such, we won't be doing much philosophy in film; instead, this course focuses on as a set of philosophical problems having to do with the nature of film and our experiences of it. We will address questions such as: Can movies be art? What is film? What distinguishes narrative fiction films from documentaries? Do films have narrators? How do films move us? Why do people watch melodrama and horror if such movies depress and disgust audiences? Do films have authors whose artistic intentions matter? Can ethical flaws detract from the aesthetic value of a film? Can films instruct or corrupt us morally? What makes a good critic? Are some better than others? Can films "do philosophy"? In other words, is "philosophy in film" possible? Students will gain a clear understanding of the major problems in the philosophy of film.
3226 Classics in Moral Philosophy Meyer
This course evaluates Nietzsche’s varied contributions to ethics. His work is situated in a nineteenth century context, which we examine on route to the detailed consideration of his ethical and cultural writings early and late. Nietzsche’s treatments of perspective, creativity, will, morality, decadence, and history receive critical attention, in the reading of major works including Birth of Tragedy, Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo. In the final weeks we turn to inspect the influence of his thought, both in Nietzsche scholarship and contemporary ethical debates.
3243 Philosophy of Law Crowe
This course is an advanced introduction to the philosophy of law. We will begin with two fundamental questions: What is the nature of our obligation to obey the law? What is it to be a society governed by the rule of law? Underlying these we will find the more basic philosophical question: What is law and how can it be distinguished from other social practices directed at ordering and improving society? We will look at some of the major schools of thought on this question, including natural law, positivism, legal realism and critical legal studies. From there we will move on to a series of problems surrounding Anglo-American conceptions of legal liability, both in civil and criminal law. Finally we will consider the nature of legal reasoning and interpretation with special attention to the problems of constitutional interpretation.
3249 Ethics in Medicine Harris
This course is an upper-level introduction to the field of biomedical ethics. We will begin by examining relevant ethical theories (Kantian, virtue ethics and ethics of care). This will be followed by applying such theories to particular debates in biomedical ethics, including issues in research ethics, justice in healthcare, informed consent, reproductive rights, end of life decision making, and reproductive and genetic technologies (eg, cloning). This course emphasizes the integration of conceptual and participatory learning. This philosophy will be reflected in the course design and throughout all phases of the teaching and learning processes.
4000/5000 Courses
We will go through the soundness and completeness proofs for a first-order deductive system (i.e., the kind used in intro logic). The main goal of the course will be to acquaint the students with these formal results, but we'll also try to spend a little time on some philosophical issues (e.g., what, if anything, does logic have to do with reasoning).
4/5276 Contemporary Continental Philosophy Hammer
The works of the Frankfurt School (represented by people like Benjamin, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Fromm and Habermas) have had an enormous impact on philosophical, social, political and aesthetic thought in the twentieth century. In this course we will be studying a selection of their most influential contributions. The objective of the course is to introduce the Frankfurt School, to obtain a good sense of its development and research, and to be able to reflect critically upon what this school of modern thought represents and has to offer today. In taking this course students will be exposed to accounts of culture and art, social critique, as well as the nature of modernity, rationality, politics, and subjectivity.
4/5216 Philosophy of Science Dyke
The course will focus on traditional issues: laws, determinism, reduction, idealization, approximation, and the place of mathematics. Along the way it will also deal with symmetry, models, constraints, error bars, estimates, metrics, and measurement. Much of the discussion will involve evolution, ecology, and, in general, complex systems. Reading: Ivar Ekeland, The Best of all Possible Worlds: Mathematics and Destiny; Ginzburg and Colyan, Ecological Orbits: How Planets Move and Populations Grow
Haila and Dyke (Eds.); How Nature Speaks: The Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition,Weber and Depew (Eds.); Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered
3/5222 Contemporary Ethical Theory Margolis
To attempt to compose a course in moral philosophy in 2008-2009 is a daunting enterprise. My sense is that what, in retrospect, may be viewed as its classic period spanning Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and, say, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is now largely eclipsed, only vestigially relevant, profoundly out of touch with the historical springs of pertinent philosophical reflection. Our changed conceptual needs are now palpable not only in moral and moral/political theory but across the entire spread of Western and global philosophy. In the narrowed context that will be our concern, the shock of 9/11 sounded the theorizing alarms obliquely and in a rather inchoate way—but effectively enough. Now, seven years later, the altered dynamics of our age have become so clear that we are able to foresee a great deal of the further transformation of the world in philosophically pertinent terms: for instance bearing on the pretensions of universalism and the challenge of historicity on the rise of a planetary vision and the inertia of entrenched local and regional moralities, on outmoded practices of war and peace, on the condition of wealth and poverty, on the irreconcilable clash of normative values, on the significance of a changing technology and demographic patterns, on the unavoidability of planetary solutions to medical, ecological and economic impasses, on the limits of rationality, flexibility and cultural habit and religious conviction, on the very idea of the relevance of moral philosophy itself.
Under these circumstances, which strike me as bringing us in touch once again (now with a vengeance) with the vital conditions for a genuine moral philosophy, we cannot proceed as usual. We will find ourselves in the middle of the world’s need to proceed improvisationally in coming to terms afresh with an understanding of what makes such reflections pertinent and practical at all with regard to formulating a coherent picture of how moral philosophy should proceed and how normative judgment, commitment and proposal may be validated at all as far as the compelling saliencies of our time are concerned. I hope to find a small selection of texts that will serve us as stalking horses in an attempt to map the import of the new realities of our time. We shall proceed both by lecture and seminar treatments of the course’s topics: students will be expected to present brief and informal analyses of selected texts. But in general our discussions will be completely openended and hospitable as far as possible to all seriously advanced options. In fact, I count on those who plan to take the course to advise me over the summer of any text, article or book, that they’ve come across that may help to organize our readings fruitfully. Moral/political philosophy may well be the most difficult area of special inquiry in contemporary philosophy, precisely because of the constructionist features of normative proposal meant to be both historically and socially relevant and free of arbitrariness at every level of pertinent debate.
4/5273 Greek Philosophy Wolfsdorf
My course 273/473 will be looking at passages from Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics that concern conceptions of and aspects of moral psychology and the psychology of action.
4/5274 Pragmatism & American Thought Taylor
American pragmatism and naturalism, with emphasis on Emerson, James, Peirce, Mead, Dewey, and contemporary pragmatists
Graduate Only Courses (5000+)
5279 Kant Hammer
The course will primarily be devoted to a close study of Kant’s ground-breaking account of human experience in the Critique of Pure Reason. Particular attention will be paid to such issues as the nature of the a priori, judgment, intuition, self-consciousness, spontaneity, schematism, and the appearance/thing-in-itself contrast. We also want to consider the role this account has played in some recent Anglophone philosophy and will be reading texts by, among others, John McDowell, Robert Pippin, and Robert Brandom.
8600 Proseminar Gordon
This seminar will be a semester-long discussion on various approaches to philosophy and some of the philosophical problems they raise. The objective is to provide students with a heightened and sustained discussion of the problematics of philosophical reasoning and their impact on various areas and conceptions of philosophy. Discussions will range from analytical philosophies of logic to transcendental, phenomenological, hermeneutical, and dialectical approaches, as well as challenges posed by feminist philosophy and Africana philosophy.
8631 Seminar in Contemporary Continental Philosophy Mohanty
TBA
8731 Seminar in Philosophy of Mind Vision
TBA