Teaching

Course description

Metaphysics is concerned with fundamental questions about reality and what constitutes reality, such as: What is a property? What is time? What constitutes the identity of objects and persons? Especially since the beginning of the 20th century, metaphysics itself has been the topic of philosophical reflection, partly because of the criticisms it has received: Is metaphysics compatible with science? Are the questions it asks even answerable? Today, debates continue regarding how metaphysics should be done.

The course will cover central topics in metaphysics (properties, personal identity, modality) as well as discourse about metaphysics itself (a discipline called “metametaphysics”). A plurality of sources and methods will be used. While the focus will be on contemporary debates in analytic philosophy, the course will also contextualize these debates through brief excursions into the history of the problem or question, as well as drawing on alternative contemporary approaches. 

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Course description

Graduate seminar on pragmatism and realism, in French, in collaboration with Mathias Girel (ENS). My sessions of the seminar were focused on pragmatist theories of truth and knowledge in William James, John Dewey, and Hilary Putnam. The first lecture introduced metaphysical realism and pragmatism, and James’ theory of truth. The second and third lectures were on Dewey: his theory of inquiry, his conception of experience, his theory of truth as warranted assertibility, and possible interpretations and problems regarding the latter. The fourth and fifth lectures were on Putnam’s internal realism: his criticism of metaphysical realism, brains-in-a-vat argument, his doctrine of conceptual relativity, his conception of truth as ideal rational acceptability. 

• Set Texts, Descartes’ Meditations (first year - Part IA)

This paper covers the main themes and arguments from the Meditations on First Philosophy (skepticism, the cogito, the possibility of error, mind-body dualism, God).

• Epistemology (second year - Part IB)

This paper covers skepticism, including internalist and externalist responses to skepticism; theories of knowledge, including Gettier problems and Knowledge-First Epistemology; internalist and externalist theories of justification and knowledge; theories of truth (correspondence, pragmatist, coherentist, deflationism).

• Early Modern Philosophy (second year - Part IB)

This paper covers John Locke's Essays Concerning Human Understanding and David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. I supervised an extended essay on Hume’s theory of the self, comparing Hume’s bundle theory with contemporary developments of his views, in particular Derek Parfit.

• Metaphysics (third year - Part II)

This paper covers realism and antirealism (metaphysical realism and its critics, conceptual relativism, Putnam’s internal realism); the metaphysics of particulars and properties; modality; philosophy of time; personal identity. I supervised two extended essays: on the metaphysics of properties, and on Putnam’s internal realism.