Online courses directory (19947)

This course analyzes theories of gender and politics, especially ideologies of gender and their construction. Also discussed are definitions of public and private spheres, gender issues in citizenship, the development of the welfare state, experiences of war and revolution, class formation, and the politics of sexuality.

Graduate students are expected to pursue the subject in greater depth through reading and individual research.

This is a class about 'ought' and ought—you can think of it as a class in philosophy of language and metaphysics in which the focus is the ethical sphere. Some of the questions that we will broach include: How should we give a semantics for 'ought' generally? Is there anything special about the ethical 'ought'? Is there anything that you ethically ought to do, e.g., give to charity or refrain from stealing?

In this course we will cover central aspects of modern formal logic, beginning with an explanation of what constitutes good reasoning. Topics will include validity and soundness of arguments, formal derivations, truth-functions, translations to and from a formal language, and truth-tables. We will thoroughly cover sentential calculus and predicate logic, including soundness and completeness results.

This course begins with an introduction to the theory of computability, then proceeds to a detailed study of its most illustrious result: Kurt Gödel's theorem that, for any system of true arithmetical statements we might propose as an axiomatic basis for proving truths of arithmetic, there will be some arithmetical statements that we can recognize as true even though they don't follow from the system of axioms. In my opinion, which is widely shared, this is the most important single result in the entire history of logic, important not only on its own right but for the many applications of the technique by which it's proved. We'll discuss some of these applications, among them: Church's theorem that there is no algorithm for deciding when a formula is valid in the predicate calculus; Tarski's theorem that the set of true sentence of a language isn't definable within that language; and Gödel's second incompleteness theorem, which says that no consistent system of axioms can prove its own consistency.

This course is a seminar on creativity in art, science, and technology. We discuss how these pursuits are jointly dependent on affective as well as cognitive elements in human nature. We study feeling and imagination in relation to principles of idealization, consummation, and the aesthetic values that give meaning to science and technology as well as literature and the other arts. Readings in philosophy, psychology, and literature are part of the course.

This course gives an introduction to the science of linguistic meaning. There are two branches to this discipline: semantics, the study of conventional, "compositional meaning", and pragmatics, the study of interactional meaning. There are other contributaries: philosophy, logic, syntax, and psychology. We will try to give you an understanding of the concepts of semantics and pragmatics and of some of the technical tools that we use.

The Creole languages spoken in the Caribbean are linguistic by-products of the historical events triggered by colonization and the slave trade in Africa and the "New World". In a nutshell, these languages are the results of language acquisition in the specific social settings defined by the history of contact between African and European peoples in 17th-/18th-century Caribbean colonies.

One of the best known Creole languages, and the one with the largest community of speakers, is Haitian Creole. Its lexicon and various aspects of its grammar are primarily derived from varieties of French as spoken in 17th-/18th-century colonial Haiti. Other aspects of its grammar seem to have emerged under the influence of African languages, mostly from West and Central Africa. And yet other properties seem to have no analogues in any of the source languages.

Through a sample of linguistic case studies focusing on Haitian Creole morphosyntax, we will explore creolization from a cognitive, historical and comparative perspective. Using Haitian Creole and some of its Caribbean congeners as test cases, we will evaluate various hypotheses about the development of Creole languages and about the role of first- and second-language acquisition in such development.

We will also explore the concept of Creolization in its non-linguistic senses. Then we will address questions of "Caribbean identities" by examining a sample of Creole speakers' attitudes toward the Creole language and the corresponding European language and toward the African and European components of their ethnic make-up.

This course explores the foundations and content of norms of justice that apply beyond the borders of a single state. We examine issues of political justice, economic justice, and human rights. Topics include the case for skepticism about global justice; the idea of global democracy; intellectual property rights; the nature of distributive justice at the global level; pluralism and human rights; and rights to control borders. It meets jointly with Harvard's Philosophy 271, and is taught by Professors Joshua Cohen, Thomas Scanlon, and Amartya Sen. Readings are from Kant, Habermas, Rawls, Sen, Beitz, Nussbaum, Stiglitz, Ignatieff, Walzer, among others.

The seminar will be devoted to understanding what we're up to when we ascribe contents to a person's assertions and mental attitudes. We seek to make clear the rules of the game for the philosophy of language. We'll survey classic discussions of the issue by Field, Lewis and Stalnaker. But much of the emphasis of the class will be on getting clear about the limitations of our theoretical tools. I'd like to focus on places where our theorizing runs into trouble, or breaks down altogether.

This course will consider the claim that there is no such thing as race, with a particular emphasis on the question whether races should be thought of as natural kinds: is our concept of race a natural kind concept? Is the term 'race' a natural kind term? If so, is Appiah right to conclude that there are no races? How should one go about "analyzing" the concept of race?

This course is a detailed investigation of the major issues and problems in the study of lexical argument structure and how it determines syntactic structure. Its empirical scope  is along three dimensions: typology, lexical class, and theoretical framework. The range of linguistic types include English, Japanese, Navajo, and Warlpiri. Lexical classes include those of Levin's English Verb Classes and others producing emerging work on diverse languages. The theoretical emphasis of this course is on structural relations among elements of argument structure.

This course focuses on phonological phenomena that are sensitive to morphological structure, including base-reduplicant identity, cyclicity, level ordering, derived environment effects, opaque rule interactions, and morpheme structure constraints. In the recent OT literature, it has been claimed that all of these phenomena can be analyzed with a single theoretical device: correspondence constraints, which regulate the similarity of lexically related forms (such as input and output, base and derivative, base and reduplicant).

This course is the second of the three parts of our graduate introduction to semantics. The others are 24.970 Introduction to Semantics and 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory. Like the other courses, this one is not meant as an overview of the field and its current developments. Our aim is to help you to develop the ability for semantic analysis, and we think that exploring a few topics in detail together with hands-on practical work is more effective than offering a bird's-eye view of everything. Once you have gained some experience in doing semantic analysis, reading around in the many recent handbooks and in current issues of major journals and attending our seminars and colloquia will give you all you need to prosper. Because we want to focus, we need to make difficult choices as to which topics to cover.

This year, we will focus on topics having to do with modality, conditionals, tense, and aspect.

This seminar will investigate the expression of gradability, comparison and degree in natural language. The course will address the following major issues, though we may also include other topics according to the interests and direction of the class:

• The underlying semantic representation of expressions of degree and the linguistic significance of scalar representations
• The logical form of comparative constructions, and the implications of comparatives for other aspects of the grammar
• The semantics of degree and the role of scalar representations in grammatical categories other than gradable adjectives