PHIL610 FA26
Graduate Proseminar (PHIL610)
Topic: Selections from Contemporary Analytic Philosophy
Dr. Nellie Wieland
Mondays · 5:00pm–7:45pm · LA1–302
PHIL 610 is designed to initiate first-semester graduate students into the program, and, more generally, philosophy as it is practiced at higher levels of professional academic competence. The initiation into advanced philosophy will be achieved by equipping students with the skills in analysis, composition, and research that are appropriate for meeting the expectations of our MA program. Students will learn the expectations of the department and its faculty, including the requirements of the program, the department’s basic qualifying examination (BQE), the thesis option and non-thesis comprehensive exams. Students will also be instructed in how to understand the arguments of major texts in the area or subdiscipline that constitutes the subject matter of the proseminar. And students will be trained in how to conduct themselves in a graduate-level setting; how to analyze texts through discussions and presentations; how to conduct philosophical research; how to properly cite sources; how to write focused, argumentative papers; and other interrelated skills.
The primary focus of the proseminar is skill development. To that end, we will complete assignments and exercises on a weekly basis. The content of the course is a vehicle for skill development. There is no set theme for the proseminar for FA26. Instead, we will read, analyze, discuss, and respond to a classic paper each week for approximately thirteen total across the fall semester. The papers are on a range of different topics across philosophy. Each one of them has been influential in the field, and each one has something to teach us about writing, argument, and the development of ideas.
This course is run as a seminar proper, not as a lecture. Hence, students will be expected to come to every class meeting prepared to discuss the readings and other assignments in a roundtable setting. All students should plan on participating at every class meeting. All students should come prepared with questions, insights, and topics for class discussion for every class meeting. In graduate-level seminars, the professor serves largely as a facilitator for a course that is run jointly by the professor and students.
Examples of possible papers that we might read, analyze, and discuss include, but is not limited to:
- Thomson, ‘A defense of abortion’
- Williams, ‘moral luck’
- Foot, ‘Morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives’
- Anderson, ‘What is the point of equality?’
- Berlin, ‘Two concepts of liberty’
- Rawls, ‘Two concepts of rules’
- Austin, ‘A plea for excuses, or three ways of spilling ink’
- Strawson, ‘Freedom and resentment’
- Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of will and the concept of a person’
- Quine, ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’
- Churchland, ‘Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes’
- Donnellan, ‘Reference and definite descriptions’
- Gendler, ‘Alief and belief’
- Putnam, ‘Brains in a vat’
- Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (selections)
- Wolf, ‘Moral saints’
- Korsgaard, ‘The origin of value’
- Davidson, ‘Rational animals’
- Evans, ‘The causal theory of names, or understanding demonstratives’
- Dotson, ‘How is this paper philosophy?’
- Lewis, ‘Scorekeeping in a language game’
- Anderson, ‘Hermeneutical impasses’
- Mills, ‘Ideal theory as ideology’
- Walton, ‘Categories of art’
- Danto, ‘The artworld’
- Murdoch, ‘The sublime and the good’
- Smuts, ‘Art and negative affect’
- Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (excerpts)
- Gaut, ‘The ethical criticism of art’