Graduate Courses

Some additional information about this semester's courses can be found at the Arts and Sciences course description page.

Fall 2024 (Term 2251) 

PHIL 2010 Greek Philosophical Texts (30741)
M 1:00-3:30
Jacob Rosen
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2041 Studies in Aristotle (30742)
H 1:00-3:30
Jacob Rosen
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2050 Topics in History of Philosophy (30743)
T 9:30-12:00
Anil Gupta
The seminar will be devoted to understanding common sense and some of its features. Our commonsense view is remarkable in its resilience: it persists through radical upheavals in our thinking—upheavals brought about by philosophical and scientific argumentation and also by religious movements. Some philosophers have been so impressed by the commonsense view that they have advocated a “philosophy of common sense.”
 
In this seminar, we will reflect on what precisely the commonsense view is, what features it possesses, and how it is that it possesses these features. We will reflect on the significance of this view for epistemological issues (e.g., skepticism) as well as metaphysical ones (e.g., the reality of color qualities). We will approach the topic through a critical reading of selected works of Thomas Reid, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
 
PHIL 2175 Studies in Kant (27682)
T 1:30-4:00
Stephen Engstrom
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2300 Ethics (Core) (28685)
W 4:00-6:30
Nandi Theunissen
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2320 Social Philosophy (31850)
T 4:30-7:00
Jed Lewinsohn
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2421 Topics in Philosophy of Language (30744)
W 1:00-3:30
Robert Brandom
Topics in the Philosophy of Language: Inferentialism
 
The course will offer an overview of the inferentialist strategy of understanding meaning in the sense of conceptual content in terms of the role linguistic expressions play in reasoning—from its historical origins in classical rationalism to the most recent results in formal implication-space semantics.  Along the way we will read chunks of Making It Explicit, Between Saying and Doing, and Pitt Ph.D. (2016) Ulf Hlobil’s and Bob Brandom’s jointly authored 2024 book Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons.  Central topics include the relations between pragmatics and semantics (theories of use and theories of meaning) and the relations between inferentialist and representationalist semantics (the latter represented by Kit Fine’s hyperintensional truth-maker semantics). 
 
PHIL 2499 Symbolic Logic (25982)
TH 9:30-10:45
Douglas Blue
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2600 Philosophy of Science Core Seminar (29643)
W 9:30-12:00
Jonathan Fuller
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2610 Special Topics in the History of the Philosophy of Science (30746)
H 10:00-12:30
Porter Williams and Mark Wilson
No course description available.
 
PHIL 2625 Recent Topics in Phil of Science (30747)
W 10:00-12:30
Robert Batterman
Seminar on Trying to Understand Why and How Deep Learning Works
This a seminar that will examine various aspects of deep neural nets.  By no means am I an expert on this. But there are clearly some interesting philosophical questions concerning how DNNs generalize, how to think about DNNs (are they models of some kind?), what makes them so effective.  In fact, one way to think about this course is that we will examine answers to the question (a`la Wigner) of the unreasonable effectiveness of deep learning.  There are reasons to believe that one way of understanding this effectiveness is through an analogy(?) with the renormalization group.
 
PHIL 2900 Teaching Philosophy (10748)
F 9:00-11:30
Thomas Berry
No course description available.
 
3-22-24