Winter Term 2024
The seminar will address fundamental questions in contemporary epistemology, including the epistemology of science and social epistemology. The course is centered the topics of justification and evidence: Can experience have a foundational role in the justification of our beliefs? How is the evidential status of a certain fact determined in scientific practice? Do (and should) values play a role in selecting and weighing evidence? Can disagreements always be settled by acquiring more evidence? How should we behave in disagreements where each party is relying on different core beliefs and different methods for assessing evidence?
One constant thread in the course will be to deal with the question of justification from our situated perspective, as (1) agents in the world; (2) limited and non-omniscient; (3) embedded in social structures.
We will revisit some of the traditional debates in epistemology (internalism vs. externalism, foundationalism vs. coherentism, relativism) from lesser-explored perspectives (pragmatism, social epistemology, feminist epistemology, hinge epistemology), and we will end by looking at contemporary discussions in the epistemology of deep disagreement.
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Winter Term 2023
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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Fall 2019
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.
October 2019 - May 2022
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).
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).
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.
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.