Weill Medical College of Cornell University · Courses
PHIL
151 courses with the subject PHIL, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
PHIL 1100Introduction to Philosophy3
A general introduction to some of the main topics, texts, and methods of philosophy. Topics may include the existence of God, the nature of mind and its relation to the body, causation, free will, knowledge and skepticism, and justice and moral obligation. Readings may be drawn from the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophical literature.
This First-Year Writing Seminar is about using philosophy and everyday life and provides the opportunity to write extensively about these issues. Topics vary by section.
Data ethics has become an increasingly important topic with the rise of big data and artificial intelligence. We will focus on three major ethic concerns raised by our lives online: privacy, manipulation, and bias. Readings will be drawn from a variety of authors, and writing assignments will apply ethical theories to practical problems.
This course will examine central issues in social and political philosophy. Topics include the legitimacy of the state, the nature of property, the nature of justice, the role of education, and the permissibility of violence. We will consider the role of identity, liberty, and autonomy in our social and political lives. Readings will be a mix of historical and contemporary sources.
We all face difficult moral decisions on occasion. This course introduces students to the idea that we face such a decision several times a day in deciding what to eat. How should facts about animal life and death inform this decision? Is the suffering involved in meat, egg, and dairy production really bad enough to make the practices immoral? How do our dietary choices affect local and non-local economies, the environment, and other people generally? Finally, given the deep connections between eating practices and various ethnic, religious and class identities, how can we implement a reasonable food policy for an expanding world population while also respecting these important differences? The goal of this course is not to teach some preferred set of answers to these questions. The goal is rather to give participants the basic tools required to reflect clearly and effectively on the questions themselves. These tools include a working knowledge of the major moral theories developed by philosophers, and an understanding of basic empirical issues related to food production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. In addition to readings, lectures, and required sections, the course will involve trips to some local food-production facilities, as well as supplemental lectures by experts from Cornell, Ithaca, and beyond.
An introduction to some of the main contemporary moral issues. Topics may, for example, include animal rights, abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, sexual morality, genetic engineering, and questions of welfare and social justice.
In what ways do movies reflect our world? In what ways to movies limit our imagination? Can we learn about ourselves and the real world from fiction in films? And if so, what is it that we learn? What do movies communicate? Can you misinterpret a film? Does it matter what the filmmaker intended? How do we evaluate the truth of what films say? How can we answer the questions they ask us? This course will explore philosophical questions and themes taken up through film and ask these philosophical questions about the genre itself.
PHIL 1595A Philosopher's Guide to the Galaxy: Philosophy & Science Fiction3
Is time travel possible? Are we stuck inside a computer simulation? Should we try to live forever? In this course we will grapple with philosophical questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics alongside works of science fiction by authors such as N. K. Jemisin, Robert Heinlein, and Ursula Le Guin. Readings and assignments will tie abstract philosophical theories to the real world, creating opportunities for both abstract philosophical debate and practical questions about the ethics of technology.
This course provides an introduction to the science of the mind. Everyone knows what it's like to think and perceive, but this subjective experience provides little insight into how minds emerge from physical entities like brains. To address this issue, cognitive science integrates work from at least five disciplines: Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Linguistics, and Philosophy. This course introduces students to the insights these disciplines offer into the workings of the mind by exploring visual perception, attention, memory, learning, problem solving, language, and consciousness.
This section is highly recommended for students who are interested in learning about the topics covered in the main course through writing and discussion.
What is race? Race can determine a lot about people’s lives. It can determine the targets of racial discrimination, violence, and injustice. It can determine who benefits from racial progress. It can be the basis of privileging some and subordinating others. It can impact a person’s self-identity. But what does it mean to belong to a certain racial group? This course will explore different philosophical answers to the question of ‘what is race?’. Is race solely biological? Are there “racial” genes? Or is race a social construction? Is race a political or cultural category? What are the consequences of each of these accounts? By engaging with these questions, students will cultivate their ability to clearly articulate their thoughts and develop their own opinions.
Who gets to decide what is right and wrong? Are there any universal moral rules? Do moral norms benefit some more than others? What are the implications when age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, income, social status, and other individual differences interact with morality? This course is designed for students who are ready to dive to the core of morality. This format of the course is a series of guest talks and active discussions.
This course introduces students to political theory as a distinctive mode of political inquiry. By surveying the wide range of forms through which political theory has been practiced-such as treatises, dialogues, plays, aphorisms, novels, manifestos, letters, speeches, illustrations, and films-we explore the ways in which political theory reflects upon, criticizes, and reshapes the basic concepts, habits of perception, and modes of feeling through which people make sense of the political world, from big events like wars and revolutions to everyday experiences of felt injustice or alienation. Our approach will be both historical and conceptual, attending to the force of each theoretical intervention in its context, while also drawing out the broader philosophical and political questions it continues to pose to us now. (GOVT-PT)
In recent years, poverty and inequality have become increasingly common topics of public debate, as academics, journalists, and politicians attempt to come to terms with growing income inequality, with the increasing visibility of inter-country differences in wealth and income, and with the persistence of racial, ethnic, and gender stratification. This course introduces students to ongoing social scientific debates about the sources and consequences of inequality, as well as the types of public policy that might appropriately be pursued to reduce (or increase) inequality. These topics will be addressed in related units, some of which include guest lectures by faculty from other universities (funded by the Center for the Study of Inequality). Each unit culminates with a highly spirited class discussion and debate.
An introduction to leading topics in legal theory and political philosophy such as: what the laws should be, how they shape and are shaped by society, how they are and should be interpreted, the proper role of ethical and religious outlooks in lawmaking, the obligation to obey the law, and the relationship between private life and public legislation.
This course is designed for first year students interested in how ideas – across time and with changing valences – shape and help us navigate our world. At stake are conversations and contestations across centuries that focus on Big Ideas such as “Origins” (Genesis, Darwin, the Big Bang); “Truth” (Plato, Kant, Nietzsche); “Storytelling” (Jesus, Kafka, Octavia Butler); “Liberation” (Exodus and Leviticus, Frederick Douglass, Sigmund Freud, Angela Davis); and “Revolution” (the biblical notion of jubilee, Marx, DuBois). The material will not be read chronologically but by shared themes, problems, and conflicts. A central concern is tracing the paradigm shifts and different models of thought that occur between antiquity, the nineteenth century, and today.
An introductory survey of ancient Greek philosophy from the so-called Presocratics (6th century BCE) through the Hellenistic period (1st century BCE) with special emphasis on the thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
A survey of Western philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries: Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. We focus largely on epistemology (ideas, skepticism, belief, knowledge, science) and metaphysics (bodies, minds, God, causation, natural laws, afterlife, and personal identity). Some of the ethical implications of these systems will also be mentioned in passing.
This course examines slavery as a topic of philosophical analysis. Surveying a range of ancient and modern discourses, we will think together about the following questions: What is slavery? What is a slave? Who can be a slave? Why does slavery exist? What is the relationship between slavery and race? Slavery and gender? Slavery and religion? We will encounter several views on these questions, paying close attention to the ways they emerged in their historical contexts. We will begin with a study of slavery in the ancient world, focusing on Greece and Rome. Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of slavery and freedom form much of the foundation for how slavery was understood in the medieval and early modern world. These beginnings will give us the conceptual tools necessary for us to analyze and understand the enslavement of Indigenous peoples and Africans by Europeans and the American anti-slavery movement. The course ends by considering slavery's enduring legacy in the modern university.
This course will survey a number of famous paradoxes about the nature of time, identity, logic, science, belief, decision, and value. Some of these paradoxes have widely accepted answers, but many do not. Paradoxes include (but are not limited to) Zeno's paradoxes, the sorites paradox, the liar paradox, paradoxes of probability, the doomsday and simulation arguments, Newcomb's puzzle, and the trolley problem. These paradoxes will be used as a stepping stone to deeper philosophical questions. Some of the questions we'll tackle include: Is time real? What is a person? Is infinity coherent? How is science possible? What is knowledge? What is it to be rational? What should we do? Does God exist? And finally, why is death bad?
Covers sentential languages, the truth-functional connectives, and their logic; first-order languages, the quantifiers every and some, and their logic.
This will be a lecture course on classic and contemporary work on central topics in ethics. The first third of the course will focus on metaethics: we will examine the meaning of moral claims and ask whether there is any sense in which moral principles are objectively valid. The second third of the course will focus on normative ethics: what makes our lives worth living, what makes our actions right or wrong, and what do we owe to others? The final third of the course will focus on moral character: what is moral praiseworthiness, and how important is it? Can we be held responsible for what we do? When and why?
This course is an introduction to the moral mind from philosophical and psychological perspectives. Many traditional philosophical problems about morality are being illuminated by current work in cognitive science. In this course, we will look at several of these problems. In each case, we will begin with a presentation of the philosophical problems, and we will proceed to examine recent empirical work on the topic. A wide range of topics will be covered, including moral judgment, agency, the self, and punishment.
This course will examine key issues in social and political philosophy. Topics may include the legitimacy of the state, political obligation, the nature and demands of justice, equality, liberty, and autonomy. Selected readings may be drawn from historical as well as contemporary sources.
The course concerns the principles and philosophical arguments underlying conflicts and moral dilemmas of central and ongoing concern to society as they arise within legal contexts. We consider questions such as what justifies using state power to punish people for wrongdoing, what kinds of conduct are rightly criminalized, what justifies the Supreme Court's power to strike down Congressional legislation, what justifies the right to private property and its boundaries, what is the right to privacy and why it is important, what are human rights, and what is the morality and law of war. Throughout we will be reading legal cases and philosophical commentaries that engage with the deep issues that the cases pose.
Bioethics is the study of ethical questions raised by advances in the medical field. Questions we'll discuss will include: Is it morally permissible to advance a patient's death, at his or her request, to reduce suffering? Is there a moral difference between killing someone and letting someone die? What ethical issues are raised by advance care planning? What is it to die? What forms of cognitive decline or physical change could you survive (and still be you)? On the flip side, were you ever a fetus? How should the rights of pregnant women be balanced against those of the fetus? Should parents be given control over the genetic make-up of their children? Are some forms of human enhancement morally troubling? Should we aim to be better than well? What is it to be disabled? How should scarce health care resources or costly therapies be allocated to those in need? Should organ sales be permitted? Should medical treatment (or health insurance!) ever be compulsory, or is mandating treatment unacceptably paternalistic? Should doctors or hospitals be permitted to refuse to provide certain medical services that violate their consciences?
This course surveys a range of ethical issues that arise in professional engineering, and provides discussion-based practice in analyzing and addressing them. Using normative frameworks from professional codes, philosophical ethics, value-sensitive design, feminist theory, and science & technology studies, the course engages with a series of historical, current, and fictional case studies, across a wide variety of engineering disciplines. Specific topics to be discussed may include: privacy, consumer rights, smart cities, geoengineering, artificial intelligence, and cloning. Instruction is through a mix of lectures and discussions.
PHIL 2473Ethics of Computing and Artificial Intelligence Technologies3
Computing is ubiquitous in modern life, and essential to professional work in engineering and many other disciplines. However, computing technologies, especially artificial intelligence, raise distinctive normative issues. This course surveys a variety of social, ethical, and political issues that arise in connection with computing technologies, including artificial intelligence, from a philosophical perspective. Specific topics may include: hacking, privacy, intellectual property, forms of deception and manipulation enabled by computing technologies, social injustices that are reinforced by algorithmic systems, machine ethics, and science fiction issues such as robot rights or existential risks posed by superintelligent computer systems. Content delivery will be through a mix of lectures, readings, and in-class discussion.
This course is an introduction to philosophy of the arts, with emphasis on contemporary visual art, and on recent theorizing about art. We will investigate questions such as: What is art? What is good art, and who decides? What is art about, and who decides? What is the relationship between art and politics? Between art and thought? Art and nature? Art and ordinary experience? What is the nature of aesthetic experience?
What must (or could) God be like, and what reasons do we have for thinking that a being of that sort actually exists? What difference would (or could) the existence of God make to our lives? Religion & Reason examines the idea, shared by several major world religions, that God must be an absolutely perfect being. What attributes must a perfect being have: must it have a mind, be a person, care for human beings? Is the concept of a perfect being coherent? Is the existence of a perfect being compatible with the presence of evil in the world, the existence of human freedom, the nature of the world as modern science understands it? Does what is morally right and wrong depend in any important way on the nature or will of a perfect being? Is a perfect being among the things that actually inhabit our universe? The course approaches these questions with the tools and methods of philosophical reason and through readings drawn from both classic texts and contemporary philosophical discussion.
This course will survey the rich and sophisticated tradition of Indian philosophical thought from its beginnings in the speculations of Upanishads, surveying debates between Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and materialistic philosophers about the existence and nature of God and of the human soul, the nature of knowledge, and the theory of language. (ASIAN-RL)
PHIL 2570Introduction to Ancient Chinese Philosophy and Literature3
This course is a survey of ancient Chinese philosophy (prior to the Qin Dynasty of the late third century BCE) and its influence on Chinese literature and aesthetics of the subsequent dynasties. We will focus on the primary texts by key philosophers of the Confucian, Daoist, Mohist, and Legalist schools. We will examine how the secular moral ideal and the transcendent ideal of Chinese aesthetics arise from the Confucian and Daoist schools of thoughts. We will also study their subsequent interplay in folk poetry, Xuanyan (metaphysical or philosophical) poetry, and Shanshui (landscape) poetry from the Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty.
An introduction to some central philosophical questions about knowledge and reality. Questions to be addressed may include: What, if anything, do we know? What is it for a belief to be reasonable? What is it for one event to cause another event? What makes the person reading the beginning of this sentence the same as the person reading the end of this sentence? Readings are typically drawn from recent sources.
This course will introduce students to some central questions in epistemology (often defined as the philosophical study of knowledge), using both contemporary and historical readings. For example, we will examine our reliance on experts and testimony for our knowledge, the status of reports concerning miraculous or 'scientifically impossible' events, and the epistemology of conspiracy theories. We will also consider questions of disagreement and pluralism when it comes to controversial matters such as politics and religion.
Throughout history, metaphors drawn from technology of the time have been proposed to understand how the mind works. While Locke likened the newborn's mind to a blank slate, Freud compared the mind to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. More recently, many have endorsed Turing's proposal that the mind is a computer. Why is this idea attractive and what exactly is a computer? Is it at all plausible that the cells of your brain are computing? Could a computer ever really have a mind, beliefs, emotions and conscious experiences? What are these mysterious things anyway? Could a machine ever count as a person and make choices based on its own free will? Is it really so clear that we have this kind of free will?
This course is an introduction to some of the central questions in metaphysics--the study of what there is and how it works. Possible topics include persistence through change, freedom of the will, the nature of time (and the possibility of time travel), causation, properties, and necessity.
This course offers an introduction to the philosophy of race. It canvasses key debates in the field concerning the metaphysical status of race, the relationship between the concept of race and racism (and the nature of the latter), the first-person reality of race, and the connections and disconnections between racial, ethnic, and national identities.
PHIL 2810Introduction to the Philosophy of Science3
We will look at some central questions about the nature of scientific theory and practice. What makes a discipline a science? Does science discover the objective truth about the world? How, and why, do scientific theories change over time? To what extent do observation and experiment determine which theories we accept? What is a good scientific explanation? What are laws of nature? Does physics have a special status compared to other sciences?
This course is an introduction to decision theory. Decision theory aims to answer a fundamental normative question: what ought one to do, given what one believes and values. Modern decision theory is a work in progress, with many outstanding issues, so our focus will be on what are sometimes called the philosophical 'foundations' of decision theory. Our discussion will be driven by some concrete problems (Newcomb, Death in Damascus, Sleeping Beauty), and by some general questions (what does practical irrationality consist in? how can one argue in favor of one decision theory or another?).
PHIL 2835Game Theory: For Economics, Politics, Knowledge and Rationality3
The course is an introduction to game theory, for students from different disciplinary backgrounds and interests. Game theory, as a discipline, is barely one hundred years old. From its origins in the analysis of parlor games, it has now become part of real life, including diplomacy and corporate strategy. Its rapid rise to prominence, with implications for various disciplines, from economics and computer science, to politics, philosophy and evolutionary biology has few parallels. This course is designed as a primer for students who have no background in game theory but have an interest in deductive reasoning.
This course examines controversies in the theory and history of civil disobedience. Do citizens have obligations to obey unjust laws? Can law breaking ever be civil rather than criminal? Do disruptive protests endanger democracy or strengthen the rule of law? How do acts of protest influence public opinion and policy? How is the distinction between violence and nonviolence politically constructed and contested? We will study classical writings and contemporary scholarship in pursuit of answers to these questions and related debates concerning the rule of law, conscientious objection, the uses of civility and incivility, punishment and responsibility, as well as whistleblowing, direct action, strikes, sabotage, hacktivism, and rioting. (GOVT-PT)
Readings in French and Francophone philosophy and theory, from the 16th century to today. Themes may vary each offering, but can include questions of: death and finitude, gender, existence, affect, literature, art, and aesthetic, humanism and posthumanism, ecology, responsibility, ethics politics, violence, slavery, education, capitalism,and colonialsim.Texts from numerous authors, such as: Montaigne, Derrida, Irigaray, Deleuze, Rousseau, Fanon, Pascal, De Beauvoir, Blanchot, Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Debord, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Levinas, Cixous, Mbembe, Descartes, Badiou, Latour, Althusser, Weil, and others.
Politicians, scientists, and citizens worldwide face many environmental issues today, but they are neither simple nor straightforward. Moreover, there are many ways to understand how we have, do, and could value the environment from animal rights and wise use to deep ecology and ecofeminism. This class acquaints students with some of the challenging moral issues that arise in the context of environmental management and policy-making, both in the past and the present. Environmental concerns also highlight important economic, epistemological, legal, political, and social issues in assessing our moral obligations to nature as well as other humans. This course examines various perspectives expressed in both contemporary and historical debates over environmental ethics by exploring four central questions: What is nature? Who counts in environmental ethics? How do we know nature? Whose nature?
PHIL 2965Ecological Justice: Feminist, Queer, and Trans Perspectives3
This course is an in-depth study of ecological justice from feminist, queer, and trans perspectives. Historically, people marginalized by race, gender, sexuality, disability, and poverty have borne the brunt of environmental degradation. But they have also led environmental movements and ecological theorizing around the globe. Drawing on the traditions of ecofeminism, racial justice, queer and trans ecology, and disability theory, students will learn how feminist, queer, and trans thinking has reshaped binaries at the heart of environmental ethics, including nature/artifice, human/animal, stranger/kin, science/poetics, and activism/daily life. As such, students will deepen their knowledge of intersectional justice within a more-than-human world.
This course explores the meaning of Law and Society, which is an interdisciplinary study of the interactive nature of legal and social forces. A law and society perspective places law in its historical, social, and cultural context, studying the dynamic way in which law shapes social norms, policy, and institutions, and conversely, the way that social forces shape the law. This Foundations of Law and Society course is structured as a series of four modules, each taught by a faculty member from a different discipline. The modules will introduce students to a range of disciplinary methods and content related to the study of the interaction of law with social, political, and economic institutions and relationships.
In this course, we will consider some philosophical writings from the last third of the 19th century through the early 20th century that are both of interest in themselves and helped shape philosophical work up to today. We will also read some more recent writings that address issues raised by material from that target period.
We will study several of Plato's major dialogues, including the Apology, the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic. Topics include knowledge and reality, morality and happiness, and the nature of the soul.
We will study several of Aristotle's major works, including the Categories, Physics, Posterior Analytics, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics. Topics include nature and change, form and matter, the nature of happiness, the nature of the soul, and knowledge and first principles.
An examination of the doctrines of the Greek philosophers working in the three centuries after the death of Aristotle. Emphasis on Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism.
A selective survey of Western philosophical thought from the fourth to the 14th century. Topics include the problem of universals, the theory of knowledge and truth, the nature of free choice and practical reasoning, and philosophical theology. Readings (in translation) include Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham. Some attention will be given to the development of ideas across the period and the influence of non-Western traditions on the West.
An introduction to some of the major thinkers and philosophical developments in the Islamic world from the 9th to the 14th centuries CE. Figures include Muslim thinkers such as Al-Kindi, Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Al-Ghazali, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) as well as important representatives of the Jewish tradition such as Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides). Themes include philosophical theology (the existence and nature of God, God's relation to the created world, prophecy, the place of reason in religion), metaphysics (the nature of existence, fundamental ontology, causality), mind and knowledge (the nature and mechanisms of cognition, our knowledge of ourselves and the world), and ethics and political philosophy (how best to live and organize the state).
This course is a survey of European philosophy of the early modern period (17th – 18th Century). This period witnessed a burgeoning of diverse philosophical views on the major issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. These views shaped contemporary philosophy and continue to profoundly influence modern society and culture. This course surveys the influential philosophers of this period including Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and Kant, whose selected works cover the following six major topics: (a) knowledge, justification, and skepticism, (b) the metaphysics of the physical world, (c) the nature of mind and consciousness, (d) free will and moral responsibility, (e) the ground for political obligation and the structure of government, and (f) the rational basis of morality.
An intensive study of the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of the Critique of Pure Reason. Some editions of the course may also consider Kant's ethical views as laid out in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and related works.
This course introduces students to Kant's moral philosophy, focusing on his normative ethics. We will pay special attention to how Kant's emphasis on virtue in his later ethical writings enables a response to many of the historical and contemporary criticisms leveled against him. We will also discuss some remaining worries about his theory; for example, those stemming from his rigorism or his views on race and gender.
This will be a course on standard set theory (first developed by Ernst Zermelo early in the 20th century): the basic concepts of sethood and membership, operations on sets, functions as sets, the set-theoretic construction of the Natural Numbers, the Integers, the Rational and Real numbers; time permitting, some discussion of cardinality.Course was formerly titled Foundations of Mathematics.
This course introduces the mathematical methods used in many areas of contemporary philosophy without any assumed mathematical background. It will also cover some of the basic applications of these methods in a range of subfields within philosophy. The course consists of six units: 1. Basic Set theory; 2. Relations (applications in metaphysics); 3. Semantics (applications in metaphysics and epistemology); 4. Probabilities (applications in epistemology and philosophy of science); 5. Decision Theory (applications in ethics); 5. Game Theory (applications in philosophy of language and social philosophy). Other units and applications may be included depending on time and interest.
A mathematical study of the formal languages of standard first-order propositional and predicate logic, including their syntax, semantics, and deductive systems. The basic apparatus of model theory will be presented. Various formal results will be established, most importantly soundness and completeness.
Modal logic is a general logical framework for systematizing reasoning about qualified and relativized truth. It has been used to study the logic of possibility, time, knowledge, obligation, provability, and much more. This course will explore both the theoretical foundations and the various philosophical applications of modal logic. On the theoretical side, we will cover basic metatheory, including Kripke semantics, soundness and completeness, correspondence theory, and expressive power. On the applied side, we will examine temporal logic, epistemic logic, deontic logic, counterfactuals, two-dimensional logics, and quantified modal logic.
This course is about the surprisingly intricate relationship between humor and morality. We will investigate several theories of humor (theories of what makes things funny), we then turn our attention to what the general relation between humor and morality might be: does immorality in a joke or wisecrack eliminate its funniness, dampen its funniness, have no effect on its funniness, or increase its funniness? Then the focus will turn to specific types of morally troublesome humor, including racist and sexist jokes, stereotype-exploitation more generally, mockery, jokes about disability and assault, and punching up and down. The course will conclude by investigating what makes for a good or bad sense of humor, as well as the possible absurdity of life and how that might be funny.
This course will primarily focus on studying and scrutinizing general conceptions of justice. Topics explored typically include liberty,economic equality, democracy, community, the general welfare, and toleration. We will also look at implications for particular political controversies such as abortion, welfare programs and pornography.
This course addresses central debates in the philosophy of legal punishment. We will analyze the leading theories of punishment, including the familiar retributivist and deterrent alternatives, as well as lesser-known hybrid, self-defense, and rehabilitative accounts. We will ask whether each theory offers a general justification for establishing institutions of punishment, and whether each theory justifies specific acts of punishment. Other topics may include criminal responsibility, the legitimacy of collateral consequences (e.g., the denial of felons' voting rights), alternatives to punishment, etc.
This will be a class on various topics in the philosophy of law. Some questions we'll be considering: What is law? Do laws have moral content? What is the proper role of judges in interpreting the law? What do alternatives to our legal system look like? Is there an obligation to obey the law? Might there sometimes be an obligation to disobey the law? What, if anything, justifies punishment by the state? What counts has having an excuse for wrongdoing? What counts as good evidence of guilt? What are the justifications for and limits of the right to free speech? When, if ever, is paternalistic interference by the state into the lives of its citizens justified? And what special ethical problems do practicing lawyers face?
PHIL 3525Africana Philosophy: Existentialism in Black3
The dominant strains in Euro-American philosophy tend either to erase or underplay the participation in and contributions to the constitution of Western philosophy of philosophers from the global African world. Additionally, dominant philosophical narratives are notorious for excluding African-inflected discourses from explorations of the perennial problems of philosophy. In this class, we seek to fill this absence by spending time studying the contributions to a distinct philosophical tradition-Existentialism-by thinkers from the global African world.
This course will be an advanced introduction to some contemporary debates in epistemology. We will start by considering skeptical arguments that we cannot really know whether the world is the way it appears to us. We will look at different strategies to respond to such skeptical arguments, in particular contextualism, and explore questions concerning the nature of knowledge and the relation between knowledge and other epistemologically significant concepts, such as certainty, justification, and evidence. We will also look at Bayesian epistemology and its theoretical underpinnings, at knowledge-first approaches to epistemology, at the relation between knowledge and action, and at the compatibility of traditional epistemology with formal epistemology. Also will explore the notion of common knowledge, and issues in social epistemology.
Concepts are properties of individuals that approximately correspond to word meanings. They play a role in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence. The course looks at phenomena and accounts of concepts from these different perspectives. Looks at problems in the semantic analysis of natural languages, critically examining work in linguistics and philosophy on particular topics of current interest. Topics vary. Not taught every year.
An introduction to some of the main issues in the philosophy of language. Topics may include names, definite descriptions, belief ascriptions, truth-conditional theories of meaning, pragmatics, and metaphor. Both historical and contemporary readings are considered.
This course delves into decision theory. We shall be concerned with a fundamental normative question: what ought one to do, given what one believes and values. Our focus, throughout, will be on philosophical questions and not on applications.
After some stage-setting on logic, and an overview of philosophical questions raised by mathematics, we will focus on Logicism: the thesis that arithmetic (understood as the part of mathematics concerned with the numbers in various number-systems) is or is a fragment of higher-order logic. We will approach Logicism historically, through writing by Frege and B. Russell. We will then look two other views of mathematics: Hilbertian formalism and Intuitionism. This will involve discussion of three restrictive projects: predicativism (imposing predicativity restrictions on definitions, comprehension principles and induction), constructivism (restricting logic to intuitionistic logic), and finitistic arithmetic. Since philosophical work in mathematics is enmeshed with mathematical work on the foundations of mathematics, it will be necessary to devote time to fully mathematical material (sets, proofs and models).
To be taken only in exceptional circumstances. Must be arranged by the student with his or her advisor and the faculty member who has agreed to direct the study.
Moral Psychology in Action is an applied psychology course for students who want to make a difference in the world through ethical leadership and positive contributions in organizations, and who are drawn to scholarly work on psychology, ethics, and morality. The course is experiential and takes place mostly outside the classroom through students' individualized partnerships in community organizations, businesses, and institutions. Learning outcomes include enhanced critical reflection, intercultural competence, ethical practice, and the practice of applied moral psychology research methods.
Reading, translation, and English-language discussion of important texts in the German philosophical tradition. Readings for a given term are chosen in consultation with students.
First course in mathematical logic providing precise definitions of the language of mathematics and the notion of proof (propositional and predicate logic). The completeness theorem says that we have all the rules of proof we could ever have. The Gödel incompleteness theorem says that they are not enough to decide all statements even about arithmetic. The compactness theorem exploits the finiteness of proofs to show that theories have unintended (nonstandard) models. Possible additional topics: the mathematical definition of an algorithm and the existence of noncomputable functions; the basics of set theory to cardinality and the uncountability of the real numbers. Students will be expected to be comfortable writing proofs. More experience with proofs may be gained by first taking CS 2800 or a 3000-level MATH course.
The question What is gender? is an increasingly thorny and political one. This course provides students with an advanced introduction to debates about the nature and function of gender in contemporary trans theory and trans philosophy. Throughout the seminar, we will analyze various definitions of gender offered by trans thinkers: gender as genus, as genre, as performance, as self-identity, and as colonial category. We will critically assess the value and limitations of key gender terms such as cisgender, genderqueer, nonbinary, and transgender. Finally, we will grapple with the current debate about whether to abolish gender or to richly celebrate gender diversity.
An investigation of central topics in the philosophy of art, with an emphasis on issues about the mind. Readings will be drawn from philosophy and psychology.
This course surveys major schools of classical Chinese philosophy: Confucianism, Mohism, and Daoism. We focus on the Confucian vision of an ideal life, moral development, and self-cultivation, whereby one refines and reshapes one's emotions to achieve ethical excellence and contribute to one's community. We explore the Mohist advocacy of an ethics in which everyone is to be treated impartially, and the differences between Mohism and Confucianism in relation to key ethical issues. We emphasize the Daoist rejection of Confucian moral preaching and the idea that the truth can be captured through theorizing and argument, as well as the espousal in this tradition of non-action and intuitive action. We shall see how advocates of these different philosophies debated and borrowed ideas from each other. (ASIAN-SC)
An intensive seminar on a special topic in epistemology to be determined by the instructor. Potential topics include: What are the limits of knowledge? What is the extent and nature of our knowledge of our own minds? How do we gain knowledge through particular sources such as perception, testimony, memory, or reasoning? Readings may be drawn from historical or contemporary sources.
This course will explore how perception works and what perception does, with an emphasis on issues in the theory of knowledge, philosophy of art, and social philosophy.
An investigation of varying topics in the philosophy of language including reference, meaning, the relationship between language and thought, communication, modality, logic and pragmatics.
What is the relationship between what words mean and how they are used? What is part of the grammar and what is a result of general reasoning? Pragmatics is often thought of as the study of how meaning depends on the context of utterance. However, it can be difficult to draw a line between pragmatics and semantics. In this course, we will investigate various topics that walk this line, including varieties of linguistic inference (including entailment and implicature), the pragmatics and compositional semantics of presupposition, anaphora and dynamic semantics, the semantics and pragmatics of focus, indexicals, and speech acts.
Introduces methods for theorizing about meaning within generative grammar. These techniques allow the creation of grammars that pair syntactic structures with meanings. Students look at several empirical areas in detail, among them complementation (combining heads with their arguments), modification, conjunction, definite descriptions, relative clauses, traces, bound pronouns, and quantification. An introduction to logical and mathematical concepts used in linguistic semantics (e.g., set theory, functions and their types, and the lambda notation for naming linguistic meanings) is included in the course.
Majors in philosophy may choose to pursue writing of an honors thesis in their senior year. Students undertake research leading to the writing of an honors essay by the end of the final semester. Prospective candidates should apply at the Department of Philosophy office, 218 Goldwin Smith Hall.
Majors in philosophy may choose to pursue writing of an honors thesis in their senior year. Students undertake research leading to the writing of an honors essay by the end of the final semester. Prospective candidates should apply at the Department of Philosophy office, 218 Goldwin Smith Hall.
PHIL 4941Locke and the Philosophies of Dispossession: Indigenous America's Interruptions and Resistances3
This course looks at the philosopher John Locke as a philosopher of dispossession. There is a uniquely Lockean mode of missionization, conception of mind and re-formulations of the 'soul' applied to dispossess Indigenous peoples of the social institutions, intellectual traditions and the material bases and practices which sustain(ed) them. While colonization is typically used as a kind of shorthand for this process, we will be attempting to stay focused on the specific dimensions of Lockean dispossession and its mutually informing relationship with English colonialism.
Reading, translation, and English-language discussion of important texts in the German philosophical tradition. Readings for a given term are chosen in consultation with students.
This course is devoted to writing philosophy papers well. During the first half of each seminar, we will consider exemplars of philosophical writing in the analytic tradition, and will discuss the way their authors use a variety of writing techniques to communicate their ideas clearly, vividly, elegantly, economically, or stylishly. During the second part of the course, students will gather and bring in their own exemplars to share with the class. Approximately half of each seminar will be devoted to discussion of and peer feedback on students’ own short papers, following by revision, with my detailed guidance. Students will also submit and revise a final paper. The choice of papers topics is free, and the aim will be to produce effectively written papers on whatever topics you choose.
In this course, we will consider some philosophical writings from the last third of the 19th century through the early 20th century that are both of interest in themselves and helped shape philosophical work up to today. We will also read some more recent writings that address issues raised by material from that target period.
We will study several of Plato's major dialogues, including the Apology, the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic. Topics include knowledge and reality, morality and happiness, and the nature of the soul.
We will study several of Aristotle's major works, including the Categories, Physics, Posterior Analytics, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics. Topics include nature and change, form and matter, the nature of happiness, the nature of the soul, and knowledge and first principles.
An examination of the doctrines of the Greek philosophers working in the three centuries after the death of Aristotle. Emphasis on Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism.
This course is a survey of European philosophy of the early modern period (17th – 18th Century). This period witnessed a burgeoning of diverse philosophical views on the major issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. These views shaped contemporary philosophy and continue to profoundly influence modern society and culture. This course surveys the influential philosophers of this period including Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, and Kant, whose selected works cover the following six major topics: (a) knowledge, justification, and skepticism, (b) the metaphysics of the physical world, (c) the nature of mind and consciousness, (d) free will and moral responsibility, (e) the ground for political obligation and the structure of government, and (f) the rational basis of morality.
An introduction to current research in the history of philosophy primarily through engagement with a variety of presentations of such research by Cornell faculty, visiting scholars, and advanced graduate students doing dissertation-level work. Each seminar meeting will involve a viva voce presentation of a current paper or research project. Students in the course will be expected to engage in both critical discussion of the work presented and reflection on the practices and methodologies exemplified in that work. Advanced graduate students in the course will be expected to present work of their own. Exposure to a variety of scholars and their work and the opportunity for explicit reflection on scholarly practices will enable students to develop and refine their own research in the history of philosophy.
This course introduces the mathematical methods used in many areas of contemporary philosophy without any assumed mathematical background. It will also cover some of the basic applications of these methods in a range of subfields within philosophy. The course consists of six units: 1. Basic Set theory; 2. Relations (applications in metaphysics); 3. Semantics (applications in metaphysics and epistemology); 4. Probabilities (applications in epistemology and philosophy of science); 5. Decision Theory (applications in ethics); 5. Game Theory (applications in philosophy of language and social philosophy). Other units and applications may be included depending on time and interest.
A mathematical study of the formal languages of standard first-order propositional and predicate logic, including their syntax, semantics, and deductive systems. The basic apparatus of model theory will be presented. Various formal results will be established, most importantly soundness and completeness.
PHIL 6311Topics in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics3
Advanced discussion of a topic in logic or foundational mathematics. Topics vary by instructor. For descriptions of each topic, please visit the university class roster.
PHIL 6417Moral Foundations of Anti-Discrimination3
What makes discrimination wrongful, when it is? Does its wrongness depend on social context and historical background? Does it depend on harmful consequences? What makes a certain ground of discrimination an improper ground? Is indirect discrimination (disparate impact) really a form of discrimination or perhaps a mild form of affirmative action? What should be the reach and scope of anti-discrimination law? Should it allow for exemptions on religious or free speech grounds? We will address these and similar questions at a fairly abstract level, trying to understand the philosophical principles that might explain the various aspects of anti-discrimination law. Most of the legal examples will be focused on discrimination cases in the context of employment and service provision (Title VII), but we will also consider racial profiling, disability cases, and some others.
This course will be about the surprising and complicated ways that morality and humor bear on one another. The focus will be on interpersonal humor (banter, teasing, mockery, leg-pulling, etc.) that raises serious moral questions, as it may well involve deception, cruelty, or stereotyping. Humor can hurt, exclude, and divide. Considering its occasional immorality, should we continue to engage in it? This is, surprisingly, a new area of exploration. We will explore literature that can help us to start thinking about the topic on our own, literature that is at least in the general vicinity (what literature on humor there is is just about jokes). It comes from a variety of disciplines, including aesthetics, psychology, metaethics, linguistics, emotion theory, and normative ethics.
What would happen if, instead of taking an instrumentalist view of the ideas of modern African political thinkers, we consider those ideas as indeed they are, attempts by them to proffer answers to the central questions of political philosophy as those are apprehended in the African context? If we did, we would end up with a robust, sophisticated discourse properly denominated 'Modern African Political Philosophy' in which we recognize, possibly celebrate and, ultimately, assess the quality of answers that African thinkers have provided. In this Seminar, we shall be reading original works by African thinkers and do so in the context of modern political philosophy. Participants in the course will work to create critical literature in response to these works as part of a more general effort to begin to create secondary resources in this relatively unexplored area of scholarship about Africa. Each participant will be expected to produce a final piece that can be a candidate for, minimally, presentation at a learned conference and, maximally, publication in a journal. This is a seminar that is absolutely focused on intellectual production by its participants under the direction of the instructor.
This course addresses central debates in the philosophy of legal punishment. We will analyze the leading theories of punishment, including the familiar retributivist and deterrent alternatives, as well as lesser-known hybrid, self-defense, and rehabilitative accounts. We will ask whether each theory offers a general justification for establishing institutions of punishment, and whether each theory justifies specific acts of punishment. Other topics may include criminal responsibility, the legitimacy of collateral consequences (e.g., the denial of felons' voting rights), alternatives to punishment, etc.
In this seminar, we will draw connections between radical theories and movements from the nineteenth century to the present. Rather than identifying isolated trajectories of “Marxism” “anarchism” and “feminism,” or distinct national traditions, we will focus on key concepts within internationalist thought: from the commune, the state, and the family to empire, colonization, revolution, and the strike. Focusing on the period before and after the 1917 Russian Revolution, we will witness Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin debate the role of the state, Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg consider the benefits and limitations of reform, Vladimir Lenin and W.E.B. Du Bois address the function of the strike, and Silvia Federici, Cedric Robinson, and Andreas Malm interrogate the racialized, gendered, and extractive foundations of capital. Taught in English.
An investigation of central topics in the philosophy of art, with an emphasis on issues about the mind. Readings will be drawn from philosophy and psychology.
This course surveys major schools of classical Chinese philosophy: Confucianism, Mohism, and Daoism. We focus on the Confucian vision of an ideal life, moral development, and self-cultivation, whereby one refines and reshapes one's emotions to achieve ethical excellence and contribute to one's community. We explore the Mohist advocacy of an ethics in which everyone is to be treated impartially, and the differences between Mohism and Confucianism in relation to key ethical issues. We emphasize the Daoist rejection of Confucian moral preaching and the idea that the truth can be captured through theorizing and argument, as well as the espousal in this tradition of non-action and intuitive action. We shall see how advocates of these different philosophies debated and borrowed ideas from each other.
An intensive seminar on a special topic in epistemology to be determined by the instructor. Potential topics include: What are the limits of knowledge? What is the extent and nature of our knowledge of our own minds? How do we gain knowledge through particular sources such as perception, testimony, memory, or reasoning? Readings may be drawn from historical or contemporary sources.
This course will explore how perception works and what perception does, with an emphasis on issues in the theory of knowledge, philosophy of art, and social philosophy.
Concepts are properties of individuals that approximately correspond to word meanings. They play a role in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Philosophy, and Artificial Intelligence. The course looks at phenomena and accounts of concepts from these different perspectives. Looks at problems in the semantic analysis of natural languages, critically examining work in linguistics and philosophy on particular topics of current interest. Topics vary. Not taught every year.
An investigation of varying topics in the philosophy of language including reference, meaning, the relationship between language and thought, communication, modality, logic and pragmatics.
An introduction to some of the main issues in the philosophy of language. Topics may include names, definite descriptions, belief ascriptions, truth-conditional theories of meaning, pragmatics, and metaphor. Both historical and contemporary readings are considered.
What is the relationship between what words mean and how they are used? What is part of the grammar and what is a result of general reasoning? Pragmatics is often thought of as the study of how meaning depends on the context of utterance. However, it can be difficult to draw a line between pragmatics and semantics. In this course, we will investigate various topics that walk this line, including varieties of linguistic inference including entailment, presupposition, and implicature), anaphora, indexicals, and speech acts.
Introduces methods for theorizing about meaning within generative grammar. These techniques allow the creation of grammars that pair syntactic structures with meanings. Students look at several empirical areas in detail, among them complementation (combining heads with their arguments), modification, conjunction, definite descriptions, relative clauses, traces, bound pronouns, and quantification. An introduction to logical and mathematical concepts used in linguistic semantics (e.g., set theory, functions and their types, and the lambda notation for naming linguistic meanings) is included in the course.
Uses the techniques introduced in Semantics I to analyze linguistic phenomena, including quantifier scope, ellipsis, and referential pronouns. Temporal and possible worlds semantics are introduced and used in the analysis of modality, tense, and belief sentences. The phenomena of presupposition, indefinite descriptions, and anaphora are analyzed in a dynamic compositional framework that formalizes the idea that sentence meaning effects a change in an information state.
After some stage-setting on logic, and an overview of philosophical questions raised by mathematics, we will focus on Logicism: the thesis that arithmetic (understood as the part of mathematics concerned with the numbers in various number-systems) is or is a fragment of higher-order logic. We will approach Logicism historically, through writing by Frege and B. Russell. We will then look two other views of mathematics: Hilbertian formalism and Intuitionism. This will involve discussion of three restrictive projects: predicativism (imposing predicativity restrictions on definitions, comprehension principles and induction), constructivism (restricting logic to intuitionistic logic), and finitistic arithmetic. Since philosophical work in mathematics is enmeshed with mathematical work on the foundations of mathematics, it will be necessary to devote time to fully mathematical material (sets, proofs and models).
This seminar inquires into the interrelations among three meanings of equality that initially appeared in the ancient world: equality before the law, isonomia; equality of voice or participation, isegoria; and equality of power, isokratia. Tacking back and forth between ancient texts and contemporary materials in law and analytic and continental political philosophy, this course will explore how these different practices of equality circulate and interact in popular and institutional (judicial and legislative) settings marked by historical injustice, scarce resources, and asymmetries of wealth and power. This seminar will include texts by Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Rawls, Bernard Williams, Amartya Sen, Danielle Allen, Etienne Balibar, among others, probing the meaning of equality. (GOVT-PT)
Social science research almost always combines empirical observation (data), the construction of concepts (language), and the logical analysis of the relations between observations and concepts (statistics). This course examines the relations between these three dimensions as the analyst moves from one to the other both as practice and in the crafting of a formal summary of findings and argument. We will be particularly interested in the foundational assumptions that underpin the connections between empirical reality, language, and statistical analysis. While these foundational assumptions are often taken for granted by social scientists, they vary dramatically between social science disciplines. The implicit contradiction between that variance and their doxic acceptance within disciplines will be a primary focus of the course. (GOVT-PT)
PHIL 6941Locke and the Philosophies of Dispossession: Indigenous America's Interruptions and Resistances3
This course looks at the philosopher John Locke as a philosopher of dispossession. There is a uniquely Lockean mode of missionization, conception of mind and re-formulations of the 'soul' applied to dispossess Indigenous peoples of the social institutions, intellectual traditions and the material bases and practices which sustain(ed) them. While colonization is typically used as a kind of shorthand for this process, we will be attempting to stay focused on the specific dimensions of Lockean dispossession and its mutually informing relationship with English colonialism.
This course is designed to help prepare Philosophy graduate students for the academic job market. Though students will study sample materials from successful job applicants, much of the seminar will function as a workshop, providing them with in-depth feedback on multiple drafts of their job materials. Interview skills will be practiced in every seminar meeting. The seminar meetings will be supplemented with individual conferences with the placement mentor, and students should also share copies of their job materials with their dissertation committees.
Invited talks in philosophy given by both outside speakers and members of the Cornell community. Enrollment for credit is required for first- and second-year philosophy graduate students.
