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.

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.

Critical introduction to philosophical problems, ideas and methods.

Explicit criteria for recognizing valid and fallacious arguments, together with various methods for schematizing discourse for the purpose of logical analysis. Illustrative material taken from science and everyday life.

Prerequisites: PHIL UN2211 Required Discussion Section (0 points). PHIL UN2101 is not a prerequisite for this course. Exposition and analysis of the metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy of the major philosophers from Aquinas through Kant. Authors include Aquinas, Galileo, Gassendi, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. 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.

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.

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.

Many of China’s most influential philosophical traditions emerge within the context of war and harsh living conditions following the collapse of the Zhou dynasty, during the historical period known as the Warring States (6th-3rd c. BCE). In response to the political turmoil they lived through, thinkers of the Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, Zhuangist, and Legalist schools of thought each posited their own diagnostic, emerging with radically different philosophical views. Their disagreements included issues such as the origin of virtues, the function of ritual, the appropriate extension of moral feelings, the demands of good governance, the proper human place in the natural world, cosmology, and the aim of argumentation. This course will introduce students to these seminal figures and themes in early Chinese thought. We will occasionally consider philosophical issues overlapping with the Western canon, but our primary focus is on the unique concepts and context which guided the inquiry of Chinese thinkers. Our inquiry will be grounded in primary texts, with secondary materials as supplements. Readings will be entirely in English, and no knowledge of Classical Chinese is required (though we will sometimes discuss issues in translation which require reference to Chinese terms). Please note that as this course is centered on intellectual traditions indigenous to early China, we will not systematically consider comparable issues through the lens of Buddhist thought. 

As this course is designed to be accessible to students beginning their philosophical studies (and not just as an extension or application of ideas acquired through the Western canon), there are no prerequisites. As with any philosophy course, success in this class does not rely heavily on prior knowledge or reading, but rather on the continued exercise and refinement of the philosophical skills of critical thinking, writing, discussion and argumentation. A typical session will include an introductory lecture from me and a brief student presentation in the first hour, before transitioning to group discussion in the second hour. In this small, seminar format class you are expected to not only read all the assigned material and attend classes, but actively engage in and contribute to discussion. 

Required of senior majors, but also open to junior majors, and junior and senior concentrators who have taken at least four philosophy courses. This exploration will typically involve writing a substantial research paper. Capped at 20 students with preference to philosophy majors.

Required of senior majors, but also open to junior majors, and junior and senior concentrators who have taken at least four philosophy courses. This exploration will typically involve writing a substantial research paper. Capped at 20 students with preference to philosophy majors.

Corequisites: PHIL W3963 Required Discussion Section (0 points). What can we know? What is knowledge? What are the different kinds of knowledge? We will read classic and contemporary texts for insight into these questions.

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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.

This course will focus on one advanced topic in feminist philosophy. Potential topics include embodiment, gender, sexuality, oppression, intersectionality, and care ethics.

This course will examine philosophical issues raised by artificial intelligence, focusing especially on modern artificial neural networks. In the first part of the course, we will ask questions related to mind and meaning. Could an artificial neural network be conscious? Do the words an LLM produces have meaning in the same way our words do when we speak? What kinds of aims and goals might a superintelligent AI have? We will then turn to distinctively ethical questions raised by AI. According to what values and beliefs should we try to constrain the behavior of neural networks? How should we think about the social relationships some people enter into with AI? How should we think about the disruptions AI will produce in the workforce? Could neural networks themselves have moral status, and so deserve a particular kind of respect? Finally, we will end by examining questions about AI related to art and creativity. In what sense do the images produced by generative AI count as art? Could a neural network itself be considered creative?

Offered in both semesters, the weekly seminar is for incoming PhD students (required) and for MA students of the first year (required) and second year (optional).  MA students can take the class at any stage during their studies for the MA. The class is graded Pass/Fail.  Every two weeks, the seminar will be co-led by the instructor and an invited member of the department who will select a reading for discussion, historical or contemporary, from their area of expertise. Students will submit responses to the readings. The alternate weeks will be divided into an hour for the PhD cohort and an hour for the MA students. Here, research skills in reading, writing, and conversing will be developed through a range of intellectual exercises.

The central insight of speech act theory is that speakers perform many different actions with
language. Words can be used to assert, question, command, promise, beg, bet, marry, arrest,
bequeath, request, refuse, threaten, subordinate, silence, complain, etc. Even the very same
words can on one occasion be a straightforward assertion, on another occasion be a promise,
and another a threat. Speech act theory investigates how it is that speakers do all these
things with words: how does a speaker succeed in communicating the force of her words?
What effects do these have? How much (if anything) is a matter of convention and how much
(if anything) is a matter of speaker’s intentions or the speaker’s state of mind more generally?
This class is divided into roughly three sections, though the topics from each section overlap.
The first third of the course is an historical overview of classic speech act theory. The second
third is on more recent and more formal theoretical developments; we look at work by both
philosophers and linguists in their development of concepts such as discourse context, context
change, presuppostion, and convention, as well as formal analyses of things like sentence
mood and imperatives. The final third is on applications of speech act theory (drawing from
theoretical ideas from the first two-thirds of the class) to issues of social, political, and ethical
importance, e.g. propaganda, pornography, hate speech, free speech, dogwhistles, and social
institutions.

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.