Symbolic Logic (Phil 101)
Michael D. Resnik

Many students in this course, which is a requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy, will be first year graduate students in philosophy, some of whom may have had little training in formal logic or mathematics. Other students are likely to have had substantial previous work in logic and to be mathematically talented. This creates a special problem for me as a teacher and us as a class. On the one hand, I want to help the philosophy graduate students over the hurdle which the course presents to them; on the other hand, I hope to expose the students from mathematics, computer science, etc. to the interesting and important results of mathematical logic which drew them to the course in the first place. We will be using Quine’s Methods of Logic and hand-outs containing supplementary material. Quine’s book is a classic, written by one of the leading philosophers of our day, and it is replete with philosophical remarks and allusions to philosophical problems. The book focuses on the use of symbolic logic as a tool for representing and testing arguments. It contains the basic logical techniques and concepts which are required for further work in contemporary analytical metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and, to some extent, even ethics. The latter sections of the book survey some of the more interesting results of mathematical logic. On the down side, Quine’s is a difficult book. It is hard conceptually and hard reading too. In my lectures I will try to go over the main ideas and major facts.

Morality, Punishment, and Preventive Detention (Phil 113)
Michael Corrado

What limits should there be on the state’s use of power to prevent undesirable behavior? There is a traditional dialectic about this, in which the power of the state to make something a crime is examined against John Stuart Mill’s "Harm Principle", and in which retribution is played off against deterrence in the effort to justify the use of punishment to prevent crime. We will look at both of those issues. But the most difficult issue we will address is something that lies outside of the traditional debates about criminalization and punishment -- the issue of preventive detention. May the state lock a person up solely on the basis of his dangerousness without convicting him of a crime? If the answer to that question is Yes, then all the established limits on the state’s power to prevent crime – for one example, that the state may not interfere with a person’s freedom, in the name of preventing crime, unless he has been convicted of a crime; for another example, that the crime that he has been convicted of involves harm to other persons – come to very little, and we must rethink the answer to the underlying question.

But we begin with the traditional debates. We ask, first, about the state’s power to make certain kinds of behavior a crime. The classical starting point is John Stuart Mill’s "On Liberty", and we will follow the discussion through modern commentary. (Where possible, we will use court cases as illustrations, including the recent case of Lawrence v. Texas.). We ask, second, about the limits on the state’s power to punish. We will explore classical justifications of the state’s use of punishment to prevent crime, and we will examine some powerful critiques of these justifications. We will also look at the philosophical underpinnings of the traditional limits on punishment – mens rea and actus reus, intention and responsibility, and the excuses and justifications that relieve criminal defendants of responsibility.

And then we come to the question of preventive detention: when, if ever, is the state entitled to detain people indefinitely just on the basis of the possibility that they will commit crimes in the future? Once upon a time it was presumed that no one could be imprisoned without having been convicted of a crime. Little by little legislatures have rejected that presumption, and have rejected the use of punishment to persuade citizens not to commit crimes. They have increasingly relied upon the use of preventive detention to take dangerous members of society out of circulation. We will look at the sequence of Supreme Court cases in which the doctrine of preventive detention has been worked out, from Salerno v. United States (1988) through Zadvidas v. INS (2001), and into the terrorist cases of the last two years. These cases threaten to undo completely the moral limits of the criminal law.

Finally, if there is time, we will read the autobiographical Nightmare, in which Wendell Williamson attempts to explain the schizophrenia that led to his killing rampage in Chapel Hill several years ago, and examine it in the light of what we have learned in the course.

Empiricism and the Foundations of Knowledge (Phil 116)
Marc Lange

We will study closely three classic essays that continue to reverberate in recent analytic philosophy, along with brief glances at a (very) few of their most recent reverberations (e.g., in works of McDowell, Putnam, Friedman, BonJour, and others). The three classic essays are: Wilfrid Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1955-6), Willard V.O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1950), and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Notice that these three essays are roughly contemporaneous. All three address questions about empiricism and the foundations of knowledge (among other things), and they propose answers that dovetail in certain important respects. We will read these essays closely. To understand them, we will need to spend some time becoming familiar with the philosophical context against which they were written. (For instance, as background to Quine's essay, we will study Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology", and as background to Carnap's essay, we will examine the 19th-century revolutions in conceptions of a priori knowledge associated with DeMorgan, Gergonne, Weierstrass, Helmholtz, Poincare, Hilbert, and others.) This course will not examine all facets of these three classic essays. Nor will it be a neutral survey of philosophical options. Rather, I will attempt to depict these three essays as suggesting a particular unified sort of picture of how certain basic epistemological regresses come to an end.

These are among the essays that every philosopher should have had the experience of working through (at least once).

Ethics and Economics (Phil 130)
Geoff Brennan

The course will consist of two parts. The first will deal with the economist's theory of the state. This will include the standard accounts of "market success" and "market failure" (the theory of public goods, etc.) and some elementary "public choice accounts" of collective decision-making processes. The second part will deal with the normative foundations of this theory, and the "economic approach" to ethics more generally.

Kant (Phil 155)
Jay Rosenberg

In this course, we secure a grounding in the fundamentals of Kant's theoretical philosophy through a careful study of his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. We engage the text from two perspectives: (1) historical, situating Kant's insights and contributions in relation to the works of his Rationalist and Empiricist predecessors (e.g., Descarte and Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume); and (2) problematic, exploring the continuing relevance of Kant's inquiries and conclusions to issues animating contemporary philosophical discourses. Along the way, we also learn more about various techniques for reading an historical text, e.g., how to recognize and resolve exegetical, in contrast to substantive philosophical, questions.

Ancient Philosophy (Phil 210)
C.D.C. Reeve

The focus of the course is Plato's psychology. We will read (parts of) Protagoras, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Philebus, and Laws together with Christopher Bobonich's Plato's Utopia Recast. We will also read some of the papers collected in Ellen Wagner's Essays in Plato's Psychology. Our aim will be to develop a vibrant picture of Plato as a philosopher by carefully following one important path through his thought. Particpants will lead discussion after the first month or so.

Philosophy of Language (Phil 245)
Dorit Bar-On

We will be looking at recent literature in the philosophy of language. We'll begin with two books, Pinker's The Language Instinct and Cowie's What's Within and then move on to some recent articles on related topics. Students will be encouraged to suggest some recent articles of interest to them.

Philosophy of Science (Phil 250)
John Roberts

There are lots of scientific theories that say that there is a strange and unfamiliar world of bizarre unobservable structures underlying the familiar world of common sense. Any such claim raises a host of philosophical difficulties. But these difficulties are a walk in the park compared to the special problems raised by the theory known as quantum mechanics. Taken at face value, the standard formulation of quantum mechanics implies that (i) nature obeys different laws when we are watching than it does when we are not, (ii) when no one is measuring the position of the moon, there is no fact of the matter about where it is, (iii) the state of a complex physical system is not in general determined by the states of its parts, and (iv) the probability of an event occurring at one location can depend on whether someone is simultaneously making a measurement in some other location, which may be miles away. There is madness enough here to make even mad-dog modal realists blush. And yet this theory is extraordinarily well-confirmed by empirical results, and it is accepted as a matter of course by working physicists. Of course, one can accept this theory without taking it at face value. But the most well-explored methods of doing so tend to resolve old perplexities by introducing new ones.

This course will be an introduction to the philosophy of quantum mechanics intended for graduate students in philosophy. No particular background in physics, philosophy of science, or mathematics (beyond high-school algebra) will be presupposed (but the course will have a non-trivial technical component).

Topics covered will include (but will not be exhausted by) the logical structure of the standard (non-relativistic) quantum theory, in the Hilbert-space formalism due to Dirac (1930/1967) and von Neumann (1932/1955); the way this theory gives rise to the problem of interpreting superpositions and the measurement problem (these are the two fundamental problems in interpreting the theory); the argument of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (1935) against the completeness of the quantum theory; the “no-go” theorems of Bell (1964) and Kochen and Specker (1967), and the restrictions these impose on any possible “hidden variables” theory that can reproduce the statistical predictions of the standard quantum theory; Bohm’s deterministic, “ontological” interpretation of quantum theory; Everett’s relative-state interpretation of quantum theory, and several recent attempts to interpret that interpretation (including the many-worlds interpretation, the bare theory, and the many-minds interpretation). The requirements for the course will be one short paper, one longer paper, and one class presentation.

Pre-dissertation Seminar (Phil 305)
Gerald J. Postema

Pre-dissertation seminar for all third-year graduate students. The work for this course, in the Fall semester, involves preparing for the Area Bibliography Exam, while in the Spring it involves continued preparation for the Area Bibliography Exam (in January and the early part of February) plus beginning the process of putting together a dissertation proposal (after writing the exam).

Research Seminar in Moral Theory -- Free Will (Phil 360)
Susan Wolf

What kind of control over our actions do we need in order to be responsible for them? What kind of freedom do we need? Are the right kinds of freedom and control compatible with determinism? Are they even conceptually coherent? The course will pursue these questions through a study of contemporary classics and other important work on the subject, including selections by Roderick Chisholm, P.F. Strawson, Harry Frankfurt, and Gary Watson.

Research Seminar in Value Theory -- Normative Concepts (Phil 365)
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

Normative Concepts: thinking with them and thinking about them. This seminar has two purposes: (i) to canvass extent accounts of what is distinctive and important about normative concepts and (ii) to identify -- or, as I am thinking now, develop -- an adequate account. A big part of the challenge will be to identify what an account needs to do in order to be adequate. My current view is that there is a surprising amount of useful work to be done when it comes to characterizing these criteria of adequacy and also when it comes to developing a plausible view that satisfies them. Predictably, given the wide role of normative concepts, we'll be looking at theoretical reasoning as well as practical reasoning, at thick concepts and thin, at epistemology no less than ethics. In the process it may emerge that a single account of normative concepts is unavailable, or that the very idea of a normative concept is wrongheaded. I am optimistic on both counts but am going in to the seminar not so much with the conviction that the optimism will be vindicated as with confidence that discovering whether, and to what extent, it is, will be important.

Current Research Group Seminar -- Moral Emotions (Phil 390)
Thomas Hill, Jr.

This is a small, discussion-oriented seminar focusing on the moral significance of various attitudes. We examine recent philosophical work, for example, on self-respect, respect for humanity, love, snobbery, contempt, vengeance, and forgiveness. We also consider the nature of attitudes and the senses in which they can be justified or unjustified. The selection of particular topics and readings is adjusted in response to the special interests of the class participants. In addition, sometimes we alter the schedule to take up further readings on interesting points that arise in discussion. We devote a few meetings to the discussion of papers by distinguished visitors prior to their presentations to the department. For example, we will discuss Samuel Scheffler’s recent work on personal attachments vs. concern for strangers in a global era (in preparation for his visit). We will also devote a session to Barbara Herman’s paper for the Chapel Hill Colloquium on how, even in Kantian moral theory, adopting certain fundamental moral ends should influence all areas of moral judgment (including matters of justice). We take turns initiating the discussion, but no formal presentations or written work is required. This seminar counts as one of a participant’s courses for the semester, but does not fulfill distribution requirements.

Current Research Group Seminar – Contemporary Epistemology (Phil 390)
Ram Neta

The central question of epistemology is: How should one think? But there are different ways of understanding this central question. Is it asking for a rule to guide our own thinking? Or is it asking for a rule to guide our assessment of thinking (be it our own thinking or the thinking of others)? And is there a real difference here? Again, is our question asking for a rule that applies to thoughts? Or is it asking for a rule that applies to revisions in thought? And again, does this contrast matter? In this course, we will look at some recent writings that are devoted to addressing these questions head-on. We will begin by reading Isaac Levi's classic work Gambling with Truth. Then we will read Gilbert Harman's book Change in View. We will conclude with Richard Foley's book The Theory of Epistemic Rationality.