Philosophy

Survey of some of the central problems, key figures, and great works in both traditional and contemporary philosophy. Topics and texts will vary with instructor and semester.

Corequisites: PHIL V2111 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Exposition and analysis of the positions of the major philosophers from the pre-Socratics through Augustine. This course has unrestricted enrollment.

This course will survey a number of topics at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, embodied cognition, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and the language of thought.

Corequisites: PHILV3413 Required Discussion Section (0 points). Advanced introduction to classical sentential and predicate logic. No previous acquaintance with logic is required; nonetheless a willingness to master technicalities and to work at a certain level of abstraction is desirable.

Required discussion section for UN3411 Symbolic Logic

Required discussion section for UN3411 Symbolic Logic

Required discussion section for UN3411 Symbolic Logic

Philosophical problems within science and about the nature of scientific knowledge in the 17th-20th centuries. Sample problems: causation and scientific explanation; induction and real kinds; verification and falsification; models, analogies and simulations; the historical origins of the modern sciences; scientific revolutions; reductionism and supervenience; differences between physics, biology and the social sciences; the nature of life; cultural evolution; human nature; philosophical issues in cosmology.

This course will focus on one topic at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, modularity, mental representation, probabilistic inference, the language of thought, and the computational theory of mind.

This course will focus on one topic at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Potential topics include free will, consciousness, modularity, mental representation, probabilistic inference, the language of thought, and the computational theory of mind.

Required discussion section for PHIL UN3701 Ethics

Required discussion section for PHIL UN3701 Ethics

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Intensive study of a philosophical issue or topic, or of a philosopher, group of philosophers, or philosophical school or movement. Open only to Barnard senior philosophy majors.

Counterfactuals play a key role in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, decision theory, game theory, artificial
intelligence, and many other related fields. Our goal for this course is to cover foundational work on
counterfactuals (with some attention paid to indicative conditionals as well). Though our reading list has
a historical component, its primary purpose is to familiarize students with contemporary state of play. We
will focus on distinctions and applications that have become an essential part of the working philosopher’s
toolkit.

Baroque questions of set-theoretic foundations are widely assumed to be irrelevant to physics. In
this seminar, we will see that they are not. Whether a physical theory is deterministic—whether
it fixes a unique future given the present—can depend on one’s stance on axioms of set theory
about which there is intractable disagreement. This is not a quirk of exotic toy models. It reaches
into the heat equation, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and general relativity. The
seminar builds from the ground up. We begin with the philosophy of determinism: what it
means, why it matters, and how it has traditionally been formalized. We then develop enough set
theory and descriptive set theory to state the key results precisely. In the second half, we work
through the sensitivity results in detail, showing how the content of fundamental physical
theories shifts with the set-theoretic background. We conclude by asking what this means for
debates about mathematical pluralism, scientific realism, and the boundary between mathematics
and physics.

No prior knowledge of set theory or mathematical physics is assumed. The seminar is open to
graduate students in philosophy and, with permission, to advanced graduate students in
mathematics, physics, and related fields.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

Prerequisites: high-quality work in the previous term. Arrangements must be made with the director of graduate studies. Tutorial work in specialized research topics.

This course offers an advanced exploration of a theme, tradition, or figure in 19th-century philosophy. Depending on the semester, the course may be organized around one central figure/text, or around a theme or tradition (for example, post-Kantian German idealism, 19th-century social and political philosophy, 19th-century philosophy of religion.)

This course will focus on topics in political philosophy.