Teaching

While much of analytic philosophy of language has focused on meaning, reference, and the formal properties of language, this seminar centers on a different tradition that understands communication in terms of action, coordination, normativity, and social interaction. We will study classic and contemporary work on intention, convention, context, and signaling, as well as naturalistic and evolutionary approaches to communication, before turning to normative, political, and moral dimensions of speech. Throughout the course, we will ask how communicative acts generate commitments, authority, responsibility, harm, and power, and how these effects can outstrip what is encoded in linguistic meaning alone. Topics include conventions and contexts, naturalistic models of communication, normativity and uptake, slurs and propaganda, social meaning, insinuation, and silencing. By the end of the course, students will have the conceptual tools to analyze communication as a norm-governed social practice and to engage critically with current philosophical debates about what speech does.

This course presents two complementary stories about how language works in contemporary philosophy of language. Story 1 treats language as a rule-governed representational system: beginning with Frege and Russell and culminating in contemporary formal semantics, it explains how linguistic expressions systematically receive truth-conditional meanings via compositional rules and models. Story 2 treats language as a form of social action and coordination: beginning with critiques of rule-based explanations (and continuing through speech-act theory, intention-based pragmatics, and discourse models, it explains how speakers use language to act, coordinate, and manage shared informational states. The course does not assume that these stories are fully unified or that one replaces the other; instead, it examines how they coexist, where they come into tension, and how contemporary work often draws on both. We will conclude by applying these frameworks to socially and politically significant uses of language—such as generics, propaganda, pornography, and genocidal discourse—to assess what our theories of meaning, action, and discourse can (and cannot) explain in high-stakes contexts.

Talk of belief has a ubiquitous and central role in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science. Despite this ubiquity—or perhaps because of it—there is plenty of explicit and implicit disagreement on what belief is, and the criteria that should be used to individuate it. This theoretical heterogeneity in the various conceptions of belief has motivated a recent attempt to systematize and unify a perspective of how different conceptions of belief in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science stand with respect to each other: Eric Mandelbaum calls it a project in ‘doxastic cartography’. This class will be an attempt to locate ourselves within and perhaps advance this project. The aim of the class will be to give an overview that is as deep as possible of the many (many!) conceptions and debates about belief mainly from a philosophical perspective but always informed by interdisciplinary cognitive science.

Talk of belief has a ubiquitous and central role in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science. Despite this ubiquity—or perhaps because of it—there is plenty of explicit and implicit disagreement on what belief is, and the criteria that should be used to individuate it. This theoretical heterogeneity in the various conceptions of belief has motivated a recent attempt to systematize and unify a perspective of how different conceptions of belief in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science stand with respect to each other: Eric Mandelbaum calls it a project in ‘doxastic cartography’. This class will be an attempt to locate ourselves within and perhaps advance this project. The aim of the class will be to give an overview that is as deep as possible of the many (many!) conceptions and debates about belief mainly from a philosophical perspective but always informed by interdisciplinary cognitive science.

Talk of belief has a ubiquitous and central role in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science. Despite this ubiquity—or perhaps because of it—there is plenty of explicit and implicit disagreement on what belief is, and the criteria that should be used to individuate it. This theoretical heterogeneity in the various conceptions of belief has motivated a recent attempt to systematize and unify a perspective of how different conceptions of belief in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science stand with respect to each other: Eric Mandelbaum calls it a project in ‘doxastic cartography’. This class will be an attempt to locate ourselves within and perhaps advance this project. The aim of the class will be to give an overview that is as deep as possible of the many (many!) conceptions and debates about belief mainly from a philosophical perspective but always informed by interdisciplinary cognitive science.

En este curso vamos a recorrer las distintas sendas intelectuales que rodean la denominada ‘filosofía de la liberación’. Específicamente, vamos a ver dos movimientos interrelacionados de la filosofía latinoamericana del siglo XX: El existencialismo y la filosofía de la liberación latinoamericanos. La interacción entre estos dos polos de pensamiento iluminará las ideas principales de una línea unitaria (mas no homogénea) de dialogo en el pensamiento latinoamericano. Así, un objetivo principal de esta exploración es desarrollar una posición crítica respecto tanto a estas ideas, como a la ansiedad meta-filosófica que las agrupa: ¿Qué es—mejor, qué puede ser—filosofía latinoamericana? Al desarrollar esta posición crítica también nos preguntaremos por las voces que faltan y por qué faltan tan llamativamente en una filosofía que dice ser latinoamericana. El contenido principal de este curso estará enmarcado en su inicio por un preámbulo que introduce las ideas principales de la fenomenología, la historiografía, y el existencialismo continental, y al final por una lectura crítica post colonial de las tradiciones que nos interesan acá.

This course is a mid-level introduction to epistemology as a subdiscipline of philosophy. To begin etymologically, epistemology is the study of knowledge; but more generally it is the study of our intellectual relationship with the world. How should we think of the ways our minds grasp and learn from the world. What does it take to know something, instead of believing it, or even having a rational, justified, or true belief? Can we be sure that we are not being deceived by an evil genie, or a simulation, or even our own social environment? Are the ways we know about the world inevitably marked by our social standing? Why do these questions even matter? Throughout the class we will delve into classic and contemporary debates in epistemology and its relevance to our social and political and political lives.

This course is an introduction to philosophy as an academic discipline. It consists of a cursory overview of classic problems in the history of philosophy and their importance to contemporary philosophical discussions and research. We will use Descartes’ Meditations in First Philosophy to address critical questions that pertain to philosophy today. Some of these questions include: What can and do we actually know about the real world if our experiences often deceive us? What does it mean when we say that we have mental states? Are they part of our body, like stomach pains, or another thing altogether? Can the universe exist without a first cause? If not, is that cause God? What is it to say that some or other action is morally wrong? Is it a matter of cultural convention, like table manners, or an objective reality, like the greenness of tree leaves? Throughout the class we will endeavor to develop critical skills that allow us to assess and questions arguments across a variety of topics and concerns. In turn, we will aim to draw connections between these seemingly abstract concerns and today’s pressing issues, like the nature of artificial intelligence, the role of social power in determining what we learn or stop learning.

When philosophers talk of Latin American philosophy, they immediately face a metaphilosophical problem: what would a Latin American philosophy even be? Is it philosophy produced in Latin America or by Latin Americans? Does it have a precise set of problems that distinguish it? In this course, we will explore a possible thematic answer by investigating how the concept of liberation is a common thread in Latin American philosophical thought. This exploration will take us from Latin American Catholic theology and the distinct philosophical humanism developed in Mexican and Chilean universities to the manifestos of indigenous revolutionary groups, like the Mexican Zapatistas. By focusing on the concept of liberation, we will collaboratively develop the skills to write successful academic texts that address important questions for our own political moment, like “How should we compare the search for liberty with the search for liberation?”, “How can we ensure the cultural and political freedom of others?”, “Is individual autonomy compatible with cultural autonomy?”.