Courses tagged with "K12" (69)

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?

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 offers an advanced survey of current debates about the ontology, methodology, and aims of the social sciences.

The class will be devoted to the work of David Lewis, one of the most exciting and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. We will have seminar-style discussions about his work on counterfactuals, time, causation, probability, and decision-theory.

Many details of phonetic realization cannot be predicted from standard phonological representations on a language-independent basis, so phonetic realization must be specified in grammar. In this seminar we will investigate phonetic realization as a component of grammar.

The basic questions that we will address are:

• What is the form of the phonetic realization component?
• What is its relationship to phonology?