A detailed examination of some central philosophical texts from history of Western philosophy. Topics vary by semester. Different topics may satisfy different Core requirements.
Ockham's Manifesto: Language and Ontology in the Summary of Logic
The Summary of Logic by William of Ockham (ca. 1287–1347) has been called "a manifesto masquerading as a textbook." In addition to teaching a revamped system of Aristotelian logic based on the semantic properties of signification and supposition, Ockham's Summary also outlines a metaphysical program that revolutionized late medieval philosophy. This program came to be known as 'nominalism', with 'realism' being its adversary. Ockham's own brand of nominalism recognizes only particulars – as opposed to universals – belonging to the Aristotelian categories of substance and quality. So among the things that exist are Kiki the cat and the grayness of her fur, but not any general felinity or gray color in virtue of which she's a gray cat. This ontological reduction is grounded in an innovative linguistic analysis involving the semantics of connotation and the theory of mental language: 'cat' signifies particular cats, not catness-in-general, and 'gray' signifies particular gray things while connoting the particular graynesses that they have. In this class, we'll investigate this doctrine along with the overall relationship between language and ontology in Ockham's Summary, reading much of Book I along with supplementary material from Ockham's other works and from other philosophers in Ockham's context.
Medieval and Early Modern Philosophical Theology
In pursuit of wisdom, most philosophers throughout history thoughtfully engaged in a project of philosophical theology. Differing from religion, theology – the study (logos) of god (theos) – critically examines the existence, features, powers, and effects of deities. Some of the most sophisticated approaches to these issues were proposed by medieval and early modern philosophers living between about 1000 and 1800 CE. In this class, we'll try to understand the theological views of a variety of philosophers of this period. Topics will include arguments for the existence of a god in the Latin and Arabic traditions, philosophical mysticism in medieval women philosophers, and the metaphysics and logic of the sacrament of the eucharist. Additional Core Requirements Met: Global Connections.
The Myth of Dualism
There are bodies and minds, and the two are fundamentally distinct. Bodies are spatial, publicly observable, and subject to mechanical laws. Minds are spectral, private, and, when things go right, observant of the rules of good reasoning and purposeful action. People are unions of the two— ghost-piloted machines whose constituents, once separated by bodily death, have very different fates: the abandoned vessel decays, while the captain somehow survives. Or so says the myth of dualism, attributed to the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes by the 20th-century British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who argues extensively against the "official doctrine" of Cartesian Dualism. But Descartes, ingenious as he was, didn't think in a vacuum. He absorbed and perpetuated an intellectual tradition stretching from Classical Greece, to the Golden Age of Islam, to the European Middle Ages, and into Modernity—crude labels for internally diverse and complexly interrelated periods of philosophical history. In the first part of this course, we'll try to locate and trace the myth throughout this roughly two-thousand-year stretch. Our approach will be chronological, and we'll study the views of numerous philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa of Ávila, Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Baruch Spinoza, and Anton Wilhelm Amo. In the second part of the course, we'll consider several approaches to rejecting the paradigm. Forsaking chronology, we'll first attend to Ryle's alternative to dualism—logical behaviorism—before reflecting on an assortment of challenges, raised by Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, Michel de Montaigne, and Nāgārjuna, to the very idea of an identifiable, unified, or non-illusory self. Additional Core Requirements Met: Global Connections.