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This is an introduction to philosophy that explores a range of issues pertaining to religious conviction, knowledge, mind, freedom, ethics, and value. This exploration will take place through critical engagement, via reflection, writing, and conversation, with written work – some classical, some contemporary – in the philosophical tradition.
Limited to 20 students. In the Fall 10 seats will be reserved for first-year students. Fall semester: Professors Leydon-Hardy and Gooding . Spring semester: Professor George
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023"All philosophers are wise and Socrates is a philosopher; therefore, Socrates is wise." Our topic is this mysterious "therefore." We shall expose the hidden structure of everyday statements on which the correctness of our reasoning turns. To aid us, we shall develop a logical language that makes this underlying structure more perspicuous. We shall also examine fundamental concepts of logic and use them to explore the logical properties of statements and the logical relations between them. This is a first course in formal logic, the study of correct reasoning; no previous philosophical, mathematical, or logical training needed.
One communal lecture and two small-group practice meetings each week. There will be three practice sections, each limited to 15 students and section 1 being restricted to first-years.
Fall semester. Professor A. George.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022European and American philosophers trace their intellectual heritage to Ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle, in particular, have set standards for philosophical inquiry, by distinguishing it from other practices such as poetry, drama, and sophistry. In this class, we will examine and critically assess their understanding of the nature of philosophical inquiry, by comparing the writing of those whom that they deemed to be philosophers to Homeric poetry, Sophoclean drama, and Protagorean sophistry. We will also examine and critically assess the arguments that Ancient Greek philosophers offered in support of their answers to questions about the nature, sources, and limits of human knowledge; about the merits of relativism, subjectivism, and objectivism in science and ethics; about the nature of the good life; about the relationship between obligations to others and self-interest; and about the connection between the body and the mind. Open to all students.
Limited to 25 students with 10 spots reserved for first-year students. Fall semester. Professor Gentzler.
2022-23: Not offered(Offered as RELI 218 and PHIL 229). Christian religious traditions have assumed that God is omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent. But attributing these attributes to the creator of the universe makes the existence of evil puzzling. If God is omnibenevolent, then God would not want any creature to suffer evil; if God is omniscient, then God would know how to prevent any evil from occurring; and if God is omnipotent, then God would be able to prevent any evil from occurring. Does the obvious fact that there is evil in the world, then, give us reason to think that there is no such God? Alternatively: if an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God does exist, then what could possibly motivate such a God to permit the existence of evil? This course will survey classical and recent philosophical discussions of these questions. Among other topics, we will explore the free-will defense and its recent revisions, skeptical theism, open theism, and the "multiverse theodicy."
Omitted 2023-24.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023U.S. citizens are currently faced with many important decisions about health care policy. Who should have access to health care and to which services? Should people shoulder the costs of their own unhealthy choices, or would a just society provide health care to all equally? Should physician-assisted suicide be legalized? Should abortion remain legal? Should I be able to make decisions about the health care of my future incompetent self with dementia, even if my future self would disagree with these decisions? What are our moral obligations to protect human health globally? These issues, in turn, raise basic philosophical questions. What is the nature of a just society? When are individuals rightly held responsible for their choices? Am I the same person as any future person with severe dementia? When does my life begin and when does it end? What are rights? Do we, for example, have a basic moral right to health care, to privacy, to decide the course of our treatment, or to authority about the timing and manner of our deaths? Do we have rights to other goods that have even more impact on our health than access to health care? Do fetuses have a right to life? These issues, in turn, raise questions about the relative weight and nature of various goods (e.g., life, pain relief, health, privacy, autonomy, and relationships) and questions about the justice of various distributions of these goods between different individuals. Finally, our attempts to answer these questions will raise basic questions about the nature of rationality. Is it possible to reach rational decisions about ethical matters, or is ethics merely subjective?
Limited to 25 students and 12 will be enrolled in the course as a Writing Intensive course with an extra section. Spring Semester. Professor Gentzler.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022(Offered as PHIL 241 and RELI 241). This course puts into dialogue the ancient philosophical traditions of China, India, and Greece. We will explore their reflections and debates on how to live a good life, how to gain knowledge, and how to understand our place in the universe. Through close readings of texts, we will compare ancient philosophical conceptions, styles of discourse, and intellectual contexts. The course reconsiders the Eurocentric history and ideologies of many modern conceptions of philosophy.
No prerequisites. Limited to 60 students. Omitted 2223-24.. Professors Gentzler, and Heim, and Harold.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023(Offered as PHIL 301 and EDST 301) In the past decade, public support for democratic institutions has waned significantly all over the world. The solution to this problem, some argue, is to educate our citizens better so that they understand the value of democracy. Against this solution, others argue that democracy is not the best way to govern a complex nation, since the people lack the knowledge and character that they need to govern well. The solution to this problem, some argue, is to educate our citizens so that they develop the knowledge and character required to exercise the rights of a democratic citizen responsibly and well.In this class, we will consider and assess philosophical arguments for and against different sorts of democracies. In light of this inquiry, we will consider what it would mean to educate for effective democratic citizenship. What knowledge and dispositions should democratic citizens have? How should they be taught? Who should have the authority to determine how the children of democratic citizens are educated? Is segregation of children by social identity in different types of schools compatible with an effective democratic citizenship? Or should schools be fully integrated with all children given the same educational opportunities? Readings will be drawn from the works of Plato, Jason Brennan, Hélène Landemore, Henry Richardson, Elizabeth Anderson, Amy Guttman, Harvey Siegel, Harry Brighouse, William Galston, David Wallace Adams, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Russell Rickford, Tommie Shelby, and others.
Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2023-2024. Professors Gentzler.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Each week, we will dive deeply into one extraordinary piece of philosophy. These masterpieces will vary from year to year. Topics will also vary but readings will be chosen that represent the broad scope of philosophical inquiry. Meets once a week.
Requisite: One course in Philosophy required. Spring semester. Professor Alexander George
2022-23: Not offeredWe will explore such questions as: What is "the scientific method"? How can we know anything beyond what we have experienced? What is a theoretical entity, like an electron? What is an explanation in science? What is mathematics about? How is mathematical knowledge acquired? What are mathematical objects, like natural numbers? What is a proof? How do we know which principles of reasoning are correct? What is an infinite collection? Why is mathematics so useful to science?
Requisite: one course in philosophy required. Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Alexander George.
2022-23: Not offered
We will be concerned to see whether there is anything to be said in a principled way about right and wrong. The core of the course will be an examination of three central traditions in ethical philosophy in the West, typified by Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill. We will also look at contemporary discussions of the relation between the demands of morality and those personal obligations that spring from friendships, as well as recent views about the nature of personal welfare.
Requisite: One course in PHIL or consent of the instructor. Priority is given to Amherst College students. Limited to 25 students. Spring semester. Professor Shah.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Is time real? If so, are the past and the future as real as the present? Do they even exist? And how should we understand time anyway? Is it independent of things within it? Could there be time without change? Time seems linear, and also to have an intrinsic direction or “arrow”? But does it have to be this way? It’s often said that time passes, but what does this mean? How fast does it pass? In what sense is time “open” in the future? Is time travel possible? Finally, can we, and should we, reconcile our everyday understanding of time with the sometimes counter-intuitive theories of modern physics? These questions have received a great deal of attention from philosophers and scientists. This class will explore these questions and others about the nature of time.
Requisite: One course in Philosophy required. Limited to 25 students. Fall semester. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Not offeredIn this course we will investigate the central issues of aesthetics. These include: the value of art, the nature of artworks, expression, creativity, artistic meaning, aesthetic experience, interpretation, criticism, beauty, sublimity. In the first part of the course, we will explore historical texts—from Hume to Heidegger—that have been influential in both the study and practice of art. In the later stages, we will discuss contemporary treatments of selected topics in aesthetics. Requires one previous course in Philosophy or consent of the instructor.
Spring semester. Professor Moore
2022-23: Not offeredMetaphysics investigates the nature of reality at the most fundamental level. It asks basic questions about the nature of time, space, causation, change, composition, possibility, identity and existence. Among the questions we will encounter are: How does time pass? Is the present like a spotlight shining on events laid out in a fourth dimension? Causation is sometimes called the cement of the universe, but is it anything more than one thing regularly following another? Can there be backward causation? How about time travel? Is a statue identical to the lump of clay from which it is fashioned—after all, the same clay might have taken a different shape? Can things really change over time, or do they last for just a moment (or both)? Can you survive in a new body? Does redness exist independently of red things? Are things any more than bundles of properties? Are there merely possible things, like the symphony I never wrote in college? Or fictional entities, like Hermione Granger? Is there more than one type of existence? Metaphysics has been an especially vibrant area of philosophy in recent years, so we will read mostly contemporary work in the field.
Requisite: One course in PHIL. Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022An introduction to philosophical problems concerning the nature of the mind. Central to the course is the mind-body problem—the question of whether there is a mind (or soul or self) that is distinct from the body, and the question of how thought, feelings, sensations, and so on, are related to states of the brain and body. In connection with this, we will consider, among other things, the nature of consciousness, mental representation, the emotions, self-knowledge, and persons.
Requisite: One course in Philosophy. Limited to 25 students. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Immanuel Kant's philosophy set off a revolution that reverberated throughout 19th-century Europe. For Kant, it is our own reason, not God or nature, which is the original source of all moral principles, freedom, and even goodness itself. The rational autonomy of human beings, Kant somewhat surprisingly suggests, commits them to building a more just and humane world.
We will trace the effects of the Kantian revolution, including several influential responses to it. We begin with Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), which grounds ethical obligations in the idea of rational autonomy, before considering his theory of the state in the Doctrine of Right (1797). Other readings will vary from year to year. Authors may include: Frederick Douglass, J.G. Fichte, G.W.F. Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Topics discussed may include: property, human rights, gender, capitalism, religion, and racism.
Our goal is to understand and evaluate some of the most exciting (and difficult) philosophical texts of the 18th and 19th centuries, and to write about them in clear and analytical prose.
Requisite: One prior course in Philosophy. Limited to 25 students.Omitted 2023-24. Professor Hasan
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023(Offered as ENST 474 and PHIL 374) Is our planet overpopulated? And if so, how many of us should live on it? Population raises tricky questions that are both empirical and broadly philosophical: How should we weigh the well-being of future individuals against the lives of those currently living? Should we aim for a future population whose average or whose total level of well-being is maximized—or should we apply some other standard? Even more fundamentally: are we right to think of human life as, on balance, a positive thing? And how might a policy based on answers to such questions be weighed against rights to reproductive choice, and against considerations of justice? In this seminar, we will explore recent work in the emerging and fascinating field of population ethics. We will chart new areas for research, as well as for practical policy-making.
Requisite: At least one course in either ENST or PHIL. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023What are the relationships between racism and capitalism? What economic changes—in the distribution of income and wealth, in production, and in the division of labor—are necessary to achieve racial justice? Marxist theorists of racism have argued that racism is necessary for the reproduction and expansion of capitalism because it maintains divisions among workers and provides an ideological justification for inequality. In this course we will focus on understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and racial oppression, the nature and functions of racial ideology, and the mechanisms by which racial inequality is reproduced. Then, we will consider how these ideas bear on the theoretical question of what racial justice requires and the practical question of how to pursue it.
Requisite: One course in Philosophy or Black Studies, or other familiarity with Marxism or theories of racism, is preferred but not required. Limited to 20 students. Omited 2023-24.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022The twentieth century saw powerful attempts to bring a halt to the kind of philosophy that had consumed people for millennia. Key figures included Wittgenstein, Quine, and so-called Ordinary Language Philosophers. They did not seek to provide solutions to philosophical problems, but tried instead to show that the problems are illusions. We will examine their attempts through several case studies involving language, mind, knowledge, and ethics.
Requisite: two courses in Philosophy. Omitted 2023-24. Professors George and Shah.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Music is sometimes described as a language, but what, if anything, does Charlie Parker’s “Ah-Leu-Cha” say to us? If music isn’t representational, then how should we understand its connection to the various emotions that it can express and invoke? (Or maybe these aren’t genuine emotions: Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is widely described as sad, but what exactly are we—or is it—sad about? And why would we choose to listen to Mozart’s Requiem if it genuinely terrified us?) Perhaps our musical descriptions and experiences are metaphorical in some way—but how, and why?
What exactly is a musical work anyway? Where, when and how do “Summertime,” or “Stairway to Heaven,” or “Shake Ya Tailfeather” exist? And what makes for a performance of one or the other (or of no work at all)?
What, if anything, guides a proper “listening” or understanding of a musical work? Does it require knowledge of relevant musical and cultural conventions, or of the composition’s historical context, or even of the composer’s intentions and guiding aesthetic philosophy? (Think of gamelan music; think of the Sgt. Pepper’s album; think of John Cage.)
What determines whether a work, or a performance of it, is good? What role is played by beauty, grace, intensity and so on? And how objective are these aesthetic properties? Finally, why do we sometimes find music to be not just enjoyable, but intensely moving and even profound?
Requisite: Two courses in PHIL or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Moore.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Does philosophy have anything to contribute to the problem of deeply disadvantaged neighborhoods? Social scientists have long studied concentrations of poverty and racial segregation in the United States. Drawing on this body of literature, Tommie Shelby’s book, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Harvard, 2016), asks: What is racial justice and what does it demand with respect to the urban poor? We will engage Shelby’s arguments as a way of thinking more broadly about racism. Difficult questions of political morality will be central to our discussions. Should governments integrate neighborhoods? Is crime ever justified? Do the oppressed have duties to help overthrow their own oppression? Alongside Dark Ghettos we will read key sources for Shelby’s thinking, including sociological work on race and racism, as well as classics of political thought in the Black radical, Marxist, and liberal egalitarian traditions. Students will actively participate in discussion with four visiting speakers over the course of the term about their recent work on racial justice and injustice: Myisha Cherry, Erin Kelly, Vanessa Wills, and Tommie Shelby himself.
Requisite: Two courses in PHIL or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Omitted 2023-24. Professor Hasan.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023Philosophers have often found it natural to hear our ordinary talk of “minds” as naming a singularly mysterious type of object, with special properties such as thought, sensation, consciousness, perception, emotion, imagination and will. And so, they set out to investigate the nature of this object in order to unravel its mysteries. Some philosophers—most famously René Descartes—claimed to have discovered that this object, this ghostly soul, is radically different from any physical object, while others countered that this object could be understood as entirely physical—as a brain, or as some fancy composite of physical parts. Both sides agreed, though, that "mind" names a special object or substance. This consensus was shattered 75 years ago by the publication of Gilbert Ryle’s revolutionary (and witty) The Concept of Mind (1949). Ryle argued that traditional theories of mind make a massive category-mistake: "mind" does not name an object, or at least not in the same sense that "body" names an object, and thus the philosophy of mind does not have a subject matter in the way that the natural sciences do. Ryle took himself to have exorcised the “ghost in the machine”; at the very least, he had transformed the theoretical landscape. We will carefully examine Ryle’s arguments for this radical thesis, along with various philosophical reactions, running from Ryle’s own ingenious suggestions right up to contemporary accounts of how we should properly understand our ordinary talk of minds.
Required two courses in Philosophy. Spring Semester. Co-taught by Professors N. Shah and J. Moore
2022-23: Not offeredThis seminar explores our obligations to one another concerning what we know and believe. The language of "oughts," "shoulds," and "obligations" is familiar in the context of moral and political philosophy. But what do we epistemically owe to one another? Are we ever obliged to believe what someone tells us—not for moral or political reasons, like solidarity—but for epistemic reasons, including what evidence we have, or should have? And how do facts about social identity and the cognitive science of human bias inform these issues? Might we be obliged to bear witness to certain kinds of testimonies? Is it not only morally, but also epistemically wrong, to disbelieve a speaker on the basis of a hearer’s sincerely held identity-prejudicial attitude? Are there ways in which one’s social identity might make it harder, or easier, for them to acquire, or share, certain kinds of knowledge? Could it be wrong to defer to a speaker on the basis of their identity, out of a morally praiseworthy attitude, such as anti-racism? Are there some forms of knowledge to which we are entitled? Or, from which we deserve to be protected? We will explore these issues in theory and through applied discussions on topics including gaslighting, predatory grooming, false confessions in the criminal justice system, tokenism, and stereotype threat, and more.
Requisite: Two courses in Philosophy. Limited to 15 students. Fall Semester. Professor Leydon-Hardy
2022-23: Not offeredIndependent reading course. Reading in an area selected by the student and approved in advance by a member of the Department.
Admission with consent of the instructor. Fall and spring semesters. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022, Spring 2023Required of candidates for Honors in Philosophy. Directed research culminating in a substantial essay on a topic chosen by the student and approved by the Department.
Open to seniors with consent of the Department. Fall semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Fall 2022Required of candidates for Honors in Philosophy. The continuation of PHIL 498. In special cases, subject to approval of the Department, a double course (499D).
Admission with consent of the instructor. Spring semester. The Department.
2022-23: Offered in Spring 2023