Fall 2023

Undergraduate courses

R1B  Reading and Composition Through Philosophy. Crockett. TuTh 3:30-5:00, Dwinelle 134.

This is a seminar in reading and writing philosophy. Students will practice analyzing, critically assessing, and writing about philosophical texts. The class will also involve student presentations and review of others students’ written work. Readings will include texts in ethics and aesthetics. This course fulfills the university’s second-semester reading and composition (R&C) requirement.

2  Individual Morality and Social Justice. Bailey. MWF 3-4, Hearst Annex A1.

An introduction to some issues in moral and political philosophy guided by two overarching questions: What is the relationship between acting morally and living a good life? And: What makes a society just?

3  The Nature of Mind. Campbell. MWF 9-10, Lewis 100.

In this introductory course we will be looking at the relation of psychological states, such as desires or memories, to the physical world. There are five sections in the course: Foundations (Dualism, Behaviorism and Central-State Materialism), Functionalism, Consciousness, Intentionality, and Personal Identity. What is the mind? Are mental states, such as beliefs and desires, memories and hopes, characteristics of a non-physical substance, or are they configurations of the physical world? And if we think that mental states are entirely physical, should we think of them as relating to the ways in which a person tends to behave, or are they rather states of the person’s brain? Can a mental state be explained by its potential for causal relations with other mental states and with behavior? What is the relation between conscious experience and the brain? Is consciousness something over and above the ordinary biological functioning of the brain, or can it somehow be explained in biological terms? How can we explain our ability to think about the world? What is a person? These questions will be explored in the course of beginning to understand the nature of the mind.

5  Science and Human Understanding. Gómez Sánchez. TuTh 11-12:30, AAPB155.

12A  Introduction to Logic. Holliday. MWF 12-1, HMMB 390.

Logical reasoning is essential in most areas of human inquiry. The discipline of Logic treats logical reasoning itself as an object of study. Logic has been one of the main branches of philosophy since Aristotle; it revolutionized the foundations of mathematics in the 20th century; and it has been called “the calculus of computer science,” with applications in many areas. Logic has also played an important role in the investigation of language and the mind, as the basis for formal semantics in linguistics and automated reasoning in artificial intelligence. Today, Logic is an interdisciplinary subject with many applications.

PHILOS 12A is intended as a first course in logic for students with no previous exposure to the subject. The course treats symbolic logic. Students will learn to formalize reasoning in symbolic languages with precisely defined meanings and precisely defined rules of inference. Symbolic logic is by nature a mathematical subject, but the course does not presuppose any prior coursework in mathematics—only an openness to mathematical reasoning.

The Spring 2019 installment of 12A will concentrate on three systems of symbolic logic: propositional logic (also known as sentential logic); syllogistic logic; and predicate logic (also known as first-order logic). Propositional logic formalizes reasoning involving “propositional connectives” such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘if…then’, and ‘if and only if’, as these words are used in mathematics. Syllogistic logic formalizes reasoning involving basic patterns of “quantification” such as ‘all whales are mammals’ or ‘some animals are carnivores’. Finally, predicate logic formalizes reasoning involving a greater variety of patterns of quantification, plus the attribution of properties to objects, both of which are on display in a statement such as ’for every number that is prime, there is a larger number that is prime’.

Students from philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and linguistics will find important connections between the symbolic logic covered in 12A and their other coursework.

25A  Ancient Philosophy. MacFarlane. MWF 1-2, Dwinelle 145.

This course is an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy–and, for the uninitiated, to philosophy itself. We will spend almost all of our time on the three most important Greek philosophers–Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle–with a passing glance at pre-Socratic and Hellenistic philosophers. Our primary goal will be to understand these philosophers’ characteristic methods and views, and (more importantly) their reasons for holding these views. It is often said that we should study ancient Greek philosophy because it is the intellectual basis for all later western philosophy and natural science. That is true, but it is only half the story. We should also study ancient Greek philosophy to become familiar with a worldview so alien that it throws our own into sharp relief. As you are outraged by some of the things these philosophers say, you will come to see more clearly what your own views are, and you will be forced to ask what justifies them. You will not just be studying the history of philosophy; you will be doing philosophy. Prerequisite: None.

98BC-2  Berkeley Connect. Dolan. Tu 6-7, Dwinelle 262.

98BC-1  Berkeley Connect. Dolan. Tu 5-6, Social Sci 80.

100  Philosophical Methods. Lee. Tu 4-6, Wheeler 222.

This course is intended to improve the student’s ability to read and write philosophy. Special emphasis will be placed on developing analytic skills. This term we will be examining a number of philosophical texts on the problem of personal identity. There will be short written assignments each week, as well as a longer final paper, which will focus on the essays we are reading. In addition to two hours of lecture, students will meet in tutorials with a teaching assistant in order to discuss the reading, their weekly writing assignment, and the preparation for the final paper.

Text: Personal Identity, edited by John Perry, University of California Press

115  Political Philosophy. Munoz-Dardé. MWF 10-11, Wheeler 102.

This course is devoted to some of the central questions in contemporary political philosophy: liberty, authority, justice and equality. The course is focused particularly on the work of John Rawls.

The course will be organized around three basic themes:

Problems of Authority: Consent and Membership We will look at the significance of obedience to the law in political theory. Are we obliged to obey the laws of a state because we have offered our (tacit) consent by residing within the borders of this state? What, if any, is the force of hypothetical consent? Is there a relation between valuing one’s membership in the political society to which one belongs, and one’s obligations to obey the laws of that society?

Rawls’s Political Liberalism Rawls offers a conception of justice and of the contractualist outlook in his A Theory of Justice and Justice as Fairness a Restatement. We shall examine the basic elements of Rawls’s approach: the role of the Original Position in justifying the account; the significance of the Basic Structure; the priority of liberty; the Difference Principle; the contrast with utilitarianism; the importance of reflective equilibrium; the idea of Political Liberalism.

Egalitarianism Rawls presents his political liberalism as a version of egalitarian theory. Various political philosophers have questioned whether political liberalism is genuinely a form of egalitarianism. We will look at this egalitarian critique. We will also examine the question of whether equality matters, and if so how.

116  Special Topics in Political Philosophy. Sluga. TuTh 9:30-11, Wheeler 222.

The course will examine some of the basic concepts of politics such as that of politics itself, the state, government, political conflict and cooperation, and power. It will focus, in addition, on technology and its role in politics, asking how governmental practices, forms of government, the conduct of war, and, indeed, the meaning and function of politics are affected by technological developments and what political challenges those developments pose.

As taught this semester, Phil 116 satisfies the ethics requirement for the philosophy major.

117AC  Philosophy of Race, Ethnicity and Citizenship. Crockett. MWF 2-3, Social Sci 166.

This course explores philosophical questions of race, ethnicity, and citizenship, with special attention to the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and indigenous peoples of the United States. Topics include the meaning of “race,” “ethnicity,” and “citizenship,” border control and immigration, reparations for past wrongs, discrimination and affirmative action, civic obligation and group solidarity, and the right to vote.

128  Philosophy of Science. Rubenstein. TuTh 12:30-2, Social Sci 56.

We will be considering a few of the classic questions in the philosophy of science, such as: how are scientific theories supported by evidence? How does scientific explanation work? What is the nature of causation, laws, probability, and time, and how do they relate to one another? Does the success of science suggest that everything can ultimately be explained in physical terms?

As taught this semester, Phil 128, can satisfy group A of the Epistemology/Metaphysics requirement.

132  Philosophy of Mind. Gómez Sánchez. TuTh 2-3:30, Cory 247.

133  Philosophy of Language. Yalcin. TuTh 12:30-2, Birge 50.

An advanced introduction to the philosophy of language. We will consider questions like: What is distinctive of language as a system of representation and communication? In virtue of what can pieces of language be true or false? How do we model the way the meaning of a whole sentence depends on the meanings of its parts? What is information? How can we model its transfer in conversation? How does language-specific knowledge interact with general reasoning in communication and action? How do meaning and communication depend on context? What is it, in general, to know a language? What kind of limits, if any, does language place on our conception of reality?

This should not be your first or second course in philosophy. Phil 12A is strongly recommended.

140A  Intermediate Logic. Holliday. MWF 3-4, Wheeler 102.

Major concepts, results, and techniques of modern logic. Basic set-theoretic tools. Model theoretic treatment of propositional and first-order logic (completeness, compactness, Löwenheim-Skolem). Philosophical implications of these results. Prerequisite: 12A or equivalent with consent of instructor.

148  Probability and Induction. Zhang. MWF 1-2, Social Sci 170.

The sun has risen every day in the past. Will it rise tomorrow? A gambler just lost ten bets in a roll. Should they be more confident that they will win the next one? More generally, how should we make predictions and generalizations based on data collected in the past? Probability theory is a powerful tool for studying such questions. This course is an introduction to the fundamental concepts of probability and inductive logic (the axioms of probability, conditional probability, Bayes’ rule, and expected value) and their application to the problem of induction and theory confirmation. Along the way, we will look at two dominant schools of statistical inferences, Bayesian and frequentist, and critically examine their philosophical foundations and limitations. We will also discuss the ethics of statistics and investigate questions such as: Is it acceptable to base high-stakes decisions (e.g. whether to convict someone) on merely statistical evidence or algorithm’s predictions? What does it mean for an algorithm to be “unbiased”? Is it possible for a machine learning program to be value-free?

Prerequisites: 12A (or equivalent) or consent of the instructor

149  Special Topics in Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics: Proof Theory. Mancosu. TuTh 9:30-11, Wheeler 102.

The course will cover in detail the basic results of structural and ordinal proof theory. Both branches of proof theory go back to the work of Gerhard Gentzen who, working in the tradition of Hilbert’s program, established the foundational results of the discipline in the 1930s. In structural proof theory, they include the formulation of natural deduction systems and sequent calculi and the major metatheorems about them (normalization and sub-formula property for natural deduction; cut elimination and sub-formula property for sequent calculi). In ordinal proof theory, Gentzen gave a constructive proof of the consistency of Peano Arithmetic by means of ordinal notations and a principle of induction for such notations (up to an ordinal called epsilon-zero). The lectures will be based on a forthcoming book on proof theory by Prof. Mancosu. The course will be of interest to philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, computer scientists, and linguists. Through this material, philosophy students will acquire the tools required for tackling further debates in philosophy of mathematics (prospects for Hilbert’s program and its relativized versions etc.) and philosophy of logic and language (meaning of the logical constants; proof-theoretic semantics; realism/anti-realism, Dummett’s program, i.e., normalization, harmony etc.). Prerequisites: Phil 12A or equivalent.

153  Chinese Philosophy. Shun. TuTh 6:30-8, Wheeler 222.

The goal of the course is to introduce the three main traditions of thought in China – Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism – through a study of selected texts. We will begin with a study of early Chinese thought, with focus on Confucianism (Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi) and Daoism (Zhuangzi), though there will also be references to other schools of thought, including Moism (Mozi) and Yangism (Yang Zhu). We will then move on to a study of Neo-Daoist thought (Guo Xiang) and Chan (or Zen) Buddism (The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch), focusing on two representative thinkers/texts. While we will attend closely to the primary texts (in English translation), the emphasis is on philosophical ideas in the texts.

154  Arabic Philosophy. Clarke. MWF 12-1, Wheeler 222.

An examination of philosophy in the Islamic world from the 9th to the 12th centuries CE, covering topics in metaphysics, natural philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion.

As taught this semester, Phil 154 may satisfy the more inclusive history requirement (which is: 153, 154, 155, 156A, 160–188).

158  Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy. Tzohar. TuTh 9:30-11, Dwinelle 209.

This is an introduction to Buddhist philosophy, extending from its origins (as preserved in the early sūtra literature), down through its evolution into multiple competing philosophical traditions (Abhidharma, Madhyamaka, Yogācāra, Pramāṇavāda, and so on). We will explore Buddhist approaches to issues in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, language, and ethics. One theme running through the course will be radical skepticism; we will explore how Buddhist philosophers questioned not only the existence of an enduring or essential self but also the existence of an external (mind-independent) world, and how their analyses impacted their understandings of meaning in language, their accounts of the nature and function of consciousness.

As taught this semester, Phil 158 may satisfy the more inclusive history requirement (which is: 153, 155, 156A, 158, 160–188).

172  Spinoza. Primus. TuTh 11-12:30, Cory 241.

In this course, we will study the distinctive metaphysical, epistemological, psychological, and ethical positions Spinoza argues for in his Ethics. We will analyze his arguments for monism and necessitarianism, evaluate his response to skepticism, assess the philosophical viability of his accounts of the human mind and human passions, and see whether the resultant picture of what constitutes a good human life is coherent (or attractive).

176  Hume. Martin. MWF 11-12, Wheeler 102.

Passion, Doubt & Justice: Hume & the 18th Century Origin of the Social Sciences

We will be reading through David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40). The intention is for us to gain some sense of how the three books that comprise the Treatise fit together (or fail to fit together). Since we cannot read through the complete Treatise in one semester, we will focus on four themes (passions, causation, body, justice), having first looked at some basic elements of Hume’s system.

This is a lecture course designed primarily for upper division undergraduate students who have taken at least one course in philosophy.

Texts needed are David Hume, A Treatise concerning Human Nature and the preferred edition is: Selby-Bigge OUP. Recommended reading is Barry Stroud, Hume, Routledge.

178  Kant. Warren. TuTh 2-3:30, Social Sci 60.

In this course we will examine some of the major metaphysical and epistemological themes of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. We will be focusing particularly on Kant’s views on the following topics: a priori knowledge and how it is possible, space and time, objectivity and experience, self-knowledge, and transcendental idealism and the contrast between appearances and things in themselves. Several short papers and two longer papers will be required.

190  Proseminar: Modern and Contemporary Aesthetics: – Feelings, Expressions, Reflections, Critique. Kaiser. Tu 4-7, Philosophy 234.

The seminar aims to identify and question key philosophical models of reflecting about art that have been formative or otherwise highly influential in our understanding of art and aesthetic phenomena: important help in this philosophical task will be gained by exploring specifically contrasting non-western perspectives.

Our study will begin with ideas taken from the classical modern canon, i.e., the beautiful, the sublime, and aesthetic judgment (Burke and Kant), followed by the 19th century perspectives of an aesthetic education of mankind (Schiller) and Hegel’s idealist interpretation of the aesthetic idea as spirit’s self-expression. The 20th century phenomena of avantgarde art (e.g., cubism, expressionism, surrealism), as well as the new media generated ‘mass art’ (e.g., photography, film, video), led to new critical responses and questioning of the inherited scope of aesthetic reflection (e.g., Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Danto, Sontag).

Moreover, performance-based anti-art movements (e.g., Dada, Fluxus, Guerilla girls), the opening up of whole new dimensions in environmental art, the emergence of new genres like Pop art, and Manga, challenged almost every single assumption in the traditional European approach to standards of beauty. Additional transformations were brought on by our own 21st century internet art with its many cross-over and app-generated creations. Art’s boundaries are shifting ever more radically. We will search for new philosophical questions that can and should be posed to art and aesthetics. In particular, although contemporary aesthetic theory has begun to address its inherited huge blind sides and opened up to more non-western perspectives as well as formerly marginalized or suppressed ones (e.g. Black, Feminist, Queer, and Everyday aesthetics), a lot of philosophical work remains to be done. Among other things, we will need to consider the significance of both creativity and receptivity, especially under conditions of recent technological AI-generated art.

190  Proseminar: Ethics and the Environment. Crockett. MW 5-6:30, Dwinelle 211.

In this seminar we will examine a wide range of perspectives on the ethical dimensions of our relationship with the natural world and its constituents–animals, plants, ecosystems, etc. Topics of readings and discussions will include: animal rights, the value of species and organisms, land and wilderness ethics, deep ecology, social ecology, environmental justice, ecofeminism, biocentric ethics, sustainability, population and consumption, and obligations to future generations.

Since this is a seminar, the expectation is that participants will come to class prepared to discuss in a respectful and collaborative way the ideas and arguments expressed in the readings.

This seminar is intended for philosophy majors who have had at least two philosophy courses. In special cases, however, permission to take the seminar may be granted by the instructor.

Note: As taught this semester, Philosophy 190 will satisfy the Ethics requirement.

198BC-1  Berkeley Connect. Kassman-Tod. M 5-6, Dwinelle 88.

198BC-2  Berkeley Connect. Kassman-Tod. M 6-7, Dwinelle 206.

198BC-3  Berkeley Connect. Haddow. W 5-6, Evans 55.

198BC-4  Berkeley Connect. Haddow. W 6-7, Dwinelle 259.

Graduate seminars

200  First Year Graduate Seminar. Dasgupta/MacFarlane. Tu 4-6, Philosophy 302.

290-1  Graduate Seminar: Causation, Free Will and Time. Campbell. Th 12-2, Philosophy 234.

We’ll review different concepts of causation, as found in the current literature, and look at how they apply to mental causation, our understanding of free will, and the ways we ordinarily think about time.

Discussion of free will is usually cast in terms of an ability humans are thought to have to control their actions. The opening sentence of O’Connor and Franklin’s excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on ‘Free Will’ is: ‘The term “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one’s actions’. And it’s usually thought that humans are distinctive among animals in having this kind of control. The more fundamental question, though, is not what kind of control is distinctive of humans, but why humans need to be able to control their actions in a way that other animals do not.

Relatedly, humans need to be able to think about linear time in a way that no other animal does. Humans think about a time that encompasses the lives of their ancestors and the lives of their children’s children, and no other animal species seems able to do that, although they are all capable of extensive temporal cognition. We not only seem to need linear time, as other animal species do not, but to make it central in our lives – it’s typically impossible to utter a sentence of any human language without indicating the location of the event reported in a linear time. And our emotional lives are built around the asymmetry between past and future.

We’ll look at differences between the causal structure of human psychology and the causal structures of the mental lives of other animals that underpin these differences in free will and temporal thinking.

The central questions here have to do with the relationship between generality and causal explanation. Does all causal explanation have to be grounded in generalizations, as most causal theorists have thought? Or is there a special place for the idiosyncratic, the one-off, particularly when we’re giving causal explanations that relate to human psychology?

The plan is for the seminar to be very responsive to what strike participants as important and interesting topics, so that we may spend longer on some topics and less on others depending on how things seem to people. Graduates are also encouraged to open sessions or to present formal comments if they would like to.

Thursday August 24th: Introduction

August 31st: Hempel, ‘The Function of General Laws in History’; Kohut, Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past, ch. 1: ‘Historical Excursus: Empathy in the Debates over Knowing in the Natural and in the Human Sciences’.

September 7th: Anscombe, ‘Causality and Determination’.

September 14th: Jaspers, ‘Imaginative Understanding and Causal Explanation’.

September 21st. Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’.

September 28th …. At this point we’ll review what seems to people in the seminar important to go into in more depth (Various analyses of the causal relation itself? Causation in psychiatry? In the law?, all of these?), before going on to look at our causal thinking and its relation to linear time.

…. An important paper for when we move to thinking about linear time will be Hoerl and McCormack, ‘Thinking in and about time: A dual systems perspective on temporal cognition’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42: 1–69.

290-2  Graduate Seminar: Regulation of Intimacy. Munoz-Dardé. M 2-4, Philosophy 234.

This seminar is based on the topics of my manuscript Regulation of Intimacy: the Politics of Sex. There are three broad areas: consent, the justice of family and marriage, and sex-work. The first half of the semester will be focused on issues surrounding the first area: consent to sex; consent and justification; consent and rights; consent vs consensual; consent as a social institution. For the second area, we’ll revisit Rawls’s question, ‘Is the family to be abolished then?’, and we’ll relate Rawls’s original discussion to Scanlon’s more recent discussion of inequality of opportunity. We’ll explore arguments for and against marriage by the state. For the third area we’ll ask what, if anything, is wrong with sex-work, and scrutinize notions of objectification and commodification, as well as social shaming attitudes which attach to sex-work. We’ll also be joined in the first half of semester by David Enoch, Professor of the Philosophy of Law, University of Oxford, and the University of Jerusalem who’ll talk to us about consent and third-party coercion.

290-3  Graduate Seminar: Recent Work on Rational Agency. Wallace. Tu 12-2, Philosophy 234.

Rational agency involves activity that is somehow responsive to our own capacity for normative or evaluative thought. We reflect on what we have reason to do, for instance, and modify our intentions on the basis of such reflection. In this seminar we will look at some important recent work on this general topic, focusing in particular on contributions by Joseph Raz, Pamela Hieronymi, Matthew Boyle, and Agnes Callard. Questions to be addressed include the following: the nature of reasons; the relation of reasons to attitudes, values, and questions; the connections between reasons, reasoning, and activity; the bases of responsibility for what we think and do; the apparent orientation of agency toward the good; and the special features of aspirational agency, which is oriented towards reasons and values that are not yet fully grasped by the agent.

290-4  Graduate Seminar: Contextualism. Yalcin. W 12-2, Philosophy 234.

We’ll get up to speed on the case for contextualism about knowledge.

290-5  Graduate Seminar: Objective Experience. Martin. W 2-4, Philosophy 234.

PF Strawson introduced the problem of objective experience first in Individuals (1959) and further developed in The Bounds of Sense (1966). Drawing on Kantian themes, Strawson offered seemingly new ways of thinking about our knowledge of a mind-independent world.

We’ll be looking at Strawson’s arguments in these two works, but first we’ll put them in historical context, both with respect to the Early Modern period, and with respect to the Early Analytic rediscovery of the problem of perception. Finally, we’ll look at some of the consequences of Strawson’s discussion, and how it becomes a source for the popular idea of perceptual representation.

290-6  Graduate Seminar: Philosophies of History. Novakovic/Hoffmann. W 4-6, Philosophy 234.

This seminar will examine a variety of approaches to history as an object of knowledge, focusing on philosophers and theorists in the history of European thought. We will discuss selected writings from figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, Koselleck, Ricoeur, Buck-Morss and Heller. Here is a sample of questions we will consider: how can the past become an object not just of empirical study, but of philosophy and theory? How do historical events or radical ruptures emerge, unfold and dissipitate? Are there underlying principles or purposes to be found across historical changes, and if so, are these necessary or contingent? What does it mean to attain historical knowledge, or to ‘learn from history’? And what are the conditions of possible histories after cataclysmic catastrophes? Co-taught by faculty in philosophy and history, this introductory seminar is open to students without extensive pre-knowledge of these texts and their backgrounds.

290-7  Graduate Seminar: Cognition, Rationality and Philosophical Naturalism. Lee. Th 2-4, Philosophy 234.

According to Quine “normative epistemology is a branch of engineering. It is the technology of truth-seeking………like any technology, it makes free use of whatever scientific findings may suit its purpose.” In this seminar we will use Quine’s controversial vision of a “naturalized epistemology”, as an inspiration to look at work on rationality and belief-formation at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.

Specific topics we may touch on include : the idea of naturalized epistemology as “non-ideal epistemology”; reliabilism and epistemic consequentialism; the idea that beliefs and belief-forming processes “aim at truth”; the relationship between rationality and adaptiveness/optimality; “rational explanation” as an explanatory strategy in psychology (including the debate about “Bayesian” explanation); bounded rationality and ecological rationality, including philosophical work on “heuristics and biases”; the evolution of belief-like and desire-like states; the evolution of reasoning and reason-giving.

The class will include special guest presentations from Verónica Gómez-Sánchez and Thomas Icard.

290-8  Graduate Seminar: Bayesian Epistemology. Zhang. F 10-12, Philosophy 234.

Description: Bayesianism is a simple and powerful theory of epistemic rationality . Roughly, the view consists of two claims: (i) ideally rational agents have degrees of belief that are probabilistically coherent, and (ii) they revise their degrees of belief by conditionalizing on their total evidence. In this course, we will make precise what these two claims mean and subject them to critical scrutiny. Topics that we will discuss include: (1) arguments for Bayesianism (e.g. the Dutch book argument, the accuracy argument) and their respective limitations; (2) how/whether the Bayesian framework can be generalized to accommodate perceptual learning, updating on conditional information, self-locating evidence and higher-order evidence, and awareness growth; (3) alternative models of partial belief; (4) non-classical Bayesianism; (5) the relationship between credence and categorical belief.

290-9  Graduate Seminar: Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory. Cohen/Hoekstra. F 12-3, Law 141.

This course is a workshop for discussing works in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The workshop creates a space for students to engage directly with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions toward the goal of fostering critical thinking about concepts of value and developing analytical thinking and writing skills. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines and perspectives who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues philosophers and theorists should know something about.

The theme for the Fall 2023 workshop is “Current Work on the History of Political, Legal, and Moral Philosophy.”

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Kinch Hoekstra and Josh Cohen.

The format of the course is as follows. A designated student commentator will lead off with a 15-minute comment on the paper. The presenter will have 5-10 minutes to respond and then we will open up the discussion to the group. The first part of the course will be open to all, including non-enrolled students, faculty, and visitors who wish to participate in the workshop discussion. We’ll stop for a break and those not enrolled in the course will leave. Enrolled students will continue the discussion with the guest for the last 50 minutes.

This is a shared seating course between the Law School (Law 210.2A), the Philosophy Department (Philosophy 290), and the Political Science Department (PS 211).

Zoom is available for those that cannot attend in Person.

295  Dissertation Seminar. Ginsborg. TBA, Philosophy 234.

375  Teaching Seminar. Novakovic. M 6-8, Philosophy 302.

A hands-on training seminar for new philosophy graduate students that addresses both practical and theoretical issues. This course is open only to Philosophy Ph.D. students.