Welcome to the Spring 1996 session of Philosophy 303. I hope you
all had a good winter break, and have returned
to campus rested and eager to start a new semester. I guess we're
starting, whether we're rested and eager or not.
Course Description
The catalogue description for this course is sufficiently general to
be at once helpful and unhelpful: it tells you that
we'll "concentrate on major philosophical figures from the Renaissance
to the beginning of the nineteenth century,"
and gives you a batch of names. That orients you to the big picture,
but leaves plenty unsaid, and invites you to come
into the course with expectations that may be reasonable but in fact
misplaced. You might, for example, expect that
we'll make some effort to trace out the historical lineages of political
(say) or religious thought, as it figures in the
hands of intellectuals in the early modern period. A course doing
this or something like it would have considerably
more historical, less philosophical flavor than ours shall in fact
have. Or you might expect that we'll try to ferret
out broadly cultural artifacts of the 17th and 18th century thinkers,
engaging their texts as a critical theorist might
engage them--to discover beneath their surface various social (say,
power) relations among the voices or ideologies
they represent. That too would be a reasonable but unmet expectation
in this course. Here is the description of our
course that went into the Spring 1996 Philosophy Department course
description packet:
In this course we shall treat the history of philosophy not as history
with a certain subject, but rather as philosophy
with a certain focus. The material we examine will be taken up
not out of respect for the past, nor for the purpose of uncovering intellectual,
social, moral, or emotional currents influencing the central figures in
early modern philosophy,
but simply out of an intrinsic desire to discover the truth about the
world. That is what philosophy is, according to
those thinkers most influential in European philosophical thought during
the so-called early modern period (roughly 1600-1800). They made
claims about how the world is; these claims are either true or false--true
if the world is the
way they claimed it is, false if the world isn't the way they claimed
it is. Of these influential thinkers, we shall examine
the philosophical writings of five: Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley,
Hume, and Kant. Readings and lectures will focus
primarily on metaphysical and epistemological topics, since those are
the philosophical topics of central concern to
these figures.
I wrote that to be informative, in a way the catalogue description wasn't
informative. While I think it's fine to be
concerned with charting intellectual history or cultural currents (and
weíll do some very small unavoidable bits of
that as we go), it turns out that I am not concerned to approach the
course in that way, but rather in a more
philosophical way. My hope is that we can all adjust our expectations
so as to be more closely aligned with the
material and methodology of the course as it will be taught this semester--more
closely aligned than your expectations might otherwise be if that description
werenít in place. Please don't let any of this put you off from asking
questions
of a purely historical or cultural nature, if you have them.
I may well not have their correct answers, but presumably
none of them deserve to go unasked if you reckon them interesting and
relevant to our discussion.
And on reflection, perhaps it doesn't go without repeating that we will
focus primarily on the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of the
figures we'll be reading. Metaphysics is the study of what there
is and the nature
of what there is; from the Greeks on down, until relatively recently,
that has been reckognized as what Aristotle
called "first philosophy"--as central and foundational to this enterprise
we call philosophical inquiry. I do see
metaphysics as central to the writings of these thinkers. So
did they, it turns out; and so, I hope, will you. Epistemology
is the study of knowledge, and we'll do a fair bit of epistemology
along the way. One of the themes crucial to understanding the early
modern period, I think, is the interplay between metaphysics and epistemology.
Indeed,
it is useful to see the so-called Empiricists (Berkely and Hume) as
arriving at their metaphysical agendas via a kind
of epistemological critique of the earlier Rationalists (Descartes
and Leibniz), and to see Kant as reacting to this
conflict between these two traditions.
Course Objectives
The primary objective of this course is to introduce students to some
of the most important and influential
philosophical themes of the early modern period, as they found expression
in its most central figures. Students
should come out of the course (i) acquainted with the broad outlines
of European philosophy in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, (ii) familiar with the details of particular
doctrines of particular figures, and (iii) in
possession of the critical analytic tools necessary to properly engage
historical texts (in philosophy) on their own.
Required Texts
We shall look at five figures in the early modern period, and there
are five required texts, available at Follett's
and University Bookstores. You'll need to purchase these books.
Descartes (Cottingham, et. al.) CSM Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings (Cambridge)
G. W. Leibniz (Ariew and Garber) AG Philosophical Essays (Hackett)
George Berkeley (Winkler) W A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Hackett)
David Hume (Steinberg) S An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hackett)
Immanuel Kant (Beck)
B
Kant: Sections (Macmillan)
Course Requirements
There will be two shorter writing assignments--"overnight," take-home
essay questions to answer--, and two
medium-length papers assigned. The first writing assignment and
first paper are meant to see how well you're
keeping up with, and working to understand, the readings. The
second assignment and paper will give you a
chance to present a more sustained bit of writing on a topic of my
choosing, presented in class but perhaps left
somewhat hanging, for you to think about for yourself. The weighting
of short essays and papers as contributing
to your final grade will be:
Two short essay questions:
first, 10%; second, 20% =30%
Two longer papers:
first, 20%; second, 30% =50%
Attendance and classroom participation:
20%
=20%
One comment, about attentance, which ought to (but doesn't, anymore)
go without saying. I expect you to attend
all class sessions. That's an expectation I can do something
about: I'll take attendance, and herewith reserve the
right--if I see the need--to announce an explicit policy that makes
your final grade a function of unexcused absences thereafter. I hope
to avoid that altogether.
[Note: if you have a learning disability or other special need
that qualifies you for some aid or service that I should
know about, please tell me, so that I can do everything I can to help
you.]
A Proposed Schedule for the Course
Here is a tentative schedule for the semester, indicating the sessions
during which we will discuss the various figures.
It also gives reading assignments for the course. I want
to remain a bit flexible with the schedule, to accommodate
special interests or difficulties that seem to me to be arising along
the way. But the sketch below will give us
something to work from, or towards: departures from it will become
obvious in class sessions, or be announced
n advance, or (likely) both. Please do readings in advance--i.e.,
by the day for which they are assigned.
*****************
JAN T 9 Background Aristotle [Physics, Metaphysics]
Th 11
(cont'd.) Copernicus, Galileo [Commentariolus; Assayer & Dialogues]
|
T 16
Descartes Method
Rules... CSM 1-18; Discourse on Method
CSM 20-40
Start: General Doubt
Meditation I CSM 76-79; Principles I.1-6 CSM
160-61
Th 18
Descartes General Doubt (contíd)
Start: Knowledge (Self, Body) Meditation II CSM 80-86;
Principles I.7-8; I.1-12 CSM 161-62; 189-94
T 23
Descartes Knowledge (contíd)
Start: God
Meditation III CSM 86-98; Principles I.17-30
CSM 165-70
Th 25
Descartes God (contíd.)
Truth and Error
Meditation IV CSM 98-105; Principles I.29-38
CSM 170-72
T 30
Descartes God and Certainty
Meditation V CSM 105-110; Principles
I.13-16 CSM 164-65
Mind and Body
Meditation VI CSM 110-22
|
T 6
Leibniz Against
Cartesian Extension New System
AG 138-39; Discourse §12, 17-21 AG 44, 49-54;
On Nature §9,11,13 AG 160-65; Specimen
AG 123-24
Th 8
Leibniz (cont'd.)
Conversation... AG 257-63; de Volder letters
AG 171-84;
Arnauld letters AG 77-90
T 13
Leibniz Space
Clarke Letters AG 324-46
Mental Substance
Monadology §1-24 AG 213-16
Th 15
Leibniz Mental
Substance (contíd) Discourse
§14-15 AG 46-48; Monadology §49-74 AG 219-22
God and Creation
Discourse §1-7 AG 35-40; Nature and Grace
§7ff AG 209-13
Monadology §36-48 AG 217-19
* * * * * *
T 20
Transition Rationalism and Empiricism
|
Th 22
Berkeley Perceptual Knowledge
Berkeley vs. Realism
Principles §8-10,14,19 W 26-31
T 27
Berkeley vs. Realism (cont'd.)
Empirical view of Meaning
Principles §1-2 W 23-24
Th 29
[No class: Cover at a conference]
MAR T 5 [No class: Spring Break]
Th 7 [No class: Spring Break]
T 12 Berkeley Objects and Ideas Principles §3-7,23 W 24-6, 32-3
Th 14
Berkeley Ideas and Minds
Principles §25-33,45,48 W 33-7, 41, 43
T 19
Berkeley Difficulties
Principles §34ff. W 37ff
Berkeley and Leibniz Handout
|
Th 21 Hume Ideas and Impressions Enquiry §II, III S 9-15
T 26 Hume Causality and Induction Enquiry § IV S 15-25
Th 28 Hume Causality and Necessity Enquiry § VII S 39-53
APR T 2 Hume Causality and Habit Enquiry § V S 25-37
Th 4
Hume
Skepticism
Enquiry §XII S 102-114
|
T 9 Kant Introduction Critique, Pref. & Intro B 95-104
Th 11 Kant Intuition, Space and Time Critique, Trans. Aesthetic B 104-09
T 16 Kant Categories Critique, Anal. Concepts B 110-15
Th 18 Kant Synthetic Unity, Causality Critique, Anal. Principles B 115-25
T 23 Kant Idealism, Freedom Critique, Dialectic B 125-36
Th 25
Kant
Rational Theology
Critique, Dialectic B 136-48