PHI 350 - Seminar in Philosophy

Spring 2019 - Reasons in a World of Causes
Instructor: Robb

We often act for reasons. A student walks to the Commons because lunch is there. A politician gives a speech in order to win voters. Galileo looks through his telescope as a way to learn about the cosmos. But it has proven remarkably difficult to fit such commonsense facts about human behavior into the world presented to us by the natural sciences. There are three main sources of the problem. (1) Mechanism: It seems increasingly likely that neuroscience will eventually provide an entirely mechanistic explanation for everything we do. But then what work is left for reasons in the explanation of behavior? (2) Externalism: Reasons for action are external to us, yet it seems that all causation is “local”: anything that causes us to act must be internal to our brains and bodies. (3) Normativity: When we act for reasons, we do so because that’s the good or rational thing to do, at least by our own lights. But there seems to be no place to fit such normativity into the natural world. After grappling with these three problems, we turn to Fred Dretske’s book, Explaining Behavior (MIT Press, 1988). This is our core text for the course. We will look in detail at Dretske’s theory of action and how he proposes to find reasons in a world of causes.

Fall 2018 - Anarchism & the State
Instructor: Studtmann

What justifies the State?  Would societies be better off without it?  What would a society without a State look like?  If the State is inevitable, what would a just state look like?  These questions have been at the heart of a great deal of political theorizing in the twentieth century.  In this course, we will examine these questions by reading the work of several prominent philosophers.

Prerequisites & Notes
This course can be repeated for credit given sufficiently distinct topics: check with the department chair. (Fall, Spring)