Yang Xiao

The primary aim of this course is to acquaint the student with the spirit, methods and problems of philosophy. Students will explore the range of issues in which philosophical inquiry is possible and to which it is relevant. Major works of important philosophers, both ancient and modern, will be used to introduce topics in metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics and other traditional areas of philosophical concern. No prerequisite. Offered every semester.

This course is a philosophical introduction to the environmental humanities, taking the concept of the Anthropocene as our point of departure. We are especially interested in critical examinations of the following concepts and topics: the meanings of ahumana and anaturea, big history, religion in human evolution, global environmental history, how humans are connected to nature and nonhuman animals, the pastoral ideal and technology, rituals and place, ecology and production of space, environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor. We also explore how traditional disciplines in the humanities, especially philosophy and religion, might be rethought in light of these new intellectual developments. Scholars we read include Hannah Arendt, Robert Bellah, Rachel Carson, William Cronon, Cora Diamond, Ian Hacking, Donna Haraway, David Harvey, Martin Heidegger, Carolyn Merchant, Ramachandra Guha, A.N. Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as thinkers from Chinese philosophical tradition. This counts toward the metaphysics requirement for the major. ENVS 112 is recommended. No prerequisite.

Language plays a central role in our life. But how does language work? For instance, how does communication take place in our everyday life? How should we interpret literary or religious texts? What is the relationship between language, thought and the world? How do we "do things with words"? We examine these issues through the writings of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Austin, Grice, Lewis and Brandom. This counts toward the metaphysics requirement for the major. Offered occasionally.

This course examines concepts and issues at the intersection between moral philosophy and psychology or theory of human nature. We discuss philosophical ideas regarding the nature of action, agency, practical reasoning, moral heuristics and moral freedom. We examine these issues through the writings of Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Murdoch, Frankfurt, as well as novels by Jane Austen and Tolstoy. This counts toward the ethics requirement for the major. No prerequisite. Offered occasionally.

This is an introduction to Hannah Arendt, one of the most important, interesting and controversial political thinkers of our time. Fearless in her thinking, she “thinks without banisters,” one of the reasons she does not take her ideas as final or conclusive; she would be the first to acknowledge that she might not get it right sometimes. She follows no party lines; she is neither a liberal nor a conservative – in fact, no existing ideological label applies to her. This is why she is often misunderstood and misused by people from all kinds of political ideologies. If you are satisfied with none of the existing mainstream political ideologies and want to explore and imagine new possibilities, this course is for you. It is a “practical introduction” to Arendt. Students try to learn to think like Arendt by thinking with and against her, engaging in what she calls “exercises in political thought.” This also means trying to think about what she has tried to think about and beyond – namely, the political experiences in her time and ours. In this process, the course introduces and critically examines the key concepts invented by Arendt to make sense of modern political experiences: vita activa (labor, work and action); life of the mind (thinking, willing and judging); Earth, world (worldliness or amor mundi); natality; plurality; public happiness; non-sovereign freedom: and responsibility. Some examples. We try to think about the Afghanistan Papers in light of Arendt’s 1969 essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers.” If we think like Arendt, we learn to connect this phenomenon and other political phenomena, such as the disappearance of epistemic authority in journalism and the elitist bureaucratization of politics (the rule of no-one). We think about the pandemic in light of Arendt’s thoughts about the ideology that the government must take human life in its biological sense as having the highest value. She was the first to think about this modern political phenomenon before it was eventually named “biopolitics” by Foucault and Agamben. Other modern political experiences and phenomena to think about include antisemitism, imperialism, globalism (neoliberalism), populism, race-thinking and racism, authoritarianism, fascism, totalitarianism and republicanism, the Holocaust, revolution, civil disobedience, violence and refugees. We try to explore the possibility of an Arendtian defense of something that might be called “democratic constitutionalism” or “constitutional populism.” Finally, the course is also a “philosophical introduction” to Arendt that explores how she – like several other Jewish philosophers, such as Strauss and Levinas, who also studied with Husserl and Heidegger – developed her new thinking as she worked out an ethical and political critique of Heidegger. We look at Arendt critically from the perspective of Strauss and Levinas, who have given different critiques of Heidegger. The counts toward the great thinkers requirement for the major. No prerequisite.

This course introduces one of the most original visions of philosophy, articulated by a group of four women, all of them associated with Somerville College (the first women’s college at Oxford University): Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001), Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), Mary Midgley (1919-2018) and Philippa Foot (1920-2010). A consensus recently has emerged that they should be recognized among the most important and original philosophers of the 20th century. There are two group biographies of these four: “The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics” (Oxford University Press, 2021) and “Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life” (Doubleday, 2022). “The Somerville School of Philosophy” refers to these four and to those they have influenced, such as Cora Diamond, Michael Thompson, Raimond Gaita, Peter Winch, Martha Nussbaum, John McDowell and Bernard Williams, and those who share their vision and style of philosophizing, such as Wittgenstein, Simone Weil, Stanley Cavell, Levinas and many ancient philosophers and religious thinkers. Some of the latter are the sources from which the Somervilleans draw their inspiration, such as Wittgenstein, Thomas Aquinas, Simone Weil, and Daoism and Buddhism. The course focuses on the four Somervilleans’ work in ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of action, theory of human nature, philosophy of literature and their arguments that these subfields are intimately connected to ethics. Readings include some of those who have influenced the four. The course explores how the Somervilleans have articulated an original and unique vision of ethics. The field today is dominated by “ethical theory,” which isolates ethics from not only other subfields of philosophy, but also the humanities in general. But the Somerville school holds that ethics is first philosophy, that it has no subject matter because everything is “ethical” and cannot be considered in isolation from other parts of philosophy or other parts of the humanities, such as history, religion, literature and the arts. This counts toward the philosophical schools and periods requirement for the major. No prerequisite.

This seminar examines important topics in normative ethics as well as meta-ethics; it emphasizes 20th-century philosophers. We discuss contemporary normative ethical theories such as ethical naturalism (Foot and Thompson), Neo-Kantianism (Korsgaard), agent-based virtue ethics (Zagzebski and Slote), utilitarianism (Smart and Singer) and critique of modern moral philosophy (Anscombe, MacIntyre, Taylor and Williams). We also discuss meta-ethical issues such as moral realism, relativism, the sources of normativity, the concept of virtue and the possibility of moral understanding. This counts toward the ethics requirement for the major. No prerequisite. Philosophy major, junior standing. Offered in a three-year rotation with PHIL 405 and 410.

Candidates for honors work in philosophy do extensive, independent research with an adviser from the department. This research culminates in a major essay (around 50 pages) that they defend to an outside examiner during the spring semester of their senior year. Honors projects take more than a year to complete, so anyone wishing to pursue honors in philosophy, must begin the process during their junior year. To pursue honors, students must submit a request during the fall of their junior year, and then submit a thesis proposal for departmental approval during the spring of their junior year. Upon departmental approval, honors candidates will register for two 0.25 unit courses to be taken during their senior year, PHIL 497 (fall) and PHIL 498 (spring). In PHIL 497, students do the substantial portion of their writing and research. In PHIL 498, students complete their research projects, and then defend their work to an outside examiner. As philosophy honors projects are very demanding, only philosophy majors with a 3.5 average in philosophy and a 3.33 overall GPA are eligible to submit proposals. Permissions of instructor and department chair required.

Prerequisite: permission of instructor and department chair.