Philosophy

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.

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 is a survey of analytic philosophy of language. It addresses central issues about the nature of meaning, including: sense and reference, speech acts, pragmatics, and the relationship between meaning and use, meaning and context, and meaning and truth.

Prerequisites: one course in philosophy. Corequisites: PHIL V3711 Required Discussion Section (0 points). This course is mainly an introduction to three influential approaches to normative ethics: utilitarianism, deontological views, and virtue ethics. We also consider the ethics of care, and selected topics in meta-ethics.

Required discussion section for PHIL UN3701 Ethics

Required discussion section for PHIL UN3701 Ethics

Required discussion section for PHIL UN3701 Ethics

Bringing together scholars from the fields of Philosophy, Medicine, Ethics, and Religion, this course
exposes students to modes of inquiry that can help to answer central questions that are often elusive and/or
unconsidered: What constitutes a good human life? What do I need to be truly happy? How does the fact
that I will one day die impact how I should live today? This interdisciplinary course provides a rare
opportunity to consider how a wide variety of thinkers and writers have approached these questions, while
also engaging with them in a personal way within our contemporary context. Lectures will be combined
with group discussion and a weekend retreat, creating possibilities for interpersonal engagement and deep
learning.

Imagine you travel to a parallel universe, where you happen to find a planet like the Earth, where you find a city like New York, where you find a university like Columbia University, where you find a person like you. Call that person X. You are staring at X. What is the relation between you and X, the other-worldly you? This is the famous “problem of transworld identity” hotly debated since the 1960s. In this course, we will be reading the two most influential books in contemporary analytic philosophy: Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (1972) and David Lewis’s On the Plurality of Worlds (1986) – where two completely different answers are forcefully argued for. Kripke argues that you and X are one and the same person. (If you kill X, will you die?) Lewis argues that you and X are merely similar strangers. (Not unlike you encounter someone who looks like you in another country.) We will start with Ted Sider’s Four-Dimensionalism (2001) – the most influential book on what turns out to be a closely analogous problem: identity over time. All these will lead up to a completely novel theory: Five-Dimensionalism (5D), which argues that you and X are parts of the same person, like your left hand and right hand are both part of your body. According to 5D, you are five-dimensional, extended across 3D space, time, and possible worlds. You are all the possible yous. There is no prerequisite for this course.

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.

The course offers an advanced introduction to key thinkers in Early Greek Philosophy, including Thales, Xenophanes, Parmenides, Melissus, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, the atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and Protagoras. Early Greek philosophers asked questions about appearances and reality, nature, the human capacity to gain knowledge, perception, disagreement, and the different ways of life that people consider “natural.” They formulate arguments of perennial interest on what should be considered fundamental, whether motion can only be explained if there is void, the nature of knowledge, and whether relativism is compelling. The class is inspired by recent research that addresses this period and novel questions that have emerged.

Intensive study of a particular topic in Moral Psychology.

The MA Research Seminar supports the research projects of MA students in Philosophy.
Participants practice key methods in philosophy and deepen their knowledge of classic and
contemporary contributions to the field. The seminar is suitable for everyone who is aiming to
write a research paper. Seminar participants receive detailed input throughout the semester.
Students can take the class at any stage during their studies for the MA. The class is graded Pass/
Fail.
 

Journalism is an important profession in modern life but remains under-theorized within academic philosophy, where vanishingly little has been written about it. This graduate course oers a survey of major topics in the philosophy of journalism, drawing on philosophical writing, the work of critics within the eld of media studies, and the reective writings of journalists themselves to address this lacuna. The course is divided into ve substantive units that concern (1) freedom of the press as a political right and the place of journalism in democratic life, (2) objectivity as an ideal for news journalism, (3) the social epistemology of journalism: propaganda and the problem of ‘fake news’, (4) the relationship of news and editorial journalism, and (5) alternatives to mainstream journalism and news organizations: publicly-funded and citizen journalism. The last two weeks of the course will be devoted to student presentations on independent research projects.

This course will focus on one topic in philosophy. 

This course will focus on one topic in philosophy. 

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The first third of this Seminar will introduce a framework and theory for addressing the nature of intentional content, and apply it to such classical issues as the structure of justification, the a priori, and logical inference. The remainder of the Seminar will apply the theory to develop an account of intentional content in the perception of music. I will use the resulting account to explain the significance and interest of music, musical communication, the mental representation of music, and the relation of music to other art forms, especially poetry.

The topic of this course is the problems and possibilities of democratic citizenship