2022 Summer Semester

• PHI 5320: History of Analytic Philosophy. Diamond on the Tractatus and Ethical Frameworks (Patrice Philie)

  • In this seminar, we will study themes that form the gist of Cora Diamond’s recent book, Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going On to Ethics.  In that book, Diamond starts by putting in a new light her idea that in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, there is space for significance going beyond empirical statements and logical truths, notably sentences that help in clarifying what one means.  This takes her, in the second half of the book, to discuss various issues in ethics and meta-ethics, through the insight that philosophy is an activity of clarification by indicating paths of thoughts to take and to avoid.  Accordingly, in the first half of the semester, we will focus on Diamond’s interpretation of the Tractatus, and the second half of the semester will be devoted to explore the ethical framework that she puts forward by comparing it with those of Bernard Williams and David Wiggins.

2022 Fall Semester

• PHI 5323: Asian and Comparative Philosophy. Consciousness and Cognition in Mahayana Buddhism (Catherine Collobert)

  • The concept of emptiness (śūnyatā) is probably the most well-known concept in Mahāyāna Buddhism, but also the most problematic and, accordingly, misinterpreted concept. It is at the very core of the Mahāyāna conception of reality. Emptiness means, in fact, lack of substance (svabhāva), as Nāgārjuna explains. The nonsubstantialist view of reality is conjoined with the idea that reality, as we experience it, is constructed. As constructed, reality does not exist the way it appears. However, we don’t chose to construct reality, and to experience it accordingly, the way we do. Rather, the construction is the result of a default cognition, which rests primarily on reification.  To correct the reifying cognition is the chief aim of philosophers across Mahāyāna Buddhist schools including Madhyamaka and Cittamātra (mind-only school).

  • Asaṅga, the founder of the latter school, proposes a very interesting and in-depth explanation as to why the mind constructs reality in a reifying and dualistic way. The Cittamātra’s explanation was, however, criticized by Candrakīrti and Śāntideva, both standing on the shoulders of Nāgārjuna.
  • For the Madhyamaka and Cittamātra schools, understanding this default cognition aims at freeing the mind of it, the result of which is the cognition of emptiness. This cognition requires to deconstruct both mind and phenomena, that is to say, to realize their emptiness. However, according to Candrakīrti  and Śāntideva, Asaṅga’s understanding leads in fact to a reification of the mind, therefore falling short of the goal, i.e., the cognition of emptiness.
  • We will examine the two schools’ respective conception of emptiness, and their commonalities and divergences in their understanding of the nature of consciousness and of cognition.
• PHI 5333: Modern Philosophy. Hegel's (Encyclopedia) Logic (Jeffrey Reid)

  • Hegel’s Logic is generally understood as the self-moving process of thought, where logical categories are meant to begin from an absolutely presuppositionless standpoint and then generate themselves through their own movement. Much effort is made trying to see how one category deduces itself from another.  As a reflection of this self-movement, the Logic is seen as pure thought, devoid of any relation to objectivity, which has been evacuated through the preceding efforts of the Phenomenology of Spirit. 

  • The seminar’s reading of the Logic will explore different approaches: 

    • Rather than being seen as presuppositionless, Hegel’s Logic is the outcome of the Phenomenology of Spirit’s process and thus is the instantiation of Absolute Knowing as the first moment of Science (Hegel’s Encyclopedic system). Absolute Knowing, as the self-consciousness of Spirit, is a historical moment. The advent of systematic Science, whose first moment is the Logic, takes place in time (at a certain moment in the history of humanity). The ghostly forms of past Phenomenological forms of consciousness still haunt the Logic. 

    • Hegel’s Logic is where we find the fullest expression of his metaphysics.  Rather than seeing metaphysics as abstract thought or as pure idealism etc., Hegel’s metaphysics are the “science of Being as Being”, as they are in Aristotle.  In other words, the Logic tells the tale of Being’s coming to be through increasingly concrete determinations of thought. The highest level of determinate Being is nature, pouring forth at the conclusion of the Logic, becoming the object of the subsequent Philosophy of Nature.
    • We are more than simply bystanders witnessing the unfolding of logical categories.  We are protagonists in the story of the Logic, that is, in the story of the determination of Being.  In fact, as thinking agents, we supply the movement that Hegel presents “für das Denken”.  As thoroughly determined Being, nature now bears the trace of our thought, of our selfhood, of our freedom.  Nature thus invites us to know it because in it we may know ourselves. 
    • As agents of thought determining Being, we participate in what Hegel calls Spirit, human Reason reflecting on the given content of the revelatory Idea.  Rather than deflating this ultimate metaphysical entity, as is often the case in contemporary, Anglo-American readings of Hegel’s Logic, the seminar will reflect on the possible meanings of the Idea’s absolute agency (e.g. “givenness”, religious, cosmological…).
• PHI 5343: Metaphysics. Parmenides, Plato, and Heidegger: The Question of Being (Francisco Gonzalez)

  • The first half of this seminar will be devoted to a reading of Parmenides’s fragments followed by Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of these fragments in a course he delivered at the University of Freiburg in 1932 (Gesamtausgabe 35). The second half of the seminar will turn to Plato’s dialogue the Parmenides in the first half of which he shows Parmenides subjecting to withering critique what is presumably Plato’s own ‘theory of Forms’. The dialogue’s second half is a dialectical exercise that has baffled all readers and led to widely divergent interpretations: the hypotheses “the one is” and “the one is not” are made the basis of at least eight deductions that lead to contradictory conclusions. But it is not too controversial to suggest that in this dialectical exercise fundamental ontological assumptions shared by Parmenides and by at least a certain version of Plato’s ‘theory of Forms” are shaken and even exploded. It is presumably this fact that attracted Heidegger to the dialogue and made him consider it at one point the work of Plato, and indeed of Ancient Greek philosophy, that advanced furthest in the question of being. Heidegger indeed saw the dialogue as shaking to its foundations what he saw as the Greek conception of being going back at least to Parmenides and grounding the whole metaphysical tradition: being as constant presence. In the dialogue’s second half Heidegger finds a radically different conception of being as ‘change’ (metabolê) along with a conception of time, not as the image of eternity, but as the ‘sudden moment’ (to exaiphnês). Heidegger’s reading of the Parmenides indeed shatters his own account of the history of metaphysics. Unfortunately, this extraordinarily important, comprehensive and close reading was pursued in a seminar from 1930/31 that remains unpublished. A recent volume of the Gesamtausgabe (83) includes Heidegger’s notes for the seminar, but they are very brief, cryptic and incomplete. A very detailed and clear transcript of the seminar is to be found in the Herbert Marcuse archive in Frankfurt am Main (presumably prepared by Marcuse himself who attended the seminar). As part of my SSHRC funded work on Heidegger’s unpublished seminars I have studied this transcript in Frankfurt and produced a translation that I will use for this graduate seminar. I will also translate Heidegger’s notes as published in the Gesamtausgabe since there is no plan to translate this volume into English in the near future. Thus students, as the culmination of this study of the question of being in Parmenides, Plato and Heidegger, will have access to the content of a Heideggerian seminar previously unavailable and arguably one of the most important he ever gave, one that completely revises our understanding of Heidegger’s relation to Ancient Greek philosophy. This unpublished seminar on Plato’s Parmenides will prove an indispensable supplement and even correction to the published course on Parmenides.

• PHI 5346: Social and Political Philosophy. The Concept of Political Culture (Hilliard Aronovitch)

  • Major philosophers in earlier periods, such as Aristotle, Montesquieu, and Hegel, and classical social theorists, such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber, have all held that different types of political regimes depend upon different socially established attitudes and values; in other words, that forms of government and political priorities are aspects of general cultural orientations. Since the mid-twentieth century, this idea of a connection between politics and cultural contexts, the hypothesis about political culture(s), has been both advocated and disputed by numerous philosophers and social scientists. Among philosophers on the topic or on associated conceptual issues are: Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Brian Barry, Bernard Williams, and Richard Rorty; prominent social scientists debating these matters include: in political science, Gabriel Almond, Samuel Huntington, Robert Putnam, and Francis Fukuyama; in anthropology and sociology, Ernest Gellner and Clifford Geertz; in psychology, Stephen Pinker.

  • By drawing on thinkers such as these, from diverse disciplines, this seminar will explore the sense and significance of the hypothesis that a political culture is the key determinant of the political system, and will investigate the empirical and normative issues it raises: about cultural causation, the requisites of democracy, hermeneutic interpretation, political traditions, moral justification, cultural relativism, etc.

  •  The above theme and applications will be looked to for insight into current political circumstances and tendencies, including prospects for democracy and concerns about populism.
• PHI 5721: Métaphilosophie. "Histoire, vérité et philosophie". Histoire de la philosophie et philosophie de l'histoire de la philosophie.

  • La notion de « philosophie de l’histoire de la philosophie » est le nom d’une entreprise proposée par Martial Gueroult. Certes, l’on pourrait penser qu’elle sous-tend également bien des récits d’historiens de la philosophie, qui ont généralement pour ambition, en commentant tel texte, de faire œuvre de philosophe. Elle n’est en cela nullement le contraire absolu d’une entreprise d’histoire de la philosophie classiquement thématique (tels, des travaux comme ceux d’Alain de Libera) ni même généalogique, comme l’atteste le fait que de Libera, puisse se référer à Gueroult, de manière certes moins fréquente qu’à Foucault ou Collingwood, mais néanmoins appuyée. Il n’en reste pas moins que les historiens de la philosophie, après Gueroult, n’ont pas revendiqué, thématisé ni réfléchi ce terme de philosophie d’histoire de la philosophie. Certes encore, cette philosophie de l’histoire de la philosophie peut se trouver en filigrane chez bien des philosophes :  Hegel en est l’exemple le plus évident, mais on pourrait l’y pressentir un peu partout, de la typologie raisonnée des positions anciennes proposées dans la Métaphysique d’Aristote en passant par la théorie herméneutique promue par Schleiermacher jusqu’à Husserl et au-delà.  Bref, sauf à avoir des positions extrêmes (philosophie sans aucune histoire de la philosophie ou histoire de la philosophie réduite à une simple gestion antiquaire d’œuvres de musée), des moments de « philosophie de l’histoire de la philosophie » sont repérables tant dans l’histoire de la philosophie que dans les textes des philosophes. Pour autant, y insiste Gueroult, avant lui cette « investigation philosophique autonome n'avait encore jamais eu lieu ».

  • Mais, dira-t-on, quelle est cette discipline nouvelle, qui quoique repérable rétrospectivement en bien des endroits, ouvre, selon son instigateur, un nouveau champ d’investigation encore jamais parcouru ? En fait, la philosophie de l’histoire de la philosophie ne se donne pas comme un ensemble de thèses, de contenus doctrinaux ni moins encore ne se détermine comme une série de recettes à appliquer ; elle renvoie uniquement à un type d’activité spécifique qui délimite un champ d’ « investigation autonome ». C’est ce champ d’activité autonome, cette pratique discursive spécifique que ce séminaire s’attachera à définir pour ensuite en tester la fécondité.

• PHI 5733: Philosophie moderne. Imagination, langage, concept dans les Lumières françaises (Mitia Rioux-Beaulne)

  • Ce séminaire sera consacré à l’étude du caractère singulier de l’empirisme français, et notamment au développement qu'il connaîtra dans la période 1748-1757 dans les échanges vifs dont on trouve les traces dans leurs textes respectifs entre Condillac, Diderot et Rousseau. Chez ces trois penseurs, en effet, on trouve une formulation particulière de l’empirisme de Locke, formulation qui, dans chaque cas, fait intervenir l’articulation entre imagination, langage et concept.

  • Les thèses soutenues par ces trois auteurs ont été absolument déterminantes pour le développement de la philosophie moderne jusqu’à Kant en Allemagne – notamment parce que ces trois auteurs irriguent les débats sur la théorie de la connaissance chez tous les penseurs gravitant autour de l’Académie de Berlin – mais aussi jusque chez les idéologues en France qui cherchent une voie alternative à l’idéalisme kantien.

  • Il s’agira donc d’étudier dans le détail les textes fondamentaux des trois auteurs où le débat sur les fonctions cognitives liées à l’imagination, au développement du langage et à la formation des concepts fait rage. On verra alors un subtil jeu de regards-croisés se construire, où ce qui se joue déborde le cadre strict d’une discussion sur le langage et la théorie de la connaissance. On voit en effet que les ramifications de cette querelle à trois personnages s’étendent jusqu’à l’anthropologie philosophique, l’esthétique, la métaphysique, mais aussi l’éthique et la politique.

• PHI 5746: Philosophie sociale et politique. Hannah Arendt face au totalitarisme: Les Origines du totalitarismes, interprétation et débats (Daniel Tanguay)

  • Près de soixante-dix après sa parution (1953), l’ouvrage d’Hannah Arendt, Les origines du totalitarisme, est considéré à juste titre comme l’une des œuvres majeures de la philosophie politique du XX^e siècle. Cet ouvrage demeure pourtant inclassable. Il mélange plusieurs genres : histoire politique et intellectuelle, spéculation philosophique et essai personnel. Traversé par un vigoureux souffle philosophique, il demeure l’une des premières grandes tentatives de mise en lumière d’un phénomène politique et humain — le totalitarisme — qui semble vouloir résister, par son aspect irrationnel et monstrueux, à tout effort d’intelligibilité. Ayant bien perçu sa radicale nouveauté, Arendt a cherché à comprendre le phénomène totalitaire en l’inscrivant dans la dynamique de la modernité politique, voire de la pensée politique occidentale depuis ses origines. Se découvre ainsi en filigrane de cet examen arendtien du totalitarisme une réflexion profonde et parfois surprenante sur les conditions propres au vivre-ensemble et de l’agir politique que la philosophe développera dans son œuvre de pensée subséquente. Ces éléments de réflexion seront abordés dans notre tentative d’interprétation qui s’attardera, plus spécifiquement, à la troisième partie de l’ouvrage consacrée plus spécifiquement aux deux grandes formes de totalitarisme, soit le communisme et le nazisme. Dès sa publication, les Origines du totalitarisme n’ont pas manqué de susciter la critique (entre autres, Aron, Voegelin, Monnerot, etc.) et le débat.  Nous nous pencherons sur ce premier débat pour éclairer certains enjeux de l’ouvrage et pour préciser la place de l’interprétation « philosophique » du totalitarisme d’Arendt en regard d’autres interprétations du phénomène totalitaire des années quarante et cinquante. Notre lecture sera enfin nourrie de réflexions postérieures sur le totalitarisme et sur la pensée d’Arendt, en particulier dans la pensée antitotalitaire française de la fin du XX^e siècle (Lefort, Abensour, Enegrén, Tassin, etc.)

• PHI 6101: Selected problems. Consciousness and Volitions: an Interdisciplinary Perspective. (Vincent Bergeron)

  • In this course we will address two fundamental questions in the study of the mind: 1. what is consciousness? 2. can we explain the emergence and operation of this central feature of human life by analyzing the brain? We will pay particular attention to philosophical, neuroscientific, and psychological methods of investigation. The discussions will be organized around four themes: 1. the nature of conscious perception in both humans and animals, 2. the development of conscious thought in infants and young children, 3. altered states of consciousness as they occur in normal and disordered sleep, and 4. the role of consciousness in decision making (volition). The course will consist of three hour sessions on a particular topic interspersed with student presentations on that topic. There will be twelve sessions in total including seven lectures and four presentation sessions, and one wrap-up session.

  • Course Directors: Profs Vincent Bergeron ([email protected]) and Leonard Maler ([email protected])
  • Course lecturers: Dr. Atance (Psychology), Dr. Bergeron (Philosophy), Dr. Fogel (Psychology), Dr. Maler (Cellular and Molecular Medicine)
  • Course Registration and prerequisites. This course will be limited to a maximum of 15 students; Instructor permission (both Drs. Bergeron and Maler) will be required to register. Graduate students from the Neuroscience program (Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine), the School of Psychology, and the Department of Philosophy will be eligible to enroll.

2023 Winter Semester

• PHI 5320: History of Analytic Philosophy. Pragmatism or Analysis: Dewey vs Russel? (Paul Forster)

  • At the height of his career John Dewey was widely considered to be the most influential philosopher in the United States.  At roughly the same time Bertrand Russell was arguably the most influential British philosopher.  Russell and Dewey engaged each other in brief but rich debates about the nature of logic, knowledge, truth, value and philosophical method.  Dewey thought Russell failed to appreciate that the behavioural sciences undermine the presuppositions of his philosophical project, rendering it largely obsolete.  Russell argued, meanwhile, that Dewey was too much in the sway of post-Kantian idealism, a view that methods of contemporary logical analysis thoroughly undercut.  Dewey argues Russell’s approach to epistemology is self-contradictory. Russell replies that Dewey ignores, rather than dissolves, key epistemological questions and conflates logical, psychological and epistemological questions.  The purpose of this course is to examine what is at stake in this debate about the legitimacy of Russell’s and Dewey’s philosophical projects and its broader significance for contemporary philosophy.  No familiarity with this material is presupposed.

• PHI 5332: Medieval Philosophy. Late Medieval Cognitive Psychology (Antoine Côté)

  • The course explores three major themes in later medieval cognitive psychology that remain important research foci in contemporary philosophy, viz., (I) the problem of skepticism; (II) the question of whether mental entities need to be postulated in the mind in order to account for cognition, and if so, which ones; and (III) the question of the object of knowledge or what knowledge is about (e.g., objects in the world, propositions, states of affairs). With one exception (Olivi’s Questions on Book II of the Sentences [see Week 5]), all the source material we will be studying is found in The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical texts, Volume Three: Mind and Knowledge (=CTMPT), edited and translated by Robert Pasnau. Before starting our examination of these texts, I will devote the first two weeks of the seminar to providing some necessary context. This will mostly involve going over some main ideas in Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas and familiarizing ourselves with some of the vocabulary used in medieval discussions.

• PHI 5341: Logic and Philosophy of Science. Logic (Paul Rusnock)

  • This course will offer individually-paced instruction, and will aim to equip graduate students with at least the basic knowledge of Logic that is routinely pre- supposed in philosophy. In particular, we will study the systems of classical propo- sitional and first-order logic, along with enough set theory to understand the stan- dard semantics, and develop the metatheory of these systems through the sound- ness, completeness, compactness, and Lo¨wenheim-Skolem theorems. We will also give an introduction to first-order modal logic with identity, including the theory of rigid- and non-rigid designators.  Further topics (e.g., Go¨del’s incompleteness theorems, non-classical logics, counterfactuals) can also be covered, depending on students’ interests and the extent of their previous knowledge.

• PHI 5345: Ethics. Doing and Allowing Harm (Andrew Sneddon)

  • A deep division in thought about ethics, whether lay or professional, concerns doing vs allowing harm. Some think that this difference is morally significant, such that allowing harm is easier to justify than doing it. Others deny this. This difference takes a variety of forms. Some address it directly, others less directly in such forms as the Doctrine of Double Effect and the Problem, even Paradox, of Dirty Hands. This course will ask whether there is a moral difference between doing and allowing harm by surveying recent examples of both the direct and indirect ways of grappling with this topic.

• PHI 5742: Épistémologie et philosophie des sciences. Le Néokantisme (David Hyder)

  • A partir de 1800, l’importance de la philosophie dite « critique » de Kant accroîtra sans interruption, occupant à la fin du siècle la position capitale de notre discipline. Il s’ensuit que la majorité des philosophes du 19^ème sont des « néokantiens », même si, dans la majorité des cas, cela s’exprime à moitié à travers les thèses kantiennes qu’ils refusent (p.ex. l’existence de vérités synthétiques a priori, de la logique « transcendantale », etc.).

  • Dans ce cours nous considérerons la lignée la plus importante de cette tradition, le néokantisme de Hermann Cohen et ses descendants, entre autres Natorp et Cassirer. Nous commencerons avec un bref survol du projet critique, pour aborder ensuite les auteurs susmentionnés ainsi que leurs antagonistes « naturalistes » tels que Lange et Helmholtz. Nous passerons ensuite au développement simultané chez Brentano et Husserl des premières théories phénoménologiques, ainsi que leur relation au néokantisme stricto sensu.