Teaching: (Links are to syllabi for the courses)
Current and upcoming courses at Tufts
Upcoming Spring 2009-2010: Social Construction
Is the division of people into races based in biology? Or is it a product of human imagination or social organization, a category we do not discover in the world but rather project onto it? Are gender differences a construction of history and culture, or natural distinctions between different kinds of people? In the last few decades, many theorists and social critics have argued that a great number of facts are “socially constructed.” Some have even claimed that quarks and planets and lumps of gold are social artifacts, whose existence depends on how we conceive of them. Such claims have elicited a sharp reaction from many philosophers, who have strongly defended the objectivity of science and realism about natural categories and kinds. Others have worked to bridge these extremes, proposing theories of social facts that are created by humans while leaving room for natural or brute facts about the world that are independent of humans.
In this class, we will examine the historical and contemporary debates on social construction. The first third of the course will look at the history of the debate, considering how social construction arises and differs in a variety of philosophical traditions, including 18th century empiricism and the romantic tradition, German idealism, and Marxism. In the second part of the course, we will examine contemporary varieties of social constructivism, from mid-century empiricism and structural anthropology to post-structuralism and the sociology of science. We will also consider contemporary critics of social construction. The third part of course will focus on race, considering arguments for taking biological and other naturalistic approaches to race, various views of race as a social construction, and eliminativist approaches that would dismiss race as an illusion. Readings drawn from Condillac, Herder, Schleiermacher, Kant, Marx, Quine, Foucault, Barnes and Bloor, Hacking, Sokal, Lewis, Searle, Kitcher, Appiah, and others.
Upcoming Spring 2009-2010: Metaphysics
This course is a survey of contemporary metaphysics. Metaphysics is the study of basic questions about the nature of reality. In ordinary conversation, we seem to commit ourselves to the existence of many puzzling objects. We talk about the sum of two numbers, about having thoughts, about the causes of an event, and about durations of time. But are there such things as numbers? Are there abstract objects as well as concrete ones? What is the relation between mental objects and physical objects? What is the nature of time, and of causation?
In the first part of the class will examine a number of key questions in contemporary metaphysics: universals and natural kinds, necessity and possibility, and the nature of time and the persistence of objects over time. In the second part, we will focus in particular on problems with causation and the nature of natural laws. We will consider classic arguments on the metaphysics of causal connections between events, and survey a number of different views taken by contemporary philosophers. The aim of the course is to provide a rigorous overview of important issues in metaphysics, and to cover central methods and concepts for understanding work in contemporary philosophy. Readings from Russell, Ayer, Quine, Lewis, Mackie, Salmon, Kripke, Kim, and others.
Fall 2009: Introduction to the Philosophy of Social Science
This course is an introduction to the philosophy of social science. The course will consider central problems in the nature and methods of the social sciences, focusing in particular on how the social sciences (like economics, sociology, psychology, political science, and history) differ from the natural sciences (like physics, chemistry, and biology). We will consider historical debates that accompanied the founding of the social sciences, as well as contemporary questions having to do with explanation, objectivity and values, and the nature of social groups.
Fall 2009: The Metaphysics of Material Objects
This seminar focuses on a central issue in contemporary metaphysics: the nature of material objects. We will examine in detail theories of the relation between an object and its parts, the essential properties of material objects, and the persistence of objects over time.
Courses I taught at Virginia Tech and Stanford:
In this grad seminar, we closely examine speech act theory, including the work of Austin, Strawson, Grice, Searle, and Bach and Harnish. Particular attention is paid to linguistically relevant speech acts, such as naming and asserting. Also discussion of the relationship between pragmatics and semantics and the connection between speech acts and intention-based theories of meaning.
A grad seminar on methodological individualism and the ontology of groups and group properties. Course description: Few people today would accept Hegel’s claim that nations or historical moments possess a “spirit” that guides their evolution. Even so, it’s clear that nations, historical periods, and grounds in general have many properties that individuals do not. We speak of a nation’s foreign policies, its unemployment rate, the national mood. Is group behavior an aggregation of individual behavior? Should explanations of social phenomena strive to be individualistic? This seminar will consider some important aspects of these issues in the ontology and methods of the social sciences. A principal focus will be cases in microeconomics, where these debates have been particularly acute. Of particular interest will be the role of “rational agents” in economic explanation.
Construction of Social Reality
A grad seminar on the metaphysics of social kinds and the semantics of social kind terms. Course description: Is there such a thing as race? Is gender a biological category, or is it something we imagine and just project on the world? For that matter, are pencils and desks, or dollar bills and banking systems, or clarinet notes and musical genres, natural features of the world? Or are they categories we define, or are they something else? In this seminar, we will consider the metaphysics of social kinds and the semantics of social kind terms, gathering together a wide range of approaches and literatures. Significant attention will be paid to works in the philosophy of language, pertaining to natural, theoretical, and nominal kind terms. Additional selections will come from social constructivists and naturalization projects. Readings from Locke, Lewis, Putnam, Burge, Millikan, Searle, Kornblith, Schwartz, Appiah, and others.
Graduate and undergraduate courses in metalogic, using Geoffrey Hunter's Metalogic text. This course covers the metatheory of propositional and predicate logic, through the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem and Gödel’s incompleteness results. I have a number of electronic materials prepared for this course, and will post them as soon as I get a chance. If you're teaching from this text, you should check out Peter Suber's website, and also Brandon Fitelson's.
This is a combined undergraduate/graduate course in predicate logic. It's a requirement for grad students (if they don't place out) and for undergraduate majors.
I use Barwise and Etchemendy's excellent Language Proof and Logic text and software. And it's great. Can't speak highly enough about it... and that's not just because Etchemendy was my dissertation advisor. The software alone makes it possible to assign more and better homework than would be possible if it were graded by hand. And the book is lively and clear.
Some of the chapters are redundant, particularly the chapters on informal proof methods, which don't add too much to the formal ones that follow. I may skip some of them next time I teach the course. Students can also develop a bit too much reliance on the software, it's useful to have them do proofs occasionally without it. Etchemendy also acknowledges that some people have expressed objections to his starting with an interpreted language, since it trains them to favor his approach to consequence, over a Tarskian one. All in all, though, their approach is head and shoulders above the alternatives.
I have prepared a fairly complete set of powerpoint slides for these lectures, which I can make available to other professors or TAs, if you email me.
This course is an introduction to critical thinking and symbolic logic. Aristotelian logic, sentential logic, including formal proofs, and the symbolism of predicate logic. For this course, I've been using The Power of Logic, which I find to be a pretty good book. It's pitched at about the right level for a course of this kind, and explains things reasonably well, though it's a bit wordy.
Layman's presentation of Aristotelian logic is a bit problematic: it presents it with Aristotelian existential assumptions, including proof techniques and Venn diagrams for traditional Aristotelian forms, before moving to Boolean forms, which are simpler. This might be ok, but it actually simplifies the Aristotelian Venn diagrams, so it's not presenting an accurate picture of traditional proofs. If they couldn't figure out a way to present the Aristotelian forms in an accurate way, maybe they should have done the Boolean ones first, and then had a little appendix on the Aristotelian variety. In the slides and course work, I changed the approach.
If you're interested in powerpoint slides for this course, I've prepared them for the first 9 chapters. Send me an email.
A graduate composition seminar I co-taught with Mark Applebaum at Stanford, dealing with history, techniques, and philosophical problems pertaining to varieties of indeterminacy in music.
There are two kinds of indeterminacy in music. One is indeterminacy in composition. This involves indeterministic methods, such as throwing dice, in the composition of pieces of music. John Cage in particular experimented with a variety of such methods.
The second kind of indeterminacy involves the level of specification of a piece of music. When the production of a piece of music is divided between composer and performer, the composer can allow the performer more or less latitude for interpretation. There is no perfectly specified piece of music, since even when there is no performer involved, there may be differences in the sound pattern produced even by a perfect recording. Many musical styles, such as jazz and figured bass, involve substantial improvisation, within the parameters of a musical piece. There are also other ways that a piece can allow for latitude of various ways in performance, including specifying that random or chance acts take place within the performance, the use of underspecified notational devices, etc. This course examined the compositional, intepretive, and philosophical issues surrounding the use of musical indeterminacy and the corresponding impact on the nature of musical works.