Fall Quarter

Money and Morality: On one view, money is "that which pays," i.e., an understood means of settling debts.  But if money is thus about "what we owe each other," what relationship does it have to morality, understood as "what we owe to each other"?  This seminar pursues various topics at the intersection of moral theory and the theory of money and finance.  Topics include: morality and debt (Nietzsche); money, credit and debt (Smith, Innes, Hockett and James); morality as "what we owe to each other" (Rawls, Scanlon, Darwall, Parfit); promissory obligation (Scanlon, Gilbert, Shiffrin, others); owing and "directional duty (Thompson, Darwall, Gilbert); accountability and accounting (Darwall, Watson, Scanlon); money and social ontology (Searle, others); money and corruption (Marx, Rousseau, Nguyen); what should not be for sale (Satz, Sandel); money as a "currency" of justice (Rawls, Sen, James); "taxation" by debt devaluation, i.e., inflation (Mises, Keynes, others); Rawls, Lerner, and the "tax and spend" booby trap: implications for liberal egalitarian theory.

Seminar on: Ethics, empathy, first philosophy.
We shall study the account of empathy developing in writings of Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Emannuel Levinas, and contemporary writings in phenomenology and moral philosophy. Empathy defines a fundamental relation between self and other, or intersubjectivity, with strong implications for how we relate to others. We shall consider the proposal that “ethics is first philosophy”, “first” in relation to phenomenology, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on.

The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics

The focus of this seminar will be A.W. Moore’s recent book, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge University Press, 2012). In this monumental work, Moore presents a history of Western metaphysics from Descartes to the present day, providing a rich narrative that includes figures from both the “analytic” and “non-analytic” traditions. Moore presents his own contribution to metaphysics via the connections and patterns revealed by this narrative. I will choose some of the figures from Moore’s history that we examine, the rest will be chosen by participants in the seminar.

This is a research training course geared specifically for first-year graduate students and taught by the Director of Graduate Studies. The specific content covered will be tailored to the research interests of the students enrolled on the course. The goal of the course is to provide a solid foundation for a successful Ph.D.