Temple University, Department of Philosophy
Course Descriptions Spring 2009
Undergrad Only
3226 Classics in Moral Philosophy Smuts
The course will examine the ethical theories of several Greek thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics.
Undergrad/Grad
3/5217 Fem Epist. & Phil Sci Solomon
This course explores the effects of gender on scientific creativity, method and decision making. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), was one of the first to show that political, social and psychological factors affect scientific change. Feminist criticisms of science, developed over the last thirty years, are one way in which his views have been developed. We will examine cases from a wide range of sciences to see where, and how, gender influences scientific practice. The complex relations between gender, race, class and nationality will also be discussed in relation to these issues. Central questions of the course will be: How pervasive is gender bias in science? Can gender bias be eliminated, and is it desirable to do so? Does the reduction of gender bias require an increased representation of women in science? Can the popular view that science is objective, truth-seeking and progressive be maintained in the face of findings of gender bias? We will read from the work of Evelyn Fox Keller, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Helen Longino, Alison Wylie and others.
Note for graduate students taking 5217: This course counts for the epistemology/metaphysics distribution requirement.
3/5222 Contemp Ethical Theory Margolis
To attempt to organize a course in moral philosophy in 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 conditions 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, say, 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 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 open-ended 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 of any text, article or book, that they’ve come across that may help to organize our readings fruitfully.(the texts for this semester’s readings will be entirely different from those assigned for last semester’s offering of the same course.) 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.
3/5234 Philosophy of Music Alperson
This course examines our preconceptions about music. It centers around three basic questions: What is music?, Why do we enjoy it?, and Why, if at all, should we listen to, play, or study it? Along the way, we address other questions: Does instrumental music have meaning? Is music a (or the) language of feeling? Why do we listen to sad music? Does music in some way reveal the secret inner nature of the world? Does music reflect prevailing social conditions? Can it control or predict changes in society? Or is the meaning of music is purely musical? Does the significance of music consist, for example, in the expectation it arouses in the listener that certain musical events will follow? If so, can musical meaning be adequately described in term of information theory and a good computer? Is music ineffable? Or meaningless? What happens to instrumental music when it gets mixed up with words and action, as in song, opera, rap, and musical theater? Is the resulting product superior to instrumental music? Inferior? What is it to compose music? Are performers creative artists or are they just lackeys following the directions of the real artists—the composers? Is a performance of a work in which a few of the notes are wrong or omitted still a performance of the work? Is musical improvisation a species of composition? Of performance? What light can psychologists or sociologists shed on musical experience? Does music therapy have anything to do with music? Is Muzak music? Is rock ‘n’ roll a bastion of moral turpitude? Can rock music mold personal and political identities? Can a feminist be a Stones fan? Is rock superior to classical music? Is classical music dead? Is jazz the new classical music? What roles do race, class, gender, cultural and corporate interests play in our musical lives? Can white people sing the blues? Can the birds make music? Can computers?
3/5325 Classics in Moral Philos Wolfsdorf
The course will examine the ethical theories of several Greek thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and the Stoics.
4/5244 Philosophy of Mind Vision
The course will cover a series of central topics in the Philosophy of Mind. Typical of these are the nature of mental states and minds, mental content and meaning, consciousness, conceptions of the self or persons, mental causation, mental concepts (e.g., belief, want) and their status, the relation of mental to brain states, and free will.
Graduate
5272 Philos of Culture Gordon
The purpose of this seminar is to address central themes in philosophy of culture, such as the challenges to defining culture, philosophical problems raised by the notion of cultural conditions of possibility, the debate over cultural universals and particulars, the role of signs and symbols in theories of culture, the philosophical significance of psychoanalysis, history, and religion, and the distinction between a philosophical anthropology and anthropological theory. This course is topical in nature, which means that it can be taken each year as different dimensions of the subject receive focus.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
Norman Brown, Life against Death
Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man and selections from The Philosophy of Symbolic Form and The Myth of the State
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
Lewis Gordon, Disciplinary Decadence
Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War
Charles Sanders Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce
Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars
5221 Social and Political Philosophy Gould
(x-list PS 8430 Problems in Political Philosophy)
A major focus in contemporary political philosophy has been our obligations to alleviate global poverty and to establish a more egalitarian world order. This seminar will examine a set of conceptual and ethical issues concerning justice and equality beyond borders that arise in the context of globalization. Questions to be discussed include the viability of a cosmopolitan or universalist perspective, especially in view of divergent cultural, political, and economic conditions; the role of climate change in an account of global justice; the ways in which norms of human rights, freedom (both negative and positive), and deliberative democracy have been used to specify the requirement of justice; and the applicability of such frameworks to address inequality in the status of women and to eliminate entrenched forms of harms to women. The course’s focus on global justice will also serve as a lens through which to view important contributions in recent social and political philosophy, in particular, selected writings by Rawls, Habermas, Young, Fraser, Singer, and Pogge. Emphasis will be placed on class discussion and on individual research in a term paper and an oral presentation.
8631 Seminar in Continental Philosophy Hammer
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of the Lifeworld
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is the last outgrowth of the classical phase of phenomenology which starts with Husserl. In this course we will study and discuss selected chapters from his two most important writings, Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. However, in order to understand Merleau-Ponty’s work, we will also look at some key texts by Husserl. The aim of the course is to understand and appreciate the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s project. In doing so, we will, among other things, be dealing with his discussion of the body, perception, thinking, language, and action. Merleau-Ponty’s work represents a radical critique of traditional conceptions of the subject, and his account of knowledge opens up new and revolutionary vistas. There is currently a lot of interest in his work, and some of this interest will be reflected in the course. At the end of the course we may also find time to consider Derrida’s critique of Merleau-Ponty.
8616 Sem in British Empiricism Kim
This course examines the central themes in the philosophical systems of three philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The topic includes the following: skepticism about the external
world; representation and consciousness; the mind-body problem; substance and essence; personal identity; the form of idealism; theories of signification; and causation.
8701 Seminar in Aesthetics Margolis
Aesthetics, or the philosophy of art (the two terms are not entirely interchangeable for both philosophical and historical reasons), is, like most specialties in contemporary philosophy, battered by the state of current discussions. For one thing, “modern” modern philosophy, dated, I suggest, from the interval spanning the work of Kant and Hegel, has never satisfactorily resolved the tension between Kantian and Hegelian proclivities. For another, late analytic aesthetics has flirted, perhaps too ardently, with the possibilities of intentionalism and reductionism. For a third, analytic and continental aesthetics are difficult to treat commensurably and favor very different kinds of questions. For a fourth, there’s a strong postmodern, deconstructive, or anarchical current that bids fair to subvert the sense of the canonical progress in aesthetics and other academic inquiries. And, for a fifth, though still more or less in the offing, there’s no clear sense of what a globalized discipline would have to include and with what consequences to the standing of allegedly normal inquiries.
I propose a sampling of strategic texts drawn from the present and the recent present, with attention to their antecedents, in order to map the scatter of the literature around the themes just collected. I shall begin our meetings with some orienting lectures on the relationship between Danto’s and Gadamer’s inquiries and the larger themes drawn from Kant and Hegel. We shall examine selected texts from both Danto and Gadamer for close reading, and there will probably be the occasional papers assigned or made available from time to time bearing on specialized topics as they arise. My recent Aesthetics: An Unforgiving Introduction (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2009) provides an impression of sorts of our central line of thought from Kant and Hegel through Danto and Gadamer. But we won’t read it as an assigned text. I’ll select at least two fairly recent books from analytic and continental sides as assigned texts, which should provide a fair sense of the sweep of both practices currently. I have in mind, particularly, in all of this, our exploring connections between aesthetics and the theory of history and culture; aesthetics and the philosophy of mind; relations between the aesthetic and the moral in the criticism of the arts; and what might be called the logic of interpreting and understanding artworks. It may well be feasible to have several texts on reserve to supply sample papers on the topics mentioned. Students will be expected to make at least one formal presentation, in the way of an analysis of some part of our assigned texts. (The list of these is not quite set.) Students will also be expected to submit a term paper on a topic agreed on by consultation.
The course will proceed by a mixture of lecture and seminar. My hope is that students’ special interests can be accommodated at least in the choice of a final essay, possibly also in discussions through the term if those interested would let me know in good time. I take the course to be exploratory but not formless, so that I would like to make room for a variety of approaches. All argumentative claims in this regard, including my own, will be open for debate by all.